Ninjalane News

Cooler Master Storm Trooper Launch Day

Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Email

A new addition to the CM Storm line has been announced and might be one of the best cases ever made.

The Trooper is a case offering that should be near the top of the list for anyone who is in the market for a full tower case.  The MSRP of $189.99 makes it about middle of the range for this sort of case.  The CM Storm Trooper is quite possibly the best case I have reviewed this year, so I am happy to award it 9/10 – LanOC Recommended.

Trooper Reviews
- Cooler Master Storm Trooper Gaming Case Review @ Ninjalane
- Cooler Master Storm Trooper Full Tower Case Review @ Hardware Canucks
- Cooler Master Storm Trooper @ LanOC Reviews

NL: Review Block - Cases and Coolers

Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Email

Seems fitting that we do a case and cooler review block considering that is all I have done for the past 5 days.

Cases
- Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced @ Bjorn3D
- SilverStone Raven RV03 @ Hexus
- SilverStone Temjin SST-TJ08-Evolution M-ATX Tower Chassis Review
- OC3D: Silverstone TJ08 Review

Coolers
- Corsair H100 Self-Contained Liquid CPU Cooler Review @ Techgage
- Corsair Hydro Series H100 CPU Water Cooler @ Metku

Sapphire 6850 Vapor-X @ PureOverclock

Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Email

Ever wondered what could be done with the HD 6850 with a really good aircooler?  How about 970Mhz on the core. wink smile

We are looking at the replacement for the original HD 5770: the Sapphire Radeon HD6850 Vapor-X. This card sports Sapphire's non-reference heatsink, black diamond chokes and 10-Phase power design, and looks to bring some robust gaming horsepower at lower temperatures with the popular Vapor-X cooler design. The HD 6850 graphics card was made for the mainstream population, with an MSRP of less than $170 and an added bonus of DiRT 3 thrown in to the mix, this looks like a very promising package for the average user.

I do really love these custom PCB video cards, they just seem like the right way to go moving forward.  Its too bad more companies don't do the same.

Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 Motherboard Review @ HardCoreWare

Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Email

Looking to get into a Sandy Bridge system but are choosing to experience the low cost nature of the platform?  Well you may consider a board just like this one.

The Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 is just one of many Z68 configurations made by Gigabyte, this one a mid-range full ATX board with not a lot of bells and whistles. What does $130 get you?

We of course looked at the ultra-high-end UD7 edition of the same motherboard, and while it comes with a few more features designed for overclocking it will have the same basic "default" performance as the UD3.

How to Overclock Sandy Bridge E to 5GHz @ Bit-Tech

Published: Saturday, September 24, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

Now that IDF is over and editors have had time to look over the SBE (Sandy Bridge E) info from the slide presentations you're bound to find exploritory articles speculating how to overclock future systems by reverse engineering what is presented.

For instance we already know that SBE is based on the Sandy Bridge architecture and that some of the leaked specs and board designs indicate that the LGA2011 is basically two SB chips stuck together.  Of course that is an over simplification but good enough for now.  One of the limitations of Sandy Bridge was the lack of real Base Clock overclocking since there was no independent system clock to control SATA and PCI Express speeds.  Basically that means you run the risk of out of frequency errors as the Base Clock increased.

Based on this article they are speculating that the same Base Clock limitation exists in SBE but Intel has introducted an additional mulitplier upstream of Base Clock to further alter CPU speed.

Let’s say we’re aiming for an overclock of 5GHz (something that the Intel engineers said they had achieved during a bit of mucking around in their office). We don’t know how much of an overclock that is, but we know that 50x100MHz=5GHz. However, if we have a ‘locked’ Sandy Bridge E CPU that doesn’t have a multiplier of 50 or more, we’ll have to change the System Clock and the CPU divider instead. The maths requires us to work backwards from 5GHz like this:

1) 5,000 ÷ 1.66 = 3,012
2) 3,012 ÷ 100 = 30.012
3) 3,012 ÷ 30 = 100.4

In step 1 we’ve used the highest CPU divider to ‘gear down’ the desired overclock to System Clock and CPU multiplier ranges we’re confident of being able to use. In step 2 we’ve divided the result of step one by the desired System Clock – we’re still a little nervous about taking the System Clock too far from 100MHz (weirdly, we’re more nervous of this than Intel, it seems) as it’s the clock that's used by buses such as SATA and USB, and we’d rather not lose all our data.

The calculation above is using basic high school algebra to determine a Base Clock speed for a 5Ghz overclock assuming the following constants.

- Desired Speed
- Reference Clock Ratio (There appears to be two of them 1.25 and 1.66, I'm going to go out on a limb and assuming mobo makers will include more.)
- CPU Multiplier (assuming 95Mhz Bclk and the assumption that you can lower the mulitplier)

Great stuff, I can't wait to start tinkering.

NVIDIA Talks PC Gaming Trends @ Techgage

Published: Friday, September 23, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Email

NVidia has always pushed the PC when it comes to gaming and even helped game developers implement nVidia technology in their upcoming titles.  While we like to complain that consoles have killed PC game development it would seem that isn't always the case.

Some claim that PC gaming is dying, but recent trends disagree. In fact, it looks to be console gaming that's soon to see a decline, thanks in part to a growing number of compelling aspects that PCs offer - including at the very least free-to-play games. Let's take a look at these and other trends, and the reasons behind them.

I don't mind paying for games just so long as they provide me with some enjoyment and have a good single player story line.  Sadly very few games can deliver.

GIGABYTE GTX 570 Super Overclock SOC @ OCAU

Published: Thursday, September 22, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

When it comes to high-end super cards you can't go wrong with the SOC from Gigabyte.  The card comes "hot clocked" from the factory and features their triple fan "Windforce" GPU cooler to help control overclocked heat loads.  Of course if mortal cooling isn't your style simply press the LN2 button, strap on a GPU pot and pour for broke.

GIGABYTE's Super Overclock series of products is well known for pushing the envelope of overclocker-friendly features and high factory-shipped clock speeds. After reviewing their GTX 580 SOC, we thought it would be worth benchmarking its more affordable brother, the GTX 570 SOC. At first look we noticed that it was, like its big brother the GTX 580, a complete redesign - from the cooling, PCB design, power circuitry and amped up clock speeds. The GTX 570 SOC maintains a dual slot design and familiar form factor seen with the GTX 580 SOC. So how does this perform against NVIDIA's pricier GTX 580, and what features does it bring to the table? Let's fire up our test bench and find out!

From what we can tell the SOC line is the only one that is specifically designed for overclocking with a custom PCB that remains well within ATX spec.

Intel's Next-Gen Sandy Bridge-E Extreme Chip to Boost Performance by 65%

Published: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

This is some good news for us Workstation enthusiasts, now if the processor will also overclock like the 900 series we'll have a great tweaking processor as well.

According to a document with Intel's performance estimates of the Core i7-3960X processor (six cores, 3.30GHz, 15MB cache) seen by X-bit labs, the forthcoming chip for the LGA2011 platform is clearly faster than its predecessor Core i7-990X (six cores, 3.46GHz, 12MB cache) across a range of benchmarks despite of lower clock-speed amid the same amount of cores due to advantages of the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture over Nehalem/Westmere micro-architecture, quad-channel memory controller and other innovations.

I'm beginning to wonder what the difference is between X and K skus besides the L3 cache size.  According to the chart they both have unlocked multipliers and we already know 8 core CPUs will be "Xeon" branded for servers.  So, what does X mean?  Multi processor maybe?

Intel Core i7-3930K compared to Core i7-980X

Published: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

After IDF I started doing some more research into what will come with the LGA2011 processors and X79.  Of course the information is sparse and likely to change but the rumor mill appears to be quite knowledgeable.

With Sandy Bridge as the foundation the processors will be tweaked with a quad-core DDR3 memory controller, better overclocking and up to six cores in retail - eight for servers.

We knwo since earlier that Intel is planning at least three Sandy Bridge-E processors in the Intel Core i7-3000 series this fall and it is the middle child Core i7-3930K that Cooler has. The processor will operate at 3.2 GHz, but can overclock to 3.8GHz in Turbo mode. it was locked at the nominal frequency and then compared to Intel's current Gulftown architecture at the same clock frequency and number of cores.

Minus the misspellings the article is quite interesting and talks about 3 basic skus with the high end editions being X and K complete with unlocked multipliers.  All processors will feature a 130w TDP and quad memory channels so they almost mimic the 1155 lineup.

The 130w TDP is quite high considering SandyBridge-E appears to be nothing more than two 1155 processors smashed together, I guess they need a little extra juice to get all of the cores and PCI Express lanes to work.

NVIDIA GeForce LAN 6 BYOC Sells out in 2 Hours!

Published: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

Gamers Sign Up in Droves for This Fall’s Hottest Gaming Event; Gives Gamers First Chance Ever to Play Three Battlefield 3 Multiplayer Maps

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—September 20, 2011— NVIDIA today opened registration for GeForce LAN 6, which was met with an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from PC gamers.

Just two hours after opening registration, seats for the highly-anticipated bring-your-own computer (BYOC) gaming area sold out, as gamers reserved their spots to play in the highly anticipated 64-person LAN featuring Battlefield 3.

Check the Ninjalane Message Forum for the full press release

Portal free on steam

Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 - By: Dean
News Source: Web

Who doesn't like free stuff? Well Steam is giving away Portal once again for free. You have till September 20th so act soon.

Windows 8 on a laptop in-depth preview

Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 - By: Dean
News Source: Web

Many of you might have known that a developers build of Windows 8 has been released to the general public already. Heres a great preview of what's inside.

Less than 24 hours after it went live on Microsoft's site, Steve Ballmer reported a whopping 500,000 downloads of Windows 8 Developer Preview. That's half a million copies, if not eager Windows fans. Well, you can count us among them. Although we were treated to some private hands-on time with a tablet optimized for the OS, we hadn't, until now, had a chance to use it on a laptop -- i.e., the computing environment where we spend most of our time, and the one where we're most used to seeing Windows, in particular.

If you don't have time yourself to install, this preview will tide you over just fine. Very in depth and informative. 

If you want to grab it yourself and give it a go, you can do so from here.

Off to Watch the Boise Open

Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Ninjalane

Not much more I can say.  I'm off to watch the Boise Open today and likely won't be able to post any news.  Don't fret normal operations will resume before you know it.

Oh wait, I said that already  big grin smile

ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z LGA1155 @ techPowerUp

Published: Friday, September 16, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Email

The Maximus IV Gene-Z that we reviewed was actually a really fun board to mess with.  It didn't have all the cool stuff found on the Maximus IV Extreme but reacted and performed exactly the same, which is saying a lot since it’s only half the size.

ASUS has updated their microATX ROG offerings with the latest chipset from Intel, and we take a look. A red and black racer, the ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z is ready for high speed gaming without a doubt, and packs in many exclusive features that just might see it hit the finish line first. Ready? Set? GO!

The ROG features are what really separate these motherboards from the competition and I think the TPU folks agree..

AMD Bulldozer FX pricing revealed @ ExtremeTech

Published: Thursday, September 15, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

Early this week AMD released some amazing overclocking numbers from a golden, and LHe cooled, FX-8150 which has many enthusiasts excited about the new platform.  Pricing for the new chip has also been released and seems to have many analysts confused.

Why is any of the above bad news? Well, the pricing is possibly too cheap. Early benchmarks of Bulldozer showed that Zambezi was never likely to be competitive with Intel’s Core i7 — and these prices, which are all well below any of Intel’s comparable i7 (and even some i5) Sandy Bridge chips, suggest that the FX Series chips are priced to sell rather than compete. The nearest-spec chip to the FX-8150, for example, is the Core i7-2600, which has an Intel-suggested retail price of $294 — some $60 more than the AMD chip. If you compare the FX against the “overclockable” 2600k, the price difference is even more pronounced.

$200 isn't bad for a new processor and I have yet to see an AMD processor ever cost more than the comparable Intel offering so I dunno what the big deal is.  Of course this is just speculation, once the reviews are up we'll know for sure.

Check CPU-World for a price list and the site below for more on this story.

IDF Goodness - Gigabyte X79 Motherboards Reveled

Published: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

Last year Gigabyte unveiled their P67 line at IDF which marked a radical change in direction for Gigabyte.  First of all they changed the board colors from light blue to matte black and updated the heatsink design to better align the accent colors with the segment level. 

Well, in keeping with tradition there is a new line of motherboards on display.  This time based on the Intel X79.

The X79A-OC we are told was built to be the X79A-OC, but as many have heard there will be no more boards named the OC board. As you can obviously see the board carries the same color coordination, as well as the same features, and a few more such as the DIP switches, which we don't know what they do.

Be sure to check out SinHardware.com for some good photos of the upcoming boards including the new X79A-UD7(OC) board.  Yep, as we had suspected the OC and UD7 lines have been combined.

You'll also notice two different boards, one based on four memory sockets with the other having eight.  Boards that come with eight memory sockets will likely be higher-end than the four socket edition but may not work as well for overclocking.

AMD FX Overclocking Preview @ HardOCP

Published: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Web

Overclocking at AMD with HardOCP. 

As some of you may have noticed there was a world record announced today stating that AMD has the fastest running processor at 8.4Ghz.  Of course it takes Liquid Helium to get the processor cold enough to run that fast but if you're looking to break a record that is how you do it.  The video they have posted is a great presentation on the steps they took to reach the highest CPU speed on LN2 before switching to LHe.

Very much worth checking out.

Top 5 Tablets for Business | Business Computing World

Published: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - By: Dennis
News Source: Email

You get one guess as to which tablet they picked as number one and will also be surprised at what popular tablet didn't make the list.

For employers, the benefit of deploying tablets is having a more productive workforce that’s always connected to what’s happening at the office. However, businesses looking to deploy tablets have a different set of requirements than the average consumer. Security and application compatibility are both top priorities for any business, thereby eliminating some of the more consumer-friendly choices on the market. If your business has decided that it’s time to choose a tablet, it’s worth considering what kind of things you are going to use it for. This way you know that you’ll match the right machine to your needs…

Top lists are great but in most cases they are extremely biased by the writers.  While I do agree with many of their statements I don't think the Apple iPad2 should be at the top of the list, especially when it comes to business usage.  

Maybe if you're a writer and want to check email all day but if you need to do graphics or hardcore computing none of the "play" tablest are going to work.  In fact you'll want an Asus Slate for something like that.  Not only will it secure up to your corp network but it comes with a Core i5 and touch screen display.