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June 2009 |
Some interesting things from the forums:
Apparently about a week ago marked 20 years of internet in Australia, thanks David. I was in Year 9 in 1989, and I'm pretty sure I had very rudimentary internet access at school, because I remember being on a NASA mailing list, but I had to dial into a machine and use a shell client to read the mails. You'll be amazed to hear I was something of a nerd at school.
AB sent in more info about Microsoft's screaming deals for Windows 7. In the United States, you'll be able to buy a Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade for $50 or get Windows 7 Professional for $100. Outside the U.S., Microsoft says, "the special low pre-order price will vary by country."
Speaking of which, from HAGAR: On Microsoft’s website today is pricing for pre-purchase of Windows 7. Unlike the US & UK, where you can get an upgrade (from XP or Vista) for $49.99US (Home Premium) or $99.99 (Professional) it costs $29.95 here but you have to buy Vista Retail first (not OEM). No mention of upgrading from 32 bit to 64 bit at the same time on their FAQ’s. They send you DVD Media between 4-6 weeks after the 22nd October after you produce your Serial #, sales receipt, and Microsoft redemption receipt. I assume this is the page. Danny spotted more info on Gizmodo.
Simon has an article about grey-market Samsung drives. Long story short, Samsung says some of its hard drives being sold in Australia are gray market drives that it will not support and will not honour warranties. But it cannot say which drives are unsupported. Not a good look if you are building a system around them!
PCPerspective ponder Propos. Recently the first die shot of the upcoming Propus class of processors showed up, and I took a good long look at it to figure out how it will affect AMD's lineup, and if it will be the next big thing in the budget quad core market. From what I have seen, things look surprisingly good.
A Sydney datacentre lost its water supply on the weekend, affecting its airconditioning. Macquarie told its customers, including iTnews, using text messages on Saturday morning when it was clear that the servers would need to be shut down.
Apparently a trojan has been capturing FTP login details from major corporations. A trojan has reportedly been uncovered that is harvesting FTP login data of major corporations, including the Bank of America, BBC, Amazon, Cisco, Monster.com, Symantec and McAfee.
From ChrisH: The voting for June's Iron Musician is now open. This month's topic was Faith, and it produced four killer entries. Come listen to some homegrown music, and vote for who you think has the right to wear the Iron Musician title.
Monday Night Reviews
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Monday, 29-June-2009 22:32:50 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Audio Visual:
Toshiba NB200-10Z - 10.1in Netbook on TrustedReviews.
Monster Turbine Headphones on TechWarelabs.
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 digicam on DigitalTrends.
Plantronics .Audio 655 Skype headset on ITReviewed.
Samsung WB550 Digital Camera on Accelenation.
Panasonic DMR-XS350 - Freesat DVD & HDD Recorder on TrustedReviews,
Tension Labs EAP03 Earphone Audio Processor on TrustedReviews.
Panasonic Viera TX-P42G15 42in plasma TV on TrustedReviews.
Samsung SyncMaster T240 monitor on PureOC.
Iiyama ProLite E2209HDS - Full HD 22in Monitor on TrustedReviews.
Cooling:
Thermal Paste Roundup on Bjorn3D.
Five Premium CPU Cooler Shootout on iXBTLabs.
Spire TherMax II CPU cooler on TechPowerUp.
NZXT Cryo S Notebook Cooler on LegitReviews.
NZXT Cryo S Notebook Cooler on Virtual-Hideout.
Nexus XiR-3500 Copper Edition CPU Cooler on OC3D.
Noctua NF-S12B FLX fan on RBMods.
Mobile Phones:
Alcatel OT-S319 on TrustedReviews.
Apple iPhone 3GS 16GB on Tweaktown.
HTC Magic Google Android phone on Draco II's blog.
Input Etc:
Thrustmaster T.16000M Joystick on ThinkComputers.
Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard on Tweaktown.
Prebuilt & Portable:
CyberPowerPC Gamer Extreme Si prebuilt gaming PC on TechWareLabs.
ASUS Eee PC 1008HA Seashell Netbook on Techgage.
Cooler Master SNA 95 Slim Notebook Universal Power Adapter on Tweaknews.
MSI GX723 Gaming Laptop on DriverHeaven.
HP Pavilion dv2 Ultra Portable on TBreak.
Garman Nuvi 1200 GPS on GPSTrends.
Monday Evening Reviews
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Monday, 29-June-2009 20:39:55 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Got the news mailbox sorted out! So here's some reviews catchup:
Motherboards:
Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P AM3 board on XbitLabs.
ASUS M4N82 Deluxe AM3 board on NEoSeeker.
ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer LGA1366 board on Motherboards.org.
ECS X58B-A LGA1366 board on OCClub.
ASRock M3A780GXH/128M LGA1366 board on Phoronix.
ZOTAC IONITX-A-U Atom N330 WiFi N Atom board on BenchmarkReviews.
Asus Crosshair III Formula AM3 board on TechSpot.
Video Cards:
Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB on TheTechLounge.
Asus HD 4770 Formula Edition on Bjorn3D.
Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 Platinum (Single PCB) on TechPowerUp.
Storage:
2TB HDD Battle: Seagate Barracuda LP vs. WD Caviar Green on HWSecrets.
HighPoint RocketRAID 4320 SAS RAID Controller on XbitLabs.
Highpoint RocketRAID 3510 SATA II RAID Controller on OCOnline.
Kingston SSDNow V-Series on PureOC.
ICY DOCK MB877SK-B HDD mobile rack on Bjorn3D.
OCZ Apex & Imation M Series SSD on TBreak.
iStar xAGE-N99 Hard Drive Docking Station on OCModShop.
Synology DS-409+ Network Attached Storage on ThinkComputers.
Verbatim BD-R and BD-RE BluRay Media on OCModShop.
Monday Afternoon
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Monday, 29-June-2009 14:55:47 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Still having issues with our news mailbox unfortunately, so if you sent anything interesting or important over the weekend, send it again to agg@overclockers.com.au - thanks.
It seems Acer have quietly been increasing market share, set to overtake Dell as the second-biggest PC maker. And if this comes to pass, Acer would trail only Hewlett-Packard; no computer company based outside the United States has ever climbed so high.
Apple have a firmware fix for those MacBook Pros with slow SATA interfaces. I'm pretty sure this only affects you if you have decided to swap the drive for an SSD or some other fast drive. While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.
Thieves are apparently using Google Earth to find valuable fish in ponds and steal them, report The Sun. Twelve thefts of the collectable creatures - which can be worth hundreds of pounds - have been reported in Hull, East Yorks, in the last three weeks.
Microsoft has revealed Windows 7 pricing and availability in a video on their Windows 7 Blog. On October 22nd, Windows 7 will be available in the following 14 languages: English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Chinese (Hong Kong). Scroll down the page for pricing.
We haven't heard from RAMBUS in a while, but they have some 7.2GHz XDR memory. Unfortunately for Rambus, XDR is only produced by Elpida Memory and Samsung Electronics, and the only XDR-based device that can boast with mass availability is Sony PlayStation 3.
Photography Gallery
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Sunday, 28-June-2009 21:04:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Here's some recent photos from our Photography Gallery forum:
Saturday Night
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Saturday, 27-June-2009 23:47:51 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Having an issue with the news mailbox at the moment, but should hopefully have it back up to speed soon. Speaking of news, Michael Jackson's recent passing prompted such a flurry of requests that Google thought it was being attacked. "The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack," Google said.
Battlefield Heroes has opened to the public, for free, at first. To try the casual shooter, simply head over to the Battlefield Heroes website with either Firefox or Internet Explorer, and hit the big, round "play now!" button. After installing the required Firefox add-on or IE ActiveX control, the game installer will open, download the game, and set everything up for you. There's an oldish thread with new info at the end here.
Space nuts will enjoy this half-hour tour of the ISS in HD on YouTube. Expedition 20 Flight Engineer Michael Barratt provides a 20-minute tour of the International Space Station, documenting the full 167 feet of the space station's pressurized modules. Barratts commentary describes to Mission Control in Houston how equipment and supplies are arranged and stored, and provides engineers with a detailed assessment of each module-to-module hatchway.
Here's some interesting-sounding on-screen privacy technology. To tap the broader consumer market, Anderson built a more consumer-friendly version called PrivateEye, which can work with a simple Web cam. The software blurs a user's monitor when he or she turns away. It also detects other faces in the background, and a small video screen pops up to alert the user that someone is looking at their screen.
Microsoft are apparently considering flash drives as an official install medium for Windows 7. Seems sensible enough - as I mentioned earlier it's fairly easy to do already.
XbitLabs compared some new high-end PSUs. DC-DC converters, independent stabilization, synchronous transformers and synchronous rectifiers, over 90% efficiency factor - please meet new high-end power supplies: Antec Signature, Enermax Revolution 85+ and Seasonic M12D.
The Pirate Bay have been denied a retrial. It looks as though The Pirate Bay will have to hope for the best on appeal now that a Swedish court ruled that the judge's membership with two pro-copyright organizations does not constitute bias.
Thanks to GMR, Scruff and PeterLemonjello for these!
     
     
Quite a few people sent word that the Federal Government has set its sights on video games, planning to block websites hosting and selling video games unsuitable for 15 year olds. Separately, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has been nominated by the British ISP industry for its annual "internet villain" award, competing alongside the European Parliament and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Discussion here.
A girl has apparently died from electrocution while using her laptop to post on twitter, while in the bath. Maria Barbu, 17, of Brasov, Romania, is said to have been plugging her laptop into wall current at the time, after "the battery died during a long session on social networking site Twitter as she took a soak."
Timbot sent in this funny Jack Thompson case mod. Mattigus bought a copy of Jack Thompson's book on eBay (which happened to be stolen from a library, by the way), gutted it and crammed in a PS2. Check out the pictures below, where you'll see GTA III being played by the Jack Thompson mod. Fantastic. :)
America's Army 3 came out a few days ago. As usual it's completely free on Steam or a standalone download. Discussion here.
Speaking of games, id Software has been bought by ZeniMax Media. While ZeniMax is not a household name like game publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision, it is the parent company of well-regarded publisher Bethesda Softworks.
Mpot spotted this video about Project Natal, a whole-body control system. Cheesy, but interesting stuff. We would all love to one day have our own personal holodeck. This is a pretty measurable step in that direction. It's been out for a little while - there's a discussion thread here.
Another odd one is the Novint Falcon, a gun controller with tactile feedback, thanks Neil. You will also feel the varying weight of objects as you pick them up, and how the gravity gun compensates for an objects weight and decreases it significantly. Additionally, you will experience recoil that matches the look, feel, and sound of every weapon in game, along with unique reload forces for each and every weapon.
Tweaktown checked out Adaptec's zero-maintenance cache protection. Last week I sat down with Scott Cleland from Adaptec and was amazed with what Adaptec's latest product offering that will allow RAID controllers to move beyond batteries for backing up the cache data.
Tech-Report have a system guide recommending a few bits and bobs. Our latest system guide features a Phenom II- and DDR3-powered Econobox, a highly versatile Mini-ITX build (which can take a Core 2 Quad and a PCIe graphics card), and much, much more.
Check out this impressive case mod. Reminds me of a Frank Lloyd Wright building. Discussion here.
Today's timewaster is The Box, from LethalCorpse. We hope that you're studying hard, but if you'd like a short break, why not play The Box, the new online game promoting UTS Engineering and IT.
Friday Morning Reviews
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Friday, 26-June-2009 03:41:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Cooling:
Titan Fenrir CPU Cooler on NeoSeeker.
Kingwin HTC XT-1264 i7 Ready CPU Cooler on ThinkComputers.
Input Etc:
Enermax Aurora Micro Aluminum Keyboard on OCModShop.
Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000 on DigitalTrends.
Microsoft SideWinder X3 Gaming Mouse on DigitalTrends.
Audio / Visual:
Philips BDP7300 Blu-ray Player on TrustedReviews.
Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD media player on TheTechZone.
VTech IS9181 Wi-Fi Internet Radio on DigitalTrends.
Toshiba Regza 26AV615DB 26in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
Turtle Beach Ear Force HPA-2 5.1 Headset on HWSecrets.
Sony Bravia KDL-32E5500 32in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision on Guru3D.
Logitech Squeezebox Duet internet radio on TechWareLabs.
BenQ GP1 projector on ITReviewed.
Altec Lansing VS2421 Compact Speaker System on RBMods.
Memorex iWakeUp iPod Clock Radio on HWZone.
Speedlink Tube Stereo PC Headset on VerdisReviews.
Samson C01U Recording/Podcasting Pak on OCIA.
Storage:
Kingston SSDnow V-Series 128GB Solid State Hard Drive on Futurelooks.
Kingston DataTraveler 200 (128GB) on ITReviewed.
Seagate Replica PC Backup System on DigitalTrends.
Icy Dock MB876SK on Bjorn3D.
Software:
StarDock WindowBlinds v6.4 on ITReviewed.
Serif PhotoPlus X3 on ITReviewed.
SlySoft CloneCD v5.3.1.4 on ITReviewed.
World of Goo PC game on GamePyre.
Cases:
NZXT Panzerbox on I4U.
In-Win X-Fighter AL-13 Series on Motherboards.org.
Prebuilt & Portable:
System76 Bonobo Professional notebook on Phoronix.
Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 All-in-One Desktop PC on HotHardware.
Networking:
Mvix Nubbin MS-811N Wireless N USB Adapter on Tweaktown.
Netgear XAVB101 Powerline Ethernet Adapter on TechWareLabs.
Misc:
Corsair HX850W PSU on OC3D.
Kingston HyperX PC2-6400 SODIMM Memory Kit on BigBruin.
EVGA E761 X58 SLI Classified Motherboard on LegitReviews.
ASUS EN9600GT 512MB video card on Bjorn3D.
Thursday Afternoon Reviews
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Thursday, 25-June-2009 17:24:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Motherboard and CPU:
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P AM3 board on BenchmarkReviews.
EVGA X58 3X SLI Classified LGA1366 board on Motherboards.org.
ASRock M3A780GXH/128M AM3 board on LegitReviews.
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 LGA775 board on HotHardware.
AMD Phenom x4 955 Black Edition AM3 CPU on Tech-Reviews.
MSI Eclipse Plus LGA1366 board on CPU3D.
Intel Core i7 920 LGA1366 CPU on PCShopTalk.
ASUS Crosshair III Formula AM3 board on Motherboards.
ASUS Maximus II Gene mATX LGA775 board on BenchmarkReviews.
Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P 790FX AM3 board on PCPerspective.
Asus Crosshair III Formula AM3 board on TrustedReviews.
Storage:
OCZ Summit 250GB SSD on Guru3D.
Solidata K5-64 SLC Indilinx Solid State Drive on Tweaktown.
Western Digital's latest My Book NAS on TechReport.
WD My Book World Edition II External 2TB NAS Drive on LegitReviews.
Cases:
NZXT Panzerbox on TechPowerUp.
NZXT Panzerbox on ThinkComputers.
Portable and Barebones:
Alienware's M17x notebook on DigitalTrends.
Asus Pro61s Laptop on RBMods.
Apple iPhone 3G S on ITReviewed.
MSI's X-Slim X340 ultraportable notebook on Tech-Report.
Lenovo ThinkPad T400s on HWZone.
Nokia E63 Mobile Phone with Email On 3 on Draco II's blog.
HP Pavilion dv3-2050ea - 13.3in Laptop on TrustedReviews.
Asus Eee PC 1005HA Seashell on HotHardware.
Shuttle SX58H7 LGA1366 barebones on HWZone.
Thursday Morning Reviews
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Thursday, 25-June-2009 02:15:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Cooling:
Coolermaster 212 Plus CPU Cooler on Pro-Clockers.
Vizo Orbiter Hard Drive Cooler on Tech-Reviews.
Thermalright HR-07 Trio Heatpipe Coolers on OC3D.
GlacialTech X-Wing Notebook Cooling Pad on ThinkComputers.
Evercool Transformer 4 CPU cooler on OCClub.
NZXT Cryo S Notebook Cooler on FutureLooks.
XtremeGear Xtreme Cooler HP-1216 CPU Cooler on Tweaktown.
NZXT Cryo S notebook cooler on PureOC.
Arctic Cooling MX-3 vs. GELID GC-2 thermal pastes on DriverHeaven.
Thermaltake ISGC-300 CPU Cooler on ThinkComputers.
NZXT Cryo S notebook cooler on OCClub.
Input Etc:
Rosewill RKM-800RF Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo on BigBruin.
I-Rocks KR-6820E Backlit Gaming Keyboard on Tweaknews.
Gigabyte GK-K6800 Multimedia Keyboard on HWLogic.
Zowie IO 1.1 Professional Gaming Bundle on OCClub.
Software:
Microsoft Security Essentials (Codename Morro) free security software on TechReviewSource.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game on GamingNexus.
Disciple PC game on GamePyre.
Corel Home Office on ITReviewed.
Interesting Forum Threads
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Wednesday, 24-June-2009 21:34:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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A quick snapshot of what's going on in the forums. If you haven't got an account you might notice you can browse even more of our forums now, with the Other Topics section being opened. This also means you can search those forums with Google now.
What exactly is this thing? in Overclocking & Hardware.
13-Inch MacBook Pro Arrives and MacBook Air Gets a Price Cut in Apple Hardware & Software.
Xbox Live gets 1080p Zune video store In Australia, Twitter and Facebook in Microsoft Consoles.
HP Blackbird 002 in Modding.
Researching changing organisation from Win to Linux in Business & Enterprise.
Corsair HydroCool 200EX : Resurrecting for Socket775 in Extreme Cooling.
Triggering an IR receiver from a white object/paint in Electronics.
Monitor Stands - Show me yours in Video Cards & Monitors.
Quadro.vs.GeForce for CAD/Rendering in Video Cards & Monitors.
VidZone and you! in Sony Consoles.
F1 teams to set up rival series in Motorsport.
So I bought one of those camera from ebay in Motoring.
NASA prepares to bomb the moon in Science.
Teleportation? in Science.
Was sold wrong filter, heres the result in Photography Gallery.
Stars and Shaceships! (84 image stacked star trail) in Photography Gallery.
Clem7 Tunnel Construction in Photography Gallery.
Movie: Bond 23 news in Entertainment.
Dob in a Bikie in The Pub.
Emissions trading blow: Fielding rejects climate change in Current Events.
NRL State of Origin 2009 in Major Sporting Events.
Sponsor Specials
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Wednesday, 24-June-2009 19:58:57 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Remember to keep an eye on our Sponsor Specials Forum if you're shopping around. In there our many sponsors have special offers and deals on laptops, media players, fitness supplements, office chairs, data retrieval, web hosting, speaker kits, camera gear, cold cathode kits and a range of PC components. Check 'em out!
Wednesday Morning
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Wednesday, 24-June-2009 03:44:47 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Apparently the Australian recording industry is demanding more money for songs played in places like gyms, cafes etc. It claims the amount they currently pay is extremely low and doesn’t fairly compensate the record labels, but if a restaurant’s licensing tab goes from $125 to $19,344 I’ll be amazed if any of them continue to play music, and if they do it’s certain to be added to the price of a customer’s meal (maybe there ought to be a music free option, where if you wear earmuffs you don’t have to pay the fee). Discussion here.
Meanwhile an American woman has copped a huge fine for using Kazaa to download songs illegally. It ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay 1.92 million dollars -- or 80,000 dollars per song -- to six record companies: Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records and UMG Recordings. Discussion here.
DriverHeaven have an SSD roundup for June 2009. Today we have a selection of these drives for review featuring models with various new controllers from Indilinx and Samsung as well as Intel’s award winning X25-M. Just to make things a little more interesting there is even a model which features a customised version of the old JMicron 602 controller.
XbitLabs have a 120mm/140mm fan roundup. After a month of hard work and numerous experiments on a new unique testbed we are proud to offer you a roundup including 57 models of fans from 25 different product series collected from all over the world.
Here's a cool idea, using public surveillance cameras to film a music video. The band set up their music equipment, from microphones to drum kit, in eighty different locations, including buses and what appear to be taxi cabs, and then requested all of the footage using the Data Protection Act, an English statute similar to the U.S.’s Freedom of Information Act that mandates any individual should have access to all information collected about them.
A few people sent in this story about recovering a stolen iPhone using the inbuilt "Find my iPhone" service. Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.
HWSecrets cover the 80 Plus certification for PSUs. With more and more manufacturers trying to design power supplies with efficiency well above 80%, they decided to create three new certification categories: Gold, Silver and Bronze. Learn what they really mean.
June's Iron Chef competition is underway, with the theme being Mushrooms. So, check out the entries so far and discussion in this thread.
Wednesday Morning Reviews
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Wednesday, 24-June-2009 03:24:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Video Cards:
Sapphire HD 4850 Toxic on NeoSeeker.
HIS Radeon HD 4770 on DigitalTrends.
NVIDIA GeForce GT2XX Reference on iXBTLabs.
AMD(ATI) RADEON R(V)7XX Reference on iXBTLabs.
Power Supply:
PC Power & Cooling Pro-Source 1500 on Bjorn3D.
OCZ Technology Fatal1ty 550W on OCIA.
OCZ Fatal1ty Champion Series 700W on PCPerspective.
Cooler Master Sileo 500 Mid-Tower on Tweaknews.
Memory:
Kingston Value PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz CL9 12GB (6x2GB) kit on OC3D.
G.Skill Trident 2000 MHz DDR3 CL9 6 GB Tri-Channel Kit on TechPowerUp.
Kingston KHX12800D3LLK3/6GX on Bjorn3D.
Storage:
Kingston 4GB DataTraveler 101 USB Flash Drive on LegitReviews.
Acer Aspire easyStore H340 home server on DigitalTrends.
Synology Disk Station DS-409+ NAS on Techspot.
QNAP TS-809 Pro Turbo NAS on CCEReviews.
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1.0TB SATA Hard Drive on PCStats.
Portable:
Apple MacBook Pro 13" Unibody on TBreak.
Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T-353 notebook on TrustedReviews.
Lenovo ThinkPad T400s notebook on HotHardware.
Ruggedbook SR659 on VIAArena.
Gateway ID5805g Notebook on HWZone.
Samsung NC20 netbook on ITReviewed.
Some interesting things from the forums:
I had an interesting time last night installing Windows 7 on a Sun Fire X4150 I picked up in the forums a couple of months ago. There's no CD/DVDROM in the machine so I ended up following this guide to install it from a USB stick. Worked fine, much to my amazement. I've got a SAS RAID card on order but in the meantime the only 2.5" SATA device I have is the Silicon Power 64GB SSD, so it's running off that. Just doing some general testing given it seems inevitable we'll end up hosting back in Sydney within a couple of months. Windows 7 is a bit of a revelation given I haven't even really used Vista much, having stuck with XP on my main PC. Still, with 8 cores and 32GB RAM it's quite a handy machine to play around on. :)
Samsung put me in my place though, with 32GB on one stick of DDR3. The announcement doesn't quote a top speed, but it says the module runs at a voltage setting of just 1.35V - 10% lower than the 1.5V default for DDR3 memory. 10% is apparently enough for Samsung to play the "green" card, touting the module as "eco-sensitive."
Here's a cool VR Gun Mod. Some features include low-cost, dual-axis miniature rate gyroscope that is fully self-contained for easy integration into human input devices such as the PC VR Gamegun. A unique electromagnetic transducer design and a single etched beam structure utilize the Coriolis effect to sense rotation in two axes simultaneously. Or in English, you move the gun around and it moves the mouse in-game.
Techgage have an article about the experience of Computex. Not so much the particulars from this year, but more about what it's like to attend a show like that. Our goal is to give more to you than just show coverage, and let you experience the trip along with us.
HotHardware spoke to Intel recently. To launch the section and follow up on our original Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition coverage, we've enlisted the help of Intel and have a blog post available featuring a discussion regarding Intel's latest flagship desktop CPU, Computex, Westmere and a few more upcoming products.
It seems OCZ's Vertex EX SSDs can benefit from a firmware upgrade, like Intel's did recently. Since we updated the Vertex EX to firmware 1.20 we'll walk you through the process and show you how it restores performance with wiper.exe 0525.
Apparently Steve Jobs had a liver transplant recently, thanks IntelInside. The newspaper said the transplant took place about two months ago, and Jobs has been recovering well and was expected to return to work on schedule later this month.
Good Game is on again on Monday night, covering Ghostbusters, Bionic Commando and Trials 2 Second Edition. Plus we'll look at some games that were canned and then leaked onto the net, and examine the rise of the casual gaming space. You can download any ep of Good Game at www.abc.net.au/goodgame - or catch us Monday nights at 8:30pm on ABC2, or late Friday nights on ABC1, right before rage.
Sunday Afternoon Reviews #3
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Sunday, 21-June-2009 17:56:50 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Video Cards:
ECS GeForce GTS 250 on TBreak.
XFX GeForce GTS250 on GamePyre.
PowerColor PCS+ HD 4890 Battle Forge Edition on HWZone.
EVGA GeForce GTX 295 on Motherboards.org.
ECS GeForce GTS 250 1GB on PureOC.
XFX 4890 Black Edition & Zotac GTX285 Infinity on DriverHeaven.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M mobile GPU on Phoronix.
Cooling:
XPad Slim Laptop Cooler on Virtual-Hideout.
Thermolab Baram Heatsink on PCShopTalk.
Corsair Ice T30 Memory Cooler on HotHardware.
Storage & Memory:
Team Xtreem DDR3-2000 3GB triple channel RAM kit on TrustedReviews.
Kingston SSDNow V Series Kit on ITReviewed.
Input Etc:
MIONIX Saiph 3200 Gaming Mouse on PCShopTalk.
Enermax Aurora Premium & Aurora Micro Keyboards on OCOnline.
Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 on I4U.
MIONIX Saiph 1800 Gaming Mouse on PCShopTalk.
Misc:
Lowepro SlingShot 100 AW Camera Bag on ThinkComputers.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game on TrustedReviews.
Sumo Omni - Extreme Lounge Gear on DriverHeaven.
EVGA Bigfoot Networks Killer Xeno Pro network card on HotHardware.
Sunday Afternoon Reviews #2
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Sunday, 21-June-2009 17:27:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Audio Visual:
Windy 6 FireWire audio interface on Guru3D.
Panasonic SC-BT205 Blu-ray Home Cinema System in TrustedReviews.
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Sound Cards on iXBTLabs.
Roccat Vire Headset on XSReviews.
ViewSonic VX2433wm 23.6 Inch DVI/HDMI TFT LCD Monitor on BigBruin.
Nikon D5000 DSLR with HD video on DigitalTrends.
BlueAnt S1 Sun Visor Bluetooth Handsfree Car Kit on HWZone.
Archos 2 8GB mp3 player on TrustedReviews.
LG HT33S 2.1-Channel DVD System on TrustedReviews.
Cases:
Enermax Phoenix Neo Aluminum Mid Tower on TechWareLabs.
Cooler Master Gladiator 600 on TechPowerUp.
Thermaltake Element S on Hi-TechReviews.
Phones:
Nokia E72 Preview on HWZone.
Nokia 5530 XpressMusic Preview on HWZone.
Apple iPhone 3G S on TechReviewSource.
Apple iPhone 3G S on DigitalTrends.
Nokia N97 on DigitalTrends.
Samsung i8910 HD on TrustedReviews.
Samsung Jack (SGH-i637) on DigitalTrends.
Samsung Alias 2 (SCH-U750) on DigitalTrends.
Philips SE659 on DigitalTrends.
HP iPAQ Voice Messenger on ITReviewed.
Sunday Afternoon Reviews
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Sunday, 21-June-2009 16:52:43 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Motherboard and CPU:
Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P AM3 board on NeoSeeker.
ASUS M4A79T Deluxe AM3 board on LegionHW.
Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition [D0 Stepping] Processor on FutureLooks.
AMD Phenom 2 955 CPU on RBMods.
BIOSTAR 945GC-330 Atom board on InsideHW.
Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P AM3 board on OCClub.
Portable and Prebuilt:
HP TouchSmart IQ830 all-in-one PC on ITReviewed.
ASRock ION 330-BD Nettop on Tweaktown.
Garmin Zumo 660 GPS on GPSTrends.
HP Pavilion dv3-2055ea - 13.3in Laptop on TrustedReviews.
Power Supply:
Topower PowerBird 900W on HWSecrets.
Kingwin ABT-1000MAIS on Bjorn3D.
Arctic Cooling Fusion 550RF on LegitReviews.
Enermax ECO80+ 350W on OC3D.
Cooler Master UCP900 on MadShrimps.
Seasonic M12D 750W on HWSecrets.
Corsair HX850W on HWSecrets.
Sanus Low-Profile ELM203 Surge Protector on LegitReviews.
-MoC- wins OCAU NRL Tipping Knockout Comp
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Friday, 19-June-2009 19:35:34 (GMT +10) - by Wolfy
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Congratulations to -MoC- who has won the OCAU NRL Tipping Knockout Competition and has won an OCAU Stubby Holder! It only took a few rounds, but it seems the unpredictable NRL Results helped finish the Knockout Comp more quickly than I expected (at least that is my excuse for being knocked out in the first week).
There are still 8 tipsters remaining in the OCAU AFL Tipping Knockout Competition (at least I'm still in that one) so good luck to them!
Quite a few people sent word that the iPhone 3.0 software is out now. Simon has details: All that people with iphones need to do is plug in their iphone to an updated version of itunes, then click on their iphone icon, click update, and the rest is handled by the itunes software. Also, the software is 230.1MB. Works fine on mine. More info here and here.
Some stuff to win: a Core i7 Upgrade Kit on SMH.com.au and an Olympus Pen Camera on Martybugs. Microsoft also have a competition to win $10k but they want to force you to use IE8.
AMD have a very limited edition TWKR CPU. Very little is known at this point in time, about this chip, beyond the point that it will provide better clock-speeds compared to the Phenom II X4 955. Discussion here.
NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter last night. LRO will go into orbit around the moon, turning its suite of instruments towards the moon for thorough studies. The spacecraft also will be looking for potential landing sites for astronauts.
ZDNet report on a new hard drive technology called HRD. DataSlide applies technology in new, patented ways to achieve unprecedented high performance 160,000 IOPS & 500MB/sec and low power <4 Watts for a magnetic storage device. Three years or more away, though. Discussion here.
Meanwhile WD have officially entered the SSD market, using technology from SiliconSystems who they aquired earlier this year. SiliconDrive III SSDs include 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) and Parallel ATA (PATA) and 1.8-inch Micro SATA products featuring native SATA 3.0 gigabits per second (Gbps) or ATA-7 interfaces with target read speeds up to 100 megabytes per second (MBps) and write speeds to 80 MBps in capacities up to 120 gigabytes (GB). More info here.
IntelInside spotted some free anti-virus software on the way from Microsoft. The US software giant described MSE as "a no-cost anti-malware solution that provides consumers with quality protection from threats including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans."
Chris sent in this article about conficker's inner workings. Despite an unprecedented collaboration against them, Conficker's accomplished creators have been able to bluff and dodge to gain control of machines inside homes, universities, government offices and the armed forces of at least three nations, establishing a powerful and lucrative network of "zombie" computers.
Tech Report checked out high-end AM3 chipsets. The Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition makes a compelling case for Socket AM3, particularly now that LGA775 has no real upgrade path. Which chipset should you choose for a high-end build? We've taken the 790FX and nForce 980a SLI for a spin to find out.
The ABC's Good Game is on tonight, ABC1 just before Rage, whatever that means in your locality. :) Or download it from the website. Sims 3 - After countless expansions of the world's best selling game, Sims 3 is finally here. EA has turned its other franchises around, favouring quality over franchise fodder. Will the Sims be any different? Red Faction: Guerrilla - Made by the Saints Row 2 lads, this one is all about destruction. Total, utter destruction of anything on the map. And Arnie quotes. Get your ass to Mars!
It's Friday! Remember we now have "next/previous" links on the image page.
     
     
Friday Afternoon Reviews
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Friday, 19-June-2009 14:16:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Storage:
Patriot Torqx 128GB Indlinx MLC SSD on Tweaktown.
Indilinx based OCZ Vertex and Super Talent UltraDrive ME SSDs on PCPerspective.
Western Digital Caviar 2TB Green Drive on Motherboards.org.
QNAP TS-119 Gigabit NAS Server on BenchmarkReviews.
1 TB Hard Disk Drive Round-Up on HWSecrets.
Video Cards:
Sapphire HD 4890 Vapor-X on NeoSeeker.
Gainward GTS 250 2048MB Limited Edition on XbitLabs.
Cooling:
Noctua NH-C12P CPU Cooler on CPU3D.
GlacialTech UFO V51 Silent CPU cooler on Hi-TechReviews.
Power Supply:
Kingwin 1220W Mach 1 on PureOC.
Corsair HX850W on DriverHeaven.
Ikonik Vulcan 850W on Bjorn3D.
World Superbike 2009
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Thursday, 18-June-2009 20:45:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Darkness sent over a few screenshots from the new World Superbike 2009 game. This seemed like a good chance to show off the new "next picture / previous picture" navigation in the image script, thanks to matthudson:
     
     
     
     
Also, some videos:
OCAU's Folding@Home team has been working hard this year, but we still need your help. While the team has been contributing over 2 Million points per day, we still need your help to increase this number and make sure we hold onto our number #2 spot in the ranking.
The team is looking for Nvidia GeForce 8XXX, 9XXX and 260/28X/295 GPU's (ATI Radeon GPU's Too!) to help increase our output. If you are ready to start, then check out this thread for instructions. Don't have a GPU to spare? Folding@Home works on your CPU as well! There's a guide to getting started here. If you have Sony Playstation 3 you should already have the client pre-installed and ready for you to start producing!
So, if you would like to help scientists learn about diseases like Cancer, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease, Osteogenesis Imperfecta - possibly help find a cure for it and put OCAU back in the number one spot - then drop by the Distributed Computing section (open to the public) and see how you can be a part of it.
 
Thursday Morning Reviews
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Thursday, 18-June-2009 02:55:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Audio Visual:
Logitech Harmony 1100 Universal Remote on TrustedReviews.
Sony NWZ-X1060 Touch-Screen PMP on TrustedReviews.
Samsung LE32B650 32in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
TriSpecs Bluetooth Headset Sunglasses on TrustedReviews.
Leadtek Winfast PxVC1100 SpursEngine card on Bjorn3D.
Sony Bravia KDL-40W5500 40in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
Audio-Technica ATH-AD700 headphones on TechPowerUp.
LG 22LU4000 22in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
Lilliput EB701Y 7-Inch Touchscreen LCD Monitor on BenchmarkReviews.
Software:
The Sims 3 PC game on ITReviewed.
Zoho Writer 2.0 wordprocessor on ITReviewed.
Cryostasis Sleep of Reason Performance on OCClub.
Cooling:
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 CPU cooler on Bjorn3D.
Thermolab Baram CPU Cooler on Pro-Clockers.
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 vs. Cooler Master 212 Plus CPU coolers on InsideHW.
Scythe Mugen 2 CPU Cooler on Tech-Reviews.
Patriot Duplicator 16GB SDHC Card on BigBruin.
Portable:
Toshiba's Artsy Notebooks on HWZone.
Sony VAIO VGN-NS20E/S - 15.4in Laptop on TrustedReviews.
OCZ Neutrino 10" Do-It-Yourself netbook on TechSpot.
Video Cards:
EVGA GeForce GTX 275 with 1792MB on Guru3D.
Sapphire Radeon 4890 Atomic on DriverHeaven.
Storage:
Synology Disk Station 109 on LegionHW.
Eagle Tech Consus T-Series ET-CSTESU2-BK External HDD Enclosure on VerdisReviews.
Patriot Torqx SSD on PureOC.
Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA HDD on TechWareLabs.
Cases:
NZXT Beta Case on HWSecrets.
Coolermaster HAF 922 on RBMods.
NZXT Beta on TechPowerUp.
Power Supply:
Tuniq Ripper 1000W on OCOnline.
Thermaltake Litepower 450W on ThinkComputers.
Misc:
OCZ Blade 6GB DDR3-2000 memory on PureOC.
MSI Eclipse Plus X58 LGA 1366 motherboard on PCPerspective.
Steelseries World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse on Metku.
Wednesday Morning
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Wednesday, 17-June-2009 04:34:43 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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If you live in a regional area (like me) you might be happy to hear that ONE HD is becoming more widespread soon, thanks pduthie_au. Regional viewers of Southern Cross 10 will finally see ONE HD in Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT and Victoria from 7pm July 2nd, it was announced today.
DriverHeaven have a DDR3 tri-channel roundup. So today we have two more kits on our test bench from OCZ and G.Skill, both of which are capable of running at 2000MHz. Added to this we have a set of memory from Kingston which is one of the few that favours volume over extreme speed, their product gives us three 4GB sticks in one kit for a total of 12GB.
Opera have an interesting idea called Opera Unite, which sounds almost like a peer-to-peer approach to the web. Share a file securely from your computer without waiting to upload it. First select the folder from which you would like to share files. Opera Unite then generates a direct URL to that folder.
BenchmarkReviews compared 80 thermal interface materials, thanks T M. In this massive follow-up article, which was built from entirely new project data taking over one year of research to publish, our collection of test material has grown to include every product we could acquire from the marketplace.
Carl spotted this interesting article about datacentre overload. Yet as data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society — even the storehouses of our fleeting cultural memory (that dancing cockatoo on YouTube!) — the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources.
Guru3D meanwhile checked out a Gigabyte factory in Taiwan. We followed the design and productions stages of both a motherboard and VGA card. In this article we'll take you though the entire fabrication processes guided with dozens and dozens of photos.
Tech Report have info on five 40nm mobile GPUs from NVIDIA. Nvidia has announced five new mainstream entrants to the mobile GPU lineup, all of which pack a brand-new 40nm graphics processor with support for DirectX 10.1 and GDDR5 memory. Check our coverage for detailed specs and a look at how Nvidia positions the newcomers against the previous generation.
Apparently the millionth English word is "Web 2.0", thanks AirQ. Uhm. Isn't that two words? Damn pesky kids. GLM said Web 2.0 beat out the terms Jai ho, N00b and slumdog to take top spot.
Paul spotted some MacBook Pros with slow SATA interfaces. The slower SATA interface is unlikely to affect the bulk of users as even the fastest traditional hard drives are unable to saturate even the 1.5 Gbit interfaces. However, if you are planning on buying a fast Solid State Drive (SSD), it could affect the drive's performance.
MaximumPC has an ultimate BIOS guide. Whatever your goal is, this is your go-to guide for everything you've ever wanted to know about the BIOS. We cover every setting -- even the obscure ones -- so you'll never feel lost or out of your element, no matter what motherboard you're rocking under the hood.
Wednesday Morning Reviews
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Wednesday, 17-June-2009 03:38:34 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Motherboard & CPU:
Intel Core i7-975 Extreme LGA1366 CPU on ITReviewed.
ASRock P45DE LGA775 board on PCShopTalk.
AMD Phenom II 9xx CPUs With DDR3 Support on iXBTLabs.
Gigabyte MA-790FXT UD5P AM3 board on Motherboards.org.
Software:
Prototype PC game on OCModShop.
Faerie Solitaire PC game on ITReviewed.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game on OCModShop.
Phones:
Apple iPhone 3G S preview on TechReviewSource.
Samsung Jet S8000 preview on HWZone.
Hands-on with Samsung's Jet Smartphone on tbreak.
Samsung Magnet (SGH-a257) on Digitaltrends.
Mophie Juice Pack Air iPhone Battery Pack on EverythingUSB.
HTC Touch Pro2 Smartphone on TrustedReviews.
Blackberry Storm on InsideHW.
Input Etc:
Razer Sphex gaming mouse on Bjorn3D.
Sharkoon Rush FireGlider Laser Gaming Mouse on Tweaktown.
Roccat Kone 3200dpi Gaming Mouse on OC3D.
Imak Mouse Cushion on LegitReviews.
Portable & Prebuilt:
Nintendo DSi portable game console on HWSecrets.
Asus Eee Top ET1602 1B All-in-One PC on Futurelooks.
Lenovo G530 Notebook on HotHardware.
Asus N90S Multimedia Notebook on I4U.
Sony VAIO P-Series (P19WN/Q) Netbook on DriverHeaven.
ZaReason Ion Breeze 3770 prebuilt Linux PC on Phoronix.
Power Supply:
BFG Tech EX Series 1200W on OCIA.
Antec CP-850 on HWSecrets.
Corsair HX850 850W on JonnyGuru.
Seventeam ST-380PAS on HWSecrets.
Cases:
NZXT Beta Mid Tower Chassis on Tweaktown.
Enermax Phoenix Gaming Case on Pro-Clockers.
GMC R-4 Bulldozer on GamePyre.
Luxa LM100 Mini Case on GamePyre.
NZXT Beta on RBMods.
Misc:
VeseNET Piggy6 HomePlug AV Power Strip on ITReviewed.
3M Vikuiti Netbook Filter privacy gadget on ITReviewed.
VelociRaptor Winners
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Tuesday, 16-June-2009 13:17:40 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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We've recieved the results of the guess the picture competition from Western Digital recently. So, congrats to:
D. O'Halloran of WA
J. Louey of VIC
Who both take home a VelociRaptor hard drive. :) The secret image was apparently part of a Ferrari car.
Tuesday Lunchtime Reviews
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Tuesday, 16-June-2009 13:06:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Video Cards:
ASUS GeForce ENGTX275 vs. ASUS Radeon EAH4890 on InsideHW.
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X on DriverHeaven.
MSI 285GTX Superpipe on Bjorn3D.
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X (1Gb GDDR5) on CPU3D.
Cooling:
Enermax Aeolus Laptop Cooler on Pro-Clockers.
Thermaltake Xaser S1000 Notebook Cooler on ThinkComputers.
Cooler Master V10 Hybrid T.E.C. Cooler on Modders-Inc.
Kingston HyperX RAM Fan on TechWareLabs.
Kingwin XT-1264 CPU cooler on Bjorn3D.
Glacialtech X-Wing Notebook Cooler on Virtual-Hideout.
Noctua NH-C12P CPU Cooler on VerdisReviews.
Storage:
Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 on HWLogic.
SanDisk 16GB SDHC Netbook Memory Card on LegitReviews.
Pioneer BDR-203BK Internal Blu-ray Writer on TrustedReviews.
OCZ Vertex Series 120Gb SSD SATA-II on CPU3D.
Samsung F2 EcoGreen HD502HI: Silent 500GB 3.5" HDD on SilentPCReview.
Thecus N3200PRO NAS Server on OCClub.
LaCie D2 Safe 1TB External Hard Drive on ThinkComputers.
Kingston 80GB SSDNow M Series Drive on Motherboards.org.
Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor on TechWareLabs.
Eagle Tech Consus ET-CSTESU2-BK External HDD Enclosure on Tweaknews.
OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB SLC SSD on LegitReviews.
Audio / Visual:
ViewSonic PJ359w monitor on ITReviewed.
BenQ Joybee GP1 Mini Projector on DigitalTrends.
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 on ITReviewed.
Photography Gallery
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Monday, 15-June-2009 21:19:42 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Here's some recent photos from our Photography Gallery forum:
Interesting Forum Threads
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Monday, 15-June-2009 14:24:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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A quick snapshot of what's going on in the forums:
Noctua Shows Off Six Heatpipe, Dual Radiator NH-D14 CPU Cooler in Overclocking & Hardware.
New Corsair case: Obsidian 800D in Overclocking & Hardware.
Intel Gulftown 32nm 6-core should work with X58 boards in Intel Hardware.
How to get your Athlon X2 running really cold for just $19 in AMD Hardware.
How Does Your Company Manage Microsoft Patching? in Business & Enterprise Comptuing.
Naked Servers in Business & Enterprise Computing.
HowTo: Use a Bluetooth headset with Ubuntu Jaunty in Other Operating Systems.
Armed Assault 2 Mini-Review (with screenshots) in Games.
SSD "which controller?" list in Storage & Backup.
My new TEAM 2.5" Combon SATA SSD Benchmark in Storage & Backup.
Prototype new motion controller for PS3 and EyeToy in Sony Consoles.
Data generated when playing games over PSN - impact on monthly quotas etc in Sony Consoles.
Show us your self-portrait with gear in Photography.
How to lose your job as a safety car driver in Motoring.
Japan considering to prohibit cars with internal combustion engines by 2020 in Motoring.
Dedicated Apple iPhone 3G 'S' Discussion in Mobile Phones.
Business wants an increase in GST in Career, Education and Finance.
Had an ultrasound? Could you hear it? Am I a freak? in Sport, Fitness & Health.
House broken into - can you enhance the CCTV? in Lifestyle.
Critical Thinking unit in schools in Current Events & Serious Discussion.
NSW Government imposes ban on Chinese products in Current Events & Serious Discussion.
Family Feud Survey in The Pub.
More news catchup from through the week:
In a quite bizarrely tragic tale, 100,000 websites were hacked due to a security issue with popular virtualisation software HyperVM. More info on the attack here, and it seems the scale of the attack has driven the CEO of the software company to hang himself. Discussion here.
Still on the security side of things, there's some new Mac malware out there. Two new pieces of malware for Apple computers have been found in the wild according to security firm Sophos.
Meanwhile Linux can claim the first USB 3.0 driver. Greg Kroah-Hartman already queued the patches for Kernel 2.6.31, "so Linux users should have official USB 3.0 support around September 2009.
Check out these extremely realistic portraits which are all computer generated. If you didn't know these were all created with a computer, would you think it was real?
Here's an amusing take on Google through a mandatory filter. Ruugle.com is a tongue-in-cheek protest website showing what the Australian Government would replace Google with if they got their way with the proposed mandatory ISP level (filtering).
A strange online music scam has been busted. The gang is alleged to have made several songs which they gave to an online US company, which uploaded them to be sold on iTunes and Amazon. Over five months they bought the songs thousands of times, spending about $US750,000 on 1500 stolen US and British credit cards, according to the Met.
Sniper spotted this interesting story about a guy who repossesses aircraft, among other things. For the past three decades, Popovich has been one of a secret tribe of big game hunters who specialise in stealing jets from the jungle hideouts of corrupt landowners in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and swiping go-fast boats from Wall Street titans in Miami and East Hampton.
Breech sent in this military flight simulator that according to the video uses 9 projectors and 120 PCs networked together. All that processing power gets you 10,000 "entities" on screen at once, realistic explosion and destruction effects and "20-40 visual acuity", which is apparently as close to photo-realism as current projector technology can manage in a situation like this. There seems to be a bigger version of the video here.
PCPerspective looked at some NVIDIA CUDA-enabled applications. We chose to test MotionDSP's vReveal, Cyberlink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra, Loilo's Super Loiloscope, ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theatre 3 Platinum, and Elemental's Badaboom to evaluate how these applications utilize CUDA technology as well as what performance benefits consumers will notice during the video transcoding process.
Recent Exhibitions
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Sunday, 14-June-2009 03:04:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Final catchup of some of the recent exhibitions:
At Computex, Gigabyte announced the final worldwide winners of their long-running overclocking competition. The Aussies did well to make it to the finals, but it was the USA team of Fugger and Vapor that won in the end. More info here.
More Computex stuff: Foxconn new products and day 4 on Ninjalane, ASUS and show girls on TechPowerUp, Gigabyte's fancy BIOS and OCZ's 1TB SSD on TechReport, Gigabyte side-dockable notebook and Super Talent PCIe SSD on PCPerspective, and Gigabyte and Sparkle on PCStats.
E3 was on recently too: Fusion-io's ioXtreme, various games and Video Game Accessory Roundup on Futurelooks, Best of E3 and hottest trends on DigitalTrends and a post-mortem on GamingNexus.
Also Apple's WWDC, with coverage on HWZone. Of course the big story was the iPhone 3G S, which DigitalTrends say is disappointing.
Finally, the PC Show in Singapore, with coverage here and here on HWZone. Also a video preview of CES 2009 on HotHardware.
Facebook Usernames
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Saturday, 13-June-2009 14:08:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Facebook just opened a process (minutes ago) where you can choose a unique username for yourself as a shortcut. So if you're a Facebook user and want to get your nickname or name reserved before anyone else, now's the time to spring into action.
Saturday Morning Reviews
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Saturday, 13-June-2009 01:11:38 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Motherboard and CPU:
MSI Eclipse Plus LGA1366 board on OCClub.
ASUS M4A79 Deluxe AM3 board on Motherboards.org.
Asus Rampage II GENE LGA1366 board on TBreak.
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 board on LegitReviews.
MSI X58 Pro-E LGA1366 board on TechSpot.
Asus P6T SE LGA775 board on TrustedReviews.
MSI X58M LGA1366 board on ITReviewed.
Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz Nehalem Processor on TechWareLabs.
MSI Media Live Diva HTPC AM2+ board on TrustedReviews.
Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P AM3 board on LegitReviews.
DFI Lanparty T3eH6 DK X58 LGA1366 board on OC3D.
Storage:
Silicon Power 64GB eSATA / USB Portable SSD on Tweaktown.
ICY DOCK MB881US-1S-1 HDD enclosure on Bjorn3D.
OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD on TrustedReviews.
Video Cards:
Sapphire HD 4890 Toxic / Vapor-X on TechPowerUp.
Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD4890 1GB on BigBruin.
GeForce GTX 295 single PCB on Guru3D.
ASUS EN9400GT GeForce 9400GT HDMI on BenchmarkReviews.
GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B Radeon HD 4890 on FutureLooks.
Portable:
Sony Ericsson W995 mobile phone on TrustedReviews.
Samsung N310 - 10.2in Netbook on TrustedReviews.
Panasonic Toughbook CF-19 (MK3) on ITReviewed.
Cooling:
Zalman CNPS9900 LED Flower Cooler on Tech-Reviews.
CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus CPU cooler on OCClub.
Cooler Master Notepal D1 notebook on CCEReviews.
Coolermaster Hyper TX3 Heatsink on Frostytech.
Misc:
Hiyatek HB-8700 Vertical 7 Port USB 2.0 Hub on Tweaknews.
I-Rocks IR-4610 Four Port USB 2.0 Hub on Tweaknews.
OCZ Technology 6GB PC3-12800 Blade Triple Channel Memory Kit on BigBruin.
Age of Pirates 2 - City of Abandoned Ships PC game on GamePyre.
Fujifilm FinePix F200EXR digicam on DigitalTrends.
OCZ Alchemy Series Illuminati Keyboard on InsideHW.
Antec P183 case on HWSecrets.
Friday again! Thanks to Dave, Rob and others for these:
     
     
     
Friday Morning Reviews
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Friday, 12-June-2009 04:14:06 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Cooling:
Zalman CNPS9900 LED CPU Cooler on Pro-Clockers.
Evercool 92mm Rifling Fan on Tech-Reviews.
Scythe Mugin 2 CPU Cooler on Pro-Clockers.
OCZ Vendetta 2 CPU cooler on Bjorn3D.
DeepCool Ice Blade Pro Heatsink on Frostytech.
Noctua NH-C12P 1366 CPU cooler on PureOC.
Thermaltake ISGC-200 CPU Cooler on NeoSeeker.
Nexus 120mm LED Series White Fans on PCShopTalk.
Thermaltake ISGC-200 Heatsink on Frostytech.
Audio Visual:
Cresyn CS-HP500 Folding HI-FI Headphones on Tweaknews.
Panasonic Lumix FX150 Digital Camera on OCIA.
Panasonic DMR-EX89 DVD / HDD Recorder on TrustedReviews.
Creative EP-430 Earphones on TBreak.
Flip UltraHD Pocket Camcorder on HotHardware.
Philips Cinema 21:9 56PFL9954H 56in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
Sony Alpha DSLR-A330 digicam on DigitalTrends.
Video Cards:
GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon HD 4890 Round-Up on HotHardware.
ASUS GeForce GTX 285 1GB on Tweaktown.
ASUS Extreme AH4770 Formula on LegionHW.
Galaxy GeForce GTX 275 OC 896MB on PCPerspective.
MSI GeForce N260GTX Lightning 1792MB on Guru3D.
Software:
Nero BackItUp & Burn on ITReviewed.
The Sims 3 PC game on GamePyre.
Storage:
Patriot 128G Torqx SSD on Bjorn3D.
IN WIN Ammo 2.5 inch SATA HDD Enclosure with RFID video review on Tweaktown.
Cases:
LUXA2 LM200 Touch HTPC Enclosure on ThinkComputers.
Cooler Master Storm Scout on RBMods.
Silverstone LC10B-E HTPC Case on BenchmarkReviews.
Cooler Master Sileo 500 on Motherboards.org.
Silverstone Raven RV01 on PureOC.
Power Supply:
BFG LS-450 on HWSecrets.
BFG EX-1200 (1200W) Modular on OC3D.
Tagan Piperock II 680W on CPU3D.
Akasa Paxpower 500W on HWSecrets.
Forum Projects
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Wednesday, 10-June-2009 20:29:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Some interesting projects from the forums:
Wednesday Midday
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Wednesday, 10-June-2009 11:23:41 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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The 2009 MS Walk is on this weekend, thanks glasnt. You can sign up and donate here. Thank you again for all the generosity last year. But it's time to come together as a team, and show everyone just what OCAU can do.
OCAU member m0zzie has written faceoffIM, a standalone Facebook chat client. I wanted something I could use to see online friends, and quickly say something if I needed to - but without the distraction of facebook, and without the need to have a web browser open. Discussion here.
There's interesting stuff going on at the moon tonight/tomorrow. If you live in Asia and Australia you have a rare opportunity for an observing adventure tomorrow. On June 10th at 18:30 UT the Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya (originally called Selene) will end its two years of science with a final impact experiment. The location of the impact is very near the southeast limb close to 80E, 63S. This area will be in shadow as the Moon has just passed full, but easy to find just beyond the terminator south of Janssen. Visual observations and video monitoring may be rewarded with a bright flash or (possibly) a cloud of ejecta that rises into sunlight as the large spacecraft rams into the surface at 6000 km/hr.
Tech Report checked out some of the new CPUs that have arrived recently. The result? An enormous roundup of 26 different types of processors, including five brand-new ones. We've poked, prodded, tested for performance, measured power efficiency, overclocked, and considered the value propositions for CPUs from $87 to $999.
China will be installing mandatory screening software on all PCs. The aim is to build a healthy and harmonious online environment that does not poison young people's minds, according to the directive.
iXBT compared video cards in Vista. The i3DSpeed project is dedicated to informing you about performance of a large number of graphics cards in Windows Vista. Traditionally, we offer you performance charts of popular graphics cards and inform about best price/performance deals in the market.
Microsoft have a laptop hunter game running via a radio station. Rather than an ad campaign, this is more a promotion, so instead of just being given the cash, you need to find the “laptop hunter” by following clues given on Nova’s breakfast radio program. It’s happening in Sydney and Melbourne this week, ending on Friday June 12, while Brisbane’s version runs all next week.
Apparently there's another season of Futurama in the works! Comedy Central has ordered all brand new episodes of Futurama, and the show has officially gone back into production.
In Sweden, the Pirate party has won a European parliament seat. Sweden's Pirate Party wants to deregulate copyright, abolish the patent system and reduce surveillance on the internet. It captured 7.1 per cent of Swedish votes in the Europe-wide ballot – enough to win it a seat. Discussion here.
There's finally a new iPhone, to end all the rumours. There's also a new phone from Palm, and PC World compared them. On the outside nothing looks much different with the 3G S. The real difference is what's inside. So how will Apple's iPhone 3G s compare to the Palm Pre?
Wednesday Morning Reviews #2
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Wednesday, 10-June-2009 11:00:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Input Etc:
GIGABYTE GM-M8000 High-Performance Laser Gaming Mouse on Futurelooks.
Microsoft SideWinder X8 Bluetrack Gaming Mouse on Metku.
Wacom Intuos4 Professional Pen Tablet on Techgage.
OCZ Eclipse Double Laser Gaming Mouse on ThinkComputers.
Portable:
Sub 500 Euro Notebooks Roundup on InsideHW.
Alienware M17x SLI laptop on HWSecrets.
Owl iMpc A10 mini portable on VIAArena.
HTC Touch Pro smartphone on HWZone.
Samsung N120 Netbook on TrustedReviews.
Software:
ASUS OC Station overclocking software on LegionHW.
Norton 360 v3.0 security software on ITReviewed.
Flowgram presentation software (video review) on VIAArena.
Helldorado PC game on GamingHeaven.
Game Booster on GamePyre.
The Sims 3 PC game on TrustedReviews.
Audio Visual:
Panasonic LUMIX DMC-TZ7 digicam on HWZone.
AKAI ATT023U Professional USB Turntable on Tweaktown.
Toshiba Regza 32AV635D 32in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
Panasonic Viera TX-P46Z1 46in Plasma TV on TrustedReviews.
BenQ Joybee GP1 Palm-sized DLP Projector on I4U.
Logitech G35 Gaming Headset on ITReviewed.
YUBZ Talk Bluetooth Headset on TheTechZone.
Apple iPod Shuffle (3d Gen) on TrustedReviews.
Trends PA-10 Tube Headphone Amplifier on TrustedReviews.
Bowers & Wilkins Panorama Soundbar on TrustedReviews.
Storage:
QNAP TS-119 Turbo NAS on HotHardware.
OCZ 30GB Vertex (OCZSSD2-1VTX30G) SSD on CCEReviews.
Fujitsu HandyDrive 400GB on TechReviewSource.
Wednesday Morning Reviews
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Wednesday, 10-June-2009 01:30:47 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Cooling:
Evercool Transformer 4 CPU Cooler on Pro-Clockers.
Alphacool HF 38 Niagara (i7) CPU water block on Guru3D.
Rosewill Fort120 CPU Cooler on DriverHeaven.
Power Supply:
Enermax Eco80+ 620W on JonnyGuru.
Thermaltake Litepower 450W on HWSecrets.
PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W on Tech-Reviews.
Tuniq Potency 650W on PureOC.
Cases:
Cooler Master HAF922 on PureOC.
Thermaltake V9 Black Edition on Virtual-Hideout.
NZXT Panzerbox on OCClub.
Antec P193on OCOnline.
Ikonik Ra X10 Liquid on Bjorn3D.
Thermaltake Element S Mid-Tower on Tweaknews.
Video Cards:
ASUS GTS 250 Dark Knight and Sapphire HD 4850 Vapor on PCPerspective.
MSI GeForce GTX 295 on Tweaktown.
HIS Radeon HD 4770 on OCCafe.
Albatron ATI Radeon HD 4770 on PCShopTalk.
Palit GeForce GTX 275 896MB on Tweaktown.
HIS HD 4890 Fan TURBO on Bjorn3D.
Sapphire HD4890 Toxic Vapor-X 11150-01-40R on BenchmarkReviews.
Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB on TheTechLounge.
Diamond Radeon HD 4870 X2 XOC on HotHardware.
ASUS Matrix 285 GTX on Tweaktown.
Remember to keep an eye on our Sponsor Specials Forum if you're shopping around. In there our many sponsors have special offers and deals on laptops, media players, fitness supplements, office chairs, data retrieval, web hosting, speaker kits, camera gear and a range of PC components. Check 'em out!
Windwithme @ Computex, Day Two
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Monday, 8-June-2009 04:22:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Windwithme has reported on his second day at Computex, with loads of pictures of all kinds of technological goodies:
click for the thread!
Fusion-io and Fatal1ty have teamed up to make a consumer-level PCI-E SSD called the ioXtreme 80GB. Engineered to provide wicked fast transfer rates within high-performance PCs, the ioXtreme is an 80GB PCI Express card that should make your traditional HDD seem absolutely antiquated. More info here.
Google have a new search tool similar to WolframAlpha, in that it does more than just shovel web data at you. It's called Google Squared and there's a video here giving an introduction to how it all works.
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is threatening to move Microsoft employees offshore if planned tax avoidance laws come into effect. According to 2006 reports, Microsoft transferred $16 billion in assets to secretive Dublin subsidiaries to shave billions off its US tax bill. 'Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland,' acknowledged Ballmer in 2005. 'It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.'"
iXBTLabs looked at some overclocker-friendly DDR3 on Phenom II. Here is a short explanation that will help you understand test results: physically, memory modules with typical frequencies of 1600 MHz, 1800 MHz, or even 2000 MHz can be based on the same chips. Of course, module manufacturers have an opportunity to sort and select chips that can operate at higher frequencies with reduced timings or, vice versa, chips that allow to raise memory frequency with alleviated timings.
Tetris turned 25 on the weekend. The game was created by Alexey Pajitnov, a computer engineer who was working for the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
A Swiss court has seemingly decided that the war on piracy is more important than privacy. However, despite these worries the court decided that privacy concerns are trumped by the needs of the anti-piracy company, noting that a legal basis is not required for them to operate, since they operate exclusively in the private sphere.
Breech noticed this open-source wireless keyboard sniffer. According to the project page, Keykeriki is intended to enable "every person to verify the security level of their own keyboard transmissions, and/or demonstrate the sniffing attacks (for educational purpose only)". Yes, "educational purposes."
Australian Police are looking into a phone banking scam. It is linked to a large email scam, or phishing, campaign that imitates official messages from the Commonwealth Bank. I've certainly been getting hojillions of those emails lately.
Everyone seems to be playing this LG Transformers-themed tower defence game, but there seems to be some concern about the authenticity of high scores. Anyway, it's a fun addictive timewaster for Monday, discussion here.
Computex Continued
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Monday, 8-June-2009 01:59:42 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Probably the final Computex update: Asrock's Booth and Thermaltake's Frio cooler on Tweaktown, while HWZone have Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7 of their coverage posted.
Also, from E3: Wicked Rhythm Game Roundup, Left 4 Dead 2 and Bioshock 2, CrimeCraft, Rogue Warrior and Modern Warfare 2 on FutureLooks. LegitReviews have their final day's coverage too.
One popular tradition of Computex is the booth babes, and there's coverage of those on Guru3D, Techgage, Tweaktown and HWZone.
Last but not least, TechwareLabs went to the Maker Faire 2009. It is a two day event, May 30-31, that features the most fun inventions I have ever seen. From keynotes talking about young "makers" to mentos and diet coke fountains, Maker Faire will make anyone feel like they are wandering around a huge science fair.
Videocard:
ATI Radeon HD 4770 CrossFireX on Xbit Labs
HIS Radeon HD 4890 Turbo (1Gb GDDR5) on CPU3D
XFX GeForce 275 GTX 896MB DDR3 Core Edition GX 275X-AHFF on Motherboards.org
Audio:
Asus Xonar Essence STX Sound Card on Xbit Labs
Klipsch Image S4 Noise Isolating Earphones on TrustedReviews
Case:
Chieftec Dragon CH-07B-R on techPowerUp
Antec P193 on Overclockers Online
Cooler Master HAF 922 on PureOverclock
Misc:
Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II on ITReviewed
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 910W PSU on Driverheaven
Tunnel Rats (PC) on GamingHeaven
OCZ Illuminati Keyboard on Driverheaven
Mafia 2 (PC) on GamingHeaven
MSI GT627-216US Gaming Notebook on HotHardware
MSI 790FX-GD70 on Bjorn3D
Thanks to Zee and Chris for some of these! Slightly larger post this week due to none last week. Also, beware the last one, it might be considered Not Safe For Work by some. :)
     
     
     
Friday Afternoon Reviews
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Friday, 5-June-2009 14:32:46 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Motherboard and CPU:
Asus Maximus II Gene LGA775 board on Bjorn3D.
AMD Athlon II X2 250 AM3 Processor on BenchmarkReviews.
Audio Visual:
Cresyn CS-HP500 Headphones on TechPowerUp.
Teufel Concept E 100 5.1 Speakers on Tech-Reviews.
EIZO FlexScan S2242W monitor on ITReviewed.
D-Link DHA-390 Network Camera Set on TechWareLabs.
Case:
NZXT Beta Classic Series Midtower Steel Chassis on ThinkComputers.
Thermaltake LanBox Lite on Hi-TechReviews.
Ikonik Ra X10 Liquid Full Tower on Tweaktown.
InWin X-Fighter on NeoSeeker.
Cooler Master Sileo 500 on HWSecrets.
Cooler Master Storm Sniper ATX Gaming Case on Tweaknews.
Storage:
ASUS SBC-04D1S-U External Blu-ray Combo Drive on HWZone.
Scythe Bay Rafter 5.25 HDD bay on XSReviews.
HornetTek Travel Lite
External Enclosure on Modders-Inc.
Portable and Prebuilt:
Beast Computers - Breed Evo System prebuilt gaming PC on DriverHeaven.
Asus Eee PC 1008HA "Seashell" netbook on HotHardware.
Input Etc:
Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 5000 on I4U.
Gigabyte GM-M8000 Laser Gaming Mouse on GamePyre.
Software:
The Sims 3 PC game on GamingHeaven.
Cryostasis PhysX Game on Motherboards.org.
Cyberlink MediaShow Espresso GPGPU Performance on LegitReviews.
Misc:
Coolermaster V10 CPU Cooler on RBMods.
Sapphire HD 4890 Toxic and Sapphire 4890 Vapor-X video cards on OCClub.
Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus 500W on HWSecrets.
More Computex snippets:
- New Intel CPUs, Pine Trail Atom platform on Tech Report.
- Corsair's H50 watercooling, Thermaltake Level 10 chassis, cool ASUS tech demo on PC Perspective.
- X58 and P55 Gigabyte boards, Global Foundries info, Intel P55 boards, NVIDIA GPU Revolution, Upcoming Intel products, Clarkedale system with on-chip GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon Netbooks, Thermaltake's perfect 10 case, InnoDisk's nano SSDs, Lian Li's Lancool PC-K62B case and 8 SSD's in RAID0 on Tweaktown.
- Part 1, NVIDIA's Tegra and Ion on HWZone.
- Day 2 and Day 3 on Guru3D.
- Computex Coverage on Techgage.
- Gigabyte, Part 2, Part 3, Half-time Show and Part 4 on HWZone.
Some particularly interesting bits:
And from E3:
AMD have demonstrated DirectX 11 capable hardware at Computex. Coverage on TechReport and Techfragments. AMD didn't announce a specific release time frame for its first DX11 GPU. However, whispers around Computex suggest a launch could take place in the late third quarter—think late September or early October. Discussion in this thread.
Andrew noticed an update to the Trade Practises Act that targets "hidden" fees. Online retailers face another set of issues, partly because selling online involves mandatory delivery charges, which will need to be included, but many online retailers sell across Australia, with different delivery charges for location, or for the amount of products purchased. We'll be keeping an eye on how online retailers manage the changes.
SilentPCReview have a single-moving-part PC. A 120x25mm fan spinning at a well-nigh inaudible 500rpm. This time, it's not just a caseless assembly suitable only for a test bench; this Single Moving Part PC — SMPPC ;) — is housed in a handsome case that would be perfectly at home in a living room or office. Again, an SSD is used in place of a hard drive.
MaximumPC have listed what they think are the most influential personal computers. In the following pages, we take a close look at some of the most influential personal computers of the past 40 years. From pre-microprocessor machines to the venerated IBM PC, each of these systems contributed in some way to the modern personal computing era.
AirQ sent word of an issue with the .Net Framework Firefox Extension. Unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has taken steps to make the removal of this extension particularly difficult - open the Add-ons window in Firefox, and you'll notice the Uninstall button next to their extension is grayed out! Update: Apparently there's already a patch from MS, thanks Badooleoo.
PCPerspective have a scathing article about NVIDIA's latest 3D Vision using cheapy coloured glasses. NVIDIA showed a few games (Tomb Raider was one, Burnout: Paradise was another) running while supplying the press with those glasses seen above and while yes, it did look like things were coming out of the screen, it looked awful while things were coming out of the screen.
GoN report on Day Zero of E3. While the rest of us are stuck at home, experiencing E3 only through the wonders of the internets, Bennett Ring and a camera crew are stationed in LA, checking out all of the goodies first hand.
HWZone have a fairly detailed guide to building an i7-based PC, for budding DIY'ers. In the pages following, we'll show you what are the criteria involved in selecting these components and how to put them altogether - all the way till installing the operating system.
HardOCP checked out gameplay performance and image quality in the game Cryostasis. Cryostasis arrived from Russia this spring, mostly to hushed anonymity. NVIDIA seems to want it to be a PhysX showcase, but is it really up to the job? Come with us as we find out, using seven of today's best video cards.
More yummy stuff from our Geek Food forum:
Thursday Night Reviews
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Thursday, 4-June-2009 21:01:41 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Motherboard and CPU:
Asus M4A78-HTPC/RC AM2+ board on SilentPCReview.
ASUS P5Q-VM LGA775 on iXBTLabs.
ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo LGA775 board on Motherboards.org.
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz 1333MHz FSB Processor on PCStats.
Audio / Visual:
Philips 32PFL9604 32in LCD TV on TrustedReviews.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1K Digital Camera on HWSecrets.
Sony Walkman NWZ-X1000 on HWZone.
Olympus E-620 digicam on DigitalTrends.
Epson EH-TW5800 LCD Projector on TrustedReviews.
Toshiba SD-590E DVD Player on TrustedReviews.
Samsung ST50 Ultra Slim Digital Camera on TrustedReviews.
Cooling:
CoolJag Falcon II Low Profile Core i7/Core 2 CPU Cooler on ThinkComputers.
Vizo Voyager HDD cooler (video review) on ReviewStash.
GlacialTech 5610 Plus Silent CPU Cooler on VerdisReviews.
Cooler Master Hyper N520 Heatsink on OC3D.
AMA Aragon 900 CPU cooler on XSReviews.
Memory:
Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600 Triple Channel 6Gb Kit on CPU3D.
Kingston HyperX 6GB DDR3-2000 on PureOC.
OCZ Blade PC3-16000 6GB Memory Kit on HWLogic.
KingSpec 32GB 2.5" PATA Solid State Drive on OCIA.
Cases:
Cooler Master Storm Scout on HWLogic.
NZXT Rogue Small Form Factor Gaming Chassis on Tweaknews.
Portable:
Lenovo Ideapad S12 on VIAArena.
Asus UX50V 15.6in CULV Laptop on TrustedReviews.
Power Supply:
Thermaltake Toughpower XT 750W on BigBruin.
Coolmax PS-224 LCD Power Supply Tester on TechPowerUp.
SilverStone Element 850W on Bjord3D.
Seventeam ST-550P-AM on HWSecrets.
Storage:
OCZ Summit MLC SSD OCZSSD2-1SUM120G on BenchmarkReviews.
Eagle Tech ET-CS2XMESU2-BK 2.5" HDD enclosure (video review) by ReviewStash.
Misc:
Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard on EverythingUSB.
ASUS EN9600GT DI/512MD3/A Geforce 9600GT Rev.B video card on PCStats.
AMD have a couple of new dual-core CPUs: the AMD Athlon II X2 250 and the higher-end AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition. Building on 10 years of AMD Athlon™ processor innovation, the new 45nm AMD Athlon™ II X2 250 processor gives mainstream consumers exceptional performance, efficiency and value. For enthusiasts and overclockers, AMD also announces the AMD Phenom™ II X2 550 Black Edition processor, the first ever dual-core AMD Phenom II CPU.* With this latest addition to the AMD Phenom II processor family, users can now experience the power of AMD platform technology, codenamed “Dragon,” with dual-, triple- and quad-core configurations.
We've already linked quite a few reviews of these here, not to mention this one and this one in the forums, but there's more coverage on ExtremeOC, InsideHW and PC Perspective.
Meanwhile Intel have unveiled the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition at 3.33GHz, which some are calling the fastest desktop CPU ever. Also, the i7-950 at 3.06GHz.
Coverage on DriverHeaven, Guru3D, Hardware Logic, HotHardware, iXBTlabs, PC Perspective, Techgage, Tweaktown (and here) and XbitLabs.
Windwithme @ Computex, Day One
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Thursday, 4-June-2009 12:55:10 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Windwithme is at Computex in Taiwan, and has reported back about day one, with loads of pictures of all kinds of goodies:
click for the thread
Sponsor Competition
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Thursday, 4-June-2009 04:47:23 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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OCAU Sponsor Data Retriever is running a competition for OCAU members only - you could win a 1TB SATA HDD, one of five 8GB USB drives, or if you're especially keen, a Mystery Prize that is guaranteed to make everyone else jealous! Runs from now until September 30, 2009; see thread for details.
A quick roundup of Computex stories:
Wednesday Evening
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Wednesday, 3-June-2009 19:24:29 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Microsoft's BING is copping some flack over porn access. By typing in words with sexual connotations, once the safety search setting is off, Bing users can access porn films and other similarly explicit material, within the site. Other search engines, such as Google, do not play the videos within their sites, but provide links to external sites.
SemiAccurate report on some next-next-generation AMD boards. Funny you should ask, how about 24 cores and 24 DDR3 DIMMs? That is what Inventec brings to market with the HPC board pictured above. It looks like there are two fiber NICs on the top right, but the board was too high up on the wall to get a close look.
Here's a strange one: The CIA is equipping Pakistani tribesmen with secret electronic transmitters to help target and kill al-Qaida leaders in the north-western tribal belt, in a tactic that could aid Pakistan's army as it takes the battle against extremism to the Taliban heartland.
Apparently Aussies and Kiwis generated 14 billion GB of data in 2008. By EMC's reckoning, that the equivalent of: 3,506,400,000 fully-loaded Apple iPods, 259,200,000 fully-loaded Blu-ray DVDs, 86,400 trillion Twitter feeds [tweets?], 138,240 trillion online bank transactions, or 5 trillion digital photos.
TorrentFreak say anti-piracy groups are targeting Australia's kids. The group’s so-called “education and awareness” campaigns will encourage children to take the opinion that piracy has nothing but a negative impact, with an aim to “motivate a change in attitudes and behavior to reduce public demand for illegal copies of film and television programs.”
PCPerspective have info on a new SSD controller from JMicron. Lets hope the ARM controller and cache help JMicron overcome the shortcomings of their previous generation controllers. Their current 'press' numbers are 230 MB/sec reads and 150-200 MB/sec writes, with IOPS figures pushing 15k/sec.
The results of the internet filtering trial aren't due until July, but in the meantime: The Rudd Government's internet censorship policy will cost about $90,000 per blocked web address to implement and the Government has admitted it has not developed any criteria to determine whether trials of the scheme are a success.
From Jason: After years of denying a new Monkey Island was coming and lots of speculation; finally a new Monkey Island adventure game IS coming. And a faithful remake of Monkey Island 1 is in the works.
Forum Projects
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Wednesday, 3-June-2009 04:20:04 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Some interesting things from the forums:
Here's all the latest Computex day one coverage from t-break, TweakTown, OC Workbench, PC World, and Anandtech, with some sites looking at Gigabyte's new netbooks, to Intel's new Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) CPUs.
CPU:
AMD Phenom II X2 550 and AMD Athlon II X2 250 Processors on X-Bit Labs
Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and i7-950 CPUs on Hardware Zone
AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition on Legion Hardware
AMD Athlon II and Phenom II X2 Processors on HotHardware.com
Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 BE on Guru3D
AMD Phenom II X2 550 on Neoseeker
AMD Athlon II X2 250 on Neoseeker
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition on Legit Reviews
AMD Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 Processors on Legit Reviews
AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition CPU on Neoseeker
AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE and Athlon II X2 250 on Techspot
AMD Phenom II X2 550 and Athlon II X2 250 Processors on OCC
Amd Phenom 2 550 & Athlon 2 250 on Bjorn3D
AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE AM3 on Benchmark Reviews
AMD AM3 Phenom 2 and Athlon 2 CPUs on DriverHeaven
Case:
In Win Allure Computer Case on TWL
NZXT Beta Mid-Tower on Hi-Tech Reviews
Enermax Phoenix Neo Case on Motherboards.org
AZZA Solano 1000 on PureOverclock
Chieftec Dragon Case on Hardware Secrets
SilverStone GD01B-MXR Case on Hardware Secrets
Thermaltake Speedo Advance Package Case on Benchmark Reviews
Storage:
Synology Disk Station DS-209 Two-Bay NAS on Tweaknews
Hornettek Viper and Hover Enclosures on RBMods
Super Talent MasterDrive OX SATA 2.0 SSD on Phoronix
LSI MegaRAID SAS 8708EM2 Controller on XbitLabs.
Display:
Panasonic Viera TX-P50S10 50in Plasma TV on Trusted Reviews
Philips 32PFL9604 32in LCD TV on TrustedReviews
Village Tronic ViBook (Device for connecting multiple monitors) on CCE Reviews
Keyboard/Mouse/Input:
Logitech Illuminated Keyboard on DV Hardware
Mionix Alioth 320 & Alioth 400 Mouse Pads on PcShopTalk
Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000 on I4U
Logitech MOMO Force Feedback Racing Wheel on Gamepyre
PSU/UPS:
Cooler Master Silent Pro M 500W Power Supply on ThinkComputers.org
BFG EX1000 1000W PSU on JohnnyGURU.com
PC Power & Cooling Pro-Source 1500VA UPS on HardwareLogic
BFG EX-1200W PSU on Driver Heaven
Software:
Sun OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Phoronix
Space Ace Review (iPhone) on OCModShop
Dragonball Evolution - PSP on Gamepyre
Punch Out!! (Wii) on GamingHeaven
Videocard:
Sapphire 4890 Vapor-X PCIe Graphics Card on OC3D
ASUS Mars GTX 295 on Nordic Hardware
Sapphire HD 4770 on OCC
Sapphire HD4770 512meg on Bjorn3D
Notebook/Systems/SFF etc:
OCZ Neutrino DIY 10-inch Netbook on TweakTown
Shuttle Prima SX58H7 on ITReviewed
Alienware M17x (codename quicksilver) on Driver Heaven
Motherboard:
ASRock M3A790GXH/128M 790GX Motherboard on TweakTown
ASUS Maximus II Gene Motherboard on Motherboards.org
Biostar TPower X58A on InsideHW
Cooling:
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 CPU Cooler on Verdis Reviews
Xigmatek D984 Cobra on PureOverclock
Misc:
Panasonic DMP-B15 Portable Blu-ray Player on Design Technica
Proporta Gadget Bag on The Tech Zone
Samsung SC-HMX20C 1080p HD Solid State Camcorder on Tweaknews
HotHardware report on AMD shipping 6-core "Istanbul" Opterons today. Hailed as the world's first six-core server processor with Direct Connect Architecture for two-, four- and eight-socket servers, this chip has up to 34 percent more performance-per-watt over the previous generation quad-core processors in the exact same platform. Over the next few weeks, systems will begin to creep out from Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems, and support from motherboard and infrastructure partners will follow suit. Tech Report have their thoughts too.
SBS is pushing for unmetered access to their online content. SBS's online technical director, Matt Costain, said the broadcaster was working with a group of internet providers to find ways to make its online content available to their customers without consuming their download allowances.
Rezin spotted an article on HostingFu about our recent relocation. Stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks on that topic.
People are reporting lots more free disk space after upgrading to Vista SP2. My assumption is that the Vista SP2 installer automatically runs compcln.exe, but we have yet to receive an official explanation from Microsoft. Once we do, though, I'll pass it along. Obviously your milage may vary depending on your system, but I think it's safe to say that most everyone will welcome more free disk space.
Microsoft's Bing search engine is now online. Seems fast enough, but what does it really bring that Google hasn't already? Discussion here. Can't really see myself saying "I must Bing that when I get home", either.
The Bonzle Digital Atlas of Australia has a new mobile version. The mobile phone version isn't just a simplified stylesheet and layout applied to the existing website, its a custom build for mobile devices. We've kept the interface as simple as possible, the pages are incredibly light to milk that mobile bandwidth for all its worth (no unnecessary white space or even carriage returns) and the maps are all generated from the source data in real time and at the correct size for the particular users mobile device. The mobile phone doesn't need to support java, javascript or cookies. If the phone can handle basic HTML it'll work.
XbitLabs checked out 3-way SLI and CrossFire. Contemporary multi-GPU technologies allow combining more than two graphics processors into a single graphics configuration. Many gamers are curious about the performance of systems like that that is why we are going to talk about these unique, rare and pretty expensive solutions in our today’s article.
Videocard:
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 275 and GTS 250 on iXBIT Labs
Sapphire Radeon HD4770 512MB Graphics Card on Bigbruin
Gigabyte GTS 250 on Bjorn3D
Sparkle GTS250 Graphics Card on Virtual-Hideout
Gigabyte GV-N96TSL-1GI GeForce 9600GT SilentCell on Motherboards.org
XFX GTS 250 Video Card on OCIA.net
ASUS Extreme NGTX275 on Legion Hardware
Mouse/Keyboard:
Gigabyte GP-MP8000 Mouse Pad on Bjorn3D
Gigabyte Ghost - GM-M8000 Mouse on High Tech Reviews
OCZ Behemoth Gaming Mouse on OC3D
i-Rocks Cherry MX Mechanical Keyboard on RBMods
Storage:
Vizo Ares II Storage Enclosure on Reviewstash.com
Adaptec RAID ASR-5805 SAS RAID Controller on Xbit Labs
LSI 3ware 9690SA-8I SAS RAID Controller on Xbit Labs
500GB Hard Disk Drives in RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 10 Arrays on Xbit Labs
CPU:
13 Intel Core i7 LGA 1366 CPU Coolers on Legit Reviews
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition on Techgage.com
AMD Phenom 9950 X4 Quad-Core Processor on TechwareLabs
Misc:
Plextor PX-610U USB DVD Burner on HardwareLogic
Eye-Fi Explore Video 4GB Camera on TechReviewSource.com
Titan TTC-NK85TZ Fenrir CPU cooler on Guru3D
iZ3D 22" LCD on Reviewstash.com
Battlestations Pacific (PC) on Gamingheaven
Kobalt Apache ICE X58 System on DriverHeaven
Case:
SilverStone Sugo SST-SG05B Mini ITX Case on Pc Perspective
Thermaltake Luxa² LM300 Touch Pro on techPowerUp
Audio:
Teufel Columa 900 Home Cinema Speakers on TrustedReviews
Philips GoGear Opus 8GB on TrustedReviews
Sony Ericsson Walkman W995 on Hardware Zone
Motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P Motherboard on Xbit Labs
EVGA X58 SLI Classified on Xbit Labs
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