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November 2010
Tuesday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 30-November-2010  16:50:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Video Cards:
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 SOC on PureOC.
ASUS GTX 580 on OCClub.
PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ 1 GB on TechPowerUp.
AMD Radeon HD 6850/6870 Graphics Cards on iXBTLabs.
SPARKLE Calibre X460G on MadShrimps.
ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU on Bjorn3D.
Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 OC edition on Guru3D.

Input Etc:
Thermaltake Challenger Pro gaming keyboard on NeoSeeker.
Roccat KONE [+] mouse on OC3D.
Gigabyte M6900 Gaming Mouse on TBreak.

Cooling:
Enermax Apollish Vegas and T.B. Silence Fan on Vortez.
Corsair AirFlow Pro Dynamic LED Display Kit memory cooler on Tweaktown.
Arctic Cooling Accelero XTREME Plus VGA Cooler on BigBruin.

Power Supply:
Choiix Power Fort 5.5 Portable Charger on APHNetworks.
NZXT HALE90 850W PSU on PC Perspective.



Projects Flashback (1 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 29-November-2010  17:30:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg

There was quite a lot of interest around the net in our recent Ottoman Racing Cockpit project from Lyshco. It's a bit quiet out there in terms of news so I thought it might be interesting to re-visit it, and look back at some other posts and projects that have brought OCAU into the limelight during the last year or so:


Ottoman Racing Cockpit
by Lyshco

Behind Panel Lighting
by Cypher

The Microwave PC
by hazard002


Balcony Modding
sent in by Simon

Motherboard Blues Window
by Dan

Playstation Controller Table
sent in by Phi



Monday Afternoon (13 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 29-November-2010  13:58:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg

NASA have powered down Discovery while they look into issues delaying the launch. However Matcat sent in some amazing photos from the current commander of the ISS. He is also known as @Astro_Wheels on twitter, where he has been tweeting pictures to his followers since he arrived at the space station.

Sniper spotted this Back to the Future HDD. The $250 that Flash Rods is asking for the device is a little steep, but the company claims four years of engineering went into making this stainless steel device a reality. When you're that dedicated to making a Delorean HDD happen, you can charge whatever you want. It's bigger than 1.21 jiggabytes, thankfully, so you can use it to doubleback-up your data. Ahem.

Microsoft are saying a recent Windows kernel flaw isn't as bad as it sounds. Hackers cannot use the exploit to remotely compromise a PC, however, as it requires local access, a fact that Microsoft stressed. "Because this is a local elevation-of-privilege issue, it requires attackers to be already able to execute code on a targeted machine," said Bryant. "On its own, this bug does not allow remote code execution, but does enable non-administrator accounts to execute code as if they were an administrator," added Wisniewski.

Internode and PC Range have teamed up to launch the FRITZ!Box ADSL2+ router which is NBN ready, thanks Sniper. Internode Managing Director Simon Hackett said Internode’s imminent launch of retail sales of FRITZ!Box was the culmination of more than a year of work to bring this product to the Australian market. "With PCRange, we're pleased to do just that because the FRITZ!Box is far and away the best broadband services router I have ever seen or used," he said.

SilentPCReview have a Silent SFF Gaming System guide. To play most PC games smoothly at the native resolutions on the large LCD monitors of today, relatively powerful systems are required. These PCs consume more energy, put out more heat, and run louder than mainstream machines. While there isn't that much we can do about the power and heat associated with high-end gear, we can certainly help the gamers build a relatively quiet system to fulfill their needs.

Wikileaks have kicked off another diplomatic crisis by revealing a quarter of a million US State Department diplomatic messages. WikiLeaks’ media partners report that the secret-spilling organization gave them 251,287 diplomatic cables from America’s 270 embassies and consulates around the world, and another 8,000 diplomatic “directives” from Washington. More here, thanks Stagea.

Here's a couple of pics from Zetetic, with a story: I came across this one about a year ago. I received an AAE satchel with the three boxes inside of it, knowing that I hadn't recently ordered anything of significant size. They came from a certain very large PC vendor, who I'm sure you can guess at. Anyway, I opened the boxes, expecting it to be a mistaken delivery of say, some sticks of RAM with too much packaging. What I ended up with was far far worse.


click pics to enlarge



Geek Food (1 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 28-November-2010  21:21:06 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's some yummy things from our Geek Food forum:


Rice and Mince
by Tomee

Pollo Planchado
by Amfibius

Chili con Carne
by bl4ck32


Lamb Chops w/ Kipflers & Beans
by kingjam

3 Cheese Risotto
by death

Scotch Fillet, Mash & Veg
by RETARD



Sunday Afternoon (9 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 28-November-2010  17:37:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg

JC sent word that Senator Kate Lundy has spoken to the Senate about the need for an R18+ games classification in Australia. I rise today to advocate for the introduction of an R18+ games classification to Australia in my capacity as Senator for the ACT. This is not a decision to be made by the Government. Rather, it is a decision that requires agreement among the Federal and State Attorneys General around the nation. More info here on Facebook.

There's a sad day in Australian aviation coming up, with the RAAF's Official F-111 Retirement events. The retirement of the Royal Australian Air Force F-111 fleet on 3 December 2010 will mark a significant milestone in the history of military aviation in Australia. We are delighted to be able to showcase and celebrate the life and service of the F-111 aircraft through Pigs' Tales, the official F-111 retirement ceremonies.

Crytek have announced a new game called Warface. Warface will use Crytek's proprietary graphics engine CryEngine 3 and will be a PC exclusive multiplayer shooter. Co-op missions will also be a key feature, though there's no mention of any singleplayer content. Interestingly, Crytek will release Warface as a free-to-play shooter and is looking to target the Korean and Asian markets specifically.

Paul sent in this 630hp V8 skateboard to be ridden by Tony Hawk at an upcoming V8 Supercars round. Tony Hawk is coming out to Sydney for the Telstra 500. Which made us wonder, what happens when you attach a V8 engine to a skateboard? There was only one way to find out.



Sunday Morning Reviews (1 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 28-November-2010  01:30:23 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Storage:
Intel X25-M 120GB Retail Solid State Drive on Tweaktown.
Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 128GB USB 3 SSD (Toshiba HG2) external SSD on PCPerspective.
Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500 GB Portable Hard Disk Drive on TechARP.
OCZ RevoDrive 50GB PCI-E Solid State Drive on ThinkComputers.
OCZ RevoDrive 50GB PCIe SSD on NeoSeeker.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Dell XPS 14 Notebook on Tweaktown.
Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z All-in-One Desktop Computer on Tweaknews.

Audio Visual:
Samsung FX2490HD 24 Inch LED TV / Monitor on Tweaknews.
Tyke Supply Dual LCD Monitor Stand on Phoronix.
Tunebug Shake Portable SurfaceSound Speaker on MegaTechNews.
StarTech ConvergeAV Triple Head DisplayPort to DVI Multi Monitor Adapter on Tweaktown.
Sunrise SW-Xcape In-ears on TechPowerUp.

Cooling:
CoolIT Omni A.L.C. CPU cooler on PureOC.
Noctua NH-C14 CPU Cooler Video Review on Vortez.

Memory:
G.Skill 2x4GB CL7 1600 MHz Trident DDR3 on Guru3D.
Mushkin PC16000 Radioactive 6GB on OC3D.
Corsair XMS3 Series PC3-16000 12GB Kit on Tweaktown.

Power Supply:
OCZ StealthXStream 2 600W on OCOnline.
Antec High Current Gamer 900W PSU on HWHeaven.

Video Cards:
HIS Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card in Crossfire w/ 960 Shaders Overclocked on Tweaktown.
ASUS ENGTX460 DirectCU on Bjorn3D.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic on Techgage.
ASUS EAH6850 DirectCU OC Edition on OCClub.
Palit GeForce GTS 450 Low Profile 1GB GDDR5 on MadShrimps.

Misc:
GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R (Rev. 2.0) LGA1366 motherboard on LegitReviews.
Thermaltake TTeSports Challenger Pro Gaming Keyboard on MadShrimps.



Misc Pics (34 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 26-November-2010  14:29:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg

It must be Ladies Night here at Misc Pics, because this week we have Tessa and Katie to thank. The second last one might be NSFW.






And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive.



Friday Afternoon (5 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 26-November-2010  13:37:16 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The Government has accepted the recommendations of a Cybercrime Committee. It agreed on the need for more public education and awareness raising of the threats along with better partnering with industry such as the forthcoming ISP Code (known as the icode) to promote monitoring of malicious botnet activity and notifying account holders with compromised systems.

The NAB have had a serious IT glitch recently. Technical issues were behind delays in the processing of some customer payments and transactions, plus delays for EFTPOS, ATM and other electronic banking facilities, NAB said. Discussion here.

Kotaku wonder why video games cost so much in Australia. At a loss with the dead silence from video game publishers on the issue, we contacted Mark, a PhD in economics, for comment on the reasons why videogames cost almost twice as much here as they do in the US, despite currency parity.

Google Street View has been launched in Germany, and people have already found some odd things. The image of the apparently naked man - which can no longer be seen on Street View - and what he was doing in the boot of a Mercedes convertible parked in the driveway of a home in Mannheim in Germany's south-west have been the subject of frenzied speculation.

Gigabyte donated 1200 motherboards for an airport art installation recently. To construct the design wall, a designer and few craftsmen had spent days just to make the 30-meter wide background with motherboards in all different sizes. The craftsmen did all cutting and shaping of the circuit boards manually just to create the collage of “MADE IN TAIWAN”. Not quite as cool as Dan's motherboard blues window somehow.

Andrew sent in a story about stupidly easy video games, which reminded me of this video, thanks Shaun. An unamused gamer has posted a video of himself playing the first mission from new game Call of Duty: Black Ops on the "hardened" skill setting. He doesn’t falter. He doesn't die. He doesn't even fire his weapon. He just walks through the mission letting the scripted action play itself out.

On the other hand, Tweaktown found Kinect a bit too difficult. Kinect Sports was the game that killed me, though. After playing it for a few hours I was just buggered and the next morning I woke up hurting in places I didn’t know you could hurt. I jokingly said to friends that I was just playing my XBOX 360 and there was this water like stuff running off my face.

EFF are happy that Microsoft are embracing modders who are tinkering with the Kinect platform. This news comes as a relief to hardware hackers and researchers who see the Kinect as an ideal, low-cost platform on which to build everything from robots that detect humans, respond to gestures and voice commands, and build 3-D maps of their surroundings, to programs that allow a users to draw and manipulate images by making gestures through the air.

GamePron have a quick story on the world's biggest LCD screen. …and that, my friends, is how Magic World Online 2 came to be played on a screen 250 metres long and 30 metres high – that’s larger than a standard football field. Due to the obvious ratio issues, the game’s display was tiled three times across the massive screen – it’s more than 820 feet long!

HotHardware have a video guide to building a PC, in case you've never done it before. We got a few requests to document the build process on video, so that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t go too in-depth, but did explain the approach we like to take to systems and talked about a few of the build decisions and tweaks we made along the way.



Thursday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 25-November-2010  16:13:40 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard and CPU:
AMD Phenom 2 X6 1075T CPU on RBMods.
ECS A890GXM-A2 AM3 board on TBreak.

Input Etc:
Arctic Cooling Arctic M571 Laser Gaming Mouse on ThinkComputers.
Arctic Cooling M571 Gaming Laser Mouse on FunkyKit.

Audio Visual:
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD Sound Card on Tweaktown.
ASRock Vision 3D Blu-ray MCE HTPC on BenchmarkReviews.
SteelSeries 7H headset on Vortez.
Veebeam HD Wireless USB PC-to-TV Video Streamer on EverythingUSB.
SteelSeries Spectrum 5XB Gaming Headset on HWHeaven.
Arctic Sound P531 USB Gaming Headset on AseLabs.
Sapphire Mini Projector 101 on XSReviews.
Corsair HS1 USB Gaming Headset on PCPerspective.
Psyko Audio Labs Psyko 5.1 PC Gaming Headset on HWSecrets.
AOC e2239Fwt Touchmate 21.5-inch Monitor on Tweaktown.
Arctic Sound P321 Gaming Headset on NeoSeeker.

Cases:
Cooler Master Centurion 5 II on PureOC.
Thermaltakr Armor A60 on TechReaction.
NZXT Phantom Full Tower on Guru3D.
Corsair Graphite 600T on TechPowerUp.
Silverstone SG07 SUGO Series Mini-ITX on FutureLooks.

Cooling:
Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strike Force notebook cooler on TechReaction.

Storage:
Seagate GoFlex Hard Drive Kit on OCModShop.
Icy Dock MB973SP-B 3 in 2 SATA Backplane Module on Tweaknews.
Corsair Force 60GB & Nova 64GB on LegionHW.

Video Cards:
PowerColor 6850 PCS+ on OCClub.
HIS Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card in Crossfire w/ 960 Shaders on Tweaktown.
ASUS GeForce GTX 580 on PureOC.



Watercooled Xbox (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 24-November-2010  20:36:40 (GMT +10) - by Agg

I've linked this project earlier in its life, but now it seems finished and looks pretty cool. Demon1300 has relocated the innards of his Xbox360 into a custom case complete with watercooling:


Click for the thread!



Wednesday Evening (1 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 24-November-2010  20:34:30 (GMT +10) - by Agg

An Apple 1 has sold for $216,000 in London. The Apple I, one of only 200 such models ever made, was sold Tuesday afternoon at Christie's auction house in central London for 133,250 pounds (about $216,492). It came with its original packaging and a signed sales letter from Steve Jobs, one of Apple Computer's co-founders and the current CEO of Apple.

Novell has been acquired by Attachmate. Which is a little bizarre given I haven't even heard of Attachmate in about 10 years and Novell at least kept in the headlines with its SUSE involvement etc. Anyhoo, maybe I just move in the wrong circles. At least I still have my NeWare 3.1x CNE certification from 1995. Nobody can take that from me. Also, a heap of their intellectual property is going to Microsoft. Discussion here.

Here's a cool Metropolis sculpture using 1,200 Hot Wheels cars. Be sure to watch the mesmerizing and incredibly noisy video of the work, featuring 1,200 Hot Wheels cars on their roller-coaster ride through the “city.”

Meanwhile you can trade in toy cars for GT5, according to GamePron. Australian retailer EB Games have announced an interesting twist on the concept of videogame trade-ins. For the first time in their history – perhaps in the world – customers can trade their toy cars towards their purchase of Gran Turismo 5.

SilentPCReview continue their build guide, this time focussing on a HTPC Home Server. Since a HTPC often becomes a central repository for media files, the concept of maximizing storage capacity on such a PC and using it as the file server for the entire home network has merit. This means the PC playes two roles, and one fewer PC is not a bad thing economically and ecologically. Check out our take on a similar idea from earlier in the week here.



Wednesday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 24-November-2010  13:44:04 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
ECS P67 & H67 Sandy Bridge Motherboard Preview on NeoSeeker.
ASUS Rampage III Gene LGA1366 board on PureOC.
ASUS P8P67 Sandy Bridge Motherboard Preview on Vortez.
AMD Athlon II X4 645, AMD Phenom II X4 970, AMD Phenom II X6 1075T on iXBTLabs.
ASRock X58 Extreme6 Motherboard on HWSecrets.

Audio Visual:
Samsung LN55C650 55" LCD HDTV on SilentPCReview.
Earjax Tonic Earbuds on iGadgetLife.
Casio Exilim EX-S7 digicam on TechReviewSource.
Sharkoon X-Tatic SX & X-Tatic SP headphones on Vortez.

Power Supply:
Sparkle SCC-850AF Gold Class 850W on Tweaktown.

Cooling:
Thermaltake JING CPU Cooler on RBMods.
Titan Fenrir EVO CPU cooler on InsideHW.
Evercool Hawk1 NB Cooling Pad (NP-511) on OCOnline.
DeepCool Ice Matrix 600 CPU / Processor Cooler on Tweaknews.
Zalman CNPS9900 MAX 135mm CPU Cooler on LegitReviews.
Lamptron FC6 Fan Controller on PCPerspective.
Cooler Master Notepal U3 Notebook Cooler on NeoSeeker.
Scythe Kaze Master Pro 5.25 Fan Controller on PureOC.

Video Cards:
Gainward GeForce GTX 460 SE 1 GB on TechPowerUp.
Gigabyte HD 6850 on TBreak.
ASUS GeForce GTX 580 Overclocked on BenchmarkReviews.
Sparkle Calibre X480 GeForce GTX 480 on ThinkComputers.

Memory:
Crucial 4GB (2GBx2) DDR3 PC3-10600 Memory on OCOnline.
OCZ Flex EX PC3-17000 12GB Triple Channel Memory Kit on OCIA.

Storage:
MUKii TransImp Docking Station on PureOC.
ioSafe SoloPRO 1TB Water & Fireproof HDD System on Tweaktown.
Samsung S2 Portable 3 - 500GB USB3.0 external 2.5" hard drive on FunkyKit.



MSI GeForce GTX 460 Cyclone 1GD5/OC (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 24-November-2010  03:00:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg

DiGiTaL MoNkEY has checked out another video card - this time it's the MSI GeForce GTX 460 Cyclone 1GD5/OC:


Click for the review!



Tuesday Midday News (4 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 23-November-2010  12:00:48 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

PC Mag round-up their best products of 2010. Inside you'll find the top desktop, laptop, and netbook PCs; and for the first time, truly useful tablets. Of course, there are smartphones, printers galore, software to keep you safe and entertained, networking tools to keep you connected, and more consumer electronics than you can imagine finding under an entire forest of Christmas trees.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available to early testers. Editing a document in Word? It’ll automatically sync to your Google Docs account each time you hit ‘Save’. Want to share a preview of your document without worrying about what file format your co-workers can open? Just send them a link to the Google Docs file.

Apple has released iOS 4.2 for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch owners. The update to Apple's mobile operating system brings more than 100 iOS 4 features to the iPad for the first time, including multitasking, app folders, unified inbox, Game Centre, and new features such as AirPlay and AirPrint. Apple iPad users running iOS 4.2 can also rent TV episodes directly from the iTunes Store.

Hardware Canucks take a look at NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 SE 1GB. When a new product is released, companies understandably want to make a pretty big fuss about it. Or at least, that’s what usually happens. Last week NVIDIA decided to very quietly launch a card called the GTX 460 SE and many didn’t find out that it was a bona-fide product until it popped up on board partners’ websites.

Meanwhile, HEXUS revisit NVIDIA's 3D Vision and see if it's now ready for prime time. In the days leading up to the launch of NVIDIA's crown jewel - the GeForce GTX 580 graphics card - I was able to revisit 3D Vision and put some of the latest titles to the test. My conclusion? 3D Vision might now be ready to finally deliver some of the wow factor it once sorely missed.

SilentPC have published a guide to help users build a silent and compact gaming system. Gaming PCs consume more energy, put out more heat, and run louder than mainstream machines. There isn't much we can do about the power and heat of high-end gear, but we can certainly help gamers build quiet system to fulfill their needs. Since they are typically louder to begin with, gaming systems have the most benefit from SPCR know-how.

Telstra and Ericsson have successfully conducted a high-quality video link-up between Sydney and Melbourne using Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Telstra's executive director for networks and access technologies Mike Wright noted that it was the first inter-capital LTE connection in Australia. The throughput speeds achieved in the test were approximately 80 megabits per second (Mbps).

3DMark 11 is set to launch November 30th. Finnish software developer Futuremark has announced that its latest graphics card benchmark 3DMark 11 will launch officially on November 30th. The test suit will focus on loading the graphics card and will demand support for DirectX 11 and be available in three versions, Basic, Advanced and Professional.

VR-Zone review Samsung's android based Galaxy Tab tablet. Apple may have their iPad tablet device, but so do other makers now. With the growing popularity of Google's Android platform, it is no surprise that manufacturers are coming up with their own tablets based on the mobile operating system. In this review, we check out the Samsung Galaxy Tab, one of the first Android tablets on the market.

Today's flash based timewaster is LARRY: Pup Run.



Tuesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 23-November-2010  07:44:07 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Motherboards:
Gigabyte P67A-UD7 Preview on Bjorn3D.
ASRock X58 Extreme6 on PureOverclock.
Gigabyte P67A-UD7 Preview on Overclock3D.
Mvix Minix 890GX Motherboard on Overclockers.

Cooling:
Nexus FLC-3000 R2 CPU Cooler on TweakTown.
Zalman VF3000A GPU Cooler on OverclockersClub.

Storage:
Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD on TechSpot.
OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD on Aph Networks.
Kingston SSDNow V+100 128GB SSD on LegitReviews.
Kingston HyperX MAX 3.0 SuperSpeed SSD on Hexus.

Graphics Cards:
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 SOC on Guru3D.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 on X-bit Labs.
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 SOC on Overclock3D.
POV GeForce GTX 460 Beast 1GB on eTeknix.

Input:
Gigabyte M6980 Laser Mouse on FunkyKit.
Mad Catz Cyborg RAT 9 on Benchmark Reviews.

Audio:
Earjax Bump Earphones on BonaFide.
Arctic Sound P531 Gaming Headset on OCIA.
Asus Xonar DG and Xense on TechReport.
Speedlink Medusa NX 2 Headset on XSReviews.
Antec Soundscience Rockus 3D 2.1 on AnandTech.

Miscellaneous:
HP TouchSmart 310 PC on TechReview.
FSP NB L90 Notebook Adapter on ProClockers.
Smooth Creations Goliath Gaming PC on TweakTown.
Imation Link Wireless USB AV Extender on ASE Labs.



Inexpensive Greener File-Server Guide (37 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 22-November-2010  03:22:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg

OCAU member "eraser" sent in a huge article which I hope you'll enjoy. He walks us through his recent project to make an inexpensive and more power-efficient home fileserver. Not only is there a build log, but he explains his decision-making along the way, provides detailed reviews of some key components and examines how close he came to achieving his goals in the end. Grab a coffee and dig in:


Click for the article!



Monday Morning (11 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 22-November-2010  02:44:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg

A US Senate panel have passed a new bill that has people concerned about internet censorship. U.S. agencies and officials would get new powers to go after foreign websites that sell counterfeit goods and pirated music, movies and books under a bill passed on Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill, which supporters hope will set the stage for action next year, targets "rogue websites" in countries such as China that are outside the reach of U.S. law.

Valve have delayed Portal 2, for the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead. "Even though Portal 2 will arrive slightly later than planned," reads the dispatch, "all life on earth won't instantaneously stop as every molecule in your body explodes at the speed of light, which is what would happen should a rip ever appear in the fabric of Valve Time."

Meanwhile Call of Duty: Black Ops has become the biggest thing ever, apparently. It's beaten everything from the biggest blockbuster movies to the best selling albums. Activision has released sales figures showing the game made more than £400 million in its first five days.

Why am I not surprised that this jetpack comes from New Zealand? They seem to have a surplus of cool backyard inventors there. The dual-propeller packs come from the mind of Glenn Martin, who's been working on the concept since 1981. It wasn't until 2005 that his ninth prototype achieved sustained flight times, resulting in the product's commercialisation today.

Windows turned 25 on the weekend. Windows 1.0 was birthed on November 20, 1985. Born as a replacement for MS-DOS, Windows was GUI-based, mouse- (and keyboard-) driven, and added multitasking as well. It wasn't until Windows 3.0, however, that Windows really started to take off. Honestly, much of that was because of the fact that the experience on the hardware at the time was pretty abysmal.

MaximumPC take the opportunity to consider what we want from Windows 8. These are wild and woolly times for Microsoft, Apple, and even Google as each company tries to give users the digital equivalent of the moon in exchange for a lifetime of loyalty. Based on the leak published earlier this summer, it’s clear that Microsoft has already given ample consideration and thought to Windows 8, or whatever the next version will be named.

Even more futuristic, a holographic pop star has been playing to sellout concerts in Japan. The reaction: "The sight of thousands of screaming fans waving glow sticks while the the holograph 'performs' on stage is straight out of a science fiction novel," says Nicholas Graham in The Huffington Post, who calls Miku a "terrible omen not only for musicians but also the continued existence of the world as we know it."

Goose1981 spotted this cool steampunk bandwidth meter. Since we've got fiber optical intertubes at home, I wanted a big brass gauge telling me how big my pipe was. And that's the idea of my TorrentMeter.



Sunday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 21-November-2010  02:37:29 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
ASUS Rampage III Extreme LGA1366 board on Bjorn3D.
Gigabyte H55N USB3 Mini-ITX LGA1156 board on Guru3D.

Video Cards:
GeForce GTX 580 3-way SLI on Guru3D.
AMD 6870 on Overclockers.com.
GIGABYTE GV-N480SO-15I Super Overclock on TechPowerUp.

Storage:
Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB Hard Disk Drive on TechARP.
OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCI-Express SSD Test on BenchmarkReviews.
SilverStone External 2.5” HDD RAID Controller on Motherboards.org.
Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Drive on TechWareLabs.
Putting SATA 3.0 to Work with Areca ARC-1880i and Crucial C300 256GB SSDs on Tweaktown.

Cases:
Aerocool Bx-500 on HWSecrets.
BitFenix Survivor on TechReport.
NZXT Phantom White on HWHeaven.
Antec DF-85 Dark Fleet on PureOC.
Cooler Master HAF 912 on Motherboards.org.
BitFenix Colossus on ComputingOnDemand.

Audio Visual:
Canon EOS 60D DSLR camera on DigitalTrends.
Choiix Boom Boom Slim Travel Speaker on ThinkComputers.
Arctic Cooling P321 Professional USB Headset on FunkyKit.
Antec Soundscience Rockus 3D 2.1 Speaker Kit on LegitReviews.
brite-View HDelight Wireless Media Player on Tweaktown.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Dell Inspiron One 2310 Desktop (All-In-One 23in) on HWHeaven.
Samsung NF310-A01 on TechReviewSource.
ASRock Vision 3D NetTop on Phoronix.
Acer Aspire 1551 11.6" Notebook on HotHardware.

Cooling:
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU cooler on PureOC.
Corsair Hydro H70 CPU Cooler Tested On Intel S775,S1156,S1366 and AMD on MadShrimps.
Corsair Hydro Series H70 CPU Cooler on ReviewStash.
Deepcool N8 CPU cooler on OCClub.
Thermalright Silver Arrow vs Noctua NH-D14 on OC3D.
DeepCool Ice Blade Pro CPU Cooler on ThinkComputers.

Input Etc:
Tt eSPORTS Challenger Pro gaming keyboard on Vortez.
Gigabyte Aivia K8100 Gaming Keyboard on Pro-Clockers.
Thermaltake TT eSPORTS Challeger Pro Gaming Keyboard on LegitReviews.
Mionix NAOS 3200 Gaming Mouse on FutureLooks.
Cyborg R.A.T. Gaming Mice lineup on Metku.

Power Supply:
Choiix Power Fort 5.5 WHR emergency charger on TechReaction.
PowerColor Extreme 850 W on HWSecrets.

Misc:
SLEEPTRACKER Elite Sleep Phase Clock on Tweaktown.



Misc Pics (38 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 19-November-2010  14:39:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to Dan, Shaun and Joanna this week!






And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive.



Friday Afternoon (4 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 19-November-2010  14:13:34 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Physics nerds are jumping up and down because antimatter has been trapped for the first time, thanks JC. ATOMS made of antimatter have been trapped for the first time, a feat that will allow us to test whether antimatter responds to the fundamental forces in the same way as regular matter. More here and here, thanks Ryan.

Also from JC: Seamus Byrne, head honcho of Gizmodo and Kotaku Australia (and stand up guy, in our books), appeared on Sunrise this morning alongside Damian Tudehope of the Australian Family Association, to talk about the censorship board's upcoming revisit of the potential need to pull videogames in line with the rest of country's film and literature classifications, by introducing an R18+ rating. On the program, they used Call of Duty: Black Ops as a key example of a game that should be deemed inappropriate to anyone under the age of 18 where Seamus and Damian offered arguments both for and against an R18+ classification for games. You can view the episode here as well.

PCPerspective checked out one of those SSD on a DIMM things, from Viking. This little guy takes its power (and space) from a standard DIMM slot and connects to the system via a standard SATA 3Gb/sec. This makes it perfect for enterprise applications (think 1U server rack-mount chassis). Come check out this innovative solution!

The deadline has passed for the Government to release the NBN report, but they haven't. The Government received the business plan last week, but says it will not be released until next month, which is after Parliament rises for the year. The Senate has ordered the Government to immediately release the document. Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham is warning the Government not to ignore the request. This nearly resulted in a gag order for Senator Conroy.

HWSecrets have an interesting one on discovering who actually made your PSU. We can also have the funny situation of two different brands providing exactly the same power supply, as many original manufacturers are providing products to more than one brand. In some situations you can also find the same power supply on the market under the real manufacturer brand.

TechSpot have a CoD: Black Ops GPU & CPU Performance report. Developed by Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops debuts a new theme around the Cold War conflict. We test 19 graphics card configurations, using AMD and Nvidia GPUs that ranged from the uber expensive models to budget-minded offerings.

Presumably setting some kind of record, someone has paid $335,000 USD for virtual property in a game I've never even heard of, "Entropia Universe". Yan Panasjuk last week completed a transaction with Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs to buy a large portion of Jacobs’ popular Entropia destination “Club Neverdie,” including seven bio-domes, a stadium, club and mall. Doesn't seem that crazy given it was making its previous owner $200k a year.

Today's timewaster is Dream Tower from biatch.



Thursday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 18-November-2010  22:49:56 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Audio Visual:
Samsung PN50C7000 50 inch Plasma TV on OCOnline.
ASUS Xonar DG Sound Card on NeoSeeker.
Mvix Ultio Pro Media Center on TechwareLabs.

Storage:
OCZ RevoDrive X2 - 100GB SSD PCI-E Card on FunkyKit.
Zalman Dual HDD Docking Station MH200 U3 on TechReaction.
Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 32GB on Techgage.
Clickfree Wireless Backup on Tweaktown.

Input Etc:
Arctic Cooling Arctic M571 Gaming Mouse on BigBruin.
GIGABYTE M6900 & M6980 Review on Vortez.
Mionix Naos 3200 Gaming Mouse on OCIA.

Portable & Prebuilt:
HP Pavilion Slimline s5660f PC on TechReviewSource.
Cryo Rapier Gaming PC on HWHeaven.
MALIBAL NINE X7200 Gaming Notebook on HotHardware.
Toshiba Portege R700 notebook on InsideHW.

Video Cards:
Asus ENGTX580 GeForce GTX 580 on TechSpot.
PNY GTX 580 XLR8 on PureOC.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 on HWSecrets.
XFX Radeon 5770 Single Slot on HWHeaven.

Misc:
NETGEAR WNCE2001 Universal WiFi Internet Adapter on Tweaktown.
Patriot G Series PC3-10666 (DDR3-1333) 8GB memory on LegionHW.
Antec High Current Gamer 900W PSU on PCPerspective.
Silverstone PS05B Precision Series case on Tweaknews.



Geek Food (1 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 17-November-2010  22:50:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's some yummy things from our Geek Food forum:


Lamb Backstrap with beans & bacon
by kingjam

Homemade bacon
by kodos78

Radical Salad, Dude
by glasnt


Greek Lamb Ball Wraps
by --B--

Chicken and Corn Soup
by Tomee

Eggplant Parmigiana
by death



Wednesday Night (7 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 17-November-2010  22:21:14 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The draft legislation to separate Telstra's wholesale and retail businesses has passed the lower house of parliament, thanks Sniper. Draft laws which will pave the way for the rollout of the NBN through the structural separation of Telstra, have passed the lower house of parliament. The changes will require Telstra to conduct network operations and wholesale functions at arm's length.

BenchmarkReviews has a Intel CPU cooler roundup. Heatsink manufacters haven't made much noise recently, holding back CPU cooler anouncements until after Intel's Sandy Bridge LGA1155 socket is launched. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests a few newcomer heatsinks against a collection of solid past performers in this Best CPU Cooler Performance: Intel Heatsinks Q3-2010 article.

Callan spotted this amazing CGI film. Alex Roman's The Third & The Seventh is a montage of enchanting slow motion shots of cameras, chairs, space shuttles, explosions, stairwells, bulbous water drops, and a trillion other things. It's all computer generated and will blow your mind. Watch! Is it really all computer-generated?

From AIVAS: I hit your site every day to check out the news, and thought I'd submit some I found that I can't recall being posted before. At least, I don't remember any games being made with Unigine. :) Just found these while downloading Unigine's benchmarks... First one is Syndicates of Arkon, a MMORPG here and the second I found which is still unavailable but looks interesting is OilRush.

Dasuperham sent in this story about a tiny cube PC, although there's not much real info. The Xi3 modular computer is a 3 and a half inch cube and weighs just 1 pound, 4 ounces. It does everything that those large computer towers do -- the ones that take up all that space under your desk at home and work. "What people have really said is, ‘I want it to be instant, I want it to be small, I want it to use as little power that can be,' and that's what we've built," says Jason Sullivan, founder and CEO of Xi3 Corporation.

SilentPCReview report on SSDs and tinnitis. This article is in response to a recent email from a sophisticated technology user who suffers from tinnitus. The writer refers specifically to electronic noise from second generation Intel SSDs triggering his tinnitus symtoms in such an upsetting way that he was compelled to seek help from Intel directly. The kind of electronic noise Richard describes is not normally audible to most people, but there is little question that it is all around us, emanating from just about every type of electronic gizmo that is part and parcel of modern living.

Here's an odd one from JC, and to me it read like an oddly serious article from cracked.com. It's about why Star Wars stormtroopers miss. These are supposedly squads of cold, calculating, efficient murder machines, professional soldiers literally bred for the purpose. Yet, the second you put an Alderaan Princess in front of them, you've got five Stormtroopers missing a stationary target roughly eight feet away, three firing their guns wildly into the sky, and one ... trying to ride his blaster rifle like a pony -- and none making the shot.

Phoronix have info about a so-called miracle patch to the Linux kernel that improves desktop interactivity under load. The patch being talked about is designed to automatically create task groups per TTY in an effort to improve the desktop interactivity under system strain. Mike Galbraith wrote the patch, which is currently in its third version in recent weeks, after Linus Torvalds inspired this idea. In its third form (patch), this patch only adds 224 lines of code to the kernel's scheduler while stripping away nine lines of code, thus only 233 lines of code are in play.

Nick sends word that Solaris 11 Express has been released. Info here and here. Oracle Solaris 11 Express provides access to advanced Oracle Solaris features that have been in development for more than five years. It allows customers to deploy the latest Oracle Solaris features today while preparing their environments to take advantage of Oracle Solaris 11.



Wednesday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 17-November-2010  20:58:41 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard and CPU:
AMD Athlon II X2 255 Processor on Vortez.
ECS P67H2-A LGA1155 P67 board on HWSecrets.

Audio Visual:
Logitech G930 7.1 Surround Wireless Gaming Headset on OCModShop.
Asus Xonar Xense Premium Gaming Audio Set W/ Headset on Tweaknews.
Samsung SCX-5935FN Network-Ready Monochrome Laser Multifunction Printer on FutureLooks.
Flip MinoHD Pocket Camcorder (2010 Edition) on FutureLooks.

Cooling:
Zalman CNPS8000A CPU Cooler on OCClub.
Deepcool Gamer Storm CPU Cooler on HWSecrets.
Prolimatech Super Mega and Armageddon CPU coolers on XSReviews.
Xigmatek Aegir SD128264 Double Layer HDT CPU Cooler on Tweaktown.
Zalman VF3000N NVIDIA GPU Cooler on Modders-Inc.

Video Cards:
PowerColor Radeon 6850 PCS+ on Guru3D.
ASUS Radeon EAH6850 DirectCU on NeoSeeker.

Cases:
SilverStone Sugo SG07 Mini-ITX on LegitReviews.
BitFenix Colossus White Case on HWHeaven.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Augen GENTOUCH78 7" Android Tablet on TestFreaks.
HP Envy 14 Beats Edition notebook on TechReviewSource.
Impactics C3LH & K.I.S.S.S. passive HTPC on TechPowerUp.

Storage:
In Win External Hard Drive Enclosure O-Ring on Pro-Clockers.
Synology NAS DS211 & DS411j on OC3D.
Adata S007 Military-Specification 16GB USB Flash Drive on FunkyKit.

Misc:
Antec High Current Gamer HCG-750 PSU on Tweaktown.
Roccat Kone + Gaming Mouse on RBMods.
GeIL EVO TWO 6GB DDR3-1800 memory on PureOC.



Forum Projects (1 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 16-November-2010  20:11:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's a few interesting things from the forums:


Youngpro has a value comparo
of Gigabyte's 6850 vs 5870

Rhad has an interesting
etched watercooled PC

Imperitos is converting
an XBOX into a LAN PC


andhey is adding some
LEDs to his G15 V2

BlueRaven has funky lighting
in his watercooled PC

slipperyskip is back
with a new mini-PC project



Tuesday Evening (7 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 16-November-2010  19:42:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The 2010 OCAU Secret Santa is now underway! The deadline for receiving your deposit will be 30th November, hopefully this gives time for people on monthly wages to join in. Don't forget that you have to pay $30 deposit and $30 on a gift so if you need to be able to afford $60 plus the cost of postage until your deposit is refunded. It is in your best interest to send your gift via registered post so that you have proof of sending. In the event that your Secret Santa does not receive their gift if you cannot prove the gift was sent they will be given your $30 deposit in lieu of their gift.

You might remember ojk007's thread about building an internet broadcast studio - he's now added a video which is quite interesting. Before anyone jumps in, yes, this is heavily inspired by both Revision3 and TWiT. The studio itself is very similar to the early TWiT studio. My budget is absolutely shoestring for what I am doing, so there is a unique blend of both brand spanking new shiny equipment, and gaffered up drawers.

On less of a shoestring is the world's new fastest supercomputer, in China, having recently topped the Top500 list. The US still dominates, with more than half of the entries in the Top 500 list, but China now boasts 42 systems in the rankings, putting it ahead of Japan, France, Germany and Britain.

GoN report on grumpy retailers threatening to stop selling games with bundled Steam. Major retailers, both physical and also online, have come on record and voiced concern that Valve's digital download service Steam is killing the PC market and they won't stand for it, threatening not to sell titles if publishers do not remove Steam integration from their games.

LegitReviews compared GTX 460 and HD 6870 in CoD: Black Ops. The hype around this first person shooter has been enormous the past few months, so we know that our readers are wanting to find out what video card brand will run Call of Duty: Black Ops the best. Today, we take the GeForce GTX 460 1GB and run it against the Radeon HD 6870!

Meanwhile HWHeaven compared GeForce GTX 580 OC vs 6870 OC CrossFire vs Radeon 5970. Each of the cards will be tested in a selection of the latest games including Call of Duty: Black Ops, F1 2010 (DX11 Patch) and Fallout: New Vegas with the latest patch

Collaborative programming site GitHub recently had an embarrasing reminder to keep production and test environments separate. Before every run of our test suite we destroy then re-create the database so that we have a known, clean starting point. This also allows us to continuously integrate topic branches with potentially different database schemas. Due to the configuration error GitHub's production database was destroyed then re-created. Not good.

There's a minor online revolt in response to a bomb threat tweet and subsequent prosecution. On January 13, a week after the post, Chambers was arrested and questioned. The case file notes that "there is no evidence at this stage that this is anything other than a foolish comment posted on Twitter as a joke for only his close friends to see", but he was charged and convicted in any case.

Today's (second) timewaster is this simple but fun Bubble Shooter from TonyR.



Tuesday Evening Reviews (3 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 16-November-2010  19:22:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
AMD Brazos Platform Benchmarked - Zacate E-350 1.6GHz APU on LegitReviews.
AMD's Brazos platform: The benchmarks on TechReport.
AMD E-350 1.6 GHz APU Brazos Platform Preview - Zacate APU Benchmarked on PCPerspective.
ASUS P67 Sandy Bridge Motherboards on PureOC.
ECS P67 and H67 Sandy Bridge Preview on PureOC.
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Processor on Vortez,
ASUS P67 Motherboards - P8P67, Maximus IV Extreme & Sabertooth 2 on LegitReviews.

Memory:
OCZ Platinum PC3-12800 6GB Triple Channel Kit on NeoSeeker.
Patriot Viper II Sector 5 PC3-12800 2x2GB DDR3 on APHNetworks.

Audio Visual:
AC Ryan Playon!HD Media Player on Techgage.
Samsung EX1/TL500 f/1.8-2.4 10.0 Megapixel Digital Camera on FutureLooks.
Zotac Zbox Blu-Ray HD-ID34 HTPC on TBreak.
AMD Zacate E-350 Processor and Brazos Platform Performance Preview on HotHardware.
Sharkoon XTACTIC SP USB Gaming Headset on FunkyKit.
Casio Exilim EX-S200 on TechReviewSource.
i-Mego Earth Series Headphones on TestFreaks.
ASUS VE228H HDMI LED Monitor on Phoronix.
Arctic Sound P311 Bluetooth Stereo Headset on Vortez.

Software:
Call of Duty: Black Ops on Techgage.
Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare on GamingNexus.
Pearl Harbor Trilogy: Red Sun Rising on GamingNexus.
Call of Duty: Black Ops on GamingHeaven.

Storage:
Going for a Dunk with the Adata S007 flash drive video on FunkyKit.
OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E Solid State Drive on OCIA.
OCZ IBIS 240GB SSD @ 700 MB/s on Guru3D.
Silicon Power SDHC Class 10 32GB Memory Card on Tweaktown.
Imation Defender F200 Biometric Flash Drive on ASELabs.
Asus details Sandy Bridge motherboard lineup on TechReport.

Video Cards:
Sparkle GeForce GTS 450 on PureOC.
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 480 SOC 1536 MB on Tweaktown.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 TOXIC on Tweaktown.
Gigabyte GeForce GTS 450 1GB on ThinkComputers.
Sapphire HD 6850 Toxic on OCClub.
AMD Radeon HD 6850 on TechReaction.
Nvidia GTS-450 on MissingRemote.
ASUS GeForce GTX 580 1.5 GB on TechPowerUp.
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Toxic Edition on HWHeaven.

Cooling:
Zalman CNPS9900 MAX CPU Cooler on BenchmarkReviews.
Arctic Cooling Accelerro XTREME Plus on OCOnline.
Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strike Force laptop cooler on APHNetworks.
Cooler Master V6 CPU / Processor Cooler on Tweaknews.

Input Etc:
Ozone Radon 5K Laser Gaming Mouse on BenchmarkReviews.
Roccat Taito King Size Gaming Mousepad on Metku.



Tuesday Midday News (10 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 16-November-2010  12:00:36 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Facebook has announced its new messaging service called "The Social Inbox." You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message.

Apple teases an iTunes announcement "that you'll never forget." Apple is notorious for stirring up excitement for even the smallest of announcements. However, they're less known for boasting it on the front page of their website, unless, perhaps, it's really something big. Today, if you visit Apple's homepage, you'll be greeted with the nice little teaser.

HardOCP take a look at GeForce GTX 580 vs. Radeon HD 5970 performance. We will see if NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 580 has what it takes to compare to AMD’s Radeon HD 5970 2GB dual-GPU video card. These five apples-to-apples tests will reveal performance differences and memory limitations on the Radeon HD 5970 2GB. The Radeon HD 5970 is less expensive, so let's where the chips fall.

AnandTech preview VIA's dual core Nano & VN1000 chipset. The dual-core Nano platform offers better graphics performance and better CPU performance than Atom. The Chrome 520 IGP, at times, can even give Intel's HD Graphics a run for the money. The two unknowns are power consumption and price.

NVIDIA officially releases its budget friendly GeForce GTX 460 SE today. The GTX 460 SE is a new variant that is designed to give a good price-performance level without compromising on memory amount or bandwidth. It retains 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface of the GTX 460 1 GB variant, but has a lower CUDA core count of 288. Clock speeds are slightly lower, too.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says smartphones will soon support bump technology and mobile payments. Schmidt came on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Monday, with a mystery phone running a new version of Android 2.3 (the as-yet-unannounced Nexus S). He bumped the phone to wake it up, and phone immediately located itself and began providing information about the hotel.

VR-Zone preview ASUS' upcoming P8P67 Deluxe motherboard. This Intel P67 Express based motherboard is designed for the next-generation Intel LGA 1155 'Sandy Bridge' Core processors, and sports an industry-leading 16+2 phase digital power design dubbed DIGI+ VRM.

Chris mentions Blizzard is having a StarCraft II free play weekend from the 19th to the 21st of November. You can find the full details and links in this thread.

Today's flash based timewaster is Sydney Shark. So what score can you achieve?



Interesting Forum Threads (1 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 15-November-2010  14:30:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's a snapshot of what's going on in some of the forums. You can also find new interesting things you might have missed via the Who's Online page, the New Posts page and the Live forum view. Also try the Today's Posts link (find it on the Quick Links menu) and the handy Who Quoted Me? feature.

You can always dream (SR-2 Classified + 6x GTX480) in Overclocking & Hardware.
Corsair 800D and other forms of overkill in Overclocking & Hardware.
A new kind of browsing - introducing RockMelt in Networking, Telephony & Internet.
Geek & Gamer Girls (music video) in Game Consoles.
PC gaming - it needs to fire up, big time in Gaming.
Video on how to remove GTX580 Heatsink in Video Cards & Monitors.
The Telstra T-Pad in Portable & Small Form Factor.
The Kindle - A Dodgy Review in Portable & Small Form Factor.
ROFL @ one of our IT interns in Business & Enterprise Computing.
Your corporate browser IE/Firefox/Chrome in Business & Enterprise Computing.
Google Preview on webpages in Networking, Telephony & Internet.
A recently milled test PCB in Electronics.
Creating a basic thermal chamber in Electronics.
Cheap and nasty BGA soldering in Electronics.
Interesting Silverstone Fan Video in Modding.
Motorola announces Milestone 2 (Aka Droid 2) for Oz in Mobile Phones.
Lee big stopper vs Hitech 3.0 (10 stop) in Photography.
Get your butt to Mars but no return ticket in Science.
F1: Who will you support when Webber retires? in Motorsport.
HMAS Queen Elizabeth? in Politics & Policies.



Monday Midday Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 15-November-2010  12:13:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Portable & Prebuilt:
Maingear Shift Gaming PC with Super Stock Options on TechSpot.
ASUS Eee PC 1015PEM netbook on InsideHW.
Asus NX90JQ notebook on InsideHW.
Targus USB2.0 Docking Station with Video on Metku.

Cooling:
Thermalright Silver Arrow CPU cooler on LegionHW.
Arctic Cooling ARCTIC NC Notebook Cooler on ASELabs.
Prolimatech Super Mega CPU cooler on Tweaknews.
DeepCool UF 120 120mm Case Fan on LegitReviews.
CoolIT Systems Vantage A.L.C. CPU Cooler on PCPerspective.

Motherboard & CPU:
ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme AM3 board on TBreak.
ECS P67H2-A Sandy bridge motherboard sneak preview on Guru3D.
ECS A890GXM-A2 Motherboard AM3 board on HWSecrets.
Asus P67 1155 Sandybridge Sneak Peak on OC3D.
ASUS P67 Motherboard Seminar on Vortez.
ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Quick Preview on HWHeaven.

Video Cards:
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card Overclocked on Tweaktown.
XFX HD 6850 Black Edition on OCClub.
HIS Radeon HD 6870 1GB Turbo on Tweaktown.

Audio Visual:
Apple iPod Touch (4th generation) on DigitalTrends.
Arctic Sound P311 Bluetooth Headset on PureOC.
Arctic Sound P311 Bluetooth Headset on OCCafe.
Arctic Sound P311 Stereo Bluetooth Headset on MegaTechNews.

Input Etc:
Rosewill RK-V1TP Wireless Touchpad Keyboard on Tweaktown.
Gigabyte Aivia K8100 gaming keyboard on Guru3D.
Mad Catz Cyborg V.5 Rumble Pad on MadShrimps.

Misc:
OCZ Blade ST 2000MHz Low Voltage DDR3 memory on BenchmarkReviews.
OCZ RevoDrive x2 240GB PCIe SSD on PCPerspective.
NZXT Tempest EVO case on OCOnline.



F1 Decider! (1 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 14-November-2010  23:18:06 (GMT +10) - by Agg

If, like many of us, you're watching the final F1 round of 2010 tonight to see if Australia's Mark Webber can squeeze back into the lead and become World Champion for the first time.. join us in this thread!


Photography Gallery (4 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 14-November-2010  18:59:23 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Some recent photos from our Photography Gallery forum:



















Sunday Morning News (2 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 14-November-2010  11:31:15 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

HotHardware take a look at how hard drive performance has increased over the past 14 years. We decided to take a look at how standard, spinning hard drive performance has evolved over the past 14 years. We rounded up a representative group of hard drives, formatted them, scanned them for bad sectors, and ran a few modern benchmarks to see how much performance has improved.

Microsoft releases service pack blocker for Windows 7 Service Pack 1. Microsoft has updated the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit to include Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. As has been the case with previous service packs, soon after SP1 hits the RTM milestone, it will first go out on Windows Update (WU), and then eventually Microsoft will push it out via Automatic Updates (AU).

Intel has cut X25-M SSD prices and Introduced a new 120GB model. It may only be the middle of November, but Christmas is coming early for anyone planning on buying an Intel SSD. The company today announced that it has dropped the prices of its mainstream X25-M drives, as well as adding a new 120GB model to the range.

Tom's Hardware have put together a fairly comprehensive list of power supply brands and manufacturers. Did you think all power supplies were manufactured by the brand selling them? We show you what makes a good PSU and reveal who actually builds PSUs. You can actually find lots of quality, instead of just scrap metal, behind some of the budget labels.

AMD's Radeon HD 6900 series has been officially postponed to mid-december. Originally poised for a November 22 launch, and plagued by reported delays, the Radeon HD 6900 series from AMD is indeed staring down at a three-week delay. According to a new release by AMD circulated to press sites, AMD is pinning the new launch date to be "in the week of" December 13, 2010.

X-bit labs take a look at graphics performance in Fallout: New Vegas. We have been long waiting for Fallout: New Vegas: the first reports about the new part of the popular sequel surfaced back in February 2010. And today we are going to find out what the graphics card owners should expect to see in the new game.

After delay and speculation about being pushed back to 2011, Gran Turismo 5 has been confirmed for a November 25th release in Australia. ..that means you’ll be experiencing over 1,000 cars, including karts and select NASCAR cars, scores of tracks, the all-new Course Maker, a dynamic weather system, a robust online community, and everything else Gran Turismo 5 has to offer in less than two weeks.

Activision claims the biggest entertainment launch again with Call of Duty: Black Ops. Call of Duty: Black Ops shattered entertainment records this week when it raked in $360 million in its first 24 hours on sale. The video game's publisher Activision said the figures made Black Ops the highest-grossing entertainment launch ever, eclipsing Hollywood's biggest blockbusters - even Avatar.



Sunday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 14-November-2010  10:04:21 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Motherboards:
Biostar A880G+ AMD on OCIA.
Zotac IONITX-P-E CULV on SilentPC.
ASUS Sabertooth X58 on Legit Reviews.
ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme on PureOverclock.
ASUS Crosshair IV Formula on HardOCP.

Displays:
ASUS 23in VG236H 3D Vision Monitor on Hexus.

Storage:
Kingston SSDNow V+ (Gen 2) 64 GB on TechArp.
Kingston SSDNow V+100 128GB on AnandTech.

Input:
Gigabyte Aivia K8100 Keyboard on Guru3D.
Thermaltake Challenger Pro on XSReviews.
Xbox 360 Transforming D-Pad Controller on IGN.

Gaming:
Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition (PC) on YouGamers.
James Bond 007: Blood Stone (360) on TweakTown.
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) on Joystiq.

Miscellaneous:
GiiNii 8" Digital Picture Frame on TestFreaks.
Jetway Mini-Top Atom Based Nettop PC on TechWare.
Juice Pack Air for Apple iPhone 4 on TestFreaks.
ASUS U33JC 13-in Bamboo Notebook on PC Perspective.
ROCCAT Taito Kingsize mTw Mousepad on RBMods.



Misc Pics (46 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 12-November-2010  12:06:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to JM, timbot and Allen this week!






And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive.



MSI GeForce GTX 460 1GB HAWK (0 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 12-November-2010  03:14:08 (GMT +10) - by Agg

DiGiTaL MoNkEY has another review for us - this time of MSI's GTX 460 1GB HAWK edition video card. It seems built for speed, with voltage monitoring plugs, load-indicating LEDs and a hefty cooler:


Click for the review!



Friday Morning (7 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 12-November-2010  03:09:46 (GMT +10) - by Agg

This weekend the Formula 1 championship will be decided, with Australia's Mark Webber still very much in the running. For those playing along at home, here's a calculator to work out what happens when drivers finish in various positions. Discussion continues here in the Motorsport forum.

AMD have given people a preview of their Brazos/Zacate platform. This is their next generation combination of CPU and GPU, expected next year in netbooks and other small, low-power things. Coverage on Anandtech, Tech Report (and here), HotHardware, LegitReviews and PC Perspective.

MadShrimps have a high end X58 mobo roundup. In this roundup of second generation X58 motherboards we put the best products from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI through the OC grinder, to find out which one can help you push your hardware to the limit. Some in-depth overclocking analysis lies ahead.

GamePron report that tetris can be theraputic. PTSD sufferers expeience recurring and intrusive thoughts of traumatic events as part of their disorder – and playing Tetris seems to offer a level of protection against the flashbacks, possibly by distracting the brain and even “short-circuiting” the way the upsetting memories are stored.

Meanwhile darth_wolf spotted an experiment to overclock brains. The current could not be felt, and had no measurable effect on other brain functions. As it was turned on, the volunteers tried to learn a puzzle which involved substituting numbers for symbols. Those given the current from right to left across the parietal lobe did significantly better when given, compared to those who were given no electrical stimulation.

Anandtech have a Radeon HD 6850 Overclocking Roundup. With an all-custom launch the door is opened to a wide variety of cards with a wide variety of performance characteristics, so we have wasted no time in collecting a few cards to see what they’re capable of – after all we’ve seen what the non-existent reference card can do, but how about the cards you can actually buy? And how about overclocking, do the latest 6850 cards continue the tradition of the *850 being strong overclockers? Today we’re going to answer all of that and more.

Plane nuts will enjoy this photo. In the end, the 717, 727, 737, 747, 757, 767, and 777 were lined up nose-to-tail on the taxiway. It is the first time Boeing has had every 7-series airplane in the same place (not counting the 787, which couldn't make the flight, of course).

Top Gear have released footage of their Stig Farm, where they are breeding the next generation of Stig. One big question does remain: will ‘touring Stig’ make it to the new series of Top Gear when it returns at the end of the year? Who knows. As James has so diligently been telling everyone, “anything can happen in Stig world”.

On a related note, the BBC are launching an international iPlayer. "Not only will that mean international fans of, for example, Doctor Who can get their fix legitimately [rather than downloading programmes illegally], but it has the potential of opening up a new revenue stream for the entire UK production industry, alongside sales to traditional broadcasters," the newspaper quoted John Smith, the chief executive of BBC Worldwide, as saying.



Thursday Evening Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 11-November-2010  18:56:33 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Chassis:
Xigmatek Pantheon Tower on TechPowerUp.
Fractal Design Define R3 on Pure Overclock.
Cooler Master Centurion 5 II on ProClockers.

Cooling:
Glacialtech Alaska CPU Cooler on LegitReviews.
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 on Overclockers Club.
Cooler Master NotePal U3 on ThinkComputers.

Storage:
Synology DiskStation DS211 NAS on TestFreaks.
MUKii TransImp USB 3.0 External HDD on TweakTown.
Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 32GB on ASE Labs.

Graphics Cards:
Gigabyte GTX 460 1GB SOC on Pure Overclock.
MSI N450GTS Cyclone 1GB OC on Benchmark Reviews.
ASUS GeForce GTX 580 SLI on Overclock3D.

Input:
Mionix Naos 3200 Mouse on RBMods.
DIATEC Filco Majestouch Keyboard on MadShrimps.

Gaming:
GoldenEye 007 (Wii) on Digital Trends.
The Force Unleashed 2 (360) on GamingHeaven.
Call of Duty: Black Ops on Digital Trends.
Fable 3 (360) on GamingHeaven.



GTX 580 Triple SLI (3 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 11-November-2010  03:11:51 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Forum-goer gmeup is showing off his new goodies, with what could well be the first triple-SLI GTX 580 setup in Australia. For benchmarks etc, check his thread:


Click for the thread!



Wednesday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-November-2010  21:40:38 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Audio Visual:
Sony Bloggie Touch (8GB) media player on TechReviewSource.
Kodak EasyShare M580 14MP Digital Camera on ThinkComputers.
ZOTAC ZBOXHD-ID34BR-U Blu-ray Mini-HTPC on Tweaktown.
Psyko Audio 5.1 Surround Sound Gaming Headset on LegitReviws.

Cases:
BitFenix Survivor Mid Tower on Tweaktown.
Corsair Graphite Series 600T on Vortez.

Video Cards:
Zotac GTX580 on OC3D.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 on Techgage.
HIS Radeon 6870 Turbo on ViperLair.
MSI GeForce GTX 480 Lightning on Tweaktown.
HIS Radeon 6850 1GB on ViperLair.

Storage:
Patriot Inferno 120GB Solid State Drive on ThinkComputers.
OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD on HWHeaven.
OCZ Technology RevoDrive X2 240GB PCIe Solid State Drive on Tweaktown.

Cooling:
Scythe Mugen 2 Rev. B CPU cooler on PureOC.
Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strike Force Laptop Cooler on OCIA.

Input Etc:
Mionix Naos 3200 Mouse on Phoronix.
Gigabyte Aivia K8100 keyboard on TBreak.
GlideTV Navigator Wireless Media Remote w/ Touchpad on TBreak.
ARTISAN KAI.g3 HIEN SOFT Large Mouse Pad on BonaFideReviews.

Misc:
Section 8: Prejudice (360) (PC) (PS3) on GamingNexus.
NZXT HALE90 850W power supply on RBMods.
Gigabyte H55N-USB3 Mini-ITX motherboard on FunkyKit.
Apple MacBook Air (11.6-inch) on DigitalTrends.



Wednesday Afternoon (6 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-November-2010  15:40:55 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Foxmulder881 brings word of a new browser called Rockmelt, which is developed by Marc Andreessen best known as co-author of Mosaic, and co-founder of Netscape. The browser, available for the first time Monday, is built on the premise that most online activity today revolves around socialising on Facebook, searching on Google, tweeting on Twitter and monitoring a handful of favourite websites.

Tasmanian and federal governments abandon National Broadband Network side-deal. The Tasmanian and federal governments have quietly killed off a secret joint venture that would have given the state government shares in NBN Co's privatisation in return for granting free access to state-owned infrastructure.

PC Perspective preview latest VIA's Nano DC processor and VN1000 chipset. Since the original VIA Nano was released, we have been expecting the dual core version to eventually hit the scene. Now after several years, we have our hands on the first samples of this new product.

AMD quietly delays the introduction of a new dual-chip flagship graphics card. At the financial analyst day AMD's graphics business unit quietly revealed a new roadmap for the short-term future. Based on the new roadmap, the company's highest-performance dual-chip Radeon HD 6990 "Antilles" will only be released in Q1 2011, which is a delay by several weeks from earlier unveiled roadmaps that were published on the Internet.

SilentPC analyse the acoustics and power characteristics of AMD's Radeon HD 6870. The new Radeons you've been waiting for are here and ready to keep you away from your loved ones during those long cold nights, they just now have a slightly different name. Our finely detailed acoustics and power focused analysis of a reference design 6870 card.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River, DiRT 3 and GRID 2 release windows have been confirmed. Codemasters CEO Rod Cousens has revealed that both Operation Flashpoint: Red River and DiRT 3 will release sometime between the start of April and the end of June next year. GRID 2, on the other hand, will launch in 2012.

Dasuperham sends word of Toshiba introducing Blade-Type SSD modules with capacities up to 256GB. Up to this point, SSD designs also followed the basic design of small form factor HDD - which does not fully leverage the capabilities of high density NAND technology. Toshiba's module-based SSDs break with this approach, giving hardware designers greater freedom and flexibility in enabling their product design.

He also mentions DICE's upcoming Battlefield 3 shooter will be primarily developed for DirectX 11, and the engine will be especially optimised for 64-bit operating systems - great news for PC gamers.

GameSpy compare Microsoft's Kinect against the PlayStation Move and Wii MotionPlus. It's a battle for the motion-control crown: Microsoft's new Kinect device for the Xbox 360 promises to make you the controller, the PlayStation Move promises a whole new level of control, and Nintendo's Wii MotionPlus promises to... improve what was already pretty good on the Wii.

Today's timewaster is from Daniel - it's the sequel to Robokill, simply named Robokill 2.



Wednesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-November-2010  10:25:41 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Chassis:
Lian Li PC-B25S Tower on PureOverclock.
Xigmatek UTGuard Tower on Tweak News.
Cooler Master Elite 430 on HardwareZone.
BitFenix Colossus Tower on XSReviews.

Cooling:
CoolIT Omni A.L.C. GPU Cooler on TechGage.
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 on Overclockers Online.
Cooler Master SF-19 Laptop Cooler on ProClockers.
GlacialTech Alaska CPU Cooler on HardwareSecrets.

Storage:
G.Skill Phoenix Pro 40GB SSD on Hexus.
LaCie 5big Storage Server NAS on AnandTech.
Seagate Constellation ES 2TB on RealWorldLabs.
QNAP TS-259 Pro+ Turbo NAS on Hexus.

Graphics Cards:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 on iXBT Labs.
Zotac GeForce GTS 450 1GB on XSReviews.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 on Motherboards.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 on Tom's Hardware.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 on HardwareZone.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 on AnandTech.

Miscellaneous:
Kodak EasyShare M580 Digital Camera on HardwareSecrets.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100 on Digital Trends.
Samsung PN58C6400 58-inch Plasma on TweakNews.



PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-November-2010  03:42:29 (GMT +10) - by Agg

DiGiTaL MoNkEY has checked out the PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 video card. With the release of AMD's Radeon HD 6870 and 6850, there has been a lot of confusion over the naming scheme and how these cards compare to the previous HD 5800-series. This article looks at where the fastest of the two, the HD 6870, fits in terms of performance. We'll also see what new features it brings to the table, and how overclocking can change its competitiveness against its 5800-series brothers.


Click for the review!



NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 (1 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-November-2010  02:07:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg

NVIDIA have unveiled their GTX 580, which they're aiming to be the fastest single-GPU card ever. Did they hit the mark? Read the reviews to find out:

GTX 580 Review on Guru3D.
GTX 580 SLI Review on Guru3D.
Zotac GTX 580 on TBreak.
GTX 580: Back in the Game on InsideHW.
GTX 580 on TechReport.
GTX 580 on NeoSeeker.
GTX 580 SLI Review on HWHeaven.
GTX 580 on LegitReviews.
GTX 580 1536MB on TechPowerUp.
GTX 580 1.5GB Review and SLI Testing on PCPerspective.
GTX 580 Performance Review on BenchmarkReviews.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 SLI on TechPowerUp.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A New Flagship Emerges on HotHardware.
GeForce GTX 580 on Bjorn3D.
NVIDIA GTX 580 on OCClub.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Tech Report on TechARP.
580 GTX on HardOCP.

Discussion continues in this thread.



Tuesday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 9-November-2010  14:33:47 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Motherboards:
ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme on Overclockers.
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R Rev 2.0 on Overclock3D.
Gigabyte X58A-UD5 on ThinkComputers.
ECS Elitegroup P55H-AK on OverclockersClub.

Storage:
OCZ RevoDrive X2 SSD on HotHardware.
ADATA Nobility NH01 USB 3.0 500Gb on MadShrimps.
OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB SSD on LegitReviews.
Hitachi Travelstar Z5K320 320GB 2.5-inch on TweakTown.
Patriot Xporter XT Rage 32GB USB on ProClockers.

Graphics Cards:
MSI Radeon HD 6870 1GB on Hardware Secrets.
ASUS GTS 450 1GB DirectCU TOP on MadShrimps.
XFX Radeon HD 6850 1GB on Hardware Secrets.
VisionTek Radeon 6870 1GB on Bjorn3D.

Audio:
ASUS Xonar Xense 7.1 Soundcard on Guru3D.
ASUS Xonar DG Audio Card on PureOverclock.
Arctic Sound P531 5.1 Heatset on NeoSeeker.
Corsair HS1 USB Gaming Headset on NeoSeeker.

Gaming:
Kinect Sports (360) on Digital Trends.
Fist of the North Star (PS3) on GamingNexus.
Kinect Joy Ride (360) on Digital Trends.
EA Sports MMA (PS3) on GamingHeaven.

Miscellaneous:
Arctic Cooling ARCTIC NB201 Bag on Aph Network.
Logitech Revue with Google TV on Digital Trends.
LAMPTRON Fan Controller Touch on MadShrimps.
ASUS U35JC-A1 13.3-inch Notebook on TweakTown.



Monday Afternoon (8 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 8-November-2010  14:02:18 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Microsoft's Kinect is well and truly in the wild now, with more coverage on DigitalTrends, GamingNexus and Techgage. Kinect of course is the "jump around the room" gaming control system, and when you point an IR camera at it, or rather at a room Kinect is observing, it's interesting to see how it tracks players. Unsurprisingly it has claimed a TV already, and it nearly went to Apple first. There's also a US $2000 bounty for open-source Kinect drivers.

Optus have been prevented from advertising its broadband the way it has been doing recently. As a result, Justice Nye Perram yesterday placed an injunction on Optus, preventing the telco from engaging in similar advertising campaigns for a period of three years. He also ordered Optus to pay all of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC's) court costs.

Logitech have a solar keyboard. With an ultra-slim 1/3-inch profile and a full slate of laptop-style chiclet keys, the Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 isn't your average rack of buttons to begin with, but the ambient light solar panels installed on the top of either side should mean you'll never need to plug it in to recharge.

Nvidia have a GTX 580 DX11 Tech Demo called "Endless City". So while you enjoy a leisurely glide through the city, the NVIDIA® GeForce® powering your flight will be churning through over 600 million polygons per second. Better yet, there will still be enough power to keep the lights running . . . hundreds of thousands of them, all lighting the scene dynamically.

XbitLabs ponder whether you're better off upgrading to an SSD, or 8GB of RAM. Imagine a computer with a fast processor, perhaps even a flagship CPU model, and a top-performance graphics subsystem that easily copes with any load. Suppose the owner of such a dream PC has got some money to spend and wants to keep on upgrading his configuration. What should he pay attention to in the first place?

The New York Times went inside Microsoft's Piracy War Room. The police reached the house undetected, barreled in and found rooms crammed with about 50 machines used to copy CDs and make counterfeit versions of software like Microsoft Office and Xbox video games. They arrested three men on the spot, who were later released while the authorities investigate the case. “The entire operation was very complicated and risky,” says a person close to the investigation, who demanded anonymity out of fear for his life.

We're a little late hearing about this, but Google have an AI Challenge underway, with submissions closing on the 27th November. The objective is to create a computer program that plays the game of Planet Wars as intelligently as possible. It is recommended that you use one of the starter packages as a starting point.

Here's a strange one: a bank's website offering different loans to different browsers. I tried to use their little payment calculator but the flash based widget wouldn't work properly in the Firefox Beta so I loaded up Safari to try and funny enough the rate offered was 2.7%. I checked in Chrome and Opera to see if it was maybe just something wrong with the Firefox beta and Chrome's rate was 2.3% while Opera's was 3.1%. Discussion on slashdot.

It seems the military are relying on Google Maps a little too much. A Nicaraguan military commander recently invaded Costa Rican territory and ordered troops to take down a Costa Rican flag and replace it with Nicaragua’s. Was this the work of a brash commander, going rogue on his superiors? A new policy of Nicaraguan imperialism? Neither. The incident was caused by an error in Google Maps.



Sponsor Specials (0 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 8-November-2010  13:07:20 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Remember to keep an eye on our Sponsor Specials Forum if you're shopping around. In there our various sponsors have specials and info on YoYos, gaming chairs, fitness supplements, headphones, camping tools, ADSL modems, hard drives, video cards and a heap of other goodies. Worth a look!


Monday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 8-November-2010  10:44:23 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

Storage:
Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 12TB on Big Bruin.
Synology DS211 Mainstream NAS on KitGuru.
Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex on Tom's Hardware.

Graphics Cards:
XFX Radeon HD 6850 1GB on Bit-tech.
Gigabyte GeForce GT 430 1GB on CDRinfo.
HIS Radeon 6850 1GB on ViperLair.
ASUS Radeon HD 6870 Voltage Tweak on Hexus.

Input:
ROCCAT Kone[+] Gaming Mouse on Hexus.
Steelseries 7G vs Das Model S Pro on PC Perspective.
Enermax Aurora Micro Keyboard on RealWorldLabs.

Power Supply:
Corsair Pro Series Gold AX850 850W on PC Perspective.
Antec TruePower New 650W PSU on KitGuru.

Miscellaneous:
Ozaki iMini Cute iPod Dock on DragonSteelMods.
ATEN VM0404H HDMI Matrix Switch on Virtual-Hideout.
Back to the Future (1985) Blu-ray on TweakTown.
BlackBerry Torch 9800 Mobile Phone on T-Break.
Thermalright Silver Arrow Heatsink on HardOCP.



Sunday Morning (0 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 7-November-2010  08:18:02 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

EA have announced a new free-to-play Battlefield game for the PC. Battlefield Play4Free combines the most popular maps from Battlefield 2 with the familiar classes and powerful weapons of Battlefield: Bad Company. It's developed by EA's Easy studio, who were responsible the cartoon-y F2P offering Battlefield Heroes. Trailer and closed beta sign-up can be found here.

VR-Zone are reporting a cut down version of the current NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB named the GTX 460 SE is set to be released November 15th. The GTX 460 SE is certainly an interesting, if somewhat perplexing new card, seemingly burst out of nowhere. Massive overclocking potential is not out of the question either. At the right price, the GTX 460 SE can be an excellent value for money proposition.

Google begins barring data from Facebook as rivalry heats up. Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users' email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users' information.

Gigabyte Australia recently announced the Gigabyte Electronic Sports Championships 2010 for Counter Strike: Source. The competition will consist of LAN qualifiers held in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane on November 21st as well as a 16 team online Qualifier to be held on Sunday November 28th. If you're interested in participating, details can be found here.

MSI displayed its first wave of upcoming Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 motherboards. At this point the line-up is quite simply three models - P67A-GD65, the performance segment offering, the P67A-GD55, upper mid-range, and H67MA-ED55, a micro-ATX board ready for integrated graphics. All three motherboards carry high-grade components such as solid chokes, high-C capacitors, and offer a level of overclocking headroom enhanced by OC Genie II.

AnandTech take a quick look at OCZ's RevoDrive X2 PCI-e based SSD. Identical to the original RevoDrive in every way, the x2 adds a second PCB complete with two more SF-1200 controllers. With a total of four SF-1200s on board, running in RAID-0, you should get IBIS-like performance without the HSDL interface.

Bit-tech preview Gigabyte's upcoming GeForce GTX 480 Super Overclock. In true Gigabyte fashion, it has rammed as much power hardware on the board as possible: there's 12+2-phase power (just like the GTX 470 SOC) along with five NEC Prodalisers that are basically high powered capacitors which also generate a very low ESR (power ripple) for the GPU core.

So what's inside Microsoft's Kinect, Anyway? iFixit tear apart Microsoft's latest gadget and find out. We haven’t been this excited to get our hands on new hardware since the iPad. The way that we interact with computers is (finally) evolving, and Kinect is unlike any hardware we’ve ever taken apart. In fact, the only thing we’ve ever taken apart that has anywhere close to this many sensors is Pleo, the dinosaur robot.



Saturday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Saturday, 6-November-2010  19:57:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
AMD Phenom II X6 1075T & X4 970BE CPUs on TBreak.
Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H AM3 board on NinjaLane.
ASUS Rampage III Formula LGA1366 board on TechReaction.

Storage:
Silverstone FP55 - Drive Bay Converter on TechReaction.
Patriot Xporter XT Rage 32GB Flash Drive on ThinkComputers.
MUKii TransImp TIP-D180U3 USB 3.0 Hard Drive Dock on Tweaktown.

Cooling:
Corsair Hydro H70 Water Cooler on Metku.
Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus GPU Cooler on SilentPCReview.
Swiftech H2O-320 Edge Series Liquid Cooling Kit on Tweaktown.
Xigmatek Aegir SD128264 CPU cooler on PureOC.
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU Cooler on ThinkComputers.

Audio Visual:
ASRock Core 100HT-BD HTPC on HWSecrets.
Asus Xonar Xense Premium Gaming Audio Set on OCClub.
WD TV Live Hub Media Player w/ 1TB of Internal Storage on LegitReviews.
Apple TV Wireless HD Media Streamer on HotHardware.
Western Digital Elements Play 2 TB HD Media Player on TechARP.

Portable & Prebuilt:
FOXCONN NT-330I Netbox on TechPowerUp.
Zotac's Zbox HD-ID34BR-U nettop on TechReport.
Garmin Nuvi 3790T GPS on TechReviewSource.

Video Cards:
Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 vs PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 on HWHeaven.
ATI Radeon HD 6800: Generation Next? on XbitLabs.
Gigabyte GTX 470 Super Overclock on HWHeaven.
PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 v2 on BenchmarkReviews.
PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+ 1 GB on TechPowerUp.
VisionTek Radeon HD 6870 on NeoSeeker.
PowerColor HD5770 Crossfire on OCClub.
MSI R6870 on BenchmarkReviews.
Asus HD 6870 (EAH6870) on Bjorn3D.
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SOC on Guru3D.

Cases:
Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced on Vortez.
Coolermaster 690 II Advanced on XSReviews.
In Win Android on Tweaknews.
AZZA Hurrican 2000 on PureOC.
Cooler Master HAF X on TechSpot.
BitFenix Survivor Tower on Pro-Clockers.

Memory:
OCZ DDR 1600MHz Platinum Extreme Low Voltage on Pro-Clockers.
GeIL Black Dragon Dual Channel 4GB DDR3 Kit on Vortez.

Input Etc:
Logitech Marathon Mouse M705 on Techgage.
Razer Abyssus Mirror Gaming Mouse on Tweaktown.
Gigabyte Aivia K8100 keyboard on PureOC.

Power Supply:
NZXT Hale90 750W on Pro-Clockers.
Aerocool E80-600 on Pro-Clockers.
Corsair GS800 800W on Tweaktown.
Arctic Cooling C1 Mobile portable power pack on FunkyKit.

Misc:
Air SyncHD Wireless 1080p HDMI Transmitter Kit on LegitReviews.
Homefront (360) (PC) (PS3) on GamingNexus.



Misc Pics (42 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 5-November-2010  14:38:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to octagonalman and teno45 this week!






And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive.



A Roundup of Roundups (0 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 5-November-2010  12:47:03 (GMT +10) - by Agg

There's quite a few comparisons in the news box today, so here goes:

Tweaktown compared 16 USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 Thumb Drives. This is the first year we have included USB 3.0 products in the round up and we are quite excited to see this new technology rapidly gaining acceptance in the market. The higher costs of USB 3.0 products means USB 2.0 still has some life left in it and with new quad channel designs USB 2.0 in some cases is just as fast as some early USB 3.0 drives.

LegitReviews checked out some 6870 video cards. Today we have a nice little roundup for you on a set of retail boxed AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 video cards from Diamond Multimedia, Sapphire and XFX. Also known as "Barts XT," the Radeon HD 6870 had a successful launch and the retail cards are now out in force. Diamond sent over the Radeon HD 6870 XOC, which will be the first factory overclocked retail card that we have seen.

It's 3D Platform Wars on BenchmarkReviews, comparing NVIDIA, AMD and HDTV. Developed on years of stereoscopic vision research, NVIDIA released their first retail product at the tail end of 2008, branded GeForce 3D Vision. The past two years have grown this technology into a central feature, exclusive to their GeForce graphics product line, further evolving into a triple-display capability they've dubbed 3D Vision Surround.

Back to the video cards, with GTX460 vs GTX470 on HotHardware and two GTX 460 cards on FutureLooks. Today at HotHardware, we're looking at a trio of mid-range video cards designed to give enthusiasts the best bang for their buck. These factory overclocked GeForce GTX 400-series graphics cards are from Gigabyte, MSI, and Zotac.

SilentPCReview looked at consumer SSDs. The WD SiliconEdge Blue 64GB, Kingston SSDNow V G2 64GB, OCZ Vertex 2 60GB, and Intel X25-V 40GB offer small capacities but big speed compared to most hard drives. One model ultimately rose to the top, both in real world performance and energy efficiency.

XbitLabs examined three Xigmatek cases. In our today’s article we are going to discuss three system cases from Xigmatek – the company, which case products haven’t yet been featured on our site. We will talk about Xigmatek Asgard, Midgard and Utgard cases.

InsideHW rounded up 10 gaming notebooks. What we wanted to do this time around is prepare a very ambitious test, i.e. confront desktop PCs and notebooks. As 800€ seems to be the go-to price range for a good gaming PC nowadays, the display and peripherals included, we wanted to check out which portable PCs can be bought for that kind of money, with features and performance being worthy of the attribute “gaming”.



Friday Morning (11 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 5-November-2010  09:25:23 (GMT +10) - by DiGiTaL MoNkEY

New 3D hologram technology brings researchers a step closer to real-time images. Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona and his cool gang of colleagues reported today that their new holographic tech can project nearly 360 degree images from one location to another; it’s called three-dimensional telepresence, and it aims to take care of the no-rear-view issue 3D projections leave out today.

HardOCP take an in-depth look at AMD’s new Morphological AA technology introduced with the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850. This new feature promises improve image quality, reducing aliasing, comparable to Supersampling AA but with a lesser performance hit. This new antialiasing feature is compatible with all other AMD antialiasing settings and does not require specific game support to function.

Apple is readying a fix for MacBook Air models released in October suffering display issues. Reports began surfacing over the weekend from users who were experiencing odd video issues with new MacBook Air models released in October. According to internal support documents obtained by Boy Genius Report, Apple has internally acknowledged the issue and is said to be working on a fix.

ASUS' UEFI interface set to be used on their upcoming Intel Sandybridge motherboards has been captured on video. Besides quicker boot times and various design enhancements, UEFI will replace the BIOS interface with a fancy, high-resolution, mouse-controlled UI. From the looks of it, what you'll be stepping into will resemble Asus' power-management Windows utilities.

HardwareCanucks review Prolimatech's latest air CPU cooler offering the Prolimatech Super Mega. Looks can be deceiving and instead of just giving it an all black paint job this beast weighs a heck of a lot more than the original and has a couple more small tricks up its polished copper and aluminium sleeve.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 motion sensor Kinect has hit stores in the USA. While Australian will have to wait until the 18th of November like the rest of the world, it doesn't stop us from checking out reviews at sites like Destructoid, Shacknews, Joystiq and Ars Technica before shelling out the $199 RRP they are asking.

MSI and Guru3D have just released the latest public beta of Afterburner 2.1.0, Beta 3. This new beta opens up voltage tweaking for both Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 graphics cards as well as some other bug fixes. Download can be found here.

Google Chrome users can test out the latest 8.0.552.28 version in beta form. This build comes with an array of bug fixes, the latest Flash Player, a handy bundled PDF viewer, better plug-in handling, and more sync services. A download can be found via the Chromium website here.

On a sad note, today the world's oldest person died aged 114. The world's oldest person, a nun named Eugenie Blanchard, has died aged 114 in the French West Indies. She was born on Saint-Barthelemy, a French overseas territory, on February 16, 1896.



Thursday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 4-November-2010  22:17:03 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
ASUS ROG Rampage III Formula (Intel X58 Express) LGA1366 board on Tweaktown.
ASUS TUF X58 SABERTOOTH LGA1366 board on Bjorn3D.
Asus Rampage III GENE LGA1366 board on LegionHW.

Video Cards:
NVidia GeForce GTS 450 SLI Performance on NinjaLane.
MSI GeForce GTX 480 Lightning on Guru3D.
Sparkle Geforce GTS450 OC 1024MB on TechWareLabs.

Audio Visual:
Apple TV (Second Generation) on DigitalTrends.
Earjax Lyrics Earbuds on TestFreaks.
Psyko Audio 5.1 Gaming Headset on ThinkComputers.
Arctic Sound P531 - 5.1 USB Gaming Headset on FunkyKit.

Cooling:
CoolIT Omni A.L.C. GPU Cooler on MadShrimps.
AeroCool F6XT Controller and Shark Fans on PureOC.
CoolIT Systems Omni AC-N470 A.L.C. VGA Cooler on Tweaktown.
Tuniq TX-4 Thermal Grease on OCClub.

Cases:
Corsair Graphite Series 600T Mid Tower on Tweaktown.
Antec Lanboy Air on XSReviews.
Xigmatek Utgard mid-tower on PureOC.

Storage:
Adata N005 16GB USB3.0 Flash Drive on FunkyKit.
Thermaltake BlacX 5G USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station on BigBruin.
Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 500GB (HTS725050A9A364) 2.5-inch Hard Drive on Tweaktown.
Seagate GoFlex 1.5TB USB 3.0 Portable Drive on EverythingUSB.
Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD on LegitReviews.
QNAP TS-259 Pro+ NAS on Tweaknews.
WD VelociRaptor 600GB RAID on OC3D.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Gateway ID49C11u notebook on TechReviewSource.
HP EliteBook 2540p notebook on DigitalTrends.
ASUS Eee PC 1201T on HWSecrets.
Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T-68U118 11.6-inch Notebook on Tweaktown.
Slappa Ballistix P-TAX 17-Inch Laptop Bag on OCModShop.

Software:
Nero Multimedia Suite 10 Platinum HD on BonaFideReviews.
God of War: Ghost of Sparta on OCModShop.



Forum Projects (4 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 3-November-2010  20:50:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's a few interesting things from the forums:


Simboo turned a Macbook Pro
into a digital photo frame

Icarus made a
fold-away PC desk

eastley reviewed the
Logitech G700 mouse


samus reviewed the
Juniper SRX210-PoE filter

xcentriq made a
pulsing LED case mod

Rex has a
mini gaming PC


Phatboy69 built a
dedicated watercooling case

windwithme has an
i5-760 overclocking guide

and he checked out the
Acer Aspire 5741G



Wednesday Afternoon (14 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 3-November-2010  14:09:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg

News.com.au have posted an amusing apology for getting Star Trek wrong in a recent story. YESTERDAY, a news.com.au article incorrectly stated that the Star Trek starship USS Enterprise-E, otherwise known as model NNC-1701-E, was the successor to Captain Kirk's original USS Enterprise. It has since been brought to our attention that the NNC-1701-E in fact came two models after Captain Kirk retired and was under the command of Captain Jean Luc Picard.

Here's an impressively geeky shed owned by a guy in Victoria. Well I am finally finished setting up the shack, I Have an 8 x 8 foot shed (2.4 x 2.4 mt) that I is my hacking space.

Lifehacker spotted some free iPhone city guides available this week. It’s a good week for free Australian city guides if you’re an iPhone owner. Time Out has rolled out a free entertainment guide for Sydneysiders, while Lonely Planet is offering its Melbourne roundup for free.

Google are suing the US Government. Yes, Google has sued the US Department of the Interior because its Request for Quotation regarding a messaging solution demanded the use of Microsoft software. Obviously, didn't sit well with Google, and I'm sure other companies putting out competing software aren't happy about it either (does Red Hat serve this market?). Google is seeking permanent injunctions against the Department of the Interior moving forward with this specific Request for Quotation until the DOI allows decent competition for the RfQ.

There's some preview coverage of VIA's dual-core Nano on Bit-Tech and TomsHardware, thanks stmok. VIA's Nano CPU has just received its first major update: another one has been strapped to it. The aptly named Nano Dual-Core is actually VIA's first ever multi-core part, but even though we've got a reference board to test, things are still set to change before its introduction next year as the CPU gets respun from its existing 65nm down to 40nm, thanks to TSMC. Discussion here.

Some retailers are calling for a lower overseas GST threshhold to discourage people from buying overseas with our strong dollar. With new research showing half of all Australians now shop online overseas, retailers have approached the Federal Government to wind back the GST threshold on overseas goods from $1000 to $400 or even abolish the limit altogether. Discussion here.

Lars Rasmussen, the Sydney-based co-founder of Google Maps, has left Google for Facebook. "Obviously they've already changed the world and yet there seems to be so much more to be done there. And I think that it's the right place for me to be."

Meanwhile 33 developers have left OpenOffice.org to join The Document Foundation, presumably a response to Oracle's takeover, thanks dasuperham. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way.

Voting has opened in the 2010 Australian Golden Joystick Awards. The Golden Joysticks truly are the people's gaming awards. Established almost 30 years ago, the Joysticks are also the oldest gaming awards ceremony in the world and the most prestigious - voted for by the only people who truly matter - gamers themselves. Oddly I think I've managed to avoid hearing about them before now.

Another thing I didn't hear about was the 2010 Motorclassica in Melbourne recently, but fortunately there's lots of photos on Supercars.net. Australia's premier indoor classic car show. Held October 22-24th at the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens, Melbourne. Organized by Exhibitions & Trade Fairs Pty Ltd., event director Paul Mathers and concours chairman Ian Hankey. Over 100 cars were displayed, many with their traditional victorian plates.



Ottoman Racing Cockpit (1 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 3-November-2010  02:28:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg

I was very impressed by this project from the forums - Lyshco has made a racing cockpit for gaming which doesn't take up half the livingroom or have to be dragged out of the shed etc. It's tucked away in this ottoman-style piece of furniture:


Click for the thread!



Tuesday Evening (9 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 2-November-2010  20:32:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The second prize in Scorptec's Gainward Quiz was won by flurex. Congrats flurex, and thanks Scorptec!

The ACCC have taken MSY to court over warranty concerns. The allegations relate to statutory warranty rights - the implied rights that protect all your tech purchases, for example that the good must be fit for their purpose. These are different to the manufacturers or extended warranties, and you might be surprised by the level of coverage in theory that they provide.

The iPhone daylight savings bug has hit Europe now, causing the same problems we experienced a couple of weeks ago, and are still having. Thing is, according to a ZDNet Australia report from more than three weeks ago, Apple acknowledged the bug with a promise to fix it with a software update. So why wasn't it rolled out in time to avoid this mess in Europe? Let's see if Apple fixes it before North America makes the switch on November 7th, otherwise, you've been warned.

Krispy Kreme's Australian arm has called in the administrators. Owners of the super-sweet chain have denied the downturn has been caused by increasingly health-conscious customers, instead pointing to a number of ailing outlets affected by high rents and high distribution costs. The US-based chain arrived with much fanfare in Australia seven years ago - now there are 50 outlets employing 660 staff across Australia.

Another search engine has launched, called blekko. "Let me just blekko that." Hrm, doesn't quite roll off the tongue like Google or even Bing, but it's less of a mouthful than WolframAlpha, I suppose. As you may recall, Blekko is designed to eliminate spam search results, allowing users to search just a subset of the web through its proprietary slashtag technology. The most significant upgrade to Blekko's search engine is the addition of slashtags that auto-fire for queries that fall into one seven categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels.

Also from the ACCC, a potential hit to Telstra's hip pocket. Telstra claimed the total valuation of its copper access network (CAN) and inter-exchange backhaul network currently stood at $31.9 billion, while the watchdog proposed the same assets were valued at $13.3 billion, leading to the shortfall.

PayPal had a big developer conference in San Francisco recently, and a competitor took a stab at their history of freezing accounts: a massive, 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface..



Tuesday Evening Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 2-November-2010  20:03:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Video Cards:
ASUS EAH6870 1GB Radeon HD6870 on BigBruin.
MSI Radeon HD 6850 review with GPU Voltage Tweak Overclocking on Guru3D.
VisionTek Radeon HD 6870 on BenchmarkReviews.
ASUS Radeon EAH6850 DirectCU on PureOC.

Prebuilt & Portable:
Smooth Creations "Battlefield" Phenom II X6 1090T Custom Gaming PC on Tweaktown.
Lenovo IdeaCentre B305 prebuilt PC on TechReviewSource.

Memory:
G.SKILL Ripjaws F3-12800CL7D-8GBRH 2x4GB DDR3 on APHNetworks.
Kingston H20 6GB 2000MHz DDR3 on OC3D.

Cooling:
NZXT Sentry LXE Touch Screen Fan Controller on BonaFideReviews.
Deepcool V4000 VGA Cooler on HWSecrets.
DeepCool Ice Matrix 400 CPU Cooler on Tweaknews.
CoolIT Vantage ALC - Advanced Liquid CPU Cooler on FunkyKit.
Cooler Master NotePal U3 Notebook Cooler on FutureLooks.
Arctic Cooling Accelero XTREME Plus VGA Cooler on Tweaktown.

Cases:
BitFenix Survivor on TechReaction.
Lian Li PC-8FI on RBMods.
LIAN LI PC-A77F on TechWareLabs.
AZZA Hurrican 2000 on TechPowerUp.
BitFenix Colossus E-ATX on PCPerspective.

Power Supply:
Sparkle Computer Gold Class 850W on ThinkComputers.

Storage:
OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCIe MLC Flash SSD on OCWorkbench.
StarTech InfoSAFE External Raid Enclosure: S354UFER on ComputingOnDemand.
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB on Techgage.
StarTech USB 3.0 docking station on TechReport.
OCZ RevoDrive 50GB PCI Express SSD on OCClub.

Motherboard & CPU:
ASRock X58 Extreme6 Motherboard LGA1366 board on OCWorkbench.
ASUS ROG Crosshair IV Extreme AM3 board on Bjorn3D.

Input Etc:
Mionix Naos 3200 Mouse on HWSecrets.
ARCTIC M551 Laser Gaming Mouse on Vortez.

Audio Visual:
Patriot Box Office Media Player on OCModShop.
Psyko 5.1 PC Gaming Headset on OCClub.
Plextor PX-B120U External Blu-ray Combo Reader Drive on OCOnline.
Playon!DVR HD on HWHeaven.
Sharkoon X-Tatic SP Gaming Headset on PureOC.
HDI Dune BD Prime 3.0 HD Media & Blu-ray Player on MissingRemote.
USB Portable Media Player w/Card Reader & OTB on BonaFideReviews.



Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 2-November-2010  01:34:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg

DiGiTaL MoNkEY has checked out another motherboard for us. This time it's the Micro-ATX GA-880GMA-UD2H from Gigabyte. Motherboards with integrated graphics are not normally our bread and butter, but this one looks fairly handy:


Click for the review!



Geek Food (2 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 1-November-2010  14:04:30 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's some yummy things from our Geek Food forum:


Beef & Stout Stew
by Xerubus

Takoyaki - Octopus Balls
by bl4ck32

Kartoffelpuffer potato pancake
by spludgey


Choc Chip Cookies
by wahoo84

Lentil Burgers
by AngelMoo

Simple Banana Cake
by TheWedgie & AngelMoo



Monday Morning (8 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 1-November-2010  03:40:23 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Foxmulder881 sends a reminder to de-dust your PC now the weather is heating up again. It's hard to say if dust was what killed his PSU, but it's a good reminder anyway. :) Small paintbrush and vacuum cleaner are my tools of choice.

Dasuperham noticed Microsoft moving away from Silverlight and going to the more standard HTML5. More info here. Regardless, Silverlight will now be mainly known as the development platform for Windows Phone going forward. In other words, the way to make native apps for those devices. But for just about everything else, it will be HTML5 or bust. And that’s great news for all end users. It’s one less plug-in to download. And it’s another step towards a unified web. I've never installed the Silverlight plugin and don't think I've missed anything important without it.

AMD have chatted with XbitLabs about the GPU market in Q3. Shipments of graphics adapters in Q3 2010 were below expectations and below shipments in the second quarter. What is it? A sign of new weakness in the global economy? Or just a temporary correction caused by local factors? Let us try to find it out with a vice president of the leading supplier of standalone graphics processors - Advanced Micro Devices - who kindly answered questions of X-bit labs.

The Mars Rover Spirit isn't doing too well, but despite being stuck in one spot it has found possible evidence of liquid water under the surface. None of these soluble minerals are exposed at the Martian surface, which indicates the soil interacted with water recently, and probably continuously. Because the Martian surface is constantly being sculpted by wind, these layers would have eroded away if they were laid down long ago. Discussion here.

Tech Report have been overclocking 6850 and GTX 460 video cards. What we found is tremendous headroom in of both of the major mid-range GPUs, especially when combined with custom coolers.

OC3D meanwhile compared offerings from HIS and EVGA for midrange gaming. Time for the Middleweight Championship of the world. In the red corner the HD6850 and HD6870. In the Green corner the GTX460 768MB and 1GB.

Also from dasuperham, Russia looking into a Linux-based Windows alternative to reduce their U.S. tech dependence. Russia [System operates you!] won't be the first country to work on a national operating system either: China's Red Flag Linux first appeared back in 1999, and only last week India announced its plans to build a proprietary, hyper-secure operating system.

Tweaktown checked out OCZ's SSD toolbox. If you follow the solid state drive market, you may have heard some of the reviewers talk about a tool released by OCZ called the OCZ Toolbox. OCZ released this tool for reviewers many months ago and asked us to keep it under wraps while they perfected this application. On October 20th OCZ released an updated version of the Toolbox for the public. The public release is missing a couple of the features found in the beta editions, but all of the useful tools are present. Let’s take a look at the software and see what all it does.

Overclockers.com have an article about ghetto extreme overclocking. What started as an OCF Benching Team forum goof, and then morphed into a MythBuster’s style mystery, turned into the following laugh filled, sub-zero experiment. The proper way, if there is such a thing, to take a GPU to sub-zero temps is with a purchased or custom built DICE/LN2 GPU pot. There are many fine examples of such pots readily available on the internet. The problem is that most of them can be a fairly expensive purchase for the average fellow who just dumped all his money into new hardware, or the average bencher who just killed half of his.

Finally, it looks like Thermaltake are running a video competition to show off a new case.



Monday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 1-November-2010  01:33:19 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Software:
Acronis True Image Home 2011 on Techgage.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 PC game on OCModShop.

Cases:
BitFenix Survivor mid-tower on Vortez.
Lian Li PC-8FI on DragonSteelMods.

Video Cards:
Sapphire AMD RADEON HD 6870 on Motherboards.org.
XFX AMD HD RADEON 6850 on Motherboards.org.
ASUS GeForce GT 430 on Motherboards.org.
MSI N460GTX Hawk on OCClub.
Lantic Radeon HD 6870 1GB Video Card in CrossFire Overclocked on Tweaktown.

Memory:
OCZ Flex EX 12GB DDR3-2133 on PureOC.
Mach Xtreme Armor 2133 CL9 on XSReviews.
Avexir Standard Series 12GB (3 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 C9 on ReviewStash.

Storage:
Western Digital's Caviar Green 3TB hard drive on Tech Report.
OCZ Revo 120GB PCI-E SSD on PureOC.
G.Skill Phoenix Pro 120GB SandForce SF-1222 SSD on LegitReviews.
Lacie Rikiki USB 3.0 500 GB Hard Drive on TechWareLabs.
Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB Hard Drive on OCModShop.

Input Etc:
Arctic Cooling Arctic M551 Gaming Mouse on BigBruin.
Razer Lachesis V2 5600 dpi Laser Gaming Mouse on BenchmarkReviews.
QPAD 5K Gaming Mouse with HeatoN and CT Mousepads on Tweaktown.
Cideko Air Keyboard Chatting on FunkyKit.
ROCCAT Kone + Maximum Customization Gaming Mouse on MadShrimps.

Motherboard & CPU:
ASRock 890GM Pro3 AM3 board on iXBTLabs.
AMD Phenom II X2 560 CPU on RBMods.
ASUS Rampage III Formula ROG LGA1366 board on Bjorn3D.
Gigabyte H55N-USB3 LGA 1156 Mini ITX Motherboard on PCPerspective.

Audio Visual:
Nikon D3100 DSLR on DigitalTrends.
Axiom Epic Grand Master 500 speakers on DigitalTrends.
Vizio XVT423SV 42-inch LCD on TechReviewSource.
LG HS200G Mini Portable Projector on TBreak.
USB Portable Media Player with Card Reader on iGadgetLife.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Gateway ID49C13u 14-inch Notebook on Tweaktown.
CherryPad 7-Inch Android Tablet Video Review on HotHardware.
Arctic Power C1 Mobile Solar Battery and Arctic Sound S111 Portable Speakers on MegaTechNews.
Meet Nvidia ION2 Platform: Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 Nettop on XbitLabs.

Misc:
Nissan Leaf electric car on DigitalTrends.
NZXT HALE90 750W PSU on OCIA.
Thermalright Shaman VGA Cooler on XbitLabs.




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