Tech News
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Gigabyte TweaKING Overclocking Event Paris Fall 2009 @ Madshrimps
Published: Monday, November 9, 2009 | By: WillIn the geekest of ways I bet this was cool to see. I always love seeing the video of these guys working away at getting the super overclock without hurt themselves with the super cold coolent.
On October 27th Gigabyte organized their TweaKING event in Paris, France. The conference room of the Le Meridien Hotel in Paris was transformed in an overclocking combat-zone where teams from 22 European countries went head-to-head in an attempt to set the best score in SuperPi 32M and 3DMark01. Power users from Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, UK and Ukraine went to Paris for this event.
Geekest is a word, right?
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NL: PC Game Reviews Roundup
Published: Monday, November 9, 2009 | By: WillHere is another couple of PC games to check out.
Dragon Age: Origins (PC) Review @ Gamingheaven
For the few of you who don't know - legendary developer Bioware have a new game released called Dragon Age: Origins. Publisher Electronic Arts have been behind a huge marketing campaign with a level of hype I haven't seen in quite a while. Thankfully we are glad to report, for once, our expectations are met - this is possibly THE game of 2009.
Torchlight (PC) Review @ GamingHeaven
Are you a fan of Diablo? Do you long for days when games didn't need to have DX11 effects and cutting edge engine technology to win you over? Torchlight might be the answer to your prayers, because it focuses entirely on gameplay and puts a twisted yet very interesting slant on the ‘Diablo' genre.
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Video Card Benchmarking - Goodbye Vista and XP, Hello Windows 7
Published: Friday, November 6, 2009 | By: WillIt is that time to update the benchmarking machines with not only new hardware and drivers, but a whole new OS as well. With all the testing done in Ninjalane Lab we can say the move to Windows 7 is well worth the upgrade troubles.
It's really been ages since I've done an editorial. I think what kind of happened is what always happens; you end up busy for a few weeks and don't get a chance to do it and by the time you finally have time to get back into it, you feel that so much time has past that it probably doesn't really matter if you do it or not.
While editorials are something that I hope to bring back in the future, the reason for one today is due to the fact that we're going to be messing around with our VGA reviews in the near future. Over the next few weeks you're going to see us remove both Vista and XP from our benchmark results."No more Vista!
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NL: PC Game Reviews Roundup
Published: Friday, November 6, 2009 | By: WillHere is a couple games to check out for the PC.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - Sith Ultimate Edition (PC) Review @ Gamingheaven
"The Force Unleashed was a big seller for Lucasarts when it was originally released with Star Wars fans buying it in their droves. While we wait patiently for a genuine successor however they have released their latest "Ultimate Sith Edition" which features a brand new exclusive level and a ton of extra content."
Shattered Horizon PC Game Review and Interview With Maingear @ Legit Reviews
"Shattered Horizon is the highly anticipated first game from Futuremark Games Studio that immerses you in the cold reality of combat in space like no other game before. This multiplayer first-person shooter is played entirely in zero gravity. A catastrophic explosion on the Moon has filled near-Earth space with billions of tons of rocky debris. You and your friends will join intense 32 player battles to control hollowed-out asteroids, huge fragments of Moon rock and the ruined remains of the International Space Station..."
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Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 Wireless iPod/ Computer Speakers
Published: Thursday, November 5, 2009 | By: WillOkay I don't usually post anything on speaker, but these wireless ones are just to cool in my book.
If you use your laptop or notebook to listen to music, watch movies or play games, but want to get away from your desk and still enjoy true-to-life sound, the ProMedia 2.1 Wireless computer speakers are for you.
The ProMedia wirelessly "talks" to your computer via a USB wireless transmitter. All you have to do is plug the transmitter into your computer's USB port and you're ready to move around your room and still experience the big, powerful sound that's made Klipsch an industry leader. It's that simple-no router or installation software is required.
The transmitter can stream audio wirelessly from your computer to the ProMedia up to 30 feet away. Plus, its robust 2.4 GHz wireless technology won't interfere with other wireless devices, such as cordless phones, so nothing stands in the way of you and amazing sound.
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NVidia Crushes MSIs Lucid Based Board
Published: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 | By: WillWe have posted news about the new Lucid based motherboards in the past and have bothered MSI regularly to get us the new board to test out. Well if this is true and holds any kind of water we might never see this board out in the wild.
"The MSI boards were shown off at IDF a month ago, and there were several working models on display. They ran dissimilar ATI and Nvidia GPUs, basically putting a 48xx and a 47xx in 'crossfire', or two dissimilar NV GPUs in 'SLI'. It worked, and Lucid is promising a driver in Q1 or so that will allow NV and ATI cards to split the rendering loads.
That functionality was shown off behind closed doors, and the author did not personally see it, but you can read about it here. It is not final yet, and there is still a bit of work to do on the drivers, so for now, the Hydra is ATI + ATI, or NV + NV. Then again, given that the Hydra 200 only intercepts DX calls, it should work with just about any rendering hardware, with a bit of tweaking.
Nvidia is very protective of it's SLI 'technology', if you define technology as blacklisting those who don't tithe in the drivers. They use it as a blunt weapon to tax users and enthusiasts, not to mention to bring in money. We heard through the grapevine at IDF that Nvidia was not happy about Lucid, and was going to break Lucid's Hydra chip at the driver level to protect its SLI tax."Okay maybe not that drastic, but it will be a hard battle for Lucid to win.
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First DirectCompute Benchmark Released @ NGOHQ
Published: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 | By: WillWe all love a good benchmark every now and then. The none hardware sponsored versions are the best for giving the real facts at what we are looking at. DirectCompute is going to be a very strong part of the next generation of GPU power.
"A forum member by the name of Pat has recently released a new benchmark tool for DirectCompute. This tool allows you to benchmark DirectX 11 latest general-purpose computing feature by calculating tons of FFT-like data and some memory transfers. DirectCompute is an application programming interface (API) that takes advantage of the massively parallel processing power of a modern graphics processing unit (GPU) to accelerate PC application performance. Be advised that DirectX 11 and the latest display drivers are required to run this benchmark."
Good stuff here.
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Can We Trust the 80 Plus Certification? @ Hardware Secrets
Published: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 | By: WillThis is a very good article for all of us that want to understand the 80 Plus program, and if it is really being done the right way. I myself have heard some white lies stuff and happenings from time to time from the 80 Plus program.
"The 80 Plus certification was an important step to change the scenario from the power supply industry: now the savvy consumer knows that he or she should buy a power supply with at least 80% efficiency. New certification levels (Bronze, Silver and Gold) raised the bar even more. But maybe it is time for a change on the 80 Plus certification methodology. Let's see why."
I have no way to prove anything so I just go on my happy little way.
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AMD Phenom II X4 965 - 125W TDP Processor
Published: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 | By: WillWith all of the i5 and i7 talk here recently it is sometimes hard to remember the other guys have processors as well. So to be fair we have a link to a review on the newest revision of the now growing to be a classic Phenom II X4 956 Black Edition processor.
Today AMD is releasing a revised Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition processor. The TDP has been lowered from 140W to 125W, and also happens to be the new C3 stepping. Along with this new processor launch the prices for the 965's have been lowered to an expected price of $195 USD, a savings of about $20.
Enjoy!
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SATA 6G Implementation Preview - Ironing Out The Creases
Published: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 | By: WillWith the SSD drives putting out some amazing performance that even fills up the SATA 3.0 specs. It is time to push out the next level of performance to keep up with these new drives. So SATA 6G is born, and getting ready for the limelight.
"SATA 6G is the next big drive transfer standard. As it stands right now Marvell is the only company with an available controller. Because of this we see them being hastily added to motherboards. In their first run the controllers failed to provide the anticipated performance and caused stability issues on the P55 boards they were placed on. These were quickly removed and the P55 was launched without SATA 6G.
However, the issue was and still is one of implementation. You see, the P55 Express chipset only has PCI-e Gen 1 lanes in it. All of the PCI-e Gen 2 lanes were moved to the Lynnfield CPU. This is normally okay as the only AIB (add in boards) that need this much bandwidth are graphics controllers. Not a problem, right? - Actually, it is a big problem."Very Interesting, indeed.
