Tech News
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Cooler Master Storm Trooper Launch Day
Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: DennisA new addition to the CM Storm line has been announced and might be one of the best cases ever made.
The Trooper is a case offering that should be near the top of the list for anyone who is in the market for a full tower case. The MSRP of $189.99 makes it about middle of the range for this sort of case. The CM Storm Trooper is quite possibly the best case I have reviewed this year, so I am happy to award it 9/10 – LanOC Recommended.
Trooper Reviews
- Cooler Master Storm Trooper Gaming Case Review @ Ninjalane
- Cooler Master Storm Trooper Full Tower Case Review @ Hardware Canucks
- Cooler Master Storm Trooper @ LanOC Reviews -
NL: Review Block - Cases and Coolers
Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: DennisSeems fitting that we do a case and cooler review block considering that is all I have done for the past 5 days.
Cases
- Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced @ Bjorn3D
- SilverStone Raven RV03 @ Hexus
- SilverStone Temjin SST-TJ08-Evolution M-ATX Tower Chassis Review
- OC3D: Silverstone TJ08 Review
Coolers
- Corsair H100 Self-Contained Liquid CPU Cooler Review @ Techgage
- Corsair Hydro Series H100 CPU Water Cooler @ Metku -
Sapphire 6850 Vapor-X @ PureOverclock
Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: DennisEver wondered what could be done with the HD 6850 with a really good aircooler? How about 970Mhz on the core.
We are looking at the replacement for the original HD 5770: the Sapphire Radeon HD6850 Vapor-X. This card sports Sapphire's non-reference heatsink, black diamond chokes and 10-Phase power design, and looks to bring some robust gaming horsepower at lower temperatures with the popular Vapor-X cooler design. The HD 6850 graphics card was made for the mainstream population, with an MSRP of less than $170 and an added bonus of DiRT 3 thrown in to the mix, this looks like a very promising package for the average user.
I do really love these custom PCB video cards, they just seem like the right way to go moving forward. Its too bad more companies don't do the same.
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Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 Motherboard Review @ HardCoreWare
Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | By: DennisLooking to get into a Sandy Bridge system but are choosing to experience the low cost nature of the platform? Well you may consider a board just like this one.
The Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 is just one of many Z68 configurations made by Gigabyte, this one a mid-range full ATX board with not a lot of bells and whistles. What does $130 get you?
We of course looked at the ultra-high-end UD7 edition of the same motherboard, and while it comes with a few more features designed for overclocking it will have the same basic "default" performance as the UD3.
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How to Overclock Sandy Bridge E to 5GHz @ Bit-Tech
Published: Saturday, September 24, 2011 | By: DennisNow that IDF is over and editors have had time to look over the SBE (Sandy Bridge E) info from the slide presentations you're bound to find exploritory articles speculating how to overclock future systems by reverse engineering what is presented.
For instance we already know that SBE is based on the Sandy Bridge architecture and that some of the leaked specs and board designs indicate that the LGA2011 is basically two SB chips stuck together. Of course that is an over simplification but good enough for now. One of the limitations of Sandy Bridge was the lack of real Base Clock overclocking since there was no independent system clock to control SATA and PCI Express speeds. Basically that means you run the risk of out of frequency errors as the Base Clock increased.
Based on this article they are speculating that the same Base Clock limitation exists in SBE but Intel has introducted an additional mulitplier upstream of Base Clock to further alter CPU speed.
Let’s say we’re aiming for an overclock of 5GHz (something that the Intel engineers said they had achieved during a bit of mucking around in their office). We don’t know how much of an overclock that is, but we know that 50x100MHz=5GHz. However, if we have a ‘locked’ Sandy Bridge E CPU that doesn’t have a multiplier of 50 or more, we’ll have to change the System Clock and the CPU divider instead. The maths requires us to work backwards from 5GHz like this:
1) 5,000 ÷ 1.66 = 3,012
2) 3,012 ÷ 100 = 30.012
3) 3,012 ÷ 30 = 100.4
In step 1 we’ve used the highest CPU divider to ‘gear down’ the desired overclock to System Clock and CPU multiplier ranges we’re confident of being able to use. In step 2 we’ve divided the result of step one by the desired System Clock – we’re still a little nervous about taking the System Clock too far from 100MHz (weirdly, we’re more nervous of this than Intel, it seems) as it’s the clock that's used by buses such as SATA and USB, and we’d rather not lose all our data.The calculation above is using basic high school algebra to determine a Base Clock speed for a 5Ghz overclock assuming the following constants.
- Desired Speed
- Reference Clock Ratio (There appears to be two of them 1.25 and 1.66, I'm going to go out on a limb and assuming mobo makers will include more.)
- CPU Multiplier (assuming 95Mhz Bclk and the assumption that you can lower the mulitplier)Great stuff, I can't wait to start tinkering.
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NL: Review Block - Video Cards Coolers and Cases
Published: Friday, September 23, 2011 | By: DennisVideo Cards
- ASUS Mars II graphics card review
- ASUS GeForce GTX 560Ti 1GB Graphics Card Review @ Bigbruin
- Sparkle Calibre X560DF Video Card Review @ Madshrimps
- MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1GD5 Power Edition OC @ Bjorn3D
- MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review
- HIS 6870 IceQ 1GB @ PureOverclock
Card Coolers
- Alpenfohn Peter GPU Cooler Review @ XSReviews
- Alpenfohn Peter VGA Cooler @ Madshrimps
Cases
- NZXT Tempest 410 Elite Mid-Tower Chassis Review @ Techgage
- Akasa Venom Toxic @ techPowerUp
- Lian Li PC-90B 'The Hammer' @ techPowerUp -
NVIDIA Talks PC Gaming Trends @ Techgage
Published: Friday, September 23, 2011 | By: DennisNVidia has always pushed the PC when it comes to gaming and even helped game developers implement nVidia technology in their upcoming titles. While we like to complain that consoles have killed PC game development it would seem that isn't always the case.
Some claim that PC gaming is dying, but recent trends disagree. In fact, it looks to be console gaming that's soon to see a decline, thanks in part to a growing number of compelling aspects that PCs offer - including at the very least free-to-play games. Let's take a look at these and other trends, and the reasons behind them.
I don't mind paying for games just so long as they provide me with some enjoyment and have a good single player story line. Sadly very few games can deliver.
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GIGABYTE GTX 570 Super Overclock SOC @ OCAU
Published: Thursday, September 22, 2011 | By: DennisWhen it comes to high-end super cards you can't go wrong with the SOC from Gigabyte. The card comes "hot clocked" from the factory and features their triple fan "Windforce" GPU cooler to help control overclocked heat loads. Of course if mortal cooling isn't your style simply press the LN2 button, strap on a GPU pot and pour for broke.
GIGABYTE's Super Overclock series of products is well known for pushing the envelope of overclocker-friendly features and high factory-shipped clock speeds. After reviewing their GTX 580 SOC, we thought it would be worth benchmarking its more affordable brother, the GTX 570 SOC. At first look we noticed that it was, like its big brother the GTX 580, a complete redesign - from the cooling, PCB design, power circuitry and amped up clock speeds. The GTX 570 SOC maintains a dual slot design and familiar form factor seen with the GTX 580 SOC. So how does this perform against NVIDIA's pricier GTX 580, and what features does it bring to the table? Let's fire up our test bench and find out!
From what we can tell the SOC line is the only one that is specifically designed for overclocking with a custom PCB that remains well within ATX spec.
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Intel's Next-Gen Sandy Bridge-E Extreme Chip to Boost Performance by 65%
Published: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 | By: DennisThis is some good news for us Workstation enthusiasts, now if the processor will also overclock like the 900 series we'll have a great tweaking processor as well.
According to a document with Intel's performance estimates of the Core i7-3960X processor (six cores, 3.30GHz, 15MB cache) seen by X-bit labs, the forthcoming chip for the LGA2011 platform is clearly faster than its predecessor Core i7-990X (six cores, 3.46GHz, 12MB cache) across a range of benchmarks despite of lower clock-speed amid the same amount of cores due to advantages of the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture over Nehalem/Westmere micro-architecture, quad-channel memory controller and other innovations.
I'm beginning to wonder what the difference is between X and K skus besides the L3 cache size. According to the chart they both have unlocked multipliers and we already know 8 core CPUs will be "Xeon" branded for servers. So, what does X mean? Multi processor maybe?
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Intel Core i7-3930K compared to Core i7-980X
Published: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 | By: DennisAfter IDF I started doing some more research into what will come with the LGA2011 processors and X79. Of course the information is sparse and likely to change but the rumor mill appears to be quite knowledgeable.
With Sandy Bridge as the foundation the processors will be tweaked with a quad-core DDR3 memory controller, better overclocking and up to six cores in retail - eight for servers.
We knwo since earlier that Intel is planning at least three Sandy Bridge-E processors in the Intel Core i7-3000 series this fall and it is the middle child Core i7-3930K that Cooler has. The processor will operate at 3.2 GHz, but can overclock to 3.8GHz in Turbo mode. it was locked at the nominal frequency and then compared to Intel's current Gulftown architecture at the same clock frequency and number of cores.Minus the misspellings the article is quite interesting and talks about 3 basic skus with the high end editions being X and K complete with unlocked multipliers. All processors will feature a 130w TDP and quad memory channels so they almost mimic the 1155 lineup.
The 130w TDP is quite high considering SandyBridge-E appears to be nothing more than two 1155 processors smashed together, I guess they need a little extra juice to get all of the cores and PCI Express lanes to work.
