Overclockers Australia!
Make us your homepage. Add us to your bookmarks  
Major Sponsors:

News
Current
News Archive
SEND NEWS!

Site
Articles & Reviews
Forums
Wiki
Podcast
Pix
Search
Contact

Team OCAU
Folding Team
Seti@Home Team
Climate Prediction

Misc
OCAU Sponsors
OCAU IRC
Online Vendors
Motorcycle Club

August 2016
Wednesday Morning Reviews (2 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 31-August-2016  03:32:49 (GMT +10) - by booj

Storage:
Samsung EVO+ 256GB microSDXC Memory Card on TweakTown.
Seagate Innov8 8TB USB 3.1 Type-C Desktop HDD on NikKTech.

Cases:
Cooler Master MasterCase Pro 3 on ThinkComputers.
Cooler Master MasterCase Pro 3 on Hardware Asylum.
Cooler Master MasterCase Pro 3 on Funky Kit.
Silverstone Milo ML08 on techPowerUp.
Cooler Master MasterCase Pro 3 on Modders-Inc.
Cooler Master MasterCase 3 on TweakTown.
Lian-Li Pitstop T60 Test Bench on Funky Kit.
SilverStone RL 05 on Modders-Inc.

Input etc:
Kingston HyperX Alloy FPS Mechanical Gaming Keyboard on Techspot.
Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo on Modders-Inc.
Tesoro Gram Spectrum Gaming Keyboard on ThinkComputers.
Roccat Sova Lapboard on ocaholic.

Audio:
Kennerton Audio Laguz In-ears on techPowerUp.
ASUS ROG Strix Wireless Headset on Vortez.

Misc:
Dell's XPS 13 + 32" UltraSharp UP3216Q on Techspot.
Silverstone SX700-LPT PSU on LanOC Reviews.
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z on Guru3D.
ASUS Strix X99 Gaming Motherboard on PC Perspective.



Tuesday Afternoon (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 30-August-2016  14:50:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Some more AMD Zen CPU info from Hot Chips, with coverage from PC Perspective and TechARP. AMD has embraced IPC while still focusing on multi-threaded capabilities. The rebalance of priorities here has allowed AMD to provide good potential performance across many applications. The scalable architecture in terms of both power efficiency and multiple “complexes” per die should allow AMD to apply this core technology from low end APUs up to high end server chips (four core/eight thread to 16 core/32 thread).

OCInside reported from Gamescom 2016 in Cologne, Germany. Of course we attend gamescom as well and published a gamescom report with more than 400 pictures of current games, latest gaming hardware, VR headsets, DCMM casemods, Cosplayer and a lot of more interesting stuff on 14 pages at OCinside.de. It is available in German only, but it is worth watching the pictures with or without a translation tool to discover the latest gaming and gaming hardware trends – you should not miss that.

Tweaktown meanwhile looked at Merged Reality Technologies from Intel at IDF 2016. Last week at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF 2016) in San Fransico, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich unveiled Intel's vision for the future of virtual and augmented reality; merged reality (MR). Virtual reality is, of course, a buzz word, but Intel's dedication to the VR/AR scene can't be overlooked. Throughout IDF 2016, multiple new and cutting edge technologies were displayed; half the time I couldn't help but realize that they are all small pieces to a much bigger puzzle.

PC World checked out some MU-MIMO WiFi routers. Old routers used to have one aerial and transmit slowly (it seemed fast at the time). Then MIMO routers appeared which had Multiple In and Multiple Out antennae. This has been the basis for routers based upon the 802.11n and subsequent 802.11ac WiFi standards for some time. The problem with both of these standards is that if there is a slow device on the network, in theory, everything on the network slows down. Enter MU-MIMO which caters for Multiple Users using different devices. As such different antennae can be focused at different users which, in theory, avoids any speed drop.

Something different from PC Perspective: a cartoon explanation of multi-GPU memory management. This pilot episode is about load-balancing and memory management in multi-GPU configurations. There seems to be a lot of confusion around what was (and was not) possible with DirectX 11 and OpenGL, and even more confusion about what DirectX 12, Mantle, and Vulkan allow developers to do. It highlights three different load-balancing algorithms, and even briefly mentions what LucidLogix was attempting to accomplish almost ten years ago.

They're hackin' errbody out there, with reports from mpot about Opera Sync users compromised, Infowars accounts breached and two US state election databases compromised. Meanwhile KPMG suggest that cyber security should be expanded to more than just IT. Cyber threats today are no longer restricted to a company’s communications and IT domains, calling for more than just technical controls to avert attacks and protect the business from future risks and breaches, a new report said. According to the joint report of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and KPMG, cyber security today embraces multiple units of an organization like human resource, supply chain, administration and infrastructure. It, therefore, requires governance at the highest levels.



Monday Midday Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 29-August-2016  12:27:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Portable & Prebuilt:
The HTC 10 Smartphone on TechARP.
HUAWEI Mate 8 Smartphone Review: Enter the Kirin 950 on PC Perspective.
The Samsung Galaxy Note7 Knox Security Features Explained on TechARP.
Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Mobile Workstation Notebook on Tweaktown.

Cases:
COUGAR Panzer Max Full Tower on NikKTech.
Deepcool DUKASE WHV2 ATX Chassis on FunkyKit.

Input Etc:
SteelSeries Rival 700 Optical Mouse on APHNetworks.
SteelSeries Rival 700 mouse on Vortez.

Video Cards:
EVGA GTX 1060 SC on LanOC.
Custom GeForce GTX 1080 Round Up With ASUS, EVGA, And Gigabyte on HotHardware.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition on NeoSeeker.
Overclocking the PowerColor Red Devil RX 470 on BabelTechReviews.

Software:
Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance on Phoronix.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Performance Analysis on Tweaktown.
No Man's Sky PC Review: Gameplay And Performance Explored on HotHardware.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided PC Graphics performance (DX11) benchmark review on Guru3D.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Performance Analysis on TechPowerUp.

Cooling:
Reeven Polariz RFC-04 Fan Controller on Tweaktown.
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Maker 92 watercooler on TechPowerUp.

Storage:
ASUSTOR AS6204T 4-bay NAS on MadShrimps.
Intel SSD DC P3520 2TB on PCPerspective.

Networking:
Linksys Max-Stream AC1900+ WiFi Range Extender RE7000 on PCWorld.
Linksys AC600 MU-MIMO WiFi on PCWorld.



Misc Pics (24 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 26-August-2016  14:30:33 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to Dan and mpot this week!









Friday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 26-August-2016  02:57:36 (GMT +10) - by booj

Graphics Cards:
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 6G on TweakTown.
ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 Turbo 6GB on PC Perspective.

Storage:
Transcend JetDrive Go 300 on Legit Reviews.
Samsung EVO Plus 256GB MicroSD Memory Card on Legion Hardware.

Cooling:
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Maker 92 CPU cooler on Guru3D.
Cooler Master Masterfan Pro 120 on Funky Kit.

Cases:
Phanteks Enthoo Mini XL DS on ocaholic.
Thermaltake Core P3 on ThinkComputers.
Raijintek Nestor on Modders-Inc.

Input etc:
SteelSeries Rival 700 Gaming Mouse on Benchmark Reviews.
Cooler Master Devastator II Keyboard and Mouse Combo on OCinside.
GAMDIAS Hermes RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard on TweakTown.
Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Keyboard and Mouse Combo on Hardware Asylum.

Smartphones and Tablets:
Samsung Galaxy A9 Pro (SM-A910F) Phablet on TechARP.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on TweakTown.
HTC One X9 on Techspot.

Misc:
Gigabyte Z170X-Ultra Gaming Motherboard on Hardware Secrets.
AVM FRITZ!Powerline 1240E WLAN Set on NikKTech.
YuXiang 668-A3 Drone on Funky Kit.
Shuttle XPC Cube SZ170R8 w/ i5-6600K on TechPowerUp.
TomTom Bandit 4K Waterproof WiFi GPS Action Camera on ModSynergy.



Thursday Morning (4 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 25-August-2016  00:26:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Anandtech have posted part two of their AMD Zen microarchitecture exploration. Hot Chips is an annual conference that allows semiconductor companies to present their latest and greatest ideas or forthcoming products in an academic-style environment, and is predominantly aimed as the professional semiconductor engineer. This year has a number of talks about power management, upcoming IBM CPUs, upcoming Intel CPUs, upcoming NVIDIA SoCs and the final talk of the final day is from AMD, discussing Zen in even more depth than the previous week.

They also have a die shot of NVIDIA's Pascal GP100. Over the next two days we’ll be covering the highlights of several presentations, but I wanted to start this year’s coverage off with some nerdy pictures. I am of course referring to die shots, as NVIDIA has released the first die shot of their behemoth 610mm2 GP100 die as part of a presentation on Pascal and NVLink 1.0. Die shots have been relatively rare in the GPU industry in recent years, particularly those for the highest-end GPUs with the most features.

Engadget meanwhile report on a new NVIDIA CPU made for autonomous cars. However, Parker is significantly less beefy than NVIDIA's other deep learning initiative, the DGX-1 for Elon Musk's OpenAI, which can hit 170 teraflops of performance. This platform still sounds more than capable of running high-end digital dashboards and keeping your future autonomous car shiny side up without a problem, regardless.

Not to be left out, Samsung apparently have a neural network deep in the brain of their Galaxy S7. One thing that caught our eye was a mention that the branch predictor uses a neural network to take a good guess at the twists and turns the software will take through its code. If your CPU can predict accurately which instructions an app is going to execute next, you can continue priming the processing pipeline with instructions rather than dumping the pipeline every time you hit a jump. "The neural net gives us very good prediction rates," said Brad Burgess, who is Samsung's chief CPU architect and is based at the South Korean giant's R&D center in Austin, Texas.

Chromebooks have outsold Macs in the USA for the first quarter ever. More Google Chromebooks are sold in the US than Apple Macs, according to the latest figures from analyst firm IDC. While few think of the company, famous more for its mobile and internet software, as a major creator of PC operating systems, the slimmed-down Chrome OS has powered almost 2m laptops sold to Americans in the first quarter of 2016, IDC told the Verge. By comparison, Apple sold 1.76m Macs in the same period.

Today marks the 25th Anniversary of Linux. The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the immediate release of its 2016 report “Linux Kernel Development - How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It”. The report comes just days before the 25th anniversary of the initial release of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds on August 25, 1991, and analyzes the work done by over 13,500 developers over more than a decade, as well as more recent trends.



Wednesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 24-August-2016  09:39:24 (GMT +10) - by booj

Graphics Cards:
EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 FTW GAMING ACX 3.0 on Bjorn3D.
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 3GB on Guru3D.
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1070 G1 Gaming on TweakTown.

Storage:
Silicon Power Jewel J30 64GB USB 3.1 Flash Drive on Madshrimps.
ASUSTOR AS6208T Eight-Bay SMB NAS on TweakTown.

Cases:
Jonsbo UMX4 on ocaholic.
Thermaltake Core X5 ATX Cube on Funky Kit.
Thermaltake Core P3 on Funky Kit.

Cooling:
Arctic Accelero Hybrid III-140 AIO VGA Cooler on OC Inside.
Thermaltake Water 3.0 Riing RGB 240 Liquid Cooler on Neoseeker.
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 Liquid CPU Cooler on ThinkComputers.

Input etc:
Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo RGB Keyboard/Mouse Set on APH Networks.
Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite on ThinkComputers.
Cooler Master Masterkeys Lite L Combo on TechnologyX.

Audio:
Logitech G633 Artemis Spectrum RGB 7.1 Surround Gaming Headset on NikKTech.
Audeze SINE On-Ear Planar Magnetic Headphones on PC Perspective.

Misc:
AMD Athlon X4 880K CPU on Vortez.
668-A3 Quadcopter Drone on ModSynergy.
MSI GE72VR Apache Pro (GTX 1060) Notebook on techPowerUp.
Moto G4 and Moto G4 Plus Smartphones on Hot Hardware.



Forum Projects (1 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 22-August-2016  17:01:10 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's some more projects and reviews from the forums:


birdie reviewed the
Balco 3D Printer

headin2001 reviewed the
Asrock Z170M OC Formula

mnpctech made a
Star Trek themed PC


Duality92 is building
two PCs into one case

maldotcom2 made a
monster log-splitter

and afcca has a
PC-themed fishtank



Monday Morning (4 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 22-August-2016  11:24:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg

International proxy provider CloudFlare says Telstra and Optus are among the most expensive ISPs in the world. To demonstrate the pricing disparity, Cloudflare founder Matthew Prince said that if bandwidth in Europe and North America costs the company 10 units, in Australia and NZ, it costs 85 units. Telstra have responded, saying the claims are overstated.

Anandtech take a look at AMD's Zen architecture. In their own side event this week, AMD invited select members of the press and analysts to come and discuss the next layer of Zen details. In this piece, we’re discussing the microarchitecture announcements that were made, as well as a look to see how this compares to previous generations of AMD core designs.

DDR5 DRAM for PCs is on the way report PC World. Specifications for DDR5 memory will be released this year, and deployment of the DRAM will begin in 2020, according to a slide deck presented at the Intel Developer Forum this week. DDR5 DRAM will have many benefits: Users will be able to cram more memory into PCs, and applications will run faster. DDR5 memory will be denser than earlier DRAM, and also consume less power, which could extend battery life in laptops.

Also coming down the pipe is PC Express 4.0, according to TomsHardware. The next iteration of PCI Express will double the bandwidth per lane, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. During Intel Developers Forum, we sat down with Richard Solomon, Vice President of PCI-SIG, and found the hidden gem in the next specification; it provides at least a 4x increase in power delivery at the slot, which might eliminate the need for auxiliary power cables with some GPUs.

Microsoft have open-sourced PowerShell and made it available for Linux and Mac OS X. PowerShell is Microsoft's command-line shell and scripting language. As of today, August 18, Microsoft is making available alpha releases of PowerShell Core on Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu and CentOS) and Mac OS X on GitHub as a binary release. More platforms will be available in the future, company officials said. Microsoft also will be releasing the source code for both the Windows and Linux versions of PowerShell today.

The Witcher 3 has added support for interesting screenshots. When NVIDIA launched its Pascal cards earlier this year, a number of cool technologies were announced at the same time. One of those technologies came in the form of Ansel, a screenshot tool on steroids. As of the latest patch for The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red enabled support for Ansel, and some of the screenshots generated are truly exquisite.

NASA have released a huge research archive online. Care to learn more about 400-foot tsunamis on Mars? Now you can, after Nasa announced it is making all its publicly funded research available online for free. The space agency has set up a new public web portal called Pubspace, where the public can find Nasa-funded research articles on everything from the chances of life on one of Saturn’s moons to the effects of space station living on the hair follicles of astronauts.



Sunday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 21-August-2016  08:53:46 (GMT +10) - by aftahours

Videocard:
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GT OC on Guru3D
EVGA GTX 1080 FTW vs. the Founder’s Edition & vs. the Fury X on BabelTech Reviews
ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX Gaming on Guru3D
GeForce GTX 1080 SLI on Techspot
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6 GB on techPowerUp
Zotac GTX 1060 AMP! Edition on LanOC

Keyboard:
AZIO MGK L80 RGB Mechanical Keyboard on APH Networks
AZIO MGK L80 (Kailh Blue) Mechanical Keyboard on APH Networks

PSU:
Seasonic PRIME 750W Titanium Power Supply on PC Perspective
Gigabyte XP1200M 80Plus Platinum Modular Power Supply on Hardware Asylum
Cougar LX Series 600 W on techPowerUp

Motherboard:
Gigabyte Z170X-Ultra Gaming on Modders-Inc
MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon (with Broadwell-E) on techPowerup
GIGABYTE Z170X-Designare Motherboard on TweakTown

Portable:
Wise Pad W7 Windows 10 Phablet on TechARP
instax SHARE SP-2 Mobile Printer on Tech ARP

Storage:
Kingston HyperX Savage 960GB SATA III SSD on BigBruin
Seagate SkyHawk 10TB NVR and DVR HDD on eTeknix
Crucial MX300 525GB SATAIII SSD on FunkyKit
SanDisk SSD PLUS vs. Kingston SSDNow V300 on Hardware Secrets

Network:
Amped Wireless REC22P Plug-In AC1200 WiFi Range Extender on ThinkComputers.org
Linksys LGS318P 18-Port Smart PoE+ Gigabit Switch on NikKTech

Misc:
AMD A10-7870K APU with Near-Silent Thernal Solution on Neoseeker
Fujifilm X-T2 Mirrorless Camera Hands-On on Tech ARP
No Man's Sky (PlayStation 4) on TweakTown
G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 32GB RAM Kit on TweakTown
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 Watercooling Kit on LanOC
Cooler Master MasterPulse Over-Ear With Bass FX Headphones on eTeknix



Misc Pics (45 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 19-August-2016  14:37:03 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to Dan and Andrew this week! Also, if you're looking for a(nother) timewaster this afternoon, Leigh sent word that there are over 4000 DOS games playable in your browser over at the Internet Archive. Enjoy!









Thursday Afternoon (0 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 18-August-2016  14:45:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg

A reminder: if you're in Melbourne and have an interest in storage, there's a Synology 2017 Event on the 11th of October. Highlights of the event: - Announcing brand-new collaboration tools and multimedia integration - The future of networking and storage - Synology's next big move for disaster recovery solutions - Face-to-face discussion with Synology experts - Chance to win a Synology NAS in the prize draw!

NBN Co have released their 2016 financial results and consider themselves on track and exceeding network targets. Issues over the NBN, its technology mix, speed and quality of broadband delivery and the negative politics of the massive project were momentarily cast aside today when chief executive Bill Morrow said, “During the year we doubled our Ready for Service footprint to 2.9 million premises, and at the same time, we doubled the amount of end users connected hitting a record high of 1.1 million”.

The Intel Developer Forum is underway, with HotHardware reporting on 7th Generation Core processors, a merged reality headset, a new Xeon Phi processor and new 100Gbps network modules. More interesting is the news that Intel are partnering with ARM, whereby Intel will manufacture ARM chips for smartphones. Now, Intel is deciding to wade back in to the ARM waters as an ARM licensee. The chip giant will not design and market its own ARM-based designs, but it will offer its mammoth custom foundry business to produce ARM processors for other companies. More info on PC Perspective.

NVIDIA meanwhile have unveiled their Pascal mobile GPU for gaming notebooks. NVIDIA flew a bunch of tech press and YouTubers out to London for the announcement of its Pascal-based GeForce graphics cards making their way into gaming notebooks. During the event, NVIDIA announced that the GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 would be finding their way into various gaming notebooks in all different shapes and sizes. More coverage on TechARP, PC Perspective, TechSpot and HotHardware.

Today's timewaster is SPACEPLAN, thanks scon. It's another of those incremental clicky games like Cookie Clicker, Reactor Idle and Factory Idle - but it won't suck up your entire life, only a few hours. Hopefully. :) Discussion here.



Wednesday Midday Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 17-August-2016  11:17:42 (GMT +10) - by booj

Motherboards:
ASUS ROG STRIX X99 Gaming on Vortez.
ASRock Fatal1ty H170 Performance/Hyper on Funky Kit.

Memory:
Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200MHz DDR4 64GB on OCC.
Corsair Vengeance LED DDR4-3200 32GB RAM Kit on TweakTown.

Storage:
Crucial MX300 750GB SSD on Guru3D.
Seagate IronWolf 10TB SATA III HDD on NikKTech.
WD My Passport Wireless Pro 3TB Portable HDD on TweakTown.

Cases:
be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 on Benchmark Reviews.
Riotoro CR1080 Tiny ATX Case on Legit Reviews.
Deepcool Genome on techPowerUp.

Input etc:
AZiO MGK L80 Red, Blue and RGB Keyboards on techPowerUp.
AZIO MGK L80 (Kailh Brown) Mechanical Keyboard on APH Networks.
AZIO MGK L80 Mechanical Keyboard Lineup on Modders-Inc.
Cooler Master MasterKeys Lite L Combo on Funky Kit.

Misc:
Reolink RLC 410 1440p PoE IP Camera on TweakTown.
Thermaltake Toughpower SFX 450W PSU on LanOC Reviews.
Motorola Moto G4 Plus on Techspot.
Gainward GTX 1070 Phoenix GS on Vortez.
Corsair ML120 PRO LED Fans on ThinkComputers.



Photography Gallery (3 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 15-August-2016  21:44:30 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's a quick snapshot of what people are up to in our Photography Gallery forum.



















Monday Morning (4 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 15-August-2016  10:35:06 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The head of the ABS is standing by his department in the wake of the Census issues. "My view is that leaders stand up when there are issues," ABS chief statistician David Kalisch told the ABC. "They respond and they fix the issues, and there will be a time for the facts to come out and for accountabilities to be made." Mr Kalisch said he was aware the ABS had suffered significant harm to its reputation. There's more on the political back-story of the Census in this article. Discussion continues in this thread.

Meanwhile OCAU member Daemon has posted his early analysis of the Census failure. Initial analysis suggests that some of the infrastructure design for the Census data was quite positively woeful. There were only 11 servers to handle all of the Census processing. What’s more, the fact that the certificate has hard coded entries means that there’s no ability to spin up additional servers to process more traffic.

Anandtech report on some new enterprise SSDs from Seagate. With the Nytro XP7200 moving toward production, Seagate has brought out another SSD tech demo with eye-catching specifications. The unnamed SAS SSD packs 60TB of 3D TLC into a 3.5" drive. In order to connect over a thousand dies of Micron's 3D TLC NAND to a single SSD controller, Seagate has introduced ONFi bridge chips to multiplex the controller's NAND channels across far more dies than would otherwise be possible. The rest of the specs for the 60TB SSD look fairly mundane and make for a drive that's better suited to read-intensive workloads, but the capacity puts even the latest hard drives to shame.

Guru3D have a guide to overclocking Titan X from NVIDIA. Overclocking never comes without risk, but it sure as heck is interesting to see how far you can take a card. As such today an article dedicated on overclocking the Nvidia Titan X. You will notice that if you go for long lifespan that overclocking the old fashioned way will not disappoint. A good 1800~1850 MHz on the GPU (reference air cooler) is certainly something you can achieve reasonably easy. However with Nvidia's updated Dynamic Clock Adjustment technology (GPU Boost 3.0) things have changed a bit. Regardless of that you'll be able to tweak a lot more performance out of this complex 12 Billion transistor GPU, more than you think. Babeltech have been overclocking Titan X as well.

The first IBM PC was released 35 years ago this month, back in August 1981. "This is the computer for just about everyone who has ever wanted a personal system at the office, on the university campus or at home," said C. B. Rogers, then-IBM vice president, at the 5150's launch. "We believe its performance, reliability and ease of use make it the most advanced, affordable personal computer in the marketplace." Within two years of its release tens of thousands of homes and businesses were fitted with an IBM PC and rival companies such as Dell and HP started to developing the machines that would become the computers of today.



Sunday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Sunday, 14-August-2016  15:49:11 (GMT +10) - by booj

Graphics Cards:
Zotac GTX 1080 AMP! Edition 8 GB on Techpowerup.
ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1070 OC on eTeknix.
Gigabyte RX 460 Windforce OC 2GB on LanOC Reviews.
AMD Radeon RX 460 on The Tech Report.
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme on Guru3D.
ASUS Radeon RX 460 STRIX OC 4 GB on techPowerUp.

Storage:
WD Gold 8TB Datacenter Drive (WD8002FRYZ) on Tech ARP.
QNAP TVS-682-I3-8G NAS Server on NikKTech.
WD Blue SSHD (WD10J31X) 1TB on Tech ARP.
Crucial MX300 750GB Solid State Drive on APH Networks.
Toshiba PX04SLB 4TB SAS1200 SSD on Hardware.info.

Cooling:
Reeven Coldwing 12 and 14 Fans on Modders-Inc.
Noctua NH-L9i Compact CPU Cooler on Funky Kit.
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 on Modders-Inc.
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 AIO Cooler on Hardware Asylum.
Cryorig A80 280mm Hybrid Air and AIO CPU Cooler on eTeknix.
Thermalright Le Grand Macho RT Air CPU Cooler on PC Perspective.
be quiet! Dark Rock TF on techPowerUp.

Input etc:
Razer Turret Living Room Gaming Mouse and Lapboard on Madshrimps.
Thermaltake Level 10 M Advanced RGB Mouse on Legit Reviews.
Razer Mechanical Keyboard Case (Apple iPad Pro) on Custom PC Review.

Misc:
Corsair Vengeance LED 32GB DDR4 on Vortez.
JBL Charge 3 Bluetooth Speaker on Legit Reviews.
BlackVue DR650S-2CH Dashcam on Big Bruin.
Cooler Master MasterBox 5 Mid-Tower Case on PC Perspective.
Thermaltake Lumi Color 256C RGB Magnetic LED Strip Control Pack on Funky Kit.



Misc Pics (38 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 12-August-2016  14:27:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Friday again!








Forum Projects (1 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-August-2016  13:49:41 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Catching up on some projects and reviews from the forums:


aXLe is getting retro with
a vintage Tandy CoCo 2

DaveHimself is cooling
a Samsung VR headset

windwithme reviewed the
MSI GT72S Dominator Pro


Windston is using a Canon
600D for Astrophotography

iRev_olution has a water
cooled 5GHz machine

josh1990 reviewed some
Fractal Design goodies



Wednesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-August-2016  10:47:57 (GMT +10) - by booj

Motherboards & CPUs:
ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Pro Gaming i7 on TweakTown.
Asus X99-A II on The Tech Report.
Gigabyte X99-Designare-EX on OCC.
ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme on PC Perspective.
Skylake Core i3 (51W) CPUs: i3-6320, i3-6300 and i3-6100 on Anandtech.

Graphics Cards:
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z Graphics Card on Modders-Inc.
RX 470 Crossfire Testing on LanOC Reviews.

Memory:
Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4-2400 16GB RAM Kit on TweakTown.
Crucial Ballistix Sport LT Red 16GB Kit (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 RAM on Funky Kit.
G.SKILL Ripjaws V 32GB 3000MHz DDR4 (F4-3000C15D-32GVR) Memory Kit on Madshrimps.

Cooling:
Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 AIO CPU Cooler on Funky Kit.
AMD Wraith CPU Cooler on Hardware Secrets.

Inout etc:
Dream Machines DM1 Pro Mouse on techPowerUp.
Zalman ZM-K650 Waterproof Keyboard on TechnologyX.
ASUS ROG Spatha Gaming Mouse on Benchmark Reviews.

Misc:
Alienware Alpha R2 SFF PC on Hot Hardware.
Toshiba OCZ RD400 PCIe NVMe SSD on ThinkComputers.
COUGAR IMMERSA Gaming Headset on Funky Kit.



Wednesday Morning (1 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 10-August-2016  10:42:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The Census was unfortunately a very public failure last night, with the ABS saying attacks from overseas caused the outage. The general media is widely using the term "hacked" which makes everyone think their private data has been stolen, but from the sounds of things it was purely a denial of service attack aimed at the DNS. "Steps have been taken during the night to remedy these issues and I can certainly reassure Australians that the data they provided is safe." Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said he would launch an investigation into the ABS "cyber attacks". "My first priority is to ensure that no personal information has been compromised as a result of these attacks," he said. Discussion continues here.

Amiga fans rejoice: the Internet Archive has added 10,000 browser-playable Amiga titles to their collection. We can’t vouch for the quality of all of the Amiga titles that were recently posted up on Archive.org, but there sure as heck are a lot of them – 10,000+, by the site’s count, including favorites as Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, King’s Quest and Double Dragon, along with what looks to be a fair amount of redundancy. I’m not really sure what the difference is between Deluxe Pac Man v1.1 and Deluxe Pac Man v1.7a, but I suspect it’s fairly minor, even for completists. Indy 500! R-Type! Xenon 2 Megablast! Emerald Mine! Oh man, productivity is going to hit an all-time low today.

HardOCP compared AMD & NVIDIA GPUs in a VR title. We are back this week to take another objective look at AMD and NVIDIA GPU performance in one of the the top selling games in the VR-only realm, The Gallery Episode 1: Call of Starseed. This is another GPU-intensive title that has the ability to put some GPUs on their heels. How do the new RX 480 and GeForce 1000 series perform?

If you're in Melbourne and have an interest in storage, there's a Synology 2017 Event on the 11th of October. Highlights of the event: - Announcing brand-new collaboration tools and multimedia integration - The future of networking and storage - Synology's next big move for disaster recovery solutions - Face-to-face discussion with Synology experts - Chance to win a Synology NAS in the prize draw!



Tuesday Night (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 9-August-2016  22:47:33 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Tonight is census night, but if you're having trouble accessing the website, you're not the only one. The website hosting the first online version of the Australian census has gone down as thousands of people around the country attempted to complete the survey. The Federal Government says work is underway to fix a major outage affecting the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website this evening. However, there are other concerns with the census, largely around privacy. The EFA have expressed their concerns as well. Discussion continues here.

Meanwhile a few days ago marked 25 years since the first website came online. In this day 25 years ago the world's first website went live to the public. The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages. Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, which would come to dominate life in the twenty-first century. On a related note, OCAU turned 17 last month. Wow!

TechSpot look at building a 40-thread Xeon monster PC on the cheap. Following up to our popular 32-thread Xeon PC feature, we've been in the hunt for affordable Xeon processors based on more modern architectures. Our search put us on the trail of Intel's Xeon E5 2630 v4, a 10-core Broadwell-EP part (40 threads for 2 CPUs) that can be found for less - with a catch - so we put together a system to show off what's on offer here.

TechARP look at what to expect from the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. We were recently invited to an exclusive tech briefing on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, where Andres Sirel, Windows & Devices Group Lead, demonstrated new features like Windows Ink, as well as improvements in Windows Hello, Microsoft Edge, Windows Notes.

Babeltech compare the Titan X vs GTX 1080. This evaluation is the second part of our ongoing Pascal TITAN X series. We have expanded our original article from Wednesday to include all 25 games of our benchmark suite, and we have added a new 3440×1440 WQHD resolution to our standard 3840×2160 and 2560×1440 benching resolutions. We have dropped 1920×1080 as it is meaningless for such powerful cards as the GTX 1080 and the TITAN X because 1080P is hopelessly bottlenecked by even a Core i7 6700K at 4.4GHz.~



AMD Radeon RX 460 Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 9-August-2016  10:26:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg

AMD have unveiled their Radeon RX 460, hot on the heels of the RX 470 from last week. These are cheaper options in the Polaris 10 family, under the flagship RX 480. Discussion of that family continues in this thread. Here's a few 460 reviews from around the net, with some 470 stragglers:

AMD Radeon RX 460 Review: Polaris On A Budget on HotHardware.
Sapphire Nitro RX 460 OC on eTeknix.
ASUS Radeon RX 460 STRIX Gaming 4 GB on Guru3D.
AMD Radeon RX 460 4GB Graphics Card on LegitReviews.
AMD Radeon RX 460 on TechSpot.
SAPPHIRE Nitro Radeon RX 460 OC 4GB on Tweaktown.
AMD Radeon RX 460 on TomsHardware.

Sapphire Nitro+ RX 470 OC on ThinkComputers.
Sapphire RX 470 4GB Nitro on LanOC.



Monday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Monday, 8-August-2016  10:10:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Audio Visual:
ARCTIC P533 Military Stereo Headset on NikKTech.
Razer Leviathan Mini Speaker on MadShrimps.
ZealSound HDE-300 Earphones on APHNetworks.
HyperX Cloud Revolver Pro Gaming Headset on HWAsylum.

Portable & Prebuilt:
The honor 5C Smartphone on TechARP.
Go Big With The Samsung Galaxy A9 Pro on TechARP.
OnePlus 3 on TechSpot.

Networking:
Linksys WRT1900ACS Dual-Band Smart Wireless Router on Tweaktown.
Edimax EW-7438RPn Mini Wi-Fi Extender on BigBruin.

Storage:
Netgear ReadyNAS 214 Four-Bay Consumer NAS on Tweaktown.
Transcend JetDrive Go 300S Lightning / USB 3.1 Flash Drive on Tweaktown.

Video Cards:
Titan X is 50% faster than GTX 1080 at 11,520 x 2160 on Tweaktown.
Sapphire Nitro+ RX 470 OC on eTeknix.
Desktop Graphics Card Comparison Guide Rev. 34.2 on TechARP.
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 470 on Vortez.
AMD Radeon RX 480 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 on Techgage.
Doom OpenGL VS Vulkan Graphics Performance Analysis on eTeknix.

Misc:
New Matter MOD-t 3D Printer Review: Low Cost, User-Friendly Creation on HotHardware.
In Win 509 Full Tower case on FunkyKit.
Cryorig R1 Ultimate CPU cooler on Modders-Inc.
Core i7-6950X vs Core i7-6700K - 2D Performance on OCAholic.



Misc Pics (36 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 5-August-2016  14:55:38 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to mpot and Matt this week! The second-last one is maaaybe NSFW.









Friday Morning Reviews (1 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 5-August-2016  09:06:16 (GMT +10) - by booj

Graphics Cards:
Nvidia Titan X (Pascal) on Guru3D.
Gainward GeForce GTX 1070 Phoenix GS 8GB on NikKTech.
NVIDIA Titan X Pascal on Techpowerup.
Pascal TITAN X vs. the GTX 1080 on BabelTechReviews.
NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal) on TweakTown.

Memory:
Crucial Ballistix Tactical DDR4-3000 16GB Memory Kit on TweakTown.
Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 2400MHz 32GB White Memory Kit on Madshrimps.

Cooling:
Arctic Liquid Freezer 120 AIO Water Cooler on OC Inside.
Corsair H115i Extreme Performance AiO Liquid CPU Cooler on TechnologyX.

Input etc:
Steelseries Rival 700 Elite Performance Gaming Mouse on Hardware Asylum.
Roccat Sova Gaming Lapboard on Techspot.

Portable & Systems:
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga on ThinkComputers.
AVADirect Avant Mini Cube Gaming Desktop on TweakTown.

Misc:
Amped Wireless Artemis AC1300 RTA1300M Wireless Router on TweakTown.
Kingston MobileLite G3 Wireless Card Reader on Bigbruin.
Kirin 650-Powered honor 5C Smartphone on TechARP.
CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme VR PC on Legit Reviews.



AMD Radeon RX 470 Graphics Card Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Friday, 5-August-2016  08:31:59 (GMT +10) - by booj

AMD has released the second iteration of their Polaris 10 architecture, the Radeon RX 470. Is it a nice card for 1080p gaming? Here is a list of reviews to find out.

ASUS Radeon RX 470 STRIX OC 4 GB on techPowerUp.
ASUS Radeon RX 470 STRIX on Hardware Heaven.
ASUS Radeon RX 470 STRIX Gaming 4GB on Guru3D.
ASUS Radeon RX 470 Strix 4Gb on Techspot.
Asus Strix RX 470 OC Edition on Toms Hardware.
Asus Radeon RX 470 Strix Gaming OC 4GB on Hexus.
Asus Radeon RX 470 STRIX 4GB on Hot Hardware.

MSI Radeon RX 470 Gaming X 8GB on Guru3D.
MSI RX 470 4GB Gaming X on Hardware Canucks.

PowerColor Radeon RX 470 RED Devil 4GB on Guru3D.
PowerColor Red Devil RX 470 on eTeknix.
PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 470 on HardOCP.

Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Nitro OC 4GB on Bit-Tech.
Sapphire Nitro Radeon RX 470 4GB on TweakTown.
Sapphire Nitro+ RX 470 OC on eTeknix.

XFX Radeon RX 470 4GB Black Edition on Legit Reviews.
XFX Radeon RX 470 4Gb on PC World.
XFX RX 470 RS Black Edition on LanOC Reviews.
XFX RX 470 RS Black Edition on The Tech Report.



Wednesday Afternoon (4 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 3-August-2016  15:14:18 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The ACCC is looking into broadband speed claims, thanks leftarc. And it has called on the industry to explain why it cannot always deliver promised speeds, whether industry prepared for the popularity of subscription video streaming, and what performance promises they could make about mobile broadband speeds. More info on the ACCC website here where you can make a submission if you have something to say on the topic.

Meanwhile there are now more than one million homes on the NBN, thanks Simon. The news comes as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission decided to declare superfast broadband networks as regulated infrastructure. This means Telstra will be forced to let its competitors buy access to the fibre network around the South Brisbane Exchange, and TPG will have to let other telcos access its fibre to the building network, which covers about 1000 apartment buildings in capital cities.

BabelTech have been overclocking video cards. At stock, the GTX 980 won decisively in performance over the stock reference RX 480, and marginally over the new stock GTX 1060. This time, we will overclock the GTX 980 and the RX 480 as far as they will go with a maxed out fan profile and with added voltage to see where they stand in relation to each other fully overclocked. We are using reference versions of all 3 cards.

NVIDIA have settled their false advertising class action, thanks Rob. Nvidia says it will pay each buyer of the graphics card $30 and will pay an additional $1.3 million in attorneys’ fees, according to settlement documents. The overall settlement amount was not publicly disclosed within court papers, however Nvidia agreed to pay all consumers who purchased the GTX 970 graphics card and indicated there would not be a cap on the total amount it would pay consumers. Not sure if it applies to Australia.

If you've caught the Pokemon Go bug (*cough* level 12 here) you might wish you lived in Malaysia, where you could catch a ride in a PokeMobile. These are special Grab cars that have been decked out in Pokémon livery. Each PokeMobile also comes with refreshments, Grab goodie bags, Hotlink PokeChargers and even a PokeMonitor, with Hotlink 4G connectivity.

Backblaze have published their latest hard drive stats report. I know some people don't like their data but I always find it an interesting read. Q2 2016 saw Backblaze: introduce 8TB drives into our drive mix, kickoff a pod-to-vault migration of over 6.5 Petabytes of data, cross over 250 Petabytes of data stored, and deploy another 7,290 drives into the data center for a total of 68,813 spinning hard drives under management. With all the ins-and-outs let’s take a look at how our hard drives fared in Q2 2016.

Police have apparently 3D printed a murder victim's finger in order to unlock his phone, thanks t1mbot. According to a new report from Flash Forward creator Rose Eveleth, law enforcement officers approached a professor at Michigan State earlier this year to reproduce a murder victim’s fingerprint from a prerecorded scan. Once created, the 3D model would be used to create a false fingerprint, which could be used to unlock the phone.

If you use Classic Shell (which gives you back the Start Menu etc on Windows 8/10), you might want to read this reddit thread and not update/reboot until the reports of it containing malware are confirmed or clarified.



Wednesday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Wednesday, 3-August-2016  14:47:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Video Cards:
NVIDIA TITAN X Review: The Pascal Beast Unleashed on HotHardware.
The NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal) 12GB Graphics Card on PC Perspective.
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 480 on Vortez.
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming on Tweaktown.

Input Etc:
G.SKILL Ripjaws MX780 Gaming Mouse on BenchmarkReviews.
Thermaltake Level 10M Advanced Gaming Mouse on HWAsylum.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Hands-On Samsung's Galaxy Note7 With Revamped Gear VR Headset on HotHardware.
ASRock DeskMini 110 on TechPowerUp.

Cooling:
Thermaltake Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit on NikKtech.
SilentiumPC Fortis 3 MCE CPU cooler on OCAholic.
Corsair ML Pro Series fans on Vortez.
Cryorig R1 Ultimate Dual Tower Cooler on eTeknix.
Thermalright Macho 120 SBM CPU Cooler on Tweaktown.

Cases:
Cooler Master MasterBox 5 on Modders-Inc.
SilverStone Primera PM01 ATX Mid-Tower on Tweaktown.
CoolerMaster MasterBox 5 Ultra White Edition on eTeknix.

Misc:
Be Quiet! Straight Power 10 700 W CM (E10-CM-700W) PSU on HWInsights.
Patriot Memory Ignite 240GB SATA3 SSD on FunkyKit.



Tuesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
 Tuesday, 2-August-2016  06:49:03 (GMT +10) - by booj

Graphics Cards:
Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Edition on Funky Kit.
MSI RX 480 Gaming X 8 GB on techPowerUp.
MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X on Guru3D.
Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 4GB on OCC.
Palit GTX 1060 Super JetStream 6 GB on techPowerUp.

Storage:
Apricorn Aegis Secure Key 3.0 on The SSD Review.
QNAP TS-453A QTS-Ubuntu Combo NAS on eTeknix.

Cases:
Fractal Design Node 202 with Integra SFX PSU Mini-ITX Chassis on TweakTown.
EVGA DG-87 Gaming Chassis on Hardware Asylum.
Antec P9 Windowed Mid-Tower on eTeknix.

Audio:
Gamdias Hephaestus V2 7.1 w/vibration on LanOC Reviews.
Sound Intone I60 Headphones on Funky Kit.

Input etc:
SteelSeries Rival 700 Gaming Mouse on Legit Reviews.
Patriot Viper V760 Mechanical Keyboard on Techgage.

Notebooks & Systems:
Dell XPS 13 and 15 Notebooks on PC Perspective.
Asrock Beebox-S 6200 Mini PC on Techspot.
Alienware Alpha R2 First Looks on Hardware Secrets.

Misc:
Corsair ML120 PRO LED Fans on ThinkComputers.
XCELLON AC Power Bank on ModSynergy.
Switchmate Bluetooth Smart Light Switch on TweakTown.




Advertisement:

All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
Interested in advertising on OCAU? Contact us for info.

Hosted by Micron21!
Advertisement:

Recent Content


Mini Server Rack
Gashapon



SpaceX Starlink



T-Force Cardea
Zero Z330 NVMe SSD



Team Group T-Force
Vulcan G SSD



Synology DS720+ NAS



Raspberry Pi 4
Model B 8GB



Retro Extreme!