Seagate today announced channel and OEM shipments of the Momentus XT drive, the world’s fastest 2.5-inch laptop PC hard drive, combining SSD-like performance with the massive capacity and much lower cost of HDDs.

The Momentus XT drive also features Adaptive Memory – a groundbreaking new technology from Seagate that learns and optimizes the drive’s performance to each user by moving frequently used information into the flash memory for faster access. The Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive boots up to 100 percent faster than traditional 5400RPM drives, the mainstream spin speed for laptop PCs, and sets new benchmarks for real-world system performance for laptops and gaming systems.

Today’s high-performance SSDs for mobile computing cost as much as 10 times more than hard disk drives of the same capacity, with the price of a 250GB SSD outstripping even the cost of many laptop PCs. As a result, most consumers and system builders are unwilling or unable to pay the high price for the greater speed and quiet operations of SSDs. Additionally, SSDs offer fewer capacity options than hard disk drives.

The Momentus XT drive is a best-of-both-worlds solution that combines a 7200RPM spin speed, 4GB of solid state memory and Seagate’s Adaptive Memory technology to deliver unprecedented hard drive performance. The unique Adaptive Memory technology works by identifying patterns in how often certain digital data is used, and then moving the most frequently used information to the embedded solid state memory for faster access – effectively tailoring hard drive performance to each user and their applications.

Momentus XT Drive Brings Unprecedented Speed to New ASUS Gaming Laptop PC
ASUS has also announced that it will offer the Momentus XT drive as an upgrade option for its new Republic of Gamers (ROG) G73Jh notebook. The system is powered by an Intel i7 720Qm quad-core processor, 8GB of DDR3 memory, and DX11 capable ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5870.

Rumors are all over the web regarding the pending release of ATI’s Radeon 5800 series DX11 class graphics cards. We ‘think’ that the first released card will be the Radeon HD 5870 which is developed under codename Cypress.

From what we heard is that this card will be lined up directly against the GeForce GTX 285 pricing wise, the rumor is that this high-end DX11 class graphics card will get a price tag of 299 USD.

Though I personally doubt it a little given the issues with the 40nm node, there is a a rumor that this graphics card would be based on a 40nm fabrication process.

* 1GB GDDR5 memory
* ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to three displays
* ATI Stream technology
* Designed for DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL
* Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
* Compliant with DirectX 11 and earlier revisions,supports OpenGL 3.1
* ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
* ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
* Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology
* 2x DL-DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI
* PCI Express 2.0 interface

Once thing is certain, we look very much forward to this new product release, whatever and how fast it may be, it looks like the shader processor count might be doubled up by the way.