Items tagged with 360
An Xbox Live customer has filed a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging that the company has been renewing subscriptions and double-billing customers without their consent. The suit was filed by Ryan Graves, an Indiana resident that claims Microsoft's pre-paid subscriptions are "governed by vague and onerous terms of use." Graves claims that he let his automatically-renewing Xbox Live subscription expire by declining to update his credit card information, and that when he renewed the account several months later with a new card, he was charged for both the new subscription and the previously expired automatic subscription. Microsoft told Graves that the issue was not a mistake, according...
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Lian Li launches PC-XB01: the Xbox 360 Chassis replacementLian Li shows Microsoft how it’s done! 14 August 2008, Keelung, Taiwan – Lian-Li Industrial Co. Ltd will launch the PC-XB01 chassis for the Xbox 360 today. The XB01 is a chassis replacement for the XBox 360 chassis, which alleviates heating issues from hot components and reduces noise from vibrating optical drives in the original case design. The PC-XB01 requires DIY knowledge for the transfer of components, but once completed, heat will no longer be a factor in dampening your XBox 360 gaming experience. Lian Li is an executive upper-class aluminum PC chassis manufacturer, well renowned as the ultimate brand for modding and stylish designs....
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Rumors have been circulating of a possible $50 price cut for the Xbox 360 Pro, the 20 GB model. While still a rumor, more evidence has arisen which seems to not just point to a $50 price cut, but also to the day: this coming Sunday.Below is an image scanned from a Target flier. Not only is the price cut by $50, Target is throwing in a $25 gift card as well.To the right, you can see a scanned image from a Best Buy flier. They're not throwing in a gift card, so Target has the better deal, for those of you who are frugal.The last such price cut for the Xbox 360 Pro came in August 2007, when it was cut from $399 to $349.This does leave the Xbox 360 Core in an awkward price point, at only $20 less...
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Microsoft had all sorts of trouble with the reliability of its XBox 360. Tales of the "Red Ring of Death" gave potential buyers pause, and Microsoft spend a small fortune replacing defective units. One of the main reasons the game console was so fragile is that the 90nm scale GPU ran very hot. 65nm chips to the rescue!Microsoft will make available its Jasper version of XBox360 game consoles in August this year and has contracted dedicated chipmakers to build chips for the latest machine. Contracts for manufacturing, packaging and testing the 65nm Xenon microprocessors have gone to International Business Machines (IBM).TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is chosen to make the 65nm...
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Remember the father who sold his pot-smoking son's Guitar Hero III game on eBay as punishment? The father netted $9K in that auction. The mom here won't get that much, but at least she's teaching her kid a lesson.A 13-year-old kid in Virginia has backtalked to his mom for the last time. When he was told to do his chores instead of play Xbox 360, he went and intentionally broke the vacuum cleaner to get out of it. What'd his mom do? Well, she's selling his Xbox and all his games on eBay. And that was before she found out he was surfing porn sites by checking out his browser's cookies.Porn on a teenage boy's PC? No! Let's hope she gets enough for a new vacuum. eBay needs a new...
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The rumor keeps circulating that Microsoft is indeed going to include a Blu-ray player in future Xbox 360s. Microsoft continually denies the rumors, such as the one started by DigiTimes regarding a deal with Lite-On to manufacture said drive.Microsoft's PR department had this say:“No. Lite-On is not manufacturing Blu-ray drives for Xbox 360. As we have stated, games are what are driving consumers to purchase game consoles and we remain focused on providing the largest library of blockbuster game available.“For our customers who want a premium movie experience we offer the largest library of on-demand HD content available and the ability to play back DVDs in high definition.“Microsoft seems...
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Some say Microsoft chose poorly when they backed Toshiba's HD DVD standard, and that had Microsoft backed Blu-ray instead, there wouldn't have been much of a format war. There's another group, including Michael Bay, that thinks Microsoft intentionally chose a standard that they didn't think would win in an attempt to undermine consumer confidence in disc formats altogether. Why?So they could build up their HD content on their digital distribution service:"Microsoft has been expanding the HD video capabilities of both Vista Media Center and Xbox Live Marketplace. The Marketplace's HD content library is modest today, but the software giant clearly has plans to change that.So, let's put everything...
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After Toshiba pulled the plug on HD DVD the rumor was that Microsoft was going to offer support for the Blu-ray devices both in Windows and on the Xbox 360. Now Microsoft is claiming that they're not presently working on such a device for the Xbox 360:"Xbox is not currently in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association to integrate Blu-ray into the Xbox experience," (Xbox group product manage Aaron) Greenberg told Reuters in an interview.One possible reason why Microsoft isn't developing a Blu-ray player just yet is that they might be planning on pushing their Xbox Live video rental service harder. Why back a competitor's technology when you can vertically integrate?...
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According to a report in the Financial Times, Sony is in talks with Microsoft about offering a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360. As many of you know, until recently Sony has touted Blu-ray as an advantage the PlayStation 3 holds over the Xbox 360. Microsoft had backed Toshiba’s HD-DVD format and offered an affordable, external HD-DVD drive for the 360, but by now we all know how that worked out... "A Blu-ray drive in a 360 would make Microsoft more competitive with the PS3, but it would also mean extra revenues for Sony’s electronics division. It would also add further cost to the 360, meaning a premium edition of the console could be necessary. A Blu-ray drive could be incorporated...
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If you're a professional looking for a laptop/mobile workstation, NVIDIA has a new graphics chip you may want to consider before making you're purchasing decision. Here's the scoop on the Quadro FX 3600M:“Engineered to deliver high performance and visualization of extensive datasets with extremely high image quality in an ISV-certified, notebook platform, the Quadro FX 3600M is available as a fully qualified MXM v2.1A type-III form factor mobile workstation graphics board with: 512 MB G-DDR3 memory 256-bit memory interface 51.2 GBps graphic memory bandwidth OpenGL 2.1, Shader Model 4.0, and DirectX 10 PowerMizer™ adaptive power management toolsThe complete line of NVIDIA Quadro FX...
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There seems to be one last detail we need to take care of before we put the fork in the HD DVD format: The hard drive for the Xbox 360. It appears Microsoft is preparing to offer an Xbox360 with a stand-alone Blu-ray drive as early as May of 2008.Michael Ephraim the Managing Director of Sony Computer Entertainment said: "We would welcome Microsoft to the Blu-ray stable. In fact it is quite logical for them as the PS3 has been very succesful in driving consumers to Blu-ray. In fact we believe that it has done more to win the format war than traditional Blu-ray player".When asked whether Sony would grant Microsoft a Blu-ray licence he said: "That is up to Sony Corporate but I see no reason...
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Call this a rumor, but a particularly cool one.Netflix may consider extending its Watch Instantly movie streaming feature to game consoles, says one customer presented with a survey by the company. Polling its subscriber base, the rental outlet asks households if they would like to watch both movies and TV shows through either the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360 and suggests a custom software implementation that would allow the feature.No confirmation yet, and only one report of this survey, which makes this report very questionable yet. It would indeed be a cool feature, however....
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Just in case you didn't catch the new link at the top of the page, we’re writing to let you all know that we’ve just posted a mid-range workstation-class GPU round-up at HotHardware. We look at three cards in particular – two from ATI and one from Nvidia. From ATI, we’ve got the new FireGL V5600 512 MB card along with the low-end FireGL V3600 256 MB card. And in the Nvidia camp, we’ve got the popular QuadroFX 1700 512 MB card. All three of these cards are very tolerable in terms of size, power consumption, noise, and (most of all) price . While one shouldn't expect top of the line performance from them, in our tests we found performance in many applications to be impressively...
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Just a few weeks ago, we took a look at the two fastest workstation class graphics cards currently on the market, the FireGL V8650 from ATI/AMD and the QuadroFX 5600 from Nvidia. We found both products to be quite powerful and thought either one would be a solid choice for a high-end workstation. However, the one comment which was repeated over and over again when looking at those cards was that unless you worked for a major studio or production firm, they were simply not very affordable. At nearly $3,000 a piece, the FireGL V8650 and QuadroFX 5600 require large investments. However, don’t think that just because a graphics card is targeted for workstation use that...
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