Tech News
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Hard-Drive Roundup June 2010 @ HardwareHeaven
Published: Monday, June 21, 2010 | By: WillHere is a great Hard-Drive Roundup that shows performance of not only a few SSD drives price segments but some of the top mechnical drives as well. It will help out on making the next hard drive choice easier.
"Todays review includes SandForce, Indilinx and Toshiba based SSDs mixed in with the Seagate 6GB/s and VelociRaptor mechanical models then just for good measure a high spec 2.5" mechanical drive is added to ensure we have a complete picture of the real world performance available at each market segment."
Crucial FTW!
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DX11 Graphics Cards High End Roundup June 2010 @ HardwareHeaven
Published: Friday, June 18, 2010 | By: WillI guess a DX 11 high end GPU roundup is possible with NVidia bringing in the GTX 480 & 470. Now the question is the GTX 465 worth it's money over the Radeon 5830? It will all be told someday.
"On the ATI based side we have Sapphire's 5970 Toxic 4GB and the Asus Matrix 5870 Platinum. From NVIDIA partners we have Zotac GTX 480's, Gigabyte and Palit GTX 470's and Gainward GTX 465s which allow us to compare single GPU and SLI based setups. We will be covering real world gameplay, PhysX, 3D Vision, GPU computing, High Definition / 3D media playback and power/noise readings in this review to establish which products are worth purchasing."
Is that day today?
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LC Power, Silverstone & Cooler Master PSUs: Clash of the Titans @ InsideHW
Published: Friday, June 18, 2010 | By: WillWith the PSU being the heart of a great Computer build it is always nice to see a roundup of the big boys to get a good idea of what someone may need. I am very curious to see which ones turn out to be top dogs of the pack.
"Latest-gen graphics cards consume an awful lot of power, and that seems
to increase with each generation. The same could be said for CPUs as
well. A configuration that would be able to run the latest games in high
resolutions often requires more than one graphics card. The usual 500 W
PSU simply won't be enough in such situations. We thought that it would
be interesting to delve into PSUs that could power overclocked quad-core
or hexa-core CPUs combined with two or more graphics cards. We borrowed
a couple of PSUs from LC Power, namely Metatron series models of 1000
and 1200 W. The remaining two arrived from SilverStone and Cooler Master..."I think I'm for the Cooler Master or maybe the SilverStone. Wow it is hard to pick.
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GTX-480 Thermal Study @ Bjorn3D
Published: Friday, June 18, 2010 | By: WillHere might be a good read to help clear the air about all the heat the GTX 480 makes. Well let's hope this article is not a lot of hot air for we here know that the GTX 480 is one hot running beast. This is just during normal gaming sessions that we have come to this conclusion.
"When the Nvidia GTX-480 hit the shelves we saw a lot of sites reporting what we considered high temperatures on the GPU. A lot of those sites were relying on Furmark and chose not to game for hours on end in a variety of games and get thermal readings that way. We can understand the initial rush to publish because in reviewing it's publish now or suffer a loss of traffic on the review or article.
We can't understand not going back and studying the thermal envelope of the GTX-480 after the initial reviews. So we fired up the GTX-480 and gamed for days on end (a dirty job but someone had to do it). Each game we ran we gamed for hours and hours then dropped out and took temperature readings. Each benchmark we used we ran multiple benchmarks back to back and dropped out and took readings. In all we spent 3 weeks gaming, taking thermal readings, and checking ambient temperatures to ensure continuity of testing."I think a pun was in there somewhere.
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Corsair Force Series 120GB SandForce SF-1200 SSD Review @ Legit Reviews
Published: Thursday, June 17, 2010 | By: WillThese new SandForce SSD drives are all the rage. This is for a very good reason as well. They are fast and rock out the benchmarks very well. On a real world usage scale they are extremely fast as well.
"As far as performance is concerned, we observed almost exactly what we saw with the Force 100GB drive, as we expected. We found both of these drives to be among the best performing MLC SATA II drives available which is typical of the all Sandforce based drives we have seen from nearly all manufacturers. The prices for SSD's haven't come down much as of late with the economy doing the yo-yo and NAND being consumed voraciously by iPads and smartphones. With Corsair freeing up more available capacity without having to add more onboard NAND really helps add to the value of the drive without increasing production costs, so the consumer wins. While the Force 120GB drive is listed online at Amazon for $350, it looks like they don't have it in stock yet which means the price is almost assuredly going to come down once it is more widely available - unless there are supply issues..."
Nice drives, but the price is not very cheap.
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Gigabyte HD 5870 SOC, PowerColor PCS+ HD5870 Graphics Cards @ iXBT Labs
Published: Thursday, June 17, 2010 | By: WillThe new custom Radeon HD 5870 are hitting the market and they look to be awesome. I do like the custom PCB on the Gigabyte, and I bet it is a great overclocker. Let's read to see how they both work out for gaming and overclocking.
"Today we have a couple of customized solutions based on the Radeon HD 5870 GPU. Both have proprietary coolers, and Gigabyte's card also has an original PCB. Besides, both graphics cards are factory-overclocked."
Enjoy!
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In Win Diva sff chassis @ Hardware Bistro
Published: Thursday, June 17, 2010 | By: WillDo you have a Princess or Diva geek in your life. Well it looks like InWin has brought out the perfect case for that special someone. Check out this review to see if this is a case that is built for a Diva.
"In Win is one of our favourite brands as they always produce innovative and high quality products although their retail business was just started. Today we will bring you another cutie chassis from In Win; Diva. In Win Diva is not really a successors of Allure but they will be in same category which is purposely designed to capture female market. Let us go through in detail without further delay."
I think my 3 year old Little Princess might like it. It's pink of course she will like it
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ATI Radeon HD 5870 & 5970 with NVIDIA PhysX
Published: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 | By: WillIf people are ATI fans they are not going to buy a high end GeForce card, but for the sake of getting in on the PhysX support buying a mid range to low end card is perfectly understandable.
"If you haven't heard already, the 257.15 Beta ForceWare driver set from NVIDIA accidently had the ability for ATI users to again use an NVIDIA card as a second to do PhysX. The whole ordeal created a bit of drama around the web; as soon as it was discovered by NVIDIA they yanked the driver and put another one up that disabled the ability.
After a bit of uproar, they put it back up but said that it wouldn't be included in future drivers; they kind of dribbled on about how it's expensive to maintain it for ATI cards. It sounds like a load of crap to be honest, because it's been disabled for ages. We're sure in the last few months they've done nothing and all of a sudden it was slipped in and working fine on ATI cards. I don't know what NVIDIA have against making money, but the whole thing sounds stupid."Seems that NVIDIA is playing the heart strings and opened up PhysX support with ATI cards. Granted the driver is beta but still, once its in the wild it will stay there.
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The Best $500 NVIDIA PhysX Setup
Published: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 | By: WillThis is an interesting article on a PhysX and building the best bang for your $500 bucks. I can see lots of combinations that could work on this subject.
"Some of my best article ideas come from forums. Talking the other day to some people, I mentioned how the GTX 480, while a great card, poses a PhysX related issue if you're using a high resolution monitor; something like a 30" with 2560 x 1600 support. The frame rate drop under games that utilize PhysX at its native resolution is so aggressive that a 30 FPS dip in performance means a game becomes unplayable.
Going through the ol' NewEgg.com and looking at some USA based For Sale forums, I found out that for about the same price as a GTX 480 you could buy a GTX 470 and a second hand GTX 260 to use as a PhysX card. Also, because you're going NVIDIA with NVIDIA, you don't have to worry about poor support from drivers since NVIDIA promote this kind of setup. So, with a GTX 480, GTX 470 and GTX 260 on hand, we show you how $500 can be best spent if PhysX is something that you're really after."I still think the GTS250 is an awesome PhysX card.
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How to make an SSD: Touring A-DATA's Taipei Factory
Published: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 | By: WillWith a followup on the SSD Roundup is a factory tour of how to make them. I bet this was very cool to see. Just gotta keep the hands in the pockets. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want me touching everything.
While Chris, our head SSD guru guy, was in Taiwan for Computex, we thought we should hit up our friends at A-DATA and see if we could arrange a personal tour of their Taipei factory. On Monday 7th of June, still a little exhausted and also sick from the craziness of the busy show, we headed on down and got things rolling.
Walking distance from A-DATA's headquarters just out of Taipei City you will find A-DATA's factory production facility. It is here where all the magic happens. A-DATA has a capacity of 100,000 double sided memory modules per day and 3,000 SSDs per day."I want to go to one of these places someday.
