Our latest poll had almost 3,000 people who answered, Which company made the best desktop motherboards in 2011?. 
Well out in front with almost half the votes, ASUS was voted as the maker of the best desktop motherboards in 2011 by TweakTown readers. In second place GIGABYTE got 20% of the votes while ASRock came in third with 14% of the votes. Read more…
Computers-Plus
More than simple IT news!
When Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison clambered onto his own Big Data elephant back in October as his company announced the Big Data Appliance, Oracle gave the impression that it would be rolling up its own implementation of the open-source Apache Hadoop data muncher. This turns out to be not true.
In fact, Oracle revealed today as it began shipping its Hadoop stack (which is named after a stuffed elephant) that it has in fact inked an OEM agreement with Cloudera – the first and thus far the biggest of the commercial Hadoop disties – as the Big Data Appliance’s mapper and reducer. Spe
With an 800 x 480 7-inch capacitive touchscreen, Bluetooth built-in for safely making/accepting hands-free phone calls, input for rear facing back-up camera (optional), and even an input to interface with the vehicle’s steering wheel controls, the Pioneer AppRadio 2 is poised to offer almost every feature one could need to travel in style – musically. The Pioneer AppRadio 2 has expanded compatibility over the original AppRadio to now include the latest Android smartphones. There probably is not a more convenient way to integrate your smartphone’s apps and functionality into your vehicle. Pioneer’s AppRadio 2 is expected to go on sale in April for $499, while the original AppRadio will continue to be sold at $399.
AMD Tuesday announced it is extending its A-Series portfolio to include 13 new dual- and quad-core APUs (accelerated processing units) for desktops and notebooks.
The expanded series will offer four new desktop and eight new notebook APUs, all of which will deliver a boost in both graphics and performance, AMD said.
The new A-Series APUs combine up to four x86 CPU cores and up to 400 Radeon cores to deliver higher quality graphics and dedicated HD video processing.
PCI-Express 3.0 has been here for a little while now, but it has only been with the launch of the PCI-Express 3.0-capable AMD Radeon HD 7000-series that there has been some proper testing. The world’s first 28nm GPU to support PCI-e 3.0 is here, people! 
PCIe 3.0 increases per-land bandwidth from 500MB/sec to 1GB/sec, this means for an x16 slot, double the bandwidth from 8GB/sec to 16GB/sec. Impressive, but will we see anything close to double the performance? Not now, and not in games. GPU compute tasks do see a difference in performance, however. < Read more…