Tech News
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GeForce GTX Titan Announced - The New Fastest GPU on PCI Express
Published: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 | By: DennisIt is a Titan of news today.
Be sure to check out our coverage of the Nvidia GTX Titan, its basically what everyone else is saying, but different.
Web Previews
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan preview
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Video Card Preview @ Legit Reviews
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Powered Maingear SHIFT @ HotHardware
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN GK110s Opening Act @ Hardware Canucks
- Gaming and Supercomputing Collide: NVIDIA Announces GeForce Titan @ Techgage
- NVIDIA Announce GTX Titan - HardwareHeavenWith any luck we should be seeing real benchmarks in a couple weeks.
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GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7 Intel Z77 Motherboard Review @ Legit Reviews
Published: Monday, February 18, 2013 | By: DennisIf there is one thing I love it is a top end motherboard, with top end features and a proven pedigree of reliability and performance. There are few companies left that can build such a product and Gigabyte is one of them.
Many hardware sites dub these as "halo" products indicating that they get the majority of the marketing money and serve to lead the way for down market sales. Of course the only downside is they are difficult to get.
All in all I have to say that the GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7 is a great board and it's been a pleasure to work with over the past couple of weeks. Despite having the rather high price tag of $399.99 I would easily recommend the Z77X-UP7 to anyone looking for a top of the line motherboard...
Be sure to check out our review of the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7, sadly no LN2 overclocking for neither Legit or myself but I can say that I was able to get 5.0Ghz stable for the OC tests and even ran benchmarks to prove it.
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Fate of AMDs Sea Islands obscured in the fog @ TR
Published: Monday, February 18, 2013 | By: DennisI used to work with a guy who loved to use the word "cadence". He would use it out of context, in casual discussion and most of the time incorrectly. Normally this wouldn't bother me but, it is like seeing a VW Beetle on the road. When you see one then you see them all.
The news came out in an unusual way, via an interview with a Japanese website and then several tweets from AMD employees and the official Radeon Twitter feed. Naturally, we had questions about the state of things, so AMD held a conference call for the press today, in an attempt to clarify matters.
Prior to last weekend, we expected AMD to be introducing a new generation of graphics cards within the next few months. That expectation was informed by the firm's usual cadence for graphics releases and its public roadmaps. For instance, here's the slide AMD shared at its CES press conference, with graphics along the top.It would seem that AMD is planning a new GPU but is planning to keep the HD7000 series GPUs as their primary focus for the majority of 2013. I suspect that nVidia will be doing the same with tentative plans for something new sometime after Haswell.
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Silverstone Precision PS08 @ techPowerUp
Published: Thursday, February 14, 2013 | By: DennisNeed a case?
The Precision PS08 is the newest addition to the Precision family of cases from Silverstone. Its key selling point is the ability to hold large graphics cards within its compact and nearly weightless belly, but is it enough to sway people away from mid-tower cases for the same price?
This isn't a bad box and with some of the strange styling aside it could work well in just about any mainstream build. Personally I have a soft spot for the Silverstone Temjin TJ08-E Evolution. Its a great small case that supports full sized video cards, full sized coolers and 1000w PSUs. Only limitation is MicroATX motherboards, which aren't all that difficlt to get these days.
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How Much is Asteroid 2021 DA14 Worth? - Some say $195B US
Published: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 | By: DennisHere is an interesting story that has been making the rounds. The Asteroid 2021 DA14, you know the one scheduled "not" to crash into earth. Well, it could be worth a whole lot of money.
Provided we could mine it.
The first story claims that there are enough minerals on that space rock to make the operation viable for consideration.
Here is the kicker, to make the story readable by the Internet public they combined two things
1) some really big numbers ($200 Billion)
2) something people are talking about (Asteroid about to miss the earth)And, it caught my attention. It also caught the attention of those smart people at Forbes who said (not in their own words) "{insert word} Please, you crazy"
No. The value of any lump of rock is not the value of the metals trapped within it. It is the value of those trapped metals minus the cost of untrapping them. Thus that calculation of value by Deep Space Industries is simply wrong.
So, for example, a mountain of iron ore out in the Australian Outback is not worth the same as that same tonnage of iron ore sitting outside a steel plant in China. We must subtract the costs of tearing the mountain apart, grading the ore, building a railroad to the coast for it, the cost of the ships to transport it to China and, crucially, the cost of the finance to do all of this.The author goes on to claim that since a space rock cannot be mined we shouldn't compare it to valuable ore but rather worthless dirt we use to bury our poo.
Personally I would like to see a space mining operation.
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ASUS ROG Maximus V Extreme Intel LGA1155 @ techPowerUp
Published: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 | By: DennisI was really looking forward to getting one of these boards to compliment my Asus motherboard collection but, the stars never aligned. Had I gotten one of these boards I may have concluded that superior Asus engineering and awesome UEFI support have positioned this motherboard to become one of the best motherboards for enthusiast hardware activities, that you can buy.
That last part is key since my other suggestions have since gone out of production. And. well, lets face it, I never got one so I can say whatever I want.
ASUS's monsterous ROG flagship is here! The ASUS Maximus V Extreme is built for the hardcore overclocker, with its sights firmly set at knocking the competition off of the top overclocking global records. Packed full of overclocking features and options, I get to see if I can make this lion purr. Turns out, it's easier than I had hoped.
It would seem that the TechPowerUp reviewer liked it.
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Intel 525 mSATA SSD Review – Every Capacity Tested @ HCW
Published: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 | By: DennisThese would be the drives to use when you enable the Smart Response cache on many Gigabyte motherboards.
We review every capacity available of the Intel 525 Series SSD. The Intel 525 is similar to the 520 Series, but in an mSATA format.
Small quote, but these are small SSD drives, lets see which one is fastest. Grab some popcorn, I'm in it until the end.
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Microsoft kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development @ ExtremeTech
Published: Monday, February 11, 2013 | By: DennisGiven the discussions in the latest podcast I felt this article hits home. Of the quotes in the article I am surprised to see how they made a reference to how consoles have kept up with PCs due to lackluster D3D support on the PC despite the hardware gap.
Pretty sure that isn't the case and if anything the issue isn't with API support but rather aging hardware in the console space and difficulties getting games to run on both platforms with a reasonable amount of quality.
XNA was Microsoft’s toolset for cross-platform game development between the Xbox 360, Zune (when applicable), Windows Phone 7, and PC titles. It debuted in 2004 and was used by a number of small developers/indie titles that were later made available on Xbox Live. As Promit Roy, CTO of Action Labs, points out, this is scarcely a surprise. XNA has lagged behind developments on the PC side for years and wasn’t capable of targeting DirectX 10 or 11 feature sets despite the former being over six years old.
Clearly the above is showing their bias towards consoles and not so much on cross platform development, laws of the lowest common denominator and all. Web developers do the same thing when building business websites. This is one reason why some sites lack support for the latest web technologies.
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NL: Review Block: Cases and Coolers redux'ed
Published: Monday, February 11, 2013 | By: DennisIn this edition of Cases and Coolers we'll be looking at a whole lotta NZXT squid coolers with the power to take down tiny wooden sailing ships with a single fan and, a pretty cool chassis from Lian Li.
Cases (aka Chassis, box, thing taking up space in the corner, etc)
- Cubitek Mini Cube ITX Case Review @ Pro-Clockers
- Lian Li PC-V700 Mid Tower Case at Modders-Inc
- Computing on Demand: Review: RAIDMAX Cobra
Coolers
- NZXT Kraken X40 Liquid Cooler review
- NZXT Kraken X40 & X60 CPU Coolers Review @ Hardware Canucks
- Corsair H100i CPU Cooler Review @ Hardware Secrets
- NZXT Kraken X60 Review
- Phanteks PH-TC12DX CPU Cooler @ TechreactionI've started taking odds on which mainstream self contained water cooler will have a major, front page on reddit, failure so big that everyone goes back to using the trusty heatpipe tower.
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Asustek, Gigabyte share over 50% motherboard market
Published: Friday, February 8, 2013 | By: DennisHere is an interesting statistic. Both Asus and Gigabyte (together) make up more than 50% of the motherboard market when you consider them as a brand. (My assumption is that they didn't count OEM products coming out of their factories)
Asustek Computer and Gigabyte Technology shipped 22 million and 19 million motherboards respectively for own-brand sale in the global DIY market in 2012, together occupying 51.3% of the total global shipments of 80 million units, according to Taiwan-based motherboard makers.
ASRock and Micro-Star International (MSI) shipped 7.7 million and five million own-brand motherboards respectively in 2012, the sources indicated.
There were an estimated 28 million own-brand motherboards shipped in the China DIY market in 2012, accounting for 35% of the global total, the sources noted. Asustek shipped nearly nine million units and Gigabyte shipped about eight million units, resulting in a combined market share of 60.7% in China, the sources indicated. The remaining shipments of about 11 million motherboards were mostly shared by ASRock, MSI, Biostar Microtech International and China-based Colorful Technology and Onda, the sources said.48 million motherboards shipped? Makes you wonder who is buying all these boards and where the Rampage and UD7 boards fall into this metric. I mean they tend to sell out rather quickly. So, are they really making only 200 of each? or are these boards really in high demand??
These numbers also shed a little light into the PC market as a whole. Assuming that more than half of those shipments are to replace aging systems you can assume that people are still building their own computers, either on a personal level or as a larger organization. Also assuming that the PC market is "flat" indicating no growth or decline will it be the motherboard makers that cause the downfall of the PC market or will some outside factor play into it?
Too many questions, maybe Darren and I will address it on the next podcast.
Stay tuned!
