The Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 Is Faster Than Every Other Graphics Card [Graphics]

The new Sapphire Radeon HD 5970—based upon the acclaimed ATI HD 5970 chipset—is the new world's fastest graphics card. Its 3DMark Vantage score is an insane 22,000.
The overclocked ATI GPU runs at 850MHz, which is supported by 4GB of DDR3 RAM (itself, clocked at 1,200MHz). And all this hardware necessitates three fans an a massive heatsink, making it thicker than your average video card. Outputs include two dual-link DVIs and one mini DisplayPort. Weird that there's no HDMI on here, like the 5870 has.

AMD expects that we'll see the HD 5970 from a variety of different manufactures, which is good because while we have no idea what the thing costs, it won't be cheap.
[Gizmodo via Fudzilla via SlashGear]

Hitachi builds 40.26mph elevator, fastest in the world

Buildings are getting higher, and nobody wants to stand around waiting for an elevator. Hitachi aims to fix that with its latest elevator, a 40.26 mph (64.8 km/h) rocket that's the fastest in the world.
It's installing the new 1,080 m/min lift in the 698-foot G1Tower, a building constructed by Hitachi in Hitachinaka City, Japan specifically for testing elevators. The tower's construction will be completed in April.
The new elevator goes so fast it needs its own air pressure control. Maybe they could use one of these in the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai). But maybe not, the Burj's elevators are almost as fast, flying at 40mph. Time for a race.
[DVICE via JCN Network]

You Know Corsair Dominator GTX 2333MHz Is Ridiculously Fast RAM Just By Looking At It [Gaming]

Corsair's Dominator GTX 2333MHz is the fastest RAM you can buy that's Intel XMP-certified, at 2333MHz with latencies of 9-11-9-27. Each 2GB module is individually tested, in case you're wondering why else it's $200 a stick.
[Gizmodo via Hexus]

Micron RealSSD Drives Claim Title of World's Fastest (by a Lot) [Ssds]

Micron's new C300 2.5-inch SSDs are incredibly fast. We're talking 50% faster than the current market leaders, and fast enough to downright shame any hard drive. Yeah, there's a new SSD speed champ every week, but these are damned impressive.
The C300 SSDs, available in 128GB and 256GB capacities when they're released sometime early next year, whups the current top dogs in read/write speeds. It's also the first to take advantage of the new SATA 3.0, which allows 6Gb/s throughput, twice that of SATA 2.0—but regardless of whether it's using 2.0 or 3.0, it's still blazingly fast. It's rated at 355MB/s read and 215MB/s write—for comparison, the champ, OCZ's Agility EX, gets 255MB/s and 195MB/s read and write speeds, respectively. You can see it compared with "a market leader" (probably either the OCZ or maybe Intel's X25-M) here:

By using the new ONFI 2.1 specification, it's also got nearly five times the data speed per transfer, which is basically means you'll be seeing improved performance while multitasking.
The C300 series is expensive, obviously, at about $350 for the 128GB and $715 for the 256GB (and then only when bought in bulk), but it's a pretty incredible performer—hopefully we'll be seeing it in some equally impressive laptops when it's released next year.
[Gizmodo via Micron]

This Car Will Run at 1,000mph [Cars]

Bloodhound is a car being designed to run at a swooshing one thousand miles-per-hour. That's 1,609 km/h, which is way faster than the speed of sound. As the video shows, it'll have more thrust than the Eurofighter combat jet:
Of course, the car has yet to be built, let alone break that record. But the effort is quite serious, these people are not amateur, and they have serious sponsors. It will use one EJ200 jet like the one used by the Eurofighter—hopefully a real one, unlike the one I got into at Dubai two years ago—alonside a one 18" hybrid rocket, and a V12 piston engines. The 6500-kilogram Bloodhound—which is being built in Bristol—will have a 47,000lbs trust, with a top speed of 1050mph.

The driver will be former RAF Wing Comander Andy Green, who broke the landspeed record in 1997.
[Gizmodo via Bloodhound via Techradar]

Fusion-io IoXtreme SSD: Fastest Consumer SSD on the Market [SSDs]

HotHardware took a look at this consumer-focused PCI-Express SSD from Fusion-io, and found that while it's pretty damn expensive at $900 for 80GB, it's blazingly fast, hitting 700MB/s read and 300MB/s write speeds.
Unfortunately, in addition to the expense, it can't be used as a bootable drive quite yet, although Fusion-io claims that feature is coming. And we probably shouldn't gloss over the expense—yeah, it's a "consumer drive," and it's cheap compared to similar drives, but it's still $900 for 80GB. But it's a cool look at where storage could be headed, and if you've got enough money to snag one (available at Amazon), well, I hate you lots.
[Gizmodo via HotHardware via Engadget]

AMD Phenom II Breaks 7GHz Barrier [Amd]

7.08GHz. That's the record-shattering speed an AMD Phenom II processor was overclocked to using a massive amount of liquid helium. You can watch the whole process in this documentary video set to one kickass soundtrack.
[Gizmodo via Crunchgear]

The First USB 3.0 Flash Drive Is a Wide Load [Usb 3.0]

Super Talent's first USB 3.0 flash drive, is huge—about the same size as Corsair's Voyager, in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB sizes. It'll push those gigs of Zatoichi rips at 4.8Gbps, or about 10x faster than USB 2.0.
Of course, you need a computer running one of these motherboards or cards, since Intel's dragging ass on a standard it helped developed. And you might as well pick up one of these hard drives too, while you're at it. [Gizmodo via Register]

Lexar announces new 600x Compact Flash cards

Lexar announced their new 600x compact flash cards today. It’s not unexpected that the faster speed memory cards are coming out, given the UDMA requirements of cameras like the Canon 7D.
The new Lexar cards have a amazing 90MB/s transfer rate when used in a device that supports the new UDMA 6 protocol. This is particularly important for the generation of cameras that shoot video, since the write speed is critical when you are shooting in HD.
The new cards are available in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes. The 8GB and 16GB cards are available now, the 32GB should be available in November. The 8GB version sells for $149, the 16GB version sells for $249. There isn’t any pricing available for 32GB version, but you can safely assume it will not be cheap.
You can read the press release here.
[CrunchGear]

Collider might discover a way to travel to the stars

Here's a good use for that massive, trouble-prone Large Hadron Collider everyone's so scared of: Let's use it to test hyperdrive spacecraft propulsion. While we were thinking hyperdrive was the stuff of science fiction, physicist Franklin Felber plans to test whether hyperdrive is possible, and he has an idea of using the Large Hadron Collider to do it.
His testing would be based on the idea that a stationary mass repels a relativistic particle that's traveling faster than half the speed of light, so Felber says, if that's true, then wouldn't a relativistic particle repel a stationary mass? Sounds logical to us:

It turns out that when it is up and running, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will accelerate particles to the kind of energies that generate this repulsive force. Felber's idea is to set up a test mass next to the beam line and measure the forces on it as the particles whiz past.

He says it won't get in the way of all the other mind-blowing things that collider will be working on, so why not? This could be our ticket to the stars. Give it a try, guys — that is, if you can ever get that collider working. Oh, and maybe check to see if this guy Felber is a loony tune or not.
[DVICE via Technology Review]

Pioneer Churns Out the World's First 12x Blu-ray Burner [Blu-Ray]

The BDR-205 is pretty much like any other mainstream 5.25-inch internal Blu-ray writer, in terms of looks and features, except for the fact that it, get this, spins slightly faster than the current crop of 8x writers. Slightly!
I was tempted to try to find a late-90s press release for Pioneer's first 12x CD burner to see how closely the language matched this one—let's just assume "very"—but a) I couldn't find one, and b) I didn't want to diminish Pioneer's achievement here too much—any device that cuts into the atrociously long Blu-ray burn times we've become slowly and begrudgingly accustomed to is a categorically good thing. The BDR-205 is due in October for $250. [Gizmodo via Crunchgear]