Tech News

• Musing on the state of motherboards @ Techreport

  Published: Friday, March 4, 2011 | By: Dennis

  I wouldn't post anything like this but it is actually a good read, here is a snip from the intro.

  Manufacturers routinely ask us what we think of their current products and what we'd like to see from future ones. Sometimes, I get the impression that they're genuinely interested in our input. Other times, I feel like my girlfriend is asking me what she should wear. My suggestion of a particular tank top, short jean skirt, and knee-high American Apparel socks—you know the ones I'm talking about—inevitably falls on deaf ears. She's only interested in my opinion if it aligns with an outfit already on her mind. And that's never it.

  I do believe that current motherboard designs could be improved but I also know why certain styles of boards are designed to be stark and devoid of the luxuries.  What would be nice is instead of 5 different motherboards they release one single board design that does everything.

  Now that would be something to see.

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• SilverStone Fortress FT03 Mini-Tower Chassis Review @ Techgage

  Published: Friday, March 4, 2011 | By: Dennis

  It has been awhile since we have heard from Silverstone, I'm actually wondering what they have been up to.

  The benefits of building a small PC are easy to understand, but what's not always easy is finding an ideal case to store all of the components in. Well, for those looking for something a bit different, SilverStone has its Fortress FT03... an offering that must be seen to be appreciated. It's a tower, yet small, and has huge aesthetic appeal.

  FT03 W00t! It's that trash can looking case we got pictures of during the last Computex.

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• Chinese activists disappear amid calls for protests

  Published: Thursday, March 3, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Do you want to know the best way to keep your people happy and prevent them from revolting?  You do the same thing you do when eating grapes that might have stayed in the bag a little too long.  Pick out the bad ones and wash the rest.
  
  If you are surprised to see this news report from China, then start reading more news.

  BEIJING - Chinese human rights activists have been disappearing ever since a mysterious call went out on the Internet for a "Jasmine Revolution" similar to the uprisings against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East - a call that was made again this week.
  
  Jiang Tianyong, an activist lawyer in Beijing, vanished Feb. 19, a day before the protests called for in Internet postings in the Chinese capital. Jiang has not been heard from since. The mysterious group running the website called this week for fresh protests Sunday.
  

  To be honest this would be the scariest thing about working in China, or any communist controlled country. We think it is wrong only because we don't understand how different our countries are.

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• 5.96GHz Overclock with P67A-UD7 and 2600K lands on HWBOT

  Published: Wednesday, March 2, 2011 | By: Dennis

  From the land of HWBot someone has posted a 5.96Ghz overclock using the 2600K and P67A-UD7  (yes the recalled on due to the chipset issue)

  The only way i can describe what I’ve seen last night on HWBOT is an all out blitzkrieg on Sandy Bridge overclocking by a German OCer SuicidePhoenix, just wow. He posted a CPUz validation at 5961MHz using a GIGABYTE P67A-UD7 and 2600K CPU.
  
  I found it particularly impressive that he did not hold back when it came to RAM either, running 1096MHz 7-7-7-21. It’s obviously telling how comfortable he is with such huge RAM clocks he is getting from GIGABYTE’s flagship board.

  The cool thing is I (yes me) was able to post 5.78Ghz using a 2600K on the Gigabyte P67A-UD7 which landed me in on the CPUz front page for that processor.  Kudos goes out to Gigabyte for building such a great board.  I so suspect my processor can go higher however condensation stopped my efforts before I could fully max out the chip.

  Given how good my chip seems to be I'll be doing my best to improve my ranking, I just need time and better ram.

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• NL: Review Block - Cards Boards Cooling and Storage

  Published: Tuesday, March 1, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Reviews from around the web.  In this edition we have a nice cross section of Video cards, some Gigabyte Motherboards, a few coolers for a hot CPU and SSD Storage soluations to round things out.

  Video Cards
  - HIS Radeon HD 6970 Turbo FAN 2GB review
  - PowerColor HD 6970 PCS+ 2 GB @ techPowerUp
  - EVGA GTX 560 Ti SC @ PureOverclock
  - Sparkle ONE GTS 450 1GB OC Single Slot Review @ Hardware Canucks
  - Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti Super Overclock Graphics Card Review @ HardwareHeaven
  - AMD teases us with HD6990 board shots and Eyefinity Dragon Age II
  
  Motherboards
  - GIGABYTE G1-Killer Motherboard Launch / LAN Party Coverage @ Hardware Canucks
  - GIGABYTE G1 Assassin (Intel X58 Express) Motherboard Preview
  
  Cooling
  - Arctic Freezer 13 Cpu Cooler @ Rbmods
  - Be Quiet Silent Wings USC 12cm Review @ XSReviews
  - Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro CPU Cooler Review @ Legit Reviews
  - Evercool Transformer 4 Plus @ PureOverclock
  
  Storage
  - Corsair Force F90 90GB Solid-State Drive Review @ Techgage
  - OCZ RevoDrive 50GB PCIe Solid State Drive @ Pro-Clockers
  - Pushing The Limits of SSD Storage at 2.4GB/s @ The SSD Review

  Stay tuned, mobo reviews coming this week.

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• Google declares war on content farms

  Published: Monday, February 28, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Ok so this is actually a week or so old (as of this news posting) but Google has made a change to its search results to prevent the artificial ranking of "content farms" when you do a search.
  
  So why is this so great?  Well it once again puts content before quantity and pushes site owners to create original content for their sites instead of copying large chunks of content from competing websites and calling it their own.
  
  Some snips
  
  

  With this move, Google is targeting content farms -- a common name for low quality sites whose main goal is to attract search traffic by piling up (mostly) useless content, usually by either producing large amounts of low-quality text or by copying it from websites with original content.
  

  
  And the reasons behind this change?
  
  

  The popularity of Google's search engine is still second to none, but Google has been plagued by black hat SEO practices and content farms for a while now, with the complaints from users slowly mounting over time. 
  

  
  In the hardware world I have seen several sites practice this and while their tactics are questionable there really isn't much you can do to stop them short of ignoring the problem and hoping for the best.  Well it would seem Google has finally figured out a way to curb the problem.  Let's just hope it works.

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• Modder overclocks Motorola Xoom to 1.5GHz

  Published: Monday, February 28, 2011 | By: Dennis

  One of the hot new tablets of CES was the Motorola Xoom, not because of its fancy name but rather the fact it is running the nVidia Tegra 2 chip.  The GPU and processor combo promises to deliver excellent performance but appears to only be clocked in at 1Ghz.

  At least from the factory

  Motorola's Xoom tablet is equipped with Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual core chip that plods along at 1GHz. It's not that the chip is particularly slow but a chap at Xda Developers Forum managed to bump up the clock speed by 50 per cent and keep it stable enough to run a suite of benchmarks.
  
  The procedure to overclock a Xoom isn't quite as easy as jumping into the BIOS and fiddling with a couple of settings, however it's far from rocket science. After unlocking the Xoom's bootloader and rooting the device, it's a matter of loading a new boot image with a kernel that supports the higher chip frequencies.
  

  That is a good gain considering the mobile nature of the Xoom and Tegra 2.

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• Intel Thunderbolt in the new Apple Macbook

  Published: Thursday, February 24, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Ever wonder why Intel held back on USB 3 support in their south bridge chips?  It would seem they were holding out for the next big thing  (sound familiar?)
  
  Thunderbolt is a unified connection technology (like USB and Firewire) that has transfer speeds up to 10GB bps which is is pretty damn fast.

  Thunderbolt could compete with connector technologies such as USB, Firewire and HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface), which link PCs to external storage, audio devices and displays. Laptops and devices with USB 3.0 ports started reaching store shelves last year and offer data transfer speeds up to 5GB bps. Intel has held off support for USB 3.0 on its PC chipsets, which has been a topic of concern for PC makers, which have had to implement third-party controllers to add USB 3.0 ports to laptops.
  

  It would also appear that Thunderbolt will not be based on fiber optics due to cost and thus will remain on copper until costs can come down or the next best thing comes along. 

  The big news here is the rumor that Thunderbolt technology will be included with the new Macbook Pro.  Of course there is no indication that it will make the Macbook any better/faster but will ensure that Apple is in the news for the rest of the week and give Apple zealots a chance to gloat about having new Intel technology. 

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• iXBT Labs Review: Gainward GeForce GTX 570 1280MB Phantom Graphics Card

  Published: Thursday, February 24, 2011 | By: Dennis

  Keep in mind this is a GTX 570 video card and from a company that doesn't typically sell their wares in the US.  If you can get past that then you'll find a great custom video card from Gainward designed as an overclockers solution.

  After a recent a review of Gainward GeForce GTX 570 1280MB "Golden Sample" Goes Like Hell we again return to the same brand and even the same GPU. It's just that we've got another interesting product from the company: Gainward GeForce GTX 570 1280MB "Phantom" with a custom cooler. Let's see how it performs.

  Rarely will you find an overclockers video card that actually allows you to overclock in the same way we tweak and tune motherboards.  While the included software can help you do this you're still limited by the hardware and how it was designed.  This is where a custom PCB video card comes into play, of course the assumption it was designed to help you push the limits and not be just another reference card.

  This review is two pages in length and rather lack luster in the details.  But there are a bunch of graphs you can click on to push up their pageview count.  Sadly the one thing missing from this review is the actual overclocking process.  For instance does it allow voltage adjustments? can you adjust memory timings (not likely)? and is there a Mhz limit on their sliders? 

  We may never know.

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• OC3D: XSPC Rasa 750 RS360 WaterCooling Kit Review

  Published: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 | By: Dennis

  We haven't seen a watercooling kit review in awhile and this one actually looks pretty good.

  Water cooling kits.... they were once a much avoided option by most in the favour of a custom loop. Times and technologies have moved on and the XSPC kit on test today is worlds away from what was once the easily available "Big Water" tacky kits that flooded eBay just a few years ago. The thing is, technology had moved on everywhere, now we have air cooling heat sinks that easily out-perform water cooling kits from a few years back.

  Personally I prefer to build my watercooling kits from scratch but that can get rather expensive and for the novice just starting out can be very confusing.  Luckily I'm a professional 

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