Tech News

• Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard Review @ ThinkComputers

  Published: Monday, October 3, 2011 | By: Dennis

  The Gigabyte X58A-OC has been making the rounds but is clearly not a very popular model since I suspect most sites, and enthusiasts, are holding out for X79 and trying not to pay attention to anything X58 anymore.
  
  What is really crappy is that even if you did buy one of these motherboards finding a halfway decent memory kit for it will be next to impossible.  There are plenty of modules tuned for Sandy Bridge but nothing left for LGA1366.

  People have been overclocking computer hardware for quite some time. Overclocking is not that hard at all, but to really get the highest achievable overclocks you need a motherboard that can take the punishment. Over the past 2 years we have seen efforts from many different manufacturers, but these efforts were targeted at 2 different demographics, overclockers and gamers. So you had all of these boards that had all the features that gamers and overclockers wanted, but what if you just wanted the overclocking features? Today we are taking a look at motherboard that gives you all of those overclock ing features and cuts out all the extra “fat” that is not needed. This board has been designed from the ground up to be best overclocking motherboard for the X58 platform. The motherboard I am talking about is the X58A-OC from Gigabyte, let’s see how far we can push this board

  Ok dispite the long description I clicked on over to the OC page and saw this.

  I tried to go right up to 4.4Ghz, but Windows would blue screen upon startup so I went back to the 160 frequency and used a multiplier of 27.  This brought the system up to 4.3GHz, which was the highest overclock we were able to attain and the highest overclock we have ever attained with this processor.

  Clearly they are "not" overclockers, which makes you wonder why they bothered to review such an awesome board.

  Be sure to check out our review of the X58A-OC where we put a 980X under phase and crank things up to 5Ghz.

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• Are sound cards still relevant? - A Blog @ TechReport

  Published: Sunday, October 2, 2011 | By: Dennis

  There is an interesting blog post over at TechReport that touches on the extremely old subject of sound cards and if they are worth your time.  From a sound quality standpoint it depends on how the discrete card was constructed and if it offers the digital connections you are looking for.  In most cases discrete is the way to go for HTPC and high end gaming, not because the sound quality is better but rather the digital audio options (for HTPC) and offloading sound processing for smoother gameplay (for Gaming).

  At the end of the day, the Xonar DX's audio quality is just enough of an improvement over the old integrated solution to make me keep the sound card around. I can live with manually selecting the headphone jack, but I really shouldn't have to considering that an entire motherboard supporting this feature can be purchased for the cost of the $82 Xonar.

  This paragraph jumped out at me as being a rather poor excuse to put a positive spin on a bad experience.  

  Oh and if you do happen to read the blog post be sure to read the Editors comment at the bottom, trying to save face are we?

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• EVGA GTX580 Classified 3072MB Air @ LanOC Reviews

  Published: Thursday, September 29, 2011 | By: Dennis

  The description pretty much tells the story and genesis of this awesome video card from EVGA.  Maybe one day we'll get one to put thru the paces.

  Nvidia’s GTX580 launched close to a year ago yet is still one of the top performing video cards on the market. When you are a manufacture like EVGA, where do you go after you have introduced a full product line around the GTX580? Apparently if left alone, EVGA’s engineers in collaboration with overclockers “k|ngp|n” and “TiN”) will turn the GTX580 a monster just begging to be overclocked. With a revamped VRM circuitry with solid-state chokes, dual BIOS’s, and power coming from two 8 pin’s AND a 6pin this could very well be the fastest GTX580 on the market when overclocked. Of course the only way to find out is to read farther into our review.

  Monster power, monster heatsink, and monster clocks.  Sadly to get the "most" from this card you'll have to trash that aircooler and go with something cooler but with a core clock of 855Mhz you may have all you need, at least for gaming.

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• Got my Battlefield 3 Beta Invite - How about you?

  Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: Dennis

  With all this talk about Battlefield 3 I thought I would share some of my good fortune.

  Battlefield 3 Alpha Trial & Battlefield 3 Open Beta (48 hours early!! )

  
  

  I'm still not a fan of how the game loads,  First you have to launch from Origin which then spawns your default browser to log you into the BattleNet.  From there you can choose to play a "Quick Match" (the only thing available in the beta).  Clicking Quick Match will spawn another window with a "join server" button.  Clicking that will spawn another process to connect you to a multiplayer server.  If you're lucky it will come back with a button that actually launches the game and allows you to play.

  When you are killed in the game you have to wait for the "Deploy" button to show which will get back into the action.  Of course clicking that button takes awhile to register so you're actually out of it for a good 15 seconds while you wait.

  Oh ya, and it looks like there is only a single map.

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• Cooler Master Storm Trooper Launch Day

  Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: Dennis

  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

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• NL: Review Block - Cases and Coolers

  Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: Dennis

  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

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• Sapphire 6850 Vapor-X @ PureOverclock

  Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: Dennis

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

  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.

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

  Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: Dennis

  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.

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

  Published: Saturday, September 24, 2011 | By: Dennis

  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.

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• NL: Review Block - Video Cards Coolers and Cases

  Published: Friday, September 23, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Video Cards
  - ASUS Mars II graphics card review
  - ASUS GeForce GTX 560Ti 1GB Graphics Card Review @ Bigbruin
  - Sparkle Calibre X560DF Video Card Review @ Madshrimps
  - MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1GD5 Power Edition OC @ Bjorn3D
  - MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review
  - HIS 6870 IceQ 1GB @ PureOverclock
  
  Card Coolers
  - Alpenfohn Peter GPU Cooler Review @ XSReviews
  - Alpenfohn Peter VGA Cooler @ Madshrimps
  
  Cases
  - NZXT Tempest 410 Elite Mid-Tower Chassis Review @ Techgage
  - Akasa Venom Toxic @ techPowerUp
  - Lian Li PC-90B 'The Hammer' @ techPowerUp

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