July - September
July
The summer heat appeared to stifle GPU innovation, and NVIDIA quietly rolled in (40nm) low-end parts, G210 and GT220 to OEM customers.Crucial joined in the SSD fray with a range of well-priced models, and, talking about price, Windows 7 Home Premium was available for less than £50 at most etailers. Yours truly bought one, incidentally.
We took a look at OCZ's 120GB Vertex SSD, and a couple of cool laptops from ASUS, as well as Cooler Master's impressive HAF 922.
A generally quiet month with little to shout about from most of the technology manufacturers.
August
AMD was back at it again with the release of the budget-orientated 785G chipset and yet another Phenom II X4 chip. We finally got our hands dirty with Corsair's Obsidian chassis, too.NVIDIA continued banging on the ION theme, this time supporting Samsung's N510 netbook. Dell took the opposite route and jumped on the Intel CULV bandwagon with the announcement of the Inspiron 11z, followed by a plethora of others, including MSI's Wind12 U200.
Nokia looked to shake-up the netbook market with the rather expensive Booklet 3G, and MSI made us cringe with its advert for ultra-thin notebooks.
August was another fairly quiet month on the technology front, really. Many companies were waiting on Intel to officially release a triumvirate of cheaper Nehalem-based chips, and AMD was busy readying DX11 graphics hardware.
September
Intel finally obliged by releasing the Core i5 750, Core i7 860, and Core i7 870 on September 8. Whilst the £150 Core i5 750 made sense, we reckoned that the chip giant had got its pricing wrong with the '860 and '870.The chips' arrival gave motherboard manufacturers a shot in the arm, and we saw countless P55 boards unveiled in the month.
Not to be overshadowed, the folks at AMD launched budget quad-core chips and two new DX11 graphics cards that put NVIDIA firmly on the back foot - in the high-end space at least.
Browser wars continued with Google releasing Chrome v3, OCZ's Z-Drive become more than just a whimsical showpiece, and students were able to pick-up Windows 7 for £30 - no doubt £29.99 too much in their eyes.
Intel's Developer Forum 2009 brought us glimpses of 2010. 22nm CPUs were discussed, Clarkdale and Arrandale were shown. It wasn't all roses for Intel, as the much-delayed Larrabee death-knell was sounded in an anaemic presentation.