Tech News

• Sneak Peek of Gigabyte X58A-UD9 Mobo - Seven Slot Edition

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Dennis

  Nope this isn't some crazy porno but a natural progression in enthusiast motherboard design.

  According to the leaked picture, the mobo is based on Intel X58 chipset, and supports LGA1366 Core i7 processors. The most glowing feature is the seven PCI-E slots to support NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire technologies. The board utilizes dual 8pin power design for enhanced overclocking performance.

  Seven slots is the ATX standard however this board looks to be stretched to make room for the Northbridge chip and cooler.  On a positive the 7 16x PCIe slots means you can run quad SLI (or crossfire) provided you're on an open test bench or modified case with room at the bottom to accept a dual slot cooler.

  The P55 Classified we recently reviewed comes with 6x PCIe slots, the 7th is shoehorned between the NF200 chip cooler at the top.

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• Kingmax Hercules PC3-17600 (2200MHz) 4GB Kit @ Tweaktown

  Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010 | By: Will

  It is funny to read this clip from the review for it was the exact thing that first ran through my mind. I am very interested in these new Hercules modules. Let's go and read the review to see if it is worth all the talk.

  "Every time I think of Kingmax my mind instantly goes back to the days of wishing so much that I could buy PC-150 TinyBGA modules from them, but only being able to afford PC-133 Apacer modules. There was a time when Kingmax was the memory to own; when we moved to DDR2, though, they did get left a bit in the dust to new performance company Corsair with its XMS lines of overclocked memory.
  
  Over the years we've seen Kingmax pull out a few stand-out performance modules, but recently they've been fairly quiet. With some new kits out and a new Hercules series they might just have what they need to get back into the lime light again."

  Flashback time.

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• COMPUTEX Sweeties - Only the hottest will get picked

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Dennis

  One of the things that makes Computex so much fun is the booth babes, they are typically models hired to wear a costume and be nice to the sweaty technogeeks looking to take their photo.

  Funny thing is the girls have been such a huge draw at the show there are guys from the local paper and news stations whos only job is to capture a shot of each and every girl and then rate them from hot to not.  

  The hottest ones get the mention on the news, which translates into free press for that company.

  In order to help the participating exhibitors to enhance potential sell, a group of 30 COMPUTEX Sweeties with youthful spirits that will stir-up the atmosphere ardently while roaming around the COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2010 in celebration of 30th anniversary. Once the "COMPUTEX Sweeties" activity was announced, there were at least 200 gorgeous applicants have registered, hoping to be selected as COMPUTEX Sweetie. Majority of applicants came from university graduates, advertising models, leading actress from movies and soap operas, contestants from local matinee idol shows and so forth. The COMPUTEX Sweetie is attracting international media attention as the new topic for exhibition.

  As some of you know I attend Computex most every year and the final day of coverage is dedicated to the booth babes.  Hopefully this year I can capture some better photos, now that I Know how to use my Rebil XSi

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• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 SLI Review @ Hardware Canucks

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Will

  I cannot wait to get over and read this review for I think this is a killer setup. SLI with the GeForce GTX470 and add some overclocking would make for a serious point pusher on HWBot.

  "With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470 cards slowly marching towards broad availability, more and more consumers are looking for the possibility of pairing up two of these cards for a somewhat affordable DX11 SLI system. In this review we take a look at the performance offered by a pair of these cards and how they compare against the best that ATI has to offer."

  Going right now to read.

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• A look at new SSDs from Corsair, Kingston, Plextor, and WD

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Will

  Gotta love it when someone does all the work for you on figuring out what is your best buy. Looks like we have some serious heavy hitters in this roundup of SSD drives.Let's see what deserves your hard earned cash.

  "SSDs are finally cheap enough to be tempting for use in high-performance desktops. The market is teeming with new entrants, too. But which one is best? We look at new drives from Corsair, Kingston, Plextor, and WD to find out."

  Enjoy!

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• Bootable USB Drive, Flashing Nvidia GPU BIOS, Recovering from a Bad Flash @ Bjorn3D

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Will

  Here is a good guide for a few different things. One of the main ones is making a bootable USB flash drive. Everyone should have one of these handy at all times if they are going to updating any kind of BIOS.

  Some days you wake up knowing exactly what you are going to do. Some days you wake up intending one thing and end up doing another. Today was one of those days. Often we get motherboards or GPU's with early BIOS and as testing drones on you get updates. After a while it gets old yanking the one working floppy drive we have left out and booting to it to flash BIOS on GPU's and motherboards. Well floppy disks haven't been the greatest quality of late and it's better to boot to a known good USB Drive than an iffy floppy that may have been on the shelf for years.
  
  Having had to do that today it struck me that other people might want easy access to a 'How to make a USB drive windows 98 bootable' for flashing their boards. Hours later here I sit with pictures in hand, bootable USB drive flashing my GPU BIOS and half wondering how I got here.
  
  All that aside lets get started. First we are venturing into making a USB Stick bootable then we'll do a short how to flash an Nvidia cards BIOS thing (GTX-480 in this case). That's easiest because that's what we needed the USB Drive bootable for.

  I might have to give the old GTX480 a flash here soon.
  

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• Win a complete EVGA P55 barebones system from Ninjalane

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Dennis

  In celebration of the 10 year anniversary of Ninjalane.com we are hosting a forum contest this month where the winner will walk away with a complete EVGA P55 barebones computer system.  

  Components for this system were provided by EVGA and Thermaltake and consist of the following:

  

  - EVGA P55 LE Motherboard
  - Thermaltake Element G Gaming Chassis
  - Thermaltake Toughpower 775 Power Supply
  - Thermaltake SpinQ VT CPU Cooler

  Entering this contest is easy; first you need to find one of the 2 special Ninjalane Contest Entry Codes.  One is located on the  Team EVGA Facebook page while the other is posted somewhere on the Thermaltake Facebook page.

  Finally, to enter, visit the official contest thread in the Ninjalane Message Forum for further details.

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• NL: Review Block - Motherboards

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Dennis

  In the past the Intel 775 socket was the premier processor socket to have, and it was for several years.  The best part was the socket supported everything from budget systems up to extreme edition quad core monsters.

  Well times have changed and the new standard in mainstream computing is the LGA 1156 on the P55 and H55/57 chipsets.

  Motherboards
  - ASUS Maximus III Extreme LGA1156 Motherboard Review @ Hardware Canucks
  - iXBT Labs Review: Gigabyte P55A-UD6 Motherboard
  - ECS H57H-MUS (V1.0A) LGA1156 Motherboard @ PCShopTalk

  As you can imagine we have reviewed quite a few of these boards as well.  Most recently is the EVGA P55 Classified.  This is the board that has everything, and gives 113%.

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• Gigabyte Intel P55 OC Challenge - The finals @ Bjorn3D

  Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: Dennis

  In case some of you don't know Gigabyte has been holding a friendly competition to see how can overclock a P55 the best.  It would seem that Bjorn3D was invited to attend the event and posted a small write up.
  
  

  Overclocking must be the computer equivalent of Formular One or Nascar for cars. The goal is the same: push the car/computer to its absolute maximum and then a bit more. Just as in racing a lot of companies that create components for the cars, or in this case computers, want to be associated with the people involved and thus it is not strange to see companies like ASUS, Intel, AMD and Gigabyte spending lots of time and money on overclocking events.
  
  We were invited to be a partner for one of these events, the Gigabyte Intel P55 OC Challenge, and then attend the event to find out who the best European P55-overclocker is (on a Gigabyte P55-motherboard).
  

  
  These competitions are really good fun, yet sadly by invitation only.  How do you get invited you might ask?  There are several ways but it seems that HWBot.org is one of the major vehicles for making this happen.
  
  As of this news post Team Ninjalane is ranked #17th out of the US based sites on HWBot.  The team is currently open to anyone so if you're interested in overclocking at drop by our Overclocking forum and join the HWBot Ninjalane Team.! 
  
  Keep in mind that overclocking doesn't require LN2 or watercooling, in fact it can be very addicting and done on a variety of budgets.
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• NL: Review Block - Coolers Cards n Stuff

  Published: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 | By: Dennis

  One thing I have noticed over the years is that CPU coolers tend to keep getting bigger and bigger, yet offer no real performance gains aside from being "quieter".  Granted we are beyond the 60mm Delta screamers of times gone by but have things really progressed?

  Coolers
  - CoolIT Systems ECO A.L.C. Liquid Cooler Review @ OCIA
  - Danamics LMX and LMX Superleggera Liquid Metal CPU Cooler Review @ ITShootOut
  - Prolimatech Megahalem Review @ Overclock3D
  
  Cards
  - Sapphire 5750 and 5750 Vapor X Review - XSReviews
  
  Stuff
  - Xigmatek Midgard PC Case Review @ Real World Labs
  - Corsair Nova Series V128 SSD Performance Review @ Legit Reviews

  It would be unfair to say that coolers haven't progressed, however in some cases excessive to be excessive seems to have taken over.  (More on this later )

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