Tech News
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Indilinx Barefoot Firmware Testing with the RunCore Pro IV SSD @ Tweaktown
Published: Wednesday, March 3, 2010 | By: WillWith all of the problems with some of the Seagate hard drives I don't think it is to uncommon anymore to update your Hard Drives Firmware. Still it is rare to see many of the manufactures showing the newest firmware for there drives. So this is a good educational article for people.
"When we first tested the RunCore Pro IV solid state drives we had no idea that the Indilinx Barefoot firmware would be updated more often than your typical motherboards BIOS. Some people may be a little disheartened by this since it can be a pain to update firmware every couple of months, but for the most part enthusiasts welcome the additional features and with them performance advantages that come from the latest in technological achievements.
When it comes to firmware updates for solid state drives, the company that manufactured your drive DOES MATTER! While going back through my collection of drives to update them to the latest firmware, I found several manufacturers that either do not list publically new firmware updates or are so outdated that it isn't even worth the hassle. TweakTown has looked at more SSDs over the past year than any other hardware review site, so we have quite a few to play around with on any given day."Free performance sweet.
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EVGA W555 Information Round Up
Published: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 | By: DennisThis isn't really a review style round up but more of an informational post about the forthcoming dual board from EVGA.
We of course got to see the board first hand at CES and even talked with Shamino about the various aspects, limitations, and available options. As many have guessed this is a dual Xeon board so you'll need dual Xeon processors
Techgage posted a mini-rant related to the EVGA W555 in response to a posting over at Bright Side of News, (which is nothing more than a FAQ / Q&A).
There is one lucky guy to have already gotten one of these super sweet boards, Movieman over at XtremeSystems scored the sweet deal of a lifetime, and has pics to prove it. The story broke in several places at once. Wrigleyvillain was nice enough to post the good news in the Ninjalane Message Forum, while the HWBot guys micro-blogged on twitter about the good news.
Sadly, no W555 for us just quite yet, but we have our fingers crossed, 4 leave clovers nearby, and credit card on standby (for procs. mems, and cards) just waiting for the much anticipated release.
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Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H AMD 890GX Motherboard @ TechwareLabs
Published: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 | By: WillAMD has just released that new 890GX/SB850 chipset that brings with it the ability to use the new 6-core Phenom. II. That is not all they also are first to the gate with USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0Gb/s native on the chipset. So check out this awesome Gigabyte board sporting all the new technology.
"Check out the new Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H Motherboard. This is Gigabytes first board to include AMDs new 8-series chipset, the 890GX. Check out what's the future holds inside! The new Phenom II X6, Thuban will also be supported by the 890GPA-UD3H."
Nice jump in front for a little bit for AMD.
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Asus P7P55D-E Premium motherboard review @ APH Networks
Published: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 | By: DennisTalk about breaking one of the 7 deadly sins.
Taking a look around the CPU socket area reveals an impressive array of chokes. You don't even need to count them to see that there's a serious quantity of them on the CPU voltage regulator circuit! Asus specifies a 48 Hybrid Phase power design on the P7P55D-E Premium, which is calculated by a 32-phase power design for the processor, three for the memory controller on the processor, and additional phases over the T.Probe to balance current over these phases.
The only question now is, how much of that hybrid PMW is always in use, and is the extra cost worth the effort? I mean it doesn't even support triple GPUs.
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ASUS X58 Rampage III Extreme Motherboard Preview @ Legit Reviews
Published: Monday, March 1, 2010 | By: WillLooks like someone got ahold of a new board without any stock heatsinks. I love the passive Zalman heatsink strapped on to this board. From the read it looks like this board is a overclocking beast.
"I'm rather glad ASUS stuck with the Rampage Extreme branding as it lets me say stuff like EEEEXXXXTRRREEEEMMMMMEEE in daily conversation. I know in just writing this article I've mumbled that to myself a half-dozen times with a grin on my face. I have a feeling the Rampage III Extreme will be another board that goes down in the history books for high performance. The ASUS R3E motherboard though won't be limited in appreciation to just those people who benchmark with liquid nitrogen and dry ice. A lot of thought was put into the layout and the fact that it has an ATX form factor height means it'll enable 4-way CrossFire in a normal ATX case unlike the EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI which fits in only a handful of cases..."
I just not feeling it when I say Extreme.
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SilverStone HDDBoost Hybrid SSD / HDD Device Review @ Hardware Canucks
Published: Sunday, February 28, 2010 | By: WillWe at Ninjalane do not get puzzled to much at new hardware till you run into something like this. This is a mother of odd ideas that just might be cool, or just might be one of the goofiest things we have seen. Read the review and be the judge of it.
"Many people have shied away from SSDs due to their somewhat limited storage capacity and high price for the drives. Spindle-based hard drives on the other hand have massive amounts of storage space but lack the performance of SSDs. SilverStone's $50 HDDBoost looks to marry the best of both worlds by allowing us to seamlessly link a budget SSD to a hard drive for increased performance. However, does it work?"
Yes, grammar hounds "goofiest" is a word. If not the word now belongs to Ninjalane.
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ASUS Ares World Exclusive @ OC3D
Published: Sunday, February 28, 2010 | By: WillLooks like Asus among other ATI card makers are lining up to create some serious gaming beast right before Fermi hits. This thing looks like a very heavy copper beast of a card. It should be very interesting to see in real life.
"Overclock3D have obtained a World Exclusive peek at the next must have product."
I fear to see the price as well.
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NL: PC Game Reviews Roundup
Published: Thursday, February 25, 2010 | By: WillWith all of the new games that just came out. The reviews for them have been pretty slim, but hey we got some for our readers.
BioShock 2 - Underwater-Shooter Review @ TweakPC
"2K Games invites again for an underworld shooting party. Is BioShock 2 a worthy successor?"
Napoleon: Total War (PC) @ GamingHeaven
"Immediately it is clear that this version of Total War, while familiar to experienced players of the series, presents more options than before. There is the open-ended campaign mode, an opportunity to play to one-off battles both historical and invented."
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NL: Radeon 4830 Roundup
Published: Thursday, February 25, 2010 | By: WillNew video cards are hitting the market to fill a void between the Radeon 4770 and the Radeon 4850. Let's see if the gap is really being taken care of in these reviews.
- ATI Radeon HD 5830 1GB Video Card @ Tweaktown
- ATI Radeon HD 5830 Review: Filling The Gap @ HotHardware
- Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Graphics Card Review @ HardwareHeaven
- ASUS EAH 5830 DirectCu @ techPowerUp
- Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1GB GDDR5 Review @ Hardware Canucks
- ATI Radeon HD 5830 - AMD Completes its HD 5000 Line-up @ Techgage -
Second-tier makers unlikely ship NVidia Fermi cards until April
Published: Thursday, February 25, 2010 | By: DennisThere is an interesting post over at Digitimes about the pending Fermi launch.
Second-tier graphics card makers are unlikely to start mass shipments of their Nvidia GeForce GTX 480/470-based (Fermi) graphics cards until April despite that Nvidia plans to announce the GPU on March 26 since most of the them have not yet received complete reference board designs, according to sources from graphics card makers.
The sources expect Nvidia will give supply priority to first-tier makers or makers that only produce Nvidia cards. Makers including XFX and PNY are already offering pre-orders for these upcoming cards with GTX 480 priced at around US$679.99 and GTX 470 at about US$499.99.Its kind of interesting to see XFX on the list offering pre-orders. It was said that they completely dropped nVidia from their lineup. The question now is, who are the First Teir companies? (pretty easy to answer), and who is left that "only" does nVidia stuff?
EVGA seems to be the only one.
