CyberPower just announced that it is upgrading its Gamer Xtreme series. The new line of CyberPower Gamer Xtreme PCs will come with USB 3.0 and SATA III as standard. Prices start as low as $749. Buyers can configure and order a Gamer Xtreme system with the new specs today.

Intel’s latest i5/i7 processors and P55/X58 chipsets will give you some nice performance and both USB 3.0 and SATA III are backward compatible so your system will have a longer life as well.

USB 3.0 devices are just now showing up for mass consumption and Super Talent is leading the charge, having just introduced the first USB 3.0 flash drive, which promises transfer rates of up to 320MB/sec.

If you have a USB 3.0 socket, you’ll get speeds up to 200MB/sec. If you use it in a USB 2.0 connector it will slow to USB 2.0 speeds of course. No word on a price or release date, but expect it to ship soon in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities.

If you’ve been waiting for USB 3.0, Asus has announced a new range of motherboards that offer up true USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s data performance. The Asus Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Series motherboard has onboard support, while the ASUS Xtreme Design P7P55D Series uses the Asus U3S6 PCIe x4 expansion card to offer the latest USB and SATA data transfer capabilities. Transferring a 20GB HD movie now takes less than 70 seconds, while a 4MB song requires less than 0.01sec.

Both come with the Intel P55 Express chipset that supports the latest LGA 1156 socket for Intel Core i7/Core i5 Processors and exclusive Hybrid Technology (Hybrid Processor, Hybrid Phase, and Hybrid OS) for intelligent performance enhancement, active cooling, and rapid online access.

Dane-Elec has just announced a new line of So SuperSpeed hard drives and SSDs which use the up and coming USB 3.0 standard. The drives can hit the amazing speed of 250MBps which is about ten times that of USB 2.0.

Capacities range from 500GB to 2TB for the hard drive. The SSDs come in 80GB and 160GB capacities. The So SuperSpeed drives will hit on December 11th, with the 500GB hard drive costing $180 while the SSDs will cost you $400 and $800 for the 80GB and 160GB capacities.

Acer has announced the Acer Aspire Timeline AS1810TZ notebook which sports an 11.6″ screen with an HD resolution and is LED backlit. This one has a full sized keyboard and delivers up to 8 hours of battery life on a single charge.

This notebook is just one of several announced by Acer, but this model is the thinnest and lightest, weighing just 3.08 pounds. This notebook will launch on October 22 with Windows 7 installed for $599.

So where’s all that USB 3.0 gear at? Well, at least Buffalo has something to offer. The HD-HU3 series of USB 3.0 hard disks will be the “world’s first” to ship. Buffalo will make NEC’s roughly $60 IFC-PCIE2U3 2-port PCI Expressx1 host controller available with its hard drives when they ship this month in Japan.

The 1TB and 1.5TB drives will cost about $225 and about $284. A 2TB disk is on the way later for about $523. Awesome. Now you have something to use those 3.0 cables with.

Parrot’s RKi8400 in-dash car stereo was made for the iPhone, so you can take a nice drive and have all of your tunes hassle-free. When you get a call it goes into hands-free mode using Stereo Bluetooth connectivity and A2DP support.

The stereo is compatible with all iPhones and second generation iPod touch models just as long as they are running firmware 3.0 and up. It also features an SDHC memory card slot so you can store music without using the included USB port.

Acer has announced their latest M-Series desktop PC called the Aspire G. It’s also known as the Predator and a quick look at the specs suggests that it lives up to it’s name. It features an Intel Core i7-950 3.06GHz processor, 6GB DDR3 RAM (up to 12GB), Intel X58 Express chipset, 1TB SATA hard drive @ 7200rpm, Two Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 (1GB VRAM), Blu-ray disc drive, 11 USB 2.0 ports, Two eSATA ports, Multi-memory card reader, Four DVI-D ports, and Two Gigabit Ethernet ports.

This one is powered by 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium and will run you €1950 bundled with the Logitech G15 keyboard and the G9 Laser mouse.

Apple may have dumped ExpressCard from their new MacBook Pro models, but the PCMCIA are going ahead with the official release of ExpressCard Standard 2.0. With 2.0, transfer speeds are reportedly boosted by up to 10-times compared to ExpressCard 1.2 and there’s also support for SuperSpeed USB 3.0.

The up to 5Gbps bandwidth will make ExpressCard 2.0 even more useful for adding eSATA ports and high-speed storage like the latest breed of SSDs. PCMCIA also sees it being useful for streaming video and audio adapters. ExpressCard 2.0 is also backward-compatible with previous cards, so existing accessories will all work in the new sockets.

Mitsubishi just announced a whole bunch of new LCDs. DLPs too. The one that has us most interested is an 82-inch DLP for $4200. It isn’t just frakkin huge, it’s also equipped with “3D-ready viewing technology.”

With this baby you’ll be all ready to go whenever 3D content enters your home. It’s part of their 737 “home theater” TV line. The company also updated their soundbar-integrated LCD TVs, which start at $1800 for a 40-inch model up to to $3,300 for a 52-incher.

USB 3.0 has been officially dubbed SuperSpeed USB. It boasts transfer speeds of 4.8Gbps and it will move a 25GB HD file in about 70 seconds. Interestingly the architecture was given extra data lanes for more streamlined transfer speeds, instead of bursts, which makes it play better with camcorders etc. It will charge your gadgets faster too, by delivering more power than USB 2.0 and its new polling architecture also makes it more efficient.

Unfortunately, your old USB cables won’t deliver SuperSpeeds. You’ll have to have USB 3.0 gear from end-to-end to get the speeds, because the cables have extra pins. It is all backward compatible. The cables have three plugs: The standard one you all know, standard B which is the square one and mini B which is a weird two headed thing and micro. The first USB 3.0-equipped gadgets should arrive sometime in 2010.

Apple made some updates to its line of popular iMacs today, including adding the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors. These new iMacs have starting prices of around $1,200.

The refreshed iMacs now include, according to Apple, faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors across the line, a 1066 MHz front-side bus and up to 4GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory. The 24-inch iMac also offers a 3.06 GHz Intel processor and the high-performance NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics as options.

Fujitsu has announced a new mobile scanner designed for Mac users. It is called the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M and it prices around $295.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M is a color, duplex ADF (automatic document feeder) scanner which works with Mac OS X Leopard. It can work via USB connectivity and offers which Fujitsu says is one touch conversion of paper documents into PDF files. It measures a compact 11.2” x 3.7” x 3.0” and weighs a little over three pounds.

We heard about USB planning to increase its speed by 10 fold back in September with USB 3.0 specs complete by mid-2008, but FireWire apparently had no intention of sitting back and being outdone. The 1394 Trade Association announced last week a new specification for FireWire that uses the same connections and cables but promises 4 times the speed of the current FireWire bringing potential speeds of up to 3.2 Gbps.

The new spec called S3200 will used 100% of its bit rate as payload and none as overhead bringing the payload speed up to 400 megabytes per second compared to 90 megabytes per second in the current FireWire 800. The new S3200 spec will also be backwards compatible with existing FireWire devices and will offer cable configurations to bring data and power over 300 feet. It also will maintain its peer-to-peer architecture to connect devices with or without a computer.

Intel along with HP, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments Incorporated have announced the formation of the USB 3.0 Promoters Group with a goal of creating the next generation of USB interconnect for use with PC’s and other mobile and consumer gadgets.

As need for increased storage continues to grow along with larger file sizes, the need for a faster connection becomes increasingly important. The USB 3.0 will create a new standard that will be backwards compatible to support existing USB 2.0 and 1.1 connections while providing the ability to transfer data at 10 times the current speed available with USB 2.0.