Tech News
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Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic @ Techgage
Published: Saturday, November 27, 2010 | By: DennisWhat is better than a brand name used to describe something "good" that would otherwise kill you if used in any other context?. In the case of the "Toxic" edition video cards we find it quite fitting.
AMD's Radeon HD 6850 is one of the more attractive mid-range offerings on the market right now, and Sapphire hopes to lure potential buyers in even closer with the help of its "Toxic" edition. It features a customized cooler that runs quiet and keeps temps low, and also cranks up reference clocks for an immediate performance boost.
Sapphire has been very smart to keep the "Toxic" brand name since it tends to be the brand that most AMD enthusiasts gravitate to when looking for their next fix.
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Palit GeForce GTS 450 Low Profile 1Gb GDDR5 Video Card Review @ Madshrimps
Published: Saturday, November 27, 2010 | By: DennisI have actually been looking to pick up one of these cards for a HTPC project, but as with any HTPC build you are most concerned with overall performance related to multimedia, not necessarily games.
Sadly this review didn't answer that question, but did however provide some good looks at the card and the sexy red pcb.
The GTS 450 Low Profile from Palit is one of the most powerful cards meant for installing inside a HTPC, so we basically get of both worlds: a compact and silent system while surfing the internet or doing office work along with decent performances in todays' games, if using lower resolutions.
We can only assume it will decode a BluRay movie and still have enough power to show it all at 1080p.
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Gainward GeForce GTX 460 SE 1 GB @ techPowerUp
Published: Saturday, November 27, 2010 | By: DennisShortly after the GTX 580 product release nVidia announced a new 400 series card designed to provide GTX 460 performance with slightly less cost.
Last week NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 460 SE which is designed to give a good price/performance level without compromising on memory amount. But is this enough to compete with the full GTX 460 variants that have 768 MB or 1 GB of memory?
Video memory, or the frame buffer, size is usually a good indicator of maximum resolution combined with texture size. Simply put video quality. Less memory means you'll have to run lower res to use the same size textures. This was one of the main reasons the GTX 460 1GB was so much faster than the 768MB counterpart. The SE comes with 1GB video ram but with a considerably slower GPU.
Normally this is also where I mention the Sexy Red PCB on most custom Gainward products, maybe one day we'll get to see some more Gainward gear grace the pages of Ninjalane.com
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Thermolab Baram 2010 @ Hardware Bistro
Published: Saturday, November 27, 2010 | By: DennisHere is a heatsink we haven't seen in awhile, the Thermolab Baram, 2010 edition.
Thermolab is a Korean thermal solution vendor and unlike other vendors they do not design and execute mass production but just fulfilling the market with adequate supply. Baram and Bada are two of their major products and have gained pretty good reputation worldwide. Today let us have a look on their Baram successor; Baram 2010 with additional dissipation area.
Not much has changed in the design; they just added a few new attachments to fit the new socket types.
For a quick side by side, check out our review of the baram here.
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Putting SATA 3.0 to Work with Areca ARC-1880i and Crucial C300 256GB SSDs
Published: Saturday, November 27, 2010 | By: DennisOk we all know the benefits of RAID disks over single disks and while the advent of faster onboard controllers and software RAID has made addon RAID cards virtually obsolete (in the enthusiast PC) you can't ignore the performance gains. Provided you are willing to pay for the opportunity to use them.
TweakTown decided to put a couple of SSD drives to the test, and in an attempt to further expand the "no duh" factor associated with the speed of both SSD and RAID they combined them together. To do so they attached these drives to the latest hardware RAID controller from Areca and ran a few benchmarks.
Today our focus is on SATA 3.0, the latest computer bus interface for mass storage devices like hard drives and of course solid state disk drives. SATA Revision 3.0 or SATA 6 Gbit/s as it is also known replaced SATA 2.0 with several improvements including importantly for us here today a doubling of the maximum throughput from 375MB/s to 750MB/s per connected device.
What do you do with all that extra bandwidth that is offered by the new bus? You put it to work, of course! We hit up the folks over at Areca about a brand spanking new SATA 3.0 SAS controller that they have started selling and they obliged our request and sent on over one of their new ARC-1880i controllers for the job. Next up, we needed something to connect up to this shiny new RAID controller and we enlisted the help of the folks over at Crucial for this part of the mission. They were friendly enough to ship over no less than four of their RealSSD C300 256GB SATA 3.0 solid state disk drives.Yep, you guessed it, it's fast
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NL: Review Block - Gigabyte Edition - All Giga All the Tyme
Published: Monday, November 22, 2010 | By: DennisIn no particular order, some random Gigabyte reviews from around the web (localized to the Ninjalane Newswire)
- Gigabyte P67A-UD4 motherboard @ FunkyKit
- GIGABYTE GV-N480SO-15I Super Overclock @ techPowerUp
- Gigabyte H55N USB3 Mini-ITX review @ Guru3D
- Gigabyte Aivia K8100 Gaming Keyboard @ Pro-Clockers
- Gigabyte HD 6850 review @ t-break
- OC3D: Gigabyte GTX480 SOC Review
- OC3D: Gigabyte P67A-UD7 Preview
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 SOC review @ Guru3D
- GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD7 Preview @ Bjorn3D
- Funky Kit Review: Gigabyte M6980 Gaming Laser MouseI see a few P67 "Previews" in there, seems that P67 boards are out in the wild.
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Clocking Up Old Hardware - Worthless or a Gem??
Published: Sunday, November 21, 2010 | By: DennisThere is no mistake that most everyone has some old computer hardware laying around, maybe an old desktop you no longer use, or some old PC's at work the IT guys are too lazy to throw out.
Believe it or not but those parts might be worth something, on HWBot.
Most computer enthusiasts are all about current technology, they need to have the latest and greatest for bragging rights or points. In terms of HWBot usage (competitive overclocking) the latest processor combined with one or more of the latest video card(s) can easily go a long way in getting a big score. However those points are in high demand and will likely be lost overnight.
How do you overcome this?? Bench some of that old gear you have and lock up points that have a tendency to stay awhile. For instance Slngsht (from the Ninjalane Forums) has racked up over 50 points benching P3 processors he bought on Ebay. No special cooling required, just a board with plenty of bios controls
This actually inspired me to unbox my old development server and make a couple runs. Believe it or not but a dual processor P3 450 still has some life left. My latest endeavor is to tackle what I am calling "The 12 Hour Challenge" (name shamelessly taken from Slngsht). In this challenge you must submit 5 SuperPi 32m scores that take over 12 hours to complete. Not only is this a complete opposite of what you normally try to do with SuperPi but tests your nerves and knowledge to make a system slow enough to actually "pass" the test.
Check out the SuperPi 32m "12 Hour Challenge" thread in the Forum for more details.
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Sapphire HD6850 Toxic @ LanOC Reviews
Published: Friday, November 19, 2010 | By: DennisRemember that new nVidia card, the GTX 580?? Well the new cooler features a technology that was first introduced by this company in the VaporX line of products.
Only a few weeks ago AMD introduced their 6800 series cards featuring both the 6850 and 6870. We covered the 6870 with both Single and Dual card reviews. It didn’t take long to see non-reference designs coming from Sapphire with their Toxic HD6850 being announced today. We have had the pleasure of putting the card through its paces to see how it compares to the 6870 in both price and performance. With the GPU being clocked at 820MHz over the stock 775MHz and a memory frequency bump of 400MHz, from 4000Mhz to 4400MHz it should perform well. But with a few less shaders, compaired to the HD6870, will it hold its own? How will it compaire to Nvidia's offerings?
So, when did Sapphire change their board colors from Red to Blue? I guess it has been awhile now, Doh!.
So long red PCB.
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Prolimatech Super Mega and Armageddon Review @ XSReviews
Published: Thursday, November 18, 2010 | By: DennisMonster cooler anyone?? Heatpipe tower coolers have become the new standard in aftermarket cooling and it would seem everyone has a different idea as to how the heatpipes should be placed.
Prolimatech appears to think inline pipes is the way to go.
This time we are going to take a look at serious air cooling. Prolimatech is known as a producer of high quality air coolers which stand the test against most concurrents. Today we are going to look at two of Prolimatech top air coolers, the thin but wide Armageddon and the proper and copper, Super Mega heatsinks. Both coolers will be matched against each other and valued for their respective prices and market position.
While we cannot fully agree with the design layout people seem to still like the performance.
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SilverStone Sugo SG07 Mini-ITX PC Case Review @ Legit Reviews
Published: Thursday, November 18, 2010 | By: DennisWhen it comes to cool cases Silverstone has the market covered.
SilverStone has done a nice job with their Sugo SG07 and accomplished what they set out to do. Build a small form factor case that will house the biggest graphics cards available while having the built-in power to handle it and the rest of the system. All this comes with the quality and aesthetics that one expects from a company like SilverStone...
This particular case has been on display at the various trade shows (CES / Computex) for over a year now and is positioned to be "the" MiniITX case to buy if your board is anything but an Atom.
