Tech News

• Maingear Debuts New Thermal Interface Material: Meet the T1000

  Published: Friday, February 17, 2012 | By: Garrett

  Speading thermal paste correctly is critical in keeping your CPU cool but ensuring a thin evenly spead application can be difficult.  Maingear offers different solution:

  Today, Maingear has launched what they claim is a genuine advance over existing thermal pastes. The Epic T1000 kit uses a PCMA (phase change metal alloy) as an interface material between CPU and heatsink. Unlike a standard paste, which is (hopefully) applied with a razor or other straight-edge, Maingear's T1000 is a transparent wafer at room temperature that one lays over the CPU before attaching a heatsink.

  The higher cost and the fact that you need to have a new waffer each time you change cpus and/or heatsinks might make hardware enthusiast shy away from it.

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• AMD HD7770 1Ghz GPU Lauch Day

  Published: Wednesday, February 15, 2012 | By: Dennis

  You may have seen some reports about how hardware sites started getting performance enhancing pills in the mail and while Valentines day was just "yesterday" you might think it was a nice gesture but really it was a marketing stunt from AMD to promote the HD7770 and HD7750.

  

  Here are some reviews from around the inbox.  Look for our preview article of the Gigabyte solution a little later today.

  - OC3D: AMD HD7770 Review
  - Funky Kit Review: HIS Radeon HD 7750 iCooler
  - HIS Radeon HD 7750 Graphics Card Review @ HardwareHeaven
  - MSI Radeon HD 7770 OC edition review
  - AMD Radeon HD 7770 and 7750 Video Card Reviews @ Legit Reviews
  - Sapphire Radeon 7770 OC @ PureOverclock
  - AMD Radeon HD 7770 and 7750 GPU Reviews @ HotHardware
  - Sapphire HD 7770 Overclock Edition @ LanOC Reviews
  - AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition
  - AMD Radeon HD 7770 & HD 7750 Review @ Hardware Canucks
  - VTX3D HD7770 1GHZ Edition Crossfire Review
  - PowerColor Radeon HD 7770 1 GB @ techPowerUp
  

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• Thremal Compound Roundup February 2012

  Published: Wednesday, February 15, 2012 | By: Garrett

  If you were ever curious on how your thermal compound compares to the others out there, Hardware Secrets has done an excellent write up.

  Following up on our Thermal Compound Roundup - January 2012 review, we are adding five more thermal compounds to our roundup, for a total of 65 different models from Akasa, Antec, Arctic Cooling, Arctic Silver, Biostar, Connectland, Coollaboratory, Cooler Master, Coolink, Deepcool, Dow Corning, Enermax, Evercool, EVGA, Gelid, Glacialstars, Innovation Cooling, Masscool, Nanoxia, Nexus, Noctua, Phobya, Prolimatech, Scythe, Shin-Etsu, Spire, StarTech, Revoltec, Rosewill, Thermalright, Thermaltake, TIM Consultants, Titan, Tuniq, Xigmatek, Zalman, and ZEROtherm. In this review, we will determine if certain products are superior to others. We will also try another alternative thermal compound to see if it works.

  While it is great to see the temperature differences of each of the compounds, Hardware Secrets takes it one step further and adds some non thermal compounds like chocolate to give you an idea of why you might want to spend the extra money to get a good thermal compound.

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• Don’t Blame Your Crappy Marriage On Video Games

  Published: Wednesday, February 15, 2012 | By: Garrett

  Are you looking for a reason your marriage is on the rocks.  If you are thinking of blaming video games, you might have to look somewhere else.

  Any happy couple will tell you that successful relationships are built on compromises, and if one member of that relationship can't figure out how to balance his or her hobbies, that relationship is not going to work. Whether your vice of choice is World of Warcraft, fantasy football, or knitting, if you fall too deep into the rabbit hole of obsession, your personal life is going to suffer. Blame the person, not the game.

  Although I agree with the article, MMORPGs can be highly addictive and you should be careful of how much time you sink into it.

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• 7.8GHz AMD LN2 Overclocking at GIGABYTE Extreme OC Workshop

  Published: Tuesday, February 14, 2012 | By: Garrett

  Check out the winning results of a extreme overclocking workshop hosted in Australia complete with video and pictures. 

  For the workshop we utilized GIGABYTE's flagship AMD motherboard the 990FXA-UD7, AMD Bulldozer FX-8150 processors, a GIGABYTE Radeon HD 6970 video card, Corsair Dominator GT memory, Corsair AX1200 power supplies and Corsair ForceGT SSDs.

  Think you could beat their results?

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• The 50 Best Video Game Endings of All Time Starts with Resident Evil and Ends with… Black Ops?

  Published: Tuesday, February 14, 2012 | By: Garrett

  While you might scratch your head after reading the list, the Guinness Book of World Records with the help of 13,000 voters, have listed the 50 top video game endings.

  More than 13,000 fans voted for their favorite video game ending of all time for the Guinness Book of World Records 2012 Gamer Edition, and this is what they came up with? Call of Duty: Black Ops is the greatest video game ending of all time? Maybe I need to go play it again. Oh wait, BioShock made the list, it's obviously complete BS.

  I would be curious to know the method that was used for this vote, as a lot of these games are fairly recent or well know classics.  The list does remind me of some awesome moments during gaming.  I am looking at you, Price of Persia: The Sands of Time.

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• Quadrant for Android gets updated with ICS and multicore CPU support

  Published: Monday, February 13, 2012 | By: Garrett

  For all those Android users out there that have used Quadrant to benchmark there phones a new verison is out.

  The famous benchmarking app, Quadrant Standard Edition, has just received a much needed update which is now available at the Android Market. For the longest time, Quadrant didn’t support multicore CPUs. The folks at from Aurora Softworks decided that had to change in this new update.

  Hopefully now phone reviewers can provide some better benchmark comparisons.

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• VisionTek Radeon 7970 @ PureOverclock

  Published: Friday, February 10, 2012 | By: Dennis

  Visiontek was one of my favorite video card builders on the ATI side, the cards were usually reference design but they were good about putting custom coolers on their cards when they could.

  We're looking at the VisionTek Radeon HD 7970. It's a reference design, and comes a standard cooler and clocks that look to put the hurt on Nvidia's current offerings. Is it strong enough to fend off the GTX 580? Framerates tell some of the story, but what about temperatures? Power consumption? Gaming value? Let's take a closer look at the VisionTek HD 7970 and answer those questions for you.

  Last I heard VisionTek was shutting down so, if anything, it is good to see they are back to building cards.

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• Security vulnerability that affects all users found in Google Wallet

  Published: Friday, February 10, 2012 | By: Garrett

  For all those rooted users with Google Wallet, be careful, your wallet is not protected.

  The new exploit works like this: a person could take the phone of a Google Wallet user, go into the app settings section for Google Wallet and press clear data, which then resets the app and PIN code. The thief can then open the Google Wallet app and create a new PIN and then add the same prepaid card - and any funds that were on it - back to the Google Wallet account. The thief can then go about their merry way buying things until the funds on the prepaid card run out.

  While Google is working on a fix to correct this, it is a good reminder that with the wonder benefits rooting offers, we have downsides like extra exposure to hacks like this.

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• Gigabyte and CyberpowerPC Partnering to Offer Intel OC Warranty for Free

  Published: Friday, February 10, 2012 | By: Garrett

  As mentioned in a previous post, Intel has started to offer OC warranty for a $20-$35 fee.  Gigabyte and CyberpowerPC take it one step further and is offering to pay that fee with purchase of select systems.

  The Performance Tuning Protection Plan being offered by Intel is a chance for users to experiment with the overclocking features of your processor without the worries of what will happen if you push the processor too far. GIGABYTE and CyberpowerPC are teamed up to bundle Intel’s Plan free of charge, and allows you a single processor replacement through CyberpowerPC’s customer support if the CPU fails while running outside of Intel specifications.

  Saving some money to put into additional upgrades or even faster shipping sounds like a good deal to me, especially if you were planning on buying a CyberpowerPC to start with.  Just remember OCer, just because the CPU has a protection plan doesn't mean it covers the other parts.

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