Tech News
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Ninjalane HWBot Ranking Update - 5th in the USA
Published: Sunday, April 24, 2011 | By: DennisSome of you may be familar with HWBot, (http://www.hwbot.org). It is a website dedicated to finding out the limits of computer hardware by taking a community approach and awarding points to members that score well. While you can use standard hardware and get a result the real fun is getting points by overclocking your hardware.
This weekend HWBot Team Ninjalane moved up and is currently ranked 5th in the US and 56th in the World!!
The HWBot team is an open enrollment so if any of you are curious about the fun you can have overclocking your gear stop by the forums and we'll let you know how to get started. Likewise if you currently overclock and your team is gotten a little "meh" lately give us a look.
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NL: Review Block - Massive Motherboard Roundup
Published: Friday, April 22, 2011 | By: DennisNormaly I like to break out the motherboard reviews into seperate postings but anymore it just makes sense to post up a review block and let you decide what to read.
Mini Motherboards
- ASRock E350M1 AMD Fusion APU Motherboard @ Pro-Clockers
- Sapphire Edge-HD Mini PC @ LanOC Reviews
Full Sized Motherboards
- ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution @ Bjorn3D
- ECS P67H2-A2 @ Phoronix
- Gigabyte G1.Sniper X58 review @ Guru3D
- OC3D: Gigabyte X58-OC Preview
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe Motherboard (B3) Review @ KitGuru
- ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional Motherboard Review @ Madshrimps
- ASUS Rampage III Formula Intel X58 Motherboard Review @ ThinkComputers
- iXBT Labs Review: Foxconn P67A-S Motherboard
- MSI P67A-GD65 Socket 1155 Motherboard @ Pro-Clockers
- ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional Review @ ocaholic
- Funky Kit Review: MSI Big Bang Marshal (B3) Motherboard
- Gigabyte G-1 Assassin Gaming Motherboard @ LanOC Reviews
- GIGABYTE G1 Assassin X58 Motherboard Review @ Legit Reviews
- ASUS P8P67 PRO P67 Motherboard Review @ APH NetworksMore to come including something new from Ninjalane
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Bears Slam OCZ After Fraud Allegation - Seeking Alpha
Published: Thursday, April 21, 2011 | By: DennisThis seems like a really big deal.
OCZ has misrepresented its SSD growth and has financial irregularities that are nearly impossible to reconcile," a short seller at Copperfield Research wrote, referring to solid-state drives. The report also alleged CEO Ryan Petersen has failed to disclose a criminal background involving charges of theft, drug violations, and forgery.
Keep in mind these are just Allegations, and as they say in the industry. Everything comes out in the wash.
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Leaked Roadmap Reveals Multiple Enthusiast Sandy Bridge-E Processors
Published: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 | By: DennisNothing like a leaked roadmap to get the juices flowing.
The first class are the 6-core chips at the very top of the pile, probably branded "Extreme Edition", which feature both unlocked BClk multipliers, and have 15 MB of L3 cache, among several other features enabled. Traditionally these processors cost around US $1000. The first of such chips will be clocked at 3.30 GHz.
The TechPowerUp news posting goes on to talk about the quad memory channels and ability to run 4 graphics cards without a bridge chip. This is basically mirroring my thoughts that the Sandy Bridge-E is two current generation Sandy Bridge chips smashed together on a single processor.
Considering the high end features 6 cores, do you think there is 2 cores disabled on there someplace? Knowing Intel. No.
Be sure to check out the "Source" for the roadmap or visit TPU for the English version.
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Crucial Ballistix Smart Tracer DDR3-1600 4GB Kit Review @ ocInside
Published: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 | By: DennisLooking for some bling for your memory modules can don't want to afford the Corsair solution? Then the Crucial Ballistix Tracer might be what you are looking for.
Today, ocinside.de published again an interesting DDR3 memory review. This time the new Crucial Ballistix Smart tracer DDR3-1600 modules are tested, which offers fast timings, high frequencies and a special highlight, in the truest sense of the word. We already know activity LEDs in different colors on the top of the modules and near the pins from several Crucial Ballistix Tracer reviews. But these new Smart Tracer RAM LEDs can be programmed with a special BallistixUtility and additionally the software can show the temperature of the DDR3 memory modules and write it into a log file. The temperature monitoring of the RAM is particularly interesting for overclocking and for us one reason more to overclock these modules up to the limit. Let us see, what these Crucial Ballistix Smart Tracer PC3-12800 CL8 4GB DDR3 kit can offer in addition to colored lighting and temperature monitoring.
The modules even come with some software to program what the LEDs do, sounds like what Corsair did back with the Xpert modules back in the day.
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Where does Homefront fit into the online Multiplayer market? @ GamingHeaven
Published: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 | By: DennisIt is clear that Homefront was designed to be a Multi player game given the lack luster single player story (despite the awesome backstory) and inclusion of LAN play out of the box. I haven't written off Homefront just quite yet but do long for a game with a good single player story.
FPS titles no longer focus on the single player experience. It's a sad fact but one that's becoming increasingly true with the release each new game as the single player lover is left in the dark. The most recent example of the future of single player FPS games was the startlingly short (at 3 hours play-time) single player campaign of the hotly anticipated Homefront.
Well said.
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Gigabyte Fires Back on Rumors of P67 Board Cancellation
Published: Monday, April 18, 2011 | By: DennisThere are several tech sites out there who thrive on a scatter gun approach to reporting the news, the idea is to keep firing, eventually you'll hit something good. I guess it works since they seem to be making money at it.
Early today there as a widespread report claiming that Gigabyte was going to shift their entire motherboard focus on the new Z68 chipset and basically stop producing the P67 version. While it seems silly that Gigabyte would stop a good thing there might be some truth in there someplace.
Here is a snip from Gigabyte in response to the rumor.
The industry reports about GIGABYTE cancelling all P67 projects and moving 100% to next gen Intel 6 series chipset models are misleading and unfounded. GIGABYTE will continue producing P67 chipset motherboards until the end of 2011, and the H67 models are expected to be available well into 2012.
Rumor sites often employ "perspective" when coming up with new stories. For instance in the issue of Gigabyte P67 projects the truth is they will still be producing current P67 designs until they can no longer obtain chipsets from Intel. The "twisted" truth is that since initial design for current P67 motherboards was done MONTHS ago and with Z68 being the next best thing you can assume that Gigabyte will be focusing their efforts on the new board design.
Both are true but the "twisted" version isn't very PC but is interesting enough that people will read it and naive people will believe it.
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SilverStone Raven RV03 Introducted
Published: Monday, April 18, 2011 | By: DennisSilverStone has been busy designing the next great computer chassis and they might have nailed it.
The RAVEN team's continued push to redefine and perfect the enthusiast tower chassis has resulted in yet another benchmark in the RAVEN RV03. With world-class cooling performance from the previous RAVEN chassis models retained by the included 180mm Air Penetrator fans, a rethinking of the interior layout enabled dramatic reduction in overall depth of the chassis compared to RAVEN RV02 while still matching RAVEN RV01's ability to accommodate Extended ATX motherboard and graphics cards longer than 13 inches.
Personally I am a big fan of the RV02 chassis given it was more compact than the RV01 and featured better cooling. Can the RV03 live up to the hype?
Great color scheme!, but to be honest that woudl be the first thing I would change.
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The Worst Tax Scams of 2011
Published: Monday, April 18, 2011 | By: DennisThis isn't really tech news but today is tax day in the US. Now while we pay taxes for just about everything we are required to file an income tax form once a year to basically "square" up what we actual owe vs what we actually paid. In most cases, if we have figured our withholdings propelry, we will be entitled to a refund. On the flip side if we don't figure the tax correctly or make a bunch of money that wasn't taxed there is a good chance we'll have to pay some extra.
The funny thing about paying income tax is that aside from the various forms proving what you paid vs what you made it is very difficut to track the various things you are allowed to claim as a tax deduction.
The IRS recently released its annual list of the worst tax scams and warned consumers to steer clear of these schemes or face significant financial penalties. The warning is particularly relevant now that we've entered the home stretch of tax season, as many consumers who have yet to file have probably put it off because they owe money.
Tax scams usually reside in the gray area of tax deductions to help reduce your taxable income. Taking advantage of these can not only land you in big trouble for the current year but can also trigger an audit which can look at past submissions as well.
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Crucial Ballistix Finned DDR3 1866 MHz CL9 4 GB @ techPowerUp
Published: Friday, April 15, 2011 | By: DennisThese aren't the fastest modules around but have a very unique style about them, in a way they resemble some of the old Patriot Viper designs of old.
The Crucial Ballistix Finned memory does not only look cool, but they also pack an on-board sensor so that you can actually make sure they stay cool during use and extreme overclocking. We take the 1866 MHz kit for a spin to check if it manages to make an impression or barely ding our armor.
On the Sandy Bridge platform memory speed is more important than timings for every day usage but when it comes down to system tuning you'll want to make sure to get a good quality module, and while popular, fancy heatspreaders don't really do much to enhance performance.
