Tech News
-
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 SLI Review @ Hardware Canucks
Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: WillI cannot wait to get over and read this review for I think this is a killer setup. SLI with the GeForce GTX470 and add some overclocking would make for a serious point pusher on HWBot.
"With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470 cards slowly marching towards broad availability, more and more consumers are looking for the possibility of pairing up two of these cards for a somewhat affordable DX11 SLI system. In this review we take a look at the performance offered by a pair of these cards and how they compare against the best that ATI has to offer."
Going right now to read.
-
A look at new SSDs from Corsair, Kingston, Plextor, and WD
Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: WillGotta love it when someone does all the work for you on figuring out what is your best buy. Looks like we have some serious heavy hitters in this roundup of SSD drives.Let's see what deserves your hard earned cash.
"SSDs are finally cheap enough to be tempting for use in high-performance desktops. The market is teeming with new entrants, too. But which one is best? We look at new drives from Corsair, Kingston, Plextor, and WD to find out."
Enjoy!
-
Bootable USB Drive, Flashing Nvidia GPU BIOS, Recovering from a Bad Flash @ Bjorn3D
Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: WillHere is a good guide for a few different things. One of the main ones is making a bootable USB flash drive. Everyone should have one of these handy at all times if they are going to updating any kind of BIOS.
Some days you wake up knowing exactly what you are going to do. Some days you wake up intending one thing and end up doing another. Today was one of those days. Often we get motherboards or GPU's with early BIOS and as testing drones on you get updates. After a while it gets old yanking the one working floppy drive we have left out and booting to it to flash BIOS on GPU's and motherboards. Well floppy disks haven't been the greatest quality of late and it's better to boot to a known good USB Drive than an iffy floppy that may have been on the shelf for years.
Having had to do that today it struck me that other people might want easy access to a 'How to make a USB drive windows 98 bootable' for flashing their boards. Hours later here I sit with pictures in hand, bootable USB drive flashing my GPU BIOS and half wondering how I got here.
All that aside lets get started. First we are venturing into making a USB Stick bootable then we'll do a short how to flash an Nvidia cards BIOS thing (GTX-480 in this case). That's easiest because that's what we needed the USB Drive bootable for.I might have to give the old GTX480 a flash here soon.
-
Win a complete EVGA P55 barebones system from Ninjalane
Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: DennisIn celebration of the 10 year anniversary of Ninjalane.com we are hosting a forum contest this month where the winner will walk away with a complete EVGA P55 barebones computer system.
Components for this system were provided by EVGA and Thermaltake and consist of the following:
- EVGA P55 LE Motherboard
- Thermaltake Element G Gaming Chassis
- Thermaltake Toughpower 775 Power Supply
- Thermaltake SpinQ VT CPU CoolerEntering this contest is easy; first you need to find one of the 2 special Ninjalane Contest Entry Codes. One is located on the Team EVGA Facebook page while the other is posted somewhere on the Thermaltake Facebook page.
Finally, to enter, visit the official contest thread in the Ninjalane Message Forum for further details.
-
NL: Review Block - Motherboards
Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: DennisIn the past the Intel 775 socket was the premier processor socket to have, and it was for several years. The best part was the socket supported everything from budget systems up to extreme edition quad core monsters.
Well times have changed and the new standard in mainstream computing is the LGA 1156 on the P55 and H55/57 chipsets.
Motherboards
- ASUS Maximus III Extreme LGA1156 Motherboard Review @ Hardware Canucks
- iXBT Labs Review: Gigabyte P55A-UD6 Motherboard
- ECS H57H-MUS (V1.0A) LGA1156 Motherboard @ PCShopTalkAs you can imagine we have reviewed quite a few of these boards as well. Most recently is the EVGA P55 Classified. This is the board that has everything, and gives 113%.
-
Gigabyte Intel P55 OC Challenge - The finals @ Bjorn3D
Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 | By: DennisIn case some of you don't know Gigabyte has been holding a friendly competition to see how can overclock a P55 the best. It would seem that Bjorn3D was invited to attend the event and posted a small write up.
Overclocking must be the computer equivalent of Formular One or Nascar for cars. The goal is the same: push the car/computer to its absolute maximum and then a bit more. Just as in racing a lot of companies that create components for the cars, or in this case computers, want to be associated with the people involved and thus it is not strange to see companies like ASUS, Intel, AMD and Gigabyte spending lots of time and money on overclocking events.
We were invited to be a partner for one of these events, the Gigabyte Intel P55 OC Challenge, and then attend the event to find out who the best European P55-overclocker is (on a Gigabyte P55-motherboard).
These competitions are really good fun, yet sadly by invitation only. How do you get invited you might ask? There are several ways but it seems that HWBot.org is one of the major vehicles for making this happen.
As of this news post Team Ninjalane is ranked #17th out of the US based sites on HWBot. The team is currently open to anyone so if you're interested in overclocking at drop by our Overclocking forum and join the HWBot Ninjalane Team.!
Keep in mind that overclocking doesn't require LN2 or watercooling, in fact it can be very addicting and done on a variety of budgets. -
NL: Review Block - Coolers Cards n Stuff
Published: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 | By: DennisOne thing I have noticed over the years is that CPU coolers tend to keep getting bigger and bigger, yet offer no real performance gains aside from being "quieter". Granted we are beyond the 60mm Delta screamers of times gone by but have things really progressed?
Coolers
- CoolIT Systems ECO A.L.C. Liquid Cooler Review @ OCIA
- Danamics LMX and LMX Superleggera Liquid Metal CPU Cooler Review @ ITShootOut
- Prolimatech Megahalem Review @ Overclock3D
Cards
- Sapphire 5750 and 5750 Vapor X Review - XSReviews
Stuff
- Xigmatek Midgard PC Case Review @ Real World Labs
- Corsair Nova Series V128 SSD Performance Review @ Legit ReviewsIt would be unfair to say that coolers haven't progressed, however in some cases excessive to be excessive seems to have taken over. (More on this later
) -
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 SLI @ techPowerUp
Published: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 | By: WillThat is a steep price to pay for two of these monsters, but it would be awesome to see the numbers you would crank out of them. As for the heat. I would not even want to imagine that at all. So let's find out instead of using our imaginations.
"Today we have on our testbench two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 accelerators. Just the graphics cards alone will cost you $1000. Is this something that can be justified? Performance aside, what's going on with power and heat when running two of these cards?"
Imaginations! Who needs that?
-
NL: Review Block - Cases, Coolers, Memory
Published: Monday, April 12, 2010 | By: DennisMemory
- Crucial 3GB Kit DDR3-1333/PC3-10600 Memory Review @ ocinside
- Kingston HyperX 4GB 2400MHz CL9 DDR3 Memory Review @ Legit Reviews
- G.Skill ECO DDR3 1600 CL7 Review @ TweakPC
Cooling
- Thermaltake Frio CPU Cooler Review @ OCIA
- Thermaltake Frio CPU Cooler Review @ DragonSteelMods
- Gelid Tranquillo Heatsink Review @ frostytech
Cases
- Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced review @ dvhardwareEnd review block, there will be more so stay tuned
-
BitFenix - A new face in the system chassis market @ Elite Bastards
Published: Monday, April 12, 2010 | By: WillA new player has come into the chassis and peripheral business and there name is BitFenix. Let's hope that the cool little video is not the only cool thing they can do. I guess time will tell here real soon.
"BitFenix is a new kind of hardware designer. Comprised of both IT and gaming professionals, BitFenix merges the insights and experience of these two groups together to create never-before-seen gaming hardware and peripherals. The BitFenix Team's core design philosophy is to put the user in complete control of their hardware and this will be achieved through smart engineering, thoughtful design, and some very novel ideas."
Don't forget the enthusiast.
