The Tetrad brings something different to the PC experience.

The Cyro Tetrad is a member of the High Performance Designs family where it is simply the best when discussing value for money. The high performance power PC is aimed at power users and game addicts.

When unboxing the Tetrad monster, it is all so boring since you have to unravel your way through huge levels of packaging and then coming to a huge dull, black Lian-Li case. However, from then on it all becomes exciting because when you have finished attaching all the wires and press the power button, its quite invigorating.

If you look inside the computer, you will envisage that all the wires are elegantly put together, perhaps to help have clean airflows. The dominant computer lights up, the Cryo logo turns neon blue and the mesh underneath does so also, what a sight!

In addition to the lighting effect, when connected all it up, there is a small LCD screen standing on top of the PC which shows the systems information i.e. the date and time of start up.

Booting Vista up is really quite rapid for this leading gaming PC unit, but you must customize your package from the website before purchasing because you could be let down by the less developed graphics card, which could ruin your pricy experience.

Product Features

• Revolutionary Intel Core i7 920
  with Cryo Boost @ 3.8GHz
  (4 cores + Hyperthreading)

• Intel X58 chipset
  QPI 4.8GT/s (Boost 6.4GT/s)

• Fast and powerful graphics with Cryo NVidia GTX 260+ Core216 – Cryo Boost OC

• High Memory Performance  with 3GB 1600MHz DDR3 and latency Cryo Boost overclocked.

• Flexible 1TB (1000GB) SATA-II RAID0

• Enhanced Performance Air Cooled added efficiency.

• Lian-Li P60 case in Black

• Realistic HD Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer sound

• 650W Power Supply Unit

Get the full specifications here.

For more of Cryo products visit here.

Our Opinion

Pros

• Unique small gadgets such as fan speed controller.
• Huge processing speed with 8 cores each 2.67GHz.
• New Core i7 processor technology.
• Built-in SAS RAID for high speeds.

Cons

• Less RAM than other cheaper models.
• GeForce GTX260 Graphics card could be much higher since it is the ultimate gaming pc
• £1595 bit too much for something a normal consumer will use for perhaps less than 4 hours daily.

Verdict

Overall, I feel this is a great gaming PC but it does have a large price tag which, during these difficult economic times, will put off consumers. Nevertheless, other consumers such as gamers will most probably be enticed into this deal since the specs are mouthwatering. However, Cryo could have included further components for example a Blu-ray drive would have gone nicely, since we are paying a huge sum. Thus, the Cryo Tetrad is definitely aimed at the top end of the market and to those who don’t fear spending £1000′s on one single PC.

The very company Thomas Edison founded said it has made a major breakthrough

Every Computer user’s dream to have so many movies on a single disk!

G.E report that the New York company, has made huge progress in digital storage technology. This tech will supposedly enable normal DVD disks (usually 4.7 GB) to support an astounding 100 DVDs.

However, we warn you not to get too complacent because this is still in the initial stages, in fact the product is still in the lab! In addition to it still being in development, the invention requires to be produced on a bigger scale and at a good price, as we are hitting the peak period of the recession very soon.

Envisioneering analyst, Richard Doherty stated,

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” backing up this potentially successful advanced piece of tech.

In terms of potential, this holographic storage can be a huge use on the consumer, scientific and commercial markets, becoming a great step in the right direction for digital storage, which to be really honest hasn’t been the biggest tech category around.

What is the product?

Firstly, the product itself is based in “holographic storage.” This means that it is able to store security codes on credit cards and interestingly, the 0′s and 1′s as well. The products data are encoded in light patterns and put into light sensitive material. However, the hologram then refracts the light patterns and so as a light shines onto it, the data that has been recorded is visible and retrievable.

Personally, I am still bewildered at the holographic storage concept, though the theory has been known since the early 1960′s, it still has a promising future. This is because the technology can cram in much more data than DVD’s that we purchase from somewhere like Best Buy, and even the blu-ray DVD’s that have more than 50 GB’s of data space.

General Electric are not the only ones experimenting with Holographic storage. InPhase Technologies are also in the hunt to make the product it shall release later this year, with a realitic fair price. InPhase’s invention is to be a holographic storage system targeted at the medical market where they can use it to store medical images or alternatively, at businesses as it can be used in important conferences, meetings with the help of video production.

Holographic Technology has been heard of before but no one has pushed on with the theory until now.

After all, no single company has used the idea for conventional use. However, General Electric look be on track for becoming the pioneers of holographic technology especially as they have learned from previous mistakes and taking a contrasting advance in working with microholographic storage.

You cannot say working on this will take less than year because it is such a long winded process, seeing as GE have developing this idea since late 2003. It is always, for any company becoming the first of its kind in a specific region, impossible not to have any troubles so for example GE are having trouble finding a small enough hologram which reflects more light patterns.

Where is this all happening?

As I said before, General Electric are based mainly in New York and not surprisingly this is where its taking place, in Niskayuna which is in the south-east of the city.

Brian Lawrence, the scientist who leads G.E.’s holographic storage program stated,

“We’re in the ballpark. We’ve crossed the threshold so we’re readable.”

One of the best things about this product is that you can use this disk on your average DVD player which must read microholographic storage discs in order to work, which don’t worry, most DVD’s do! This holographic disk is set to hold 500 GB’s of space with the technology General Electric have acheived over 10x times more space than blu-ray disks!

Stanford Professor, Bert Hessilink quoted,

“If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology.”

As always with new discoveries, there are always huge meetings within a couple of months of the idea introduction. No surprise that it will take place in Orlando, in May, displaying their findings.

In addition to what Hessilink said, James N. Porter, an independent analyst of the storage market spoke out his feelings,

“It’s always well to remember that the most important technical specification in any storage device, however impressive the science behind it, is price.”

When will it come out and what price?

Giving that the development is around three quarters through, I would expect to see the introduction of the holographic storage to be with us around 2012. At the estimated time, I reckon it will be very cheap at around $15 cents per gigabyte, backed up with the fact that in less than three years, 1 GB on a blu-ray has declined over half. As Brian Lawrence explained, “The price of storage per gigabyte is going to drop precipitously.”

To make a big success, General Electric must target specific markets that have a place for its product. Ideally, this would be in the commercial market. If they went directly to a few hospitals and small studios just to start off to build a base. Earn some revenue and then go worldwide, which is sure to be a big seller! Though, for any newly developed product, the company needs a partner that knows what its talking about, with much experience and knowledge about the topic, in this case, optical storage.

Discussions between Microsoft and Yahoo took place earlier this week. Could it be key to counter Google's Internet Domination?

First meaningful act towards making a new deal after last year’s antics where Yahoo walked away from Microsoft’s uninviting buyout opportunity.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met up and discussed matters on search and advertising partnerships. Though, it is still not obvious whether agreements with each of the companies will go through as both Yahoo and Microsoft have not made any comments which was preliminary and informal, according to the NY Times.

One agreement that could possibly be made is Microsoft selling search ads for Yahoo while Yahoo sells Premium display ads on everything Microsoft own to make the deal fair.

These talks came as a shock to many people including me not just because of what happened just over a year ago. During the last six months, Micorosft had been aggressively pushing forward with codename “Kumo” even taking Yahoo’s head of engineering for the Search and Advertising Technology Group, Qi Lu to head the operation.

In addition, both Yahoo and Microsoft are discussing sharing content with Demand Media. Demand Media for those who don’t know work on niche websites and publish articles and videos. Yahoo are selling display advertising for Demand Media which talks are going on further and Demand Media with Microsoft, talks are happening but they are not too productive though there is always hope that they will end up on an agreement.

If Yahoo and Microsoft did work as a team, it would be very good as Google persist in governing both searching and online advertising marketing.  Currently, Google own 60% of the market, Yahoo owns around 20% and Microsoft owns less that 15%.

Yahoo’s new chief, Carol Bartz who took over in January, is very strong minded and will not sell a single part of Yahoo without thoroughly thinking it through. I personally think that with her in Yahoo, they are strong and stand a better chance of catching up with high flyers Google with her in charge of dealings.

Remind you of any other social networking site?... Thought so!

 Futuristic Design attracts much attention

FriendFeed offers a different kind of service to its customers. As well as posting updates like Twitter and Facebook allow you to do, it also  is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from other micro-blogging services. 

People do not really pay much attention to FriendFeed until now even though it is being used by over 200 million people. The best thing about FriendFeed is that it accumulates and distrubutes lots of information to you so quickly without having to refresh your page. However, in other services like Facebook you have to refresh the page and even then there is limited information, many people refer to it as “static.”

Oh yes, that is where I saw it from!

Though Friendfeed has re-designed its site to attract the same amount of visitors as facebook. However, it has a long way to go still as there are over triple the amount of users using FriendFeed in comparison to Facebook.

Now that FriendFeed has used Facebook’s design to its advantage, inevitably it will soon take small, useful features which will be good for FriendFeed, but I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg would think!

Saying this, I still think Facebook has a long way to go until it becomes the central website on the Internet. Perhaps, if FriendFeed would possibly share their features such as “Like” which they have already done. Facebook with FriendFeed’s aid and vice-versa, they could both benefit from each others help which makes each social network so unique.

Generally, I think Social Networking as a whole is going in the right direction, they are using each others findings well and soon this category will be people’s homepages as well the world’s number one site, perhaps even in front of the mighty Google or Yahoo!