Tech News
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Sapphire FleX HD 7770 GHz Edition @ LanOC Reviews
Published: Thursday, September 13, 2012 | By: DennisSapphire is pretty famous for offering "flex" edition video cards that allow you to connect more displays to a single card than the non-flex edition.
Sapphires selection of cards for the HD 7000 series has been impressive to say the least. On top of having stock and overclocked versions of every model, they also have a few different models like the Vapor-X and FleX, each serving a different purpose. The vapor-X models having ungraded cooling and their FLeX models have improved support for multiple monitors. We have taken a look at everything else from their HD 7770 lineup; it’s only natural that we take a look at the HD 7770 as well. We know that FleX cards can be great deals for people looking for a cheaper way to run multiple monitors without having to pick up active Displayport adapters or Displayport monitors, let’s take a look at the HD 7770 FleX and see if it holds up to the FleX name
Just don't expect the card to be the fastest among your friends.
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Undercover reporter details work at Foxconn's iPhone plant
Published: Wednesday, September 12, 2012 | By: DennisThis is a c|net story and appears to be a report from a larger posting from the Shanghai Evening Post. The worker who broke the story talks about his 10-days working at Foxconn making the backplate for the new iPhone 5.
It would seem he didn't get what he was expecting.
The reporter worked a night shift, which included a midnight to 6 a.m. stint without a break. He was in charge of marking the smartphone's backplate in four points using an oil-based paint pen. He worked with dozens of other employees doing the same thing, and the goal was to do it as fast as possible.
If you read the translated version of this story at SEP and have ever applied for a job working in a factory you will see many familiar things. For instance during the application process you are given a test designed to determine your level of intelligence. I'm not sure why they need to know this but my guess is that they are looking for a certain type of person to work there.
Factory work is not easy either, the hours are long and the work is repetitive. On the side of the factory they get paid based on how many products they move out the door and the more they move the higher the profit margins. If you have one assembly line running slow the factory risks missing their profit mark and starts losing money.
I wouldn't be surprised if the poor guy who submitted his story gets a visit in the middle of the night, heck it might have already happened.
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FBI launches nationwide facial recognition system
Published: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 | By: DennisThere is always a fine line between maintaining security and respecting privacy. For security to work you have to give up a little bit of privacy, in the case of criminals that can mean giving up a mugshot and a copy of their fingerprints. This is an expected outcome for those individuals and is accepted by society.
The problem starts when privacy is no longer respected in an attempt to find criminals who are trying to hide or are good enough not to get caught. The result, non-criminals get caught in the crossfire and are often victims of mistaken identity.
According to New Scientist, facial recognition systems have reached the point where they can match a single face from a pool of 1.6 million mugshots/passport photos with 92% accuracy, in under 1.2 seconds [PDF]. In the case of automated, biometric border controls where your face and corresponding mugshot are well lit, the accuracy approaches 100%. Likewise, where DNA or iris records exist, it’s a very expedient way of accurately identifying suspects.
It would seem that before long privacy will be a thing of the past. There will be naked pictures of us at the TSA and the FBI will have faces of ever American searchable at a moment's notice. Of course for that information to be useful it must contain meta data such as "who it is"
The author and Zuckerberg might be on to something, next thing you will know Calvin Klein will start making stylish hoodies lined with copper mesh.Of course the real question most enthusiasts will want to know is. Does the FBI still use LGA775 or have they finally upgraded to CyberPowerPC based Sandy Bridge Extreme systems using the latest watercooling options from Thermaltake backed by a SSD RAID array? or will they fire up an Android tablet and store their person data in the cloud??
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MSI Geforce GTX 670 Power Edition @ Rbmods
Published: Monday, September 10, 2012 | By: DennisNVidia might have been a little too aggressive with the Kepler given that an overclocked GTX 660Ti is often faster than a GTX 670 when it comes to games. The jury is still out on raw overclocking performance but its not looking good.
Of course if you are in the market for a GTX 670 you can't go wrong with the custom Power Edition cards from MSI.
On the market for a hardcore videocard? On our test bench today we have the GTX 670 from MSI. We are going to test this in various benchmarks and games so stay tuned to see how this videocard performs and what we rate it at in the end!
Not sure how to react to that teaser but the card does feature the Twin Frozr IV cooler and "should" come with triple overvoltage controls. If you want to get the best overclocking performance you'll need them both.
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Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi Intel LGA 2011 @ techPowerUp
Published: Monday, September 10, 2012 | By: DennisThe Gigabyte Ultra Durable 5 technology was announced at Computex this year and the new technolgoy has sparking a total refresh of the entire Gigabyte product line.
Got a ton of hard drives, and not enough ports? Looking to buy a RAID card, and found the $400+ pricing too much? What if you could get a motherboard, and a RAID controller, for less than a RAID card itself? Gigabyte says you can! The Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi is no normal LGA2011 board - fitted with an Intel C606 chip instead of a standard Intel X79 Express, this Workstation product not only has eight SAS ports, but also everything else you need to build your own supercomputer.
Before LGA2011 was publically available Intel made it clear that if a board was using the retail chipset you could not enable the onboard SAS controller. The X79-UP5 with C606 Workstation chipset is the Gigabyte work around to this limitation.
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NL: Review Block - Thermaltake Water 2.0 Cooler Reviews
Published: Monday, September 10, 2012 | By: DennisSelf contained watercooling units seem to be the hot item this year, and why not? They are cheaper than building a DIY and perform better than your standard aircooler.
Water 2.0 Reviews
- Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme AIO CPU Cooler @ Pro-Clockers
- Thermaltake WATER2.0 Performer & Pro CPU Coolers Review @ TechgageWant to take your CPU cooling to the next level and adopt a self-contained liquid cooler? The market at the moment is packed with such offerings, and Thermaltake just padded it further with its WATER2.0 series. Available in three flavors, we're taking a look at the Performer and Pro variants here to see if they deserve to be in your rig. -Techgage
During our testing of the Water 2.0 system we determined that the fans were not powerful enough to really take advantage of the larger radiator in the Pro system. The good thing is swapping fans is an easy fix.
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Kickstarter is a HUGE Funded Honeypot for Scammers
Published: Thursday, September 6, 2012 | By: DennisI have been reading some interesting things related to Kickstarter lately, disturbing things that have done nothing but make me really distrust the service as being a valid way to make money, at least for the honest person.
Darren and I have discussed Kickstarter on the Ninjalane Podcast and at the time we both agreed that Kickstarter could be a great way to get your project off the ground when funds are limited. The only cost to you?, when you're project is funded and complete you simply give your backers something in return. But what if the project starter, after getting their project funded, decided to disappear, leave the country, lose internet access, or simply die? Well logic tells us that you're not going to get that thing you paid good money for.Or worse yet you actually get something you backed but turned out to be nothing like what you had expected. Penny-Arcade explored that notion and one of them ended up dead.
CNN has posted a look into Kickstarter what happens if the project starter doesn't come thru.
But as the popularity of the site, and others like Indiegogo, increases, users have been asking: What happens when I donate to a project but then the recipient never follows through?
This week, the site said that while that rarely happens, there's not much they can do about it when it does.
"Kickstarter does not investigate a creator's ability to complete their project," a team of Kickstarter's top officers said in a blog post. "Backers ultimately decide the validity and worthiness of a project by whether they decide to fund it."I do believe that Kickstarter was founded on the principle that people are generally honest and often do the right thing, but then again this is the Internet generation fueled by the polar opposite.
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Will your body be the battery of the future? @ ET
Published: Thursday, September 6, 2012 | By: DennisStraight from the mind of the Matrix.
The average human, at rest, produces around 100 watts of power. This equates to around 2000 kcal of food energy, which is why your recommended daily intake of calories is around 2000 kcal. Over periods of a few minutes (or a few hours in the case of trained athletes), we can comfortably sustain 300-400 watts — and in the case of very short bursts of energy, such as sprinting, some humans can output up to 2,000 watts.
As humans move around they tend to "waste" a lot of energy in the form of body heat and kinetic energy. What if you could harvest that energy to charge one of your many mobile devices? Of course that is assuming you walk around enough to generate the power needed but it could be possible.
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NL: Review Block - Motherboards and Video Cards
Published: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 | By: DennisJust what every growing hardware enthusiast needs, more motherboards and video cards. Of course it is a little known fact that the more video cards you have running in your system the more lady friends you will hook up with on the weekends. The hotness of these ladies is proportional to the GPU level at the time of launch.
I'm sure there is a mathematical formula describing the relationship of hotness to GPU level along with a factor modifier for cash vs credit but I'll be dammed if I know what it is.Motherboards
- ASUS Maximus V Formula @ Ocaholic
- ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion Motherboard Review
- ASRock X79 Extreme11 Intel LGA 2011 @ techPowerUp
- Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Motherboard Review @ HardOCP
- Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H Motherboard Review @ APH Networks
Video Cards
- GTX 660 Ti 5-Way Roundup (ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, Galaxy, MSI) @ Hardware Canucks
- Sapphire HD 7750 1GB Low Profile Review @ Custom PC Review
- Sapphire 7970 Vapor-X @ PureOverclock
- Sapphire HD7770 Videocard @ RbmodsAll of these cards are "modern" and offer different levels of support for multi GPU configurations. Consult the user submitted reviews on Newegg for a laugh and read professional sites for the real, hard hitting, information on multi GPU compatibility with your system.
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Tale of the Dead Staples Omnitech Shredder - Why Not Fix it Yourself? @ PCStats
Published: Monday, September 3, 2012 | By: DennisThings have changed over the past 50 some years, to the point where things you buy tend to fall into one of two categories. 1) The item lasts for a long time and is user serviceable to extend its life, and 2) The item is inexpensive, built cheap and not designed to last for very long.
These trends in product design often go against everything the average consumer wants from their purchases. For instance the consumer doesn't want to spend a lot of money and is upset when their cheaply made product quits working. Along the same lines you have products that last for a really long time, like cars, and offer no reason for people to upgrade or replace them. In the end, shredder company = rich, car company = bankrupt.
PCStats has posted a short editorial talking about their quest to defy the laws of modern consumerism and fix a throw away product like a paper shredder.
Funny thing I would have tried to fix it too.
If your consumer electronics break, what's stopping you from trying to fix it yourself? A few weeks ago our inexpensive $50-dollar Omnitech OT-EMC7A micro cut paper shredder from Staples.ca gave up the ghost and stopped working. Being out of warranty, I took a stab at fixing the wee beastie.
Consumerism today is all about buy buy buy. When you are done with the item you have to decide if you will simply throw the item away, give it to someone, "sell" it to someone or recycle it. Personally I find it difficult to sell an item that has lost its usefulness and hate the idea that 1000's of dead paper shedders are sitting in a pit somewhere out of the public eye. Recycling is the "popular" choice but I see the option as greedy on the side of the recycler. Here I am giving them something, that I cannot claim on my taxes, that they use to make money from before throwing most of it into the landfill.
