quick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
12 MA XIMUMPC MARCH 2006
PSU- and memory-maker OCZ has announced
its intention to wade into the vapor-phase-change
market with the world’s fi rst semi-affordable unit.
Typical phase-change setups sell for around $900,
but OCZ says its upcoming Cryo-Z cooler will retail
for around $300. We’re cynical, of course, but if
OCZ pulls this off, its great news for overclockers.Phase-Change on
the Cheap
Seagate
Swallows
Maxtor for
$1.9 Billion
In a move that surprised the
PC hardware industry—includ-
ing us—Seagate announced a
buyout of rival Maxtor Corp. in a
stock transaction valued at (put
your pinkie on the side of your
mouth) $1.9 billion dollars.
The move was especially
unexpected because there
hasn’t been much consolidation
in the storage industry since
Hitachi bought IBM’s drive busi-
ness in 2002 (and that came
after a two-year lull following
Maxtor’s purchase of Quantum
in 2000). Furthermore, Maxtor
was considered a relatively
strong player, though there were
rumors suggesting the company
was suffering incredibly slim
profi t margins.
Seagate is the world’s larg-
est manufacturer of disk drives,
and reportedly owns 60 percent
of the lucrative enterprise-stor-
age market. In this space, its
fi ercest rival was Maxtor, whose
Atlas 10K and Atlas 15K drives
were considered the best drives
of their class. The purchase
will give Seagate considerable
enterprise-drive market share,
transforming the company
from an 800-pound gorilla into
a 1,000-pound beast. And if
Seagate inherits Maxtor’s fat
contract to supply drives to Dell,
it’ll be sitting very pretty.
The deal leaves just two
other drive makers—Western
Digital and Hitachi—to compete
with Seagate in the 3.5-inch
drive market. Western Digital
is the number two drive maker,
followed by Hitachi.
The combined company
will operate as Seagate, and
will have its headquarters in
Seagate’s current Scott’s Valley
location, so pour out a 40-
ouncer in honor of Maxtor—the
company is a goner. At press
time, there’s been no word
on the fate of Maxtor’s just-
released DiamondMax 11 line of
hard drives.Phantom Lapboard for Sale?
It’s shocking, but
Infi neon Labs—the
maker of the rightly
maligned Phantom
game console—is
actually going to
release its intrigu-
ing controller, the
Lapboard, as a stand-alone product. As you can see in
the picture, the Lapboard is a couch-friendly keyboard
and mouse designed for gaming. From our brief time
with the device several E3s ago, we consider it the
most promising controller for on-the-couch PC gam-
ing that we’ve seen.AMD Inks Deal with Rambus
Though AMD was one of the pioneers of DDR, which
scuttled Direct Rambus RAM’s hopes of going main-
stream, AMD says it will pay Rambus $75 million over
the next fi ve years for access to Rambus patents used
by technologies including DDR2, DDR3, FB-DIMMs,
PCI-E, and XDR memory. Neither company is detailing
AMD’s plans, but we’d expect to see support for FB-
DIMM (fully buffered DIMM) DDR3 memory in future
AMD memory controllers. Also possible,
but highly unlikely, would be an
XDR-memory-based
Athlon 64, or a Rambus-
designed replacement
for HyperTransport.DELL SELLING TOO MANY AMD
CPUS
According to a report at The Inquirer website,
AMD resellers aren’t getting as many AMD
CPUs as they’d like, and they’re blam-
ing—drum roll, please—Dell. Though Dell
doesn’t sell any prebuilt AMD systems, the
gigantor company recently began selling
individual CPUs on its website, to meet cus-
tomer demand.XBOX 360 SHORTAGE STINGS
MICROSOFT
Prior to ship-
ping its next-gen
Xbox 360 console
in November,
Microsoft made the
bold claim that it
would sell 4 mil-
lion units within
three months, but
post-holiday sales
figures totaled
only 1.3 million sold. D’oh! Weak sales of
the console, largely due to lack of product,
caused Microsoft to change its forecast. The
company now plans to sell 4 million units by
June 2006.A NEW USE FOR RFID TAGS
A couple in Bellingham, Washington, is
taking security technology very seriously.
According to a blurb at Dailytech.com, the
couple recently had RFID tags implanted in
their hands, in order to allow them exclusive
access to their apartment and to their com-
puters. We just wonder what’s going to hap-
pen when they move into a new pad.LIQUID-, ER, OIL-COOLING
Those crazy kids at
Tom’s Hardware website
recently took a system
with an Athlon 64 FX- 55
and an nVidia 6800,
removed the fans from all of
the components (GPU, CPU,
and chipset), and poured
eight gallons of cooking
oil into the enclosure (after
sealing it, of course). The
resulting PC was dead silent, and the CPU
ran at just 40 C under full load. Congrats,
guys—that’s one hell of a DIY project.FUNSIZENEWS
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