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Wednesday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 10-March-2010  23:40:23 (GMT +10) - by Agg Motherboards: ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 890GX AM3 board on PureOC. Gigabyte H55M-USB3 LGA1156 board on Techgage. MSI H55-GD65 Gamer Series LGA1156 on FutureLooks. ASUS M4A89GTD AM3 board on Guru3D. ASUS P6T7 and P7P55 WS Workstation Motherboards on PCPerspective. Input Etc: Gigabyte KM7580: Keyboard and Mouse Combo on Bjorn3D. Steelseries Xai gaming mouse on XSReviews. Mionix NAOS 5000 on OC3D. Power Supply: Coolermaster GX 750 on Pro-Clockers. Nexus RX-6300 on PureOC. Thermaltake Toughpower XT 775W on OCClub. CoolerMaster GX Series 750W on FutureLooks. Storage: WD SiliconEdge-Blue Solid State Drive on BenchmarkReviews. Kingston SSDNow V-Series 30GB Solid State Boot Drive on ThinkComputers. Mushkin Mulholland Drive 2GB USB Drive on OCClub. Thecus N7700 Pro 7 Drive NAS Server on Tweaktown. Asus TS Mini Home Server on Tweaknews. Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive on EverythingUSB. OCAU 10th Anniversary Stubby Holders (4 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 9-March-2010  15:47:57 (GMT +10) - by Agg Polo shirt orders are now closed and should ship in a couple of weeks. But we still have quite a few stubby holders left over from the first batch, and they're ready to ship now! Click for ordering info! Beer not included :) Right now you can get two of these shipped to you anywhere in Australia for twenty bucks total! Get some cool stuff and support OCAU, it's win-win. :) Tuesday Afternoon (6 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 9-March-2010  15:02:08 (GMT +10) - by Agg The Federal Government apparently recieved over 55,000 submissions on whether or not an R18+ rating should be introduced for video games in Australia. The federal Attorney-General's Department will prepare a report for the Standing Committee of Attorneys General based on the submissions. Information on submissions that didn't request confidentiality would be made public in "due course". Some more info on Electronic Frontiers Australia. A particularly noteworthy submission is here. Kotaku meanwhile report that the recent game violence vs smoking study was done by a group funded by Michael Atkinson, a vocal opponent to R18+ game classification. Now, as reported by News.com.au, it comes to light that the ACCM has received considerable funding from the office of Michael Atkinson, the censorship minister who opposes the introduction of an R18+ rating for videogames. Mr Atkinson also apparently demanded $20k from someone who had posted a rude remark about him online. Kytro sent in a radio interview where Dr Christopher Ferguson criticises the moral panic about video game violence in Australia. Dr Christopher Ferguson has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida and is the co-author of: Much Ado About Nothing: The Misestimation and Overinterpretation of Violent Vido Game Effects in Eastern and Western Nations: Comment on Anderson et al. (2010). USA retailer NewEgg have released a statement about the fake Intel processors people received from them recently. Initial information we received from our supplier, IPEX, stated that they had mistakenly shipped us “demo units.” We have since come to discover the CPUs were counterfeit and are terminating our relationship with this supplier. Ford have unveiled their first electric vehicle, and it's a van aimed at fleet users. Ford says as many as one in four cars it builds in 2020 will be a hybrid or electric vehicle, and it’s rolling out an electric Focus next year. But it’s starting with a delivery van because fleets are a perfect market for EVs. The vehicles tend to follow set routes, so range isn’t an issue. They return to a centralized location, making recharging a snap. The up-front cost is higher, but the operating costs are lower. Kingston have released a 30GB SSD "Boot Drive". Seems like an odd move, but there's some logic to it. Coverage on LegitReviews, TestFreaks and HWLogic. The idea of an SSD boot drive like the Kingston 30GB V Series drive works well of a lot of users who just can’t dump a load of money into a drive but would really like to get rid of the HDD bottleneck in their system. Tuesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 9-March-2010  11:26:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg Video Cards: Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Video Card in CrossFire on Tweaktown. PowerColor Radeon HD 5870 PCS+ on OCClub. Portable: HP dv6-1390ev Notebook on TBreak. ViewSonic ViewBook Pro VNB131S 13.3-inch Notebook on Tweaktown. Alienware M11x Notebook on TBreak. Toshiba Satellite E205-S1904 Laptop on HotHardware. Cooling: XtremeGear HP-1216B HSF on OCOnline. Thermaltake ISGC-300 CPU Cooler on Tweaknews. Noctua NH-D14 and C12P-SE14 CPU coolers on XSReviews. Thermaltake Silent 1156 CPU Heatsink on APHNetworks. Thermaltake Contac 29 Direct Touch CPU Cooler on LegitReviews. Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer Red PC3-12800 on OCIA. Kingston HyperX PC3-17066 (2133MHz) 4GB on Tweaktown. Cases: NZXT LEXA S Crafted Series on DragonSteelMods. In Win Fanqua Mid Tower on ThinkComputers. Coolermaster USP100 on Hi-TechReviews. Raidmax Skyline on OCIA. NZXT Panzerbox on OC3D. Software: Mass Effect 2 (PC) on YouGamers. Aliens vs Predator (PC) on GamingHeaven. Audio Visual: Auzen X-Fi Bravura 7.1 sound card on Guru3D. Masscool MP-1370S 'Media Mate' Media Player on LegitReviews. Mini USB 2.0 LED Projector with Tripod on BigBruin. Arctic Cooling E361-WM Headphones on RBMods. EOS wireless loudspeaker system on TechwareLabs. Misc: The WikiReader on TechwareLabs. ASUS U3S6 USB 3.0/SATA 3 6Gbps PCIE Card on TestFreaks. Brother HL-3070CW LED Printer on CCEReviews. Monday Night (7 Comments) (link)  Monday, 8-March-2010  21:00:20 (GMT +10) - by Agg Popular Science magazine have made 137 years of back issues available for free on the net. As you will soon see, it's an amazing resource. Aside from bringing back memories for longtime readers, as a whole the archive beautifully encapsulates over a century of PopSci's fascination with the future, and science and technology's incredible potential to improve our lives. Tweakguides have some info on Ubisoft's new DRM. It seems it was recently cracked in a matter of hours. More recently people were unable to play games with the new DRM when the authentication servers were having an issue. Well, as it turns out, when the Ubioft severs go down, no one can play their games and Ubisoft customers get very upset. At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games. enigma sent in some photos from the March 6th "Stop the Filter protest, in Melbourne and Perth. Melbourne also copped some freak hail and rain recently. Check out the amount of water coming down the road towards the end of this video. AirQ spotted this article about killing mosquitoes with lasers. In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light. ... The scientists' actual target is malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people. Tweaktown have a couple of articles looking into the software side of Thecus NASs, here and here. At first it started out as a harmless test with a single drive on a different file system to see what would happen to performance. Forty-eight hours later has evolved into a nonstop Bawls fueled obsession to see how much improvement we could find just by setting our NAS up differently. Interesting Forum Threads: Gulftown testing begins in Intel Hardware. Are subs that important for movies/games? in PC Audio. This guy's macro-fu is better than yours in Photography. What's your colour IQ? in Photography. Radio circuit in Electronics. Dolphins are non-human persons in Science. Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples in Science. Car Motion Simulator in Modding. How much money is enough? Salary poll in Career, Education & Finance. The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations in Career, Education & Finance. Sunday Afternoon (14 Comments) (link)  Sunday, 7-March-2010  17:06:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg Lots of people sent word that Zgeek have won the defamation lawsuit against them. The $42.5 million lawsuit against ZGeek has been settled after our lawyers required the plaintiff to provide proof of the movie deal that was purportedly lost due to comments posted on this site. So, congratulations to them. :) You'll be surprised to hear that the Police have no sense of humour when it comes to drug trafficking. Michael the Police Officer has kindly pointed out to me that it is a criminal offence to solicit money with the intent to purchase drugs and sell them at a profit. Beware the NVIDIA 196.75 drivers, as it seems they are killing cards, thanks Sniper. NVIDIA 196.75 drivers were released on March 2nd, and have now been removed from the download site. If you are running these drivers it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you uninstall this driver and immediately downgrade to the 196.21 drivers. Portal 2 has been confirmed for 2010 by Valve. Game Informer has revealed that its April 2010 cover story is none other than ... Portal 2 -- which Valve has given a release window of "this holiday season." The magazine's site teases the 12-page feature, calling the game "a full-fledged, standalone sequel" with "new gameplay mechanics, storyline, and some surprising new twists." It seems there's some fake Intel CPUs doing the rounds. More info here, thanks Ambush. Some of our forum members are reporting that they purchased Intel i7 920 processors from Newegg, but what they received was anything but a usable processor. The box looks real enough until you look closely and notice things like spelling errors and fake security tape. Some people think these might have been meant for display purposes in a retail store and were shipped on error. HyRax1 notes that Open Source is bad, evil and un-american. But is it Unawstraaaaan? What has Indonesia done to make it onto the Special 301 Priority Watch list? Turns out it had the temerity to send out a circular endorsing the use and adoption of open-source software within government organizations, which it hoped would "result in the use of legitimate open source and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and a reduction in overall costs of software." HotHardware played around with a 6-screen EyeFinity setup. A little simple arithmetic reveals the effective desktop resolution of a setup like this is 5760x2160, or 12.4 megapixels. You want high res? We've got it right here. What's more interesting than sitting at the Windows desktop, is gaming on a 6-screen setup like this. With that in mind, we also snapped a couple of quick videos showing that a single Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition can do in H.A.W.X. and Left 4 Dead 2. We haven't heard all that much about Cebit 2010, but there's coverage on Hexus and HWHeaven (and Day 2 and Day 3). With the first F1 race for 2010 happening next weekend, here's a video of Australia's Mark Webber previewing the Bahrain GP in Red Bull's rFactor Pro-powered simulator. There's some more info on the simulator here and discussion here. It sure beats my setup! Sunday Afternoon Reviews (2 Comments) (link)  Sunday, 7-March-2010  15:03:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg Portable & Prebuilt: Gateway EC14D07u Ultraportable Laptop on Tweaktown. Puget Echo I HTPC System on TestFreaks. Dell Inspiron Zino HD Desktop on HotHardware. Sony VAIO EB12FX/T notebook on TechReviewSource. Asus G73J: The Ultimate Gaming Notebook on InsideHW. Storage: Synology DiskStation DS210j NAS on TestSeek. Patriot Valkyrie NAS on NeoSeeker. OCZ Agility Series 120GB SSD on OCClub. ADATA S596 128GB SSD Video Review & Benchmarks on Motherboards.org. Western Digital RE4-GP 2 TB Hard Disk Drive on TechARP. A-DATA N002 USB 3.0 and SATA II 128GB SSD on Motherboards.org. Kingston 128GB V Series Notebook Upgrade Kit on Motherboards.org. LaCie Network Space 2 on DigitalTrends. Cases: Four Mainstream System Cases from AeroCool, Enermax, NZXT and Scythe on XbitLabs. Xclio Nighthawk on PureOC. VidaBox vCase3 Premium mATX HTPC chassis on Guru3D. Thermaltake V3 Black Edition Mid Tower on OCIA. DimasTech Bench Table V2.5 on TechPowerUp. Motherboard & CPU: AMD 785G Motherboard Roundup on iXBTLabs. Intel's Core i3-530 - The Budget Powerhouse? on Techgage. Intel Core i3-530 Clarkdale Processor on PCPerspective. ECS A890GXM-A 890GX AM3 board on OCClub. Gigabyte H55M-S2H Budget 1156 on Pro-Clockers. AMD Phenom II X2 555 BE on RBMods. Intel D510MO Mini-ITX on BigBruin. Athlon II X4 635 CPU on InsideHW. ASUS TUF SaberTooth 55i LGA1156 board on Bjorn3D. Zotac ION-ITX-A dual-core Atom on XbitLabs. Video Cards: XFX RADEON HD 5830 on Motherboards.org. Gigabyte GV-567OC-1GI Radeon HD 5670 on PCStats. MSI R5770 HAWK Radeon HD 5770 on PCPerspective. Power Supply: Chieftec Power Supply Units Roundup on XbitLabs. Thermaltake TR2 RX 750W on NinjaLane. OCZ Z Series 1000W on HWSecrets.

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