Tech News

• PAX East Starts Tomorrow - March 22 - 24 2013

  Published: Thursday, March 21, 2013 | By: Dennis

  In another failed attempt to attend a legit PAX event I am relinquished to watch from afar as Boston residents flock to the convention center to attend, what might be, the best PAX ever.

  Some of my friends in the hardware industry will be on hand showing demos of their latest gaming gadgets including Gigabyte, Cooler Master, MSI, NVidia and Asus.  If you are attending PAX East be sure to stop by their booths and tell them "Ninjalane Sent Me".

  I cannot promise you'll get a prize but it doesn't hurt to ask.

  For those of us who cannot attend you can watch the event live over Twitch.tv

  PAX East 2013 Official Stream
  
  Tune into Twitch this weekend to catch all the excitement from one of the largest consumer gaming conventions in North America, PAX East 2013. Starting this Friday, March 22 - 24, the official PAX channel on Twitch will be bringing you some of the best content from the main stages, including rare and thought proviking presentations from industry luminaries, live concerts and of course, the infamous Omegathon tournament.
  
  WHERE: http://twitch.tv/pax

  There will be more news as it unfolds.  Be sure to check out the schedule for when things will happen, the fun starts tomorrow (3/22/2013) @ 10am EST.

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• The Future is Annealed Pyrolytic Graphite @ Frostytech

  Published: Wednesday, March 20, 2013 | By: Dennis

  I have no idea what this stuff is but, it sounds amazing.

  When the thermal conductivity of copper and aluminum heat spreaders just won't cut it, the future revolves around a material called Annealed Pyrolytic Graphite. Let's consider the numbers: where a solid aluminum heat spreader has a thermal conductivity of 126W/mK, the same heatspreader with an Annealed Pyrolytic Graphite core would see thermal
  conductivity on the order of 1092 W/mK. That's not a typo.

  Check out the Frostytech summary, No word on how much this stuff costs but it does seem to be the next step in thermal transfer.

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• NL: Review Block: Coolers for Everyone

  Published: Monday, March 18, 2013 | By: Dennis

  Everyone needs a cooler now and again.

  Web Reviews
  - Prolimatech MK-26 GPU Cooler Review @ Pro-Clockers
  - Prolimatech Megahalems Red Series CPU Cooler Review @ Hardware Secrets
  - Corsair H90 - 1 x 140 Millimeter Watercooler Review @ Ocaholic
  - Noctua NH-L12 @ techPowerUp

  Just a short list,  Its good to see that Prolimatech has been hitting the sites again.

  Full ArticleVisit Website

• Bench/Test Tables Listing @ Ocaholic

  Published: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 | By: Dennis

  I designed a test bench a couple years back.  It was a simple bench design that took a modular approach to bench design so that you could move the important parts from one benching location to another.  The design was based on one that I had helped a forum member with and I think it turned out pretty good.  Since then I have refined my design to the point where it "could" be mass produced, if anything on a small scale.

  My design still has a long way to go before it would be a commercially viable product (mostly due to my cost cutting measures) but, with the right manufacturing partner I'm sure those stop gaps could be filled rather quickly.

  Well, despite my money strapped product design adventures there are test benches out there and some of them actually look pretty good.

  Here we made a list of all - hopefully - Bench/Test tables around the world sorted by manufacturer with pics, specs and prices. If you think or see some that are missing or if you spot mistakes, please leave a comment and we will add/fix it as soon as possible.

  The list/article is pretty simple and related to something you would find in an internet forum read: mfg product photo and spec sheet, both of which are copied from the respective websites

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• CeBIT 2013 Coverage with more than 100 pictures on 10 pages @ Ocinside

  Published: Monday, March 18, 2013 | By: Dennis

  Never been to CeBIT, might be fun to attend one of these years but for the money I'd prolly rather hit up Computex. 

  The CeBIT 2013 computer fair in Hanover showed also in this year a lot of new products.  On the following 10 pages of our CeBIT 2013 report you will see approx. 150 pictures with new IT products.  This ocinside.de CeBIT 2013 report is hardware related and contains new Haswell and Mini-ITX motherboards, chassis, cooler, PSUs, SSDs, memory modules, NAS and wireless storage solutions.  It is only available in German language, but it is worth watching the pictures or use a translation tool to discover the latest trends. 

  I guess there is aways next year.

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• North Korea's Internet returns after 36-hour outage

  Published: Monday, March 18, 2013 | By: Dennis

  Fun little story,  You often read about outages in the middle east related to some fisherman draggin' anchor and cutting a fiber-optic line.  I guess there is only one cause when that line goes down so does the entire region.

  You'd think they would protect that better. .

  North Korea doesn't have much in the way of Internet connectivity and there is little redundancy in its connection. Its main connection runs via China Unicom in neighboring China, and there is also a back-up satellite Internet connection via Intelsat. The country has just 1,024 IP (Internet protocol) addresses, making its national network more like that of a medium-sized company than an entire country.
  
  Only a few thousand people are estimated to have direct Internet access -- mainly high-ranking government officials and scientists -- and the country has only a handful of public websites. Most of them carry propaganda from the state-run news media. The vast majority of the country has access to a nationwide intranet, which runs on the same technologies as the global Internet but has no connectivity outside of the country.

  Pretty sure this is the result of some political hacker type in China trying to punish an entire country but, who knows maybe someone from Japan was draggin' anchor somewhere.

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• Is your cloud drive really private?

  Published: Monday, March 18, 2013 | By: Dennis

  Most everything in this article is common sense, assuming you understand what a cloud really is.  I'm not going to say I'm an expert on all things cloud but at the most basic level a cloud is a server that serves stuff.

  For instance Steam has a cloud service that keeps your games up to date and will even backup your save files.  Google has several clouds and one of the biggest is the GMail service.  In exchange for hosting an email address they will serve you ads and try to make a couple bucks in the process.

  The question is, how private is a cloud?

  Some popular cloud storage providers sweep accounts looking for illegal data. Right now, the focus is on hunting for child pornography, but their terms of service allow for other kinds of files to be considered non grata as well.
  
  "When users place their data with cloud computing services, they lose the ability to maintain complete control of that information," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

  I have been telling people for years that when you upload your data "to the cloud" it is no longer your data, it is no longer private and is accessible to anyone on the cloud (Albeit, indirectly).

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• Digg will make a Google Reader alternative

  Published: Thursday, March 14, 2013 | By: Dennis

  I cannot say I have ever used Google Reader but the people who do are rather upset to hear that Google is killing the app.

  My guess, they had low readership (see what I did there?) or figure that people "google it" anyway so why bother keeping a redundant application live..  

  Well digg has announced that they will be building their own RSS reader in an attempt to get their name back in the news and hopefully bring their site back from whatever grave they dugg themselves into.

  Whether you used it or not, you’ve likely heard the (loud, anguished) news: Google Reader will be shutting down on July 1st. Despite the now 50,000+ strong petition begging otherwise, it looks like Google will be going through with its plans, and so users have been looking far and wide for an alternative. Digg has stepped forward and said it will provide that alternative.

  Just watch, digg will launch the new reader and instead of giving people what they want will let the community decide if a certain RSS post is viable to be seen. Seems to work for facebook so, why not.

  Oh wait, isn't that why digg was on the decline to begin with?

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• Titan Titan! It's 4-Way SLI With Asus and Shammy

  Published: Thursday, March 14, 2013 | By: Dennis

  The really interesting thing about overclocking is the lengths a skilled overclocker will go to get the best score possiable and HWBot Team Pure is one of the best.

  

  Be sure to check out the forum thread to see the scores and check out some more pics of the 4-way Titan SLI setup on LN2.

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• EVGA GeForce GTX 670 FTW 2GB review: popular GTX 670

  Published: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 | By: Dennis

  GTX 670 is a really nice GPU that in some cases is just as fast as the GTX 680.

  The EVGA GeForce GTX 670 FTW resembles the GTX 680 much more than the GTX 670. The clock frequencies, the PCB, and the cooler are all from the GTX 680. Only the lower number of shader units reveal the fact that it's actually a GTX 670. 

  FTW cards are slightly overclocked and, if you can afford them, I would say those are the ones to get.

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