June 2020 - Overclockers Australia

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June 2020

Forum Projects (0 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 30-June-2020 23:59:19 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Time to catch up on some more cool projects from the forums. Another good way to see what's going on in there is to hit the New Posts link. Enjoy!

cokeeffekt is building a tiny ITX gaming case	Vanne has a retro Compaq Deskpro build	Mistkal is having a Socket370 nightmare
luke_o built a tiny 3700x Mini-ITX machine	sonicthemouse has made custom ITX and MATX cases	Soc is building a Clubman with a Hayabusa engine

Tuesday Morning (3 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 30-June-2020 00:33:31 (GMT +10) - by Agg

It's 2020 and there's some flying car news, thanks von Stalhein! Like a scene straight out of Mad Max, flying cars are set to grace the South Australian outback in Coober Pedy, where the original film was shot. It may sound futuristic, but an international startup says it will host a full-scale flying car race in remote South Australia before the end of the year.

Even if I don't have my flying car yet, perhaps I can smash things with my robot arm. At ICRA this week, researchers from Université de Sherbrooke in Canada are finally giving us what we want, in the form of a waist-mounted remote controlled hydraulic arm that can help you with all kinds of tasks while also being able, should you feel the need, to smash through walls.

It's reached the point where the concept of suicide drones doesn't surprise me anymore. Have we learned nothing from Philip K. Dick stories?! The Pentagon tested a loitering munition, more commonly referred to as a suicide drone, last year that will arrive over its designated target area at hypersonic speeds. It has since turned the project over to the U.S. Army for further development. Additional details about the program, dubbed Vintage Racer, have now emerged in an official picture showing Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy discussing it, as well as other advanced weapon systems.

Back to Earth, and Guru3D look at Ryzen memory scaling. The impact of memory timings and frequency on AMD Ryzen 3000 systems in games has been a topic of discussion. In this article, we'll zoom in on specifically that. See, AMD made a change in 3rd generations Ryzen, aka "Zen 2" processors, splitting the memory controllers from the die that contains CPU cores. The DDR4 memory controller is located in the processor's 12 nm I/O controller die. What's the game performance effect with frequencies, latencies, and ranks.

Here's a fairly heavy-going article about the history of non-volatile memory. As with every significant semiconductor product development, from the transistor to the microprocessor, NVM devices evolved from the work of pioneering researchers who built on the efforts of their predecessors through intuitive insights, lucky breaks, trial and error, and a determination to ignore the doubts of naysayers. This article is a chronological presentation of some of those pioneers and their key technology developments from the first glimmerings of the idea at Fairchild in 1960 to the high-volume manufacture of Flash chips in the last decade of the 20th century.

Another interesting read comes from metamorphosis, about tracking down people who changed their name to Turok in a promotional contest years ago. But perhaps its most successful and notorious stunt was to raise awareness for Turok: Evolution. This 2002 PR campaign offered five members of the British public £500 and a free Xbox if they changed their name to Turok. The idea that people took up this offer is amazing to me. Signing for parcels, going to work, going on dates named after a fictional dinosaur hunter – what was life like as Mr or Mrs Turok? I had to know, which is why I decided to track them down and ask them myself.

Also, the Segway is officially dead. Now, less than 20 years after the first Segway’s release, Fast Company has learned that the Segway brand will retire the last Segway as we know it, the Segway PT.

Monday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Monday, 29-June-2020 00:05:40 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
ASUS ROG Strix Z490-E Gaming on Guru3D.
ASRock B550 Taichi on FunkyKit.

Input Etc:
XPG Summoner RGB Gaming Keyboard on NikKTech.
Dream Machines DM2 Supreme Gaming Mouse on MadShrimps.

Cooling:
Corsair H100i RGB PRO XT All-In-One cooler on LanOC.
Corsair A500 CPU Cooler on APHNetworks.
Zalman CNPS17X CPU Cooler on Tweaktown.

Audio Visual:
Sennheiser GSP 300 EPOS Gaming Headset on Tweaktown.
Vissles 2-in-1 Music Pill on TechPowerUp.

Misc:
EnGenius SkyKey I Network Management Controller on NikKTech.
Samsung Galaxy Tab Active Pro Review: A Rugged Battery Life Champ on HotHardware.
InWin C200 case on TechPowerUp.
Corsair DDR4 3200 Dominator Platinum RGB 32GB memory on OCClub.
ASUS Radeon RX 5700 XT TUF EVO video card on TechPowerUp.
ICY DOCK ICYNano MB861U31-1M2B NVMe USB-C Enclosure on TechPowerUp.

Misc Pics (25 Comments) (link)
Friday, 26-June-2020 14:03:19 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to Axe and Simon this week - don't forget we have OCAU Merchandise over on RedBubble at the moment, too!

Unintentionally Watercooled PSU (3 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 25-June-2020 23:58:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg

As you know, I like to highlight projects and achievements from forum members on the news page. Sometimes, however, it's more like a warning. Like when havabeer's watercooling loop dumped its contents into his PSU:

Click for the thread!

Thursday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 25-June-2020 23:35:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
Asus ROG Strix B550-I Gaming Motherboard on Modders-Inc.
GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS XTREME on Vortez.
AMD Ryzen 3 3100 & 3300X Quad-core CPU Performance on TechGage.
MSI MEG Z490 Godlike Z490 mobo on Guru3D.
EVGA Z490 FTW WIFI on LanOC.
AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Review: Mid-Range Zen 2 Beats Intel's Best on TechSpot.
ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (Wi-Fi) on Tweaktown.

Memory:
Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB White 32GB DDR4 4000MHz on NeoSeeker.
ADATA XPG SPECTRIX D60G DDR4-3600 MHz CL14 2x8 GB on TechPowerUp.

Input Etc:
Redragon Cobra M711 FPS mouse on TechPowerUp.
MSI Vigor GK50 & Clutch GM50 mouse and keyboard on Vortez.
XPG Battleground XL Prime RGB Mouse Pad on ThinkComputers.
HyperX Alloy Origins Gaming Keyboard on ThinkComputers.
1STPLAYER DK 5.0 Mechanical Keyboard on APHNetworks.
HyperX Pulsefire Dart Wireless RGB Gaming Mouse on FunkyKit.

Cooling:
Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L V2 RGB on OCInside.
SilentiumPC Grandis 3 EVO ARGB & Grandis 3 CPU coolers on TechPowerUp.

Portable & Prebuilt:
XPG Xenia 15 (Coffee Lake) Laptop on Tweaktown.
Shuttle XPC nano NC10U3 Barebone on MadShrimps.
Acer Predator 9000 prebuilt PC (video review) by OCClub.

Storage:
Crucial P5 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD on Tweaktown.
LaCie 12Big Thunderbolt 3 on Tweaktown.
TeamGroup Cardea Zero Z340 M.2 NVMe on Guru3D.
Team Group PD1000 3.2 Gen 2 SSD on BabelTechReviews.
Toshiba Desktop P300 6TB SATA III HDD on NikKTech.

Audio Visual:
MSI Optix MAG272CQR monitor on Vortez.
Elgato Wave 1 on Vortez.
Kittyhok 100% Wire-free Battery AI Security Camera (video review) by OCClub.

Misc:
Thermaltake AH T600 Review - "AH" for Attack Helicopter case on TechPowerUp.
Chieftronic PowerPLAY Gold 750W PSU on NikKTech.

Tuesday Night (6 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 23-June-2020 22:13:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg

I'm sure you all remember the Bitchin' Fast 3D 2000 video card from a zillion years ago. Gibbon pointed out a YouTuber who has finally tested one in the flesh! He's also managed to get his hands on a 3dfx Voodoo5 9000, an 8-way NV-Link RTX 2090 setup and even Intel's as-yet-unreleased Xe Gaming GPU. Brilliant stuff. :)

I dipped briefly into the world of ARM in my recent Raspberry Pi article, but the big news is that Apple are going to be moving from Intel to ARM soon. Apple has just announced its plans to switch from Intel CPUs in Macs to silicon of its own design, based on the ARM architecture. This means that Apple is now designing its own chips for iOS devices and its Mac desktop and laptops. Apple said it will ship its first ARM Mac before the end of the year, and complete the Intel -> ARM transition within two years. Discussion here.

It's been a big day for ARM news, with the world's new fastest supercomputer using ARM chips to take the top spot. At the heart of Fugaku is the A64FX, a custom Arm v8-A CPU-based chip optimised for compute. The total configuration uses 158,976 of these 48+4-core cards, running at 2.2 GHz peak performance (48 cores for compute, 4 for assistance). This allows for some substantial Rpeak numbers, such as 537 PetaFLOPs of FP64, the usual TOP500 metric.

Meanwhile quannum spotted a new version of Quake3 on a Raspberry Pi - at 100+fps! Martin Thomas is an NVIDIA engineer, and he has concocted something very cool that fans of retro games and tiny single board PCs will really appreciate. He has taken an inexpensive Raspberry Pi 3B+ and transformed it into a machine that is capable of running a version of Quake3 at over 100 fps. To get the game to run at that frame rate on the basic Pi hardware, Thomas created a new low-level Vulkan-based RPi-VK-Driver for the RPi platform and used it to power VkQuake3 on the Raspberry Pi.

That led me onto this, which is one of the coolest, nerdiest things I've seen in a while - a Threadripper Task Manager dancer. Given that Threadripper 3990X has 128 threads at its disposal, it’s enough "pixels" to present a somewhat discernible image when put in motion. In this case, it's a visual reproduction of the music video for the song “Bad Apple” by Alstroemeria Records. Given the amount of pixels that we're working with, it's by no means an "high definition" remake, but it's close enough to be impressively cool.

Australia has been under cyber attack recently. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australian organisations, including governments and businesses, were currently being targeted by a sophisticated foreign "state-based" hacker. More info here.

Saturday Night Reviews (2 Comments) (link)
Saturday, 20-June-2020 22:22:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg

CPU & Motherboard:
ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (Wi-Fi) on Vortez.
ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 on TechPowerUp.
AMD B550 Motherboard First Look & VRM Temperature Test on TechSpot.
Gigabyte B550i Aorus PRO AX (Mini-ITX) on Guru3D.
ASUS STRIX B550-F Gaming on Guru3D.
Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master on Guru3D.
MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk on Vortez.
Asus ROG Strix B550-I Gaming on LanOC.
Gigabyte B550I AORUS Pro AX on TechPowerUp.
Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro on TechPowerUp.
ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming (WiFi) on TechPowerUp.

Cooling:
Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L V2 RGB Closed Loop Water Cooler on APHNetworks.
Zalman CNPS20X CPU Cooler on Tweaktown.

Audio Visual:
ASTRO A50 Wireless Headset + Base Station on Tweaktown.
Elgato Wave:3 Review - Microphone Redefined on TechPowerUp.
CORSAIR Elgato WAVE:3 Microphone on MadShrimps.
Elgato Wave:3 Premium Microphone & Digital Mixing Solution on NikKTech.
Elgato WAVE:3 Microphone on Guru3D.
Elgato WAVE: 1 Microphone on Tweaktown.
Elgato WAVE: 3 Microphone on Tweaktown.
Elgato Wave:3 Microphone on ThinkComputers.
Creative Sound Blaster G3 on GamingNexus.

Input Etc:
ROCCAT Vulcan 120 AIMO keyboard on TechPowerUp.
Cougar Arena X Pink Gaming Mouse Pad on FunkyKit.
Hexgears K520 Mechanical Keyboard on NikKTech.
Dream Machines DM2 Supreme mouse on TechPowerUp.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Fitbit Charge 4 Special Edition Advanced Fitness Tracker on Tweaktown.
Intel NUC10i7FNH Review: Powerful, Palm-Sized 6-Core Mini PC on HotHardware.

Storage:
ADATA Swordfish 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD on TechPowerUp.
Crucial P2 500GB on LanOC.
Synology DS420+ Four-Bay NAS on Tweaktown.

Memory:
PNY XLR8 DDR4-3200 32GB Dual-Channel Memory Kit on Tweaktown.
Thermaltake TOUGHRAM RGB on Vortez.
Crucial Ballistix Gaming DDR4 3200 MHz 64 GB (4x 16GB) on Guru3D.

Misc:
Proscenic P10 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner on NikKTech.
ABKONCORE Tenergy 850W Gold 80+ Modular PSU on FunkyKit.
Antec P82 Flow Review - A Compact, Fan-Packed Mid-Tower on TechPowerUp.
XPG Prime ARGB Extension Cables 24-pin & 8-pin on TechPowerUp.
XFX RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro 14Gbps video card on NeoSeeker.

Misc Pics (27 Comments) (link)
Friday, 19-June-2020 14:11:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to mr bill and Dan this week!

Thursday Night (15 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 18-June-2020 22:45:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg

An interesting announcement from Intel recently concerns their hybrid CPU platform. This new processor combines one ‘big’ CPU core with four ‘small’ CPU cores, along with a hefty chunk of graphics, with Intel setting out to deliver a new computing form factor. Highlights for this processor include its small footprint, due to new 3D stacking ‘Foveros’ technology, as well as its low standby SoC power, as low as 2.5 mW, which Intel states is 91% lower than previous low power Intel processors.

AMD meanwhile have some more Ryzen 3000 CPUs, this time with an "XT" name. These seem to just bump up the Turbo clock speed from the corresponding X part at the same price point. The new 3000XT family of processors focuses mostly on boosting the turbo frequency by 100-200 MHz for the same power. AMD states that this is due to using an optimized 7nm manufacturing process. This is likely due to a minor BKM or PDK update that allows TSMC/AMD to tune the process for a better voltage/frequency curve and bin a single CPU slightly higher.

This one from OhSmeg, news that the source code for the games Soldat and Delores has been released. Nice to see BluesNews is still going too! A new post on Steam announces the release of the source code for Soldat, the side-scrolling multiplayer shooter first released back in 2002. The game itself is free-to-play on Steam, where it's described like so: "Soldat is a unique 2D (side-view) multiplayer action game. It has been influenced by the best of games such as Liero, Worms, Quake, and Counter-Strike and provides a fast-paced gaming experience with tons of blood and flesh." The open source announcement reminisces about the game's history and goes into more detail about the release.

The May 2020 update to Windows 10 seems to have broken some stuff. Most recently, some users have been unable to utilize the Windows 10 “Fresh Start” tool since the installation of the latest update. The Fresh Start tool allows users to install a clean version of Windows 10 on their device, perhaps recovering proper functionality from a cluttered or malfunctioning image. Users are able to keep some of their personal files, but the tool removes various third-party apps and even Microsoft Office. Meanwhile the June update has broken printing, thanks metamorphosis.

FOTW spotted some Chrome add-on spyware issues. A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google's market-leading Chrome Web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry's failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions. Alphabet's Google said it removed more than 70 of the malicious add-ons from its official Chrome Web Store after being alerted by the researchers last month.

Here's a funny retro article from metamorphosis, about the horror of old GPU box art. Today, most GPUs come in cool, stylish, minimalist packaging. Slipping my RTX 2080 Super out of its monolithic box felt like opening some prestige electronics product. But it wasn't always like this. Back through the mists of time, in the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s, GPU and 3D accelerator packaging was its own nightmarish artform. Here are some examples of the best, or worst, depending on your perspective.

I've been playing Doom and Quake thanks to rediscovering them on the Raspberry Pi, but all this retro FPS fun made me really miss one particular game: Duke Nukem 3D. The good news is, apparently a 20th Anniversary edition is coming to the Nintendo Switch. I don't have a Switch, but that made me look elsewhere for it, and find it on Steam. Kickass!

Thursday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 18-June-2020 00:37:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Input Etc:
SteelSeries Apex 5 keyboard on Vortez.
XPG Summoner Gaming Keyboard on NeoSeeker.
Cougar Vantar MX Mechanical Gaming Keyboard on FunkyKit.

Video Cards:
AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition on Tweaktown.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q on TechSpot.

Storage:
Kingston KC2000 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review - Firmware Update Tested on TechPowerUp.
HP EX950 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD on NikKTech.
TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z340 512GB m.2 SSD on Tweaktown.

Power Supply:
Cooler Master MWE 650 White V2 650W on APHNetworks.
XPG Core Reactor 850W on TechPowerUp.

Memory:
Patriot Viper 4 Blackout Series DDR4 64GB (2x32GB) 3600MHz on FunkyKit.
Crucial Ballistix Gaming DDR4 3200 MHz 64 GB (4x 16GB) on Guru3D.

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB (82 Comments) (link)
Sunday, 14-June-2020 17:37:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg

A long waffly article in which I buy a Raspberry Pi, and get a lot more than I bargained for.

click for the article!

Sunday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Sunday, 14-June-2020 13:29:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Motherboard & CPU:
Ryzen 7 2700X vs. Ryzen 7 3700X: High Refresh Gaming Comparison on TechSpot.
Intel Core i3-10320 on TechPowerUp.
Z490 Aorus PRO AX on Guru3D.
ASUS Maximus XII Hero (WiFi) on TechPowerUp.
ASUS Maximus XII Extreme (Intel Z490) on Tweaktown.

Storage:
Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB on LanOC.
Kingston KC2000 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD on TechPowerUp.
Seagate FireCuda 1TB Gaming SSD on Tweaktown.
Silicon Power Blaze B32 64GB USB 3.2 Gen1 Flash Drive on MadShrimps.
Patriot PXD 1TB M.2 PCIE TYPE-C Portable SSD on FunkyKit.
Silicon Power PC60 960GB Portable SSD on FunkyKit.
Sabrent Rocket Q 1TB NVMe SSD M.2 on Guru3D.
Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD on FunkyKit.
Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe 8TB SSD on Tweaktown.

Cooling:
Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML120L V2 RGB AIO on OCInside.
Corsair iCUE H150i RGB PRO XT AIO cooler (video review) by OCClub.
Fractal Design Celsius S36 All-In-One CPU Cooler (video review) by OCClub.
Zalman CNPS17X CPU cooler on TechPowerUp.
Cooler Master MasterFan MF120 Halo on OCInside.

Input Etc:
Corsair Scimitar RGB Elite MOBA/MMO Gaming Mouse on Tweaktown.
Razer Viper Mini gaming mouse on TechPowerUp.

Software:
The ‘AMID EVIL’ RTX Performance & IQ Review on BabelTechReviews.
OCC's Saints Row: The Third Remastered Performance Analysis on OCClub.

Video Cards:
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q on TechSpot.
ASUS TUF Gaming X3 Radeon RX 5700 EVO on Tweaktown.

Portable & Prebuilt:
ASUS TUF Gaming A15 Review: Ryzen Power With GeForce RTX Pop on HotHardware.
Dell XPS 17 9700 Review: The 17-Inch Laptop Gold Standard on HotHardware.

Audio Visual:
1MORE Dual Driver ANC Pro headphones on TechPowerUp.
AOC 27G2U Gaming Monitor on NikKTech.
XPG Precog Virtual 7.1 Surround Sound Gaming Headset on NikKTech.

Power Supply:
Seasonic Connect 750 W PSU on Guru3D.
Antec Signature Platinum 1000W on APHNetworks.
XPG Core Reactor 750 W on TechPowerUp.

Memory:
Crucial Ballistix Gaming 64GB DDR4 3200MHZ CL16 Dual-Channel Kit on NikKTech.
G.SKILL Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 MHz CL16 4x16 GB on TechPowerUp.

Misc:
Elgato Multi Mount Modular Rigging System on Tweaktown.
Tesoro Alphaeon S1 Gaming Chair on TechPowerUp.
Homematic OLED status display and Homematic IP PSU on FunkyKit.
Abkroncore Ramesses R310 gaming PC chassis on FunkyKit.

Misc Pics (19 Comments) (link)
Friday, 12-June-2020 14:35:58 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to Axe and Simon this week!

Wednesday Morning (2 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 10-June-2020 00:06:51 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Prevailing opinion at the moment seems to have Intel CPUs as best for gaming, while AMD are best for value. TechSpot decided to find out just how much faster Intel CPUs are for gaming, in a variety of games. Today we’re going to compare the Ryzen 7 3700X and Core i5-10600K in a number of games, but we’ll be doing so with low or esports level of quality settings in games such as Fortnite, World of Tanks, Rocket League, and about half a dozen other competitive titles. This is quite different to the game tests featured in our CPU reviews where we test with high and ultra quality presets in modern and often very demanding titles such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield V and Red Dead Redemption 2, to name just a few. And although in these tests we use a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and test at 1080p as well as 1440p, in many instances performance is still more limited by the GPU.

IntelInside spotted a possibly privacy issue with WhatsApp revealing your phone number, seemingly by design, to Google searches. If your number does indeed pop up, then ask whether you're OK with having it public. Many businesses would want their numbers to be. If not, then contact WhatsApp to see if it can be removed from wa.me. If you are fine with the arrangement, then make sure that number is not connected to any other account as a password-recovery verification number or a receiver for two-factor-authentication SMS codes.

Meanwhile OCClub look into MechWarrior 5 performance. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries released back in December and though some months have passed, I have returned to it as it has finally received some graphics features worth looking at. For some time it was known that the game would receive ray tracing accelerated by the RT Cores in NVIDIA's RTX Turing-based GPUs, like the RTX 2060 and RTX 2080, but what I do not recall is it being stated the game would receive DLSS support. Well, not only does it now support DLSS but it is one of the first four games to get DLSS 2.0 support, giving extra reason for me to come back and see the kind of impact it has.

Retro fans will be excited to hear of an unreleased Days of Thunder NES game being reconstructed from floppies. It's unclear why the video game was canceled, but Oberth had virtually finished the game before it was shelved. The game was discovered spread across 40 different floppy disks acquired from Oberth's family by the Video Game History Foundation earlier this year. Along with the disks obtained from the family were various materials including old computers.

Harvard made some tiny fast-moving robots. Harvard researchers have made the tiny Harvard Ambulatory Microrobot (HAMR) even tinier. The next-gen, cockroach-inspired robot is about the size of a penny, and it can run at speeds of 13.9 body lengths per second. That makes it one of the smallest and fastest microrobots to date. The team also believes it’s the most dexterous robot of its size. What could possibly go wrong?

If you've got any old computer magazines or books you'd like to see scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive, contact decryption, who's in a scanning frenzy at the moment - details in this thread.

Tuesday Morning (1 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 9-June-2020 00:39:16 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Corsair have issued a recall for some SF Series PSUs. According to the company, an investigation of RMA’d PSUs has turned up an issue with PSUs made in the last several months. When in an environment with both “high temperatures, and high humidity”, the PSUs can unexpectedly fail. The fault is apparently a highly variable one – Corsair’s notice reports units failing both out of the box and later on – but thankfully seems to be relatively benign overall, as the problem is on the AC side of the transformer, well before any power is fed to PC components. Discussion here.

Techgage have a Blender performance roundup. To greet the launch of the Blender 2.83 release, we loaded up our test rigs to generate fresh performance numbers. For rendering, we’re going to pore over CPU, GPU, CPU and GPU, and NVIDIA’s OptiX. For good measure, we’ll also look at viewport frame rates, and the impact of tile sizes with Cycles GPU rendering.

From metamorphosis, this article from a couple of months ago about how Folding@Home was the most powerful supercomputer on earth, crunching COVID cures. F@H hit its pinnacle of mindshare—and performance—in 2007, when Sony added it to the PlayStation 3. But like many other projects, it saw a gradual decline in its popularity since. This past March, however, F@H saw a sudden resurgence. Thanks to a confluence of events, notably including the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Folding@Home broke the exaFLOP barrier at least one or two years before Intel, AMD, IBM, or Cray could do it. Here’s how those events played out.

Here's an interesting article on Dyson's failed electric car project, and how close they came to success. As a technology-based car – being developed by a non-automotive company – we realised that our car was suddenly no-longer commercially viable. It was a difficult decision to stop, because hundreds of engineers, scientists and designers, had poured everything into the project and it was a great engineering achievement. But I have no regrets about having started the programme. We learned a lot and Dyson has benefited from a huge influx of engineering talent from the automotive industry – it has quickly been applied in other areas of our research and development.

Here's a timewaster from biatch, although it might teach you some useful nerd-fu: Regex Crosswords.

Tuesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 9-June-2020 00:20:31 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Storage:
ADATA Falcon 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD on TechPowerUp.
Patriot PXD Portable Solid State Drive on ThinkComputers.
Crucial BX500 240GB, 480GB and 1TB SSD on OCInside.
Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 2TB SSD on Tweaktown.
Silicon Power Stream S07 6TB USB 3.2 External HDD on FunkyKit.
Synology DS220j 2-bay & DS420j 4-bay NAS on TechGage.

Input Etc:
ASUS ROG Chakram mouse on TechPowerUp.
Cooler Master MM831 Gaming Mouse on ThinkComputers.
Cooler Master MM831 Wireless Optical Mouse on APHNetworks.
Razer Viper Mini Ultra-Light Gaming Mouse on MadShrimps.

Motherboard & CPU:
ASUS Maximus XII Formula Motherboard on HWAsylum.
Intel Core i7-10700K Review - Unlocked and Loaded on TechPowerUp.
Intel Core i9-10980HK Review: Flagship Laptop CPU on TechSpot.
ROG Maximus XII Extreme on LanOC.
Intel Core i3-10300 on TechPowerUp.

Cooling:
Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black CPU Cooler on APHNetworks.
be quiet! Pure Rock 2 CPU cooler on TechPowerUp.

Audio Visual:
FiiO FA9 Six BA Driver Earphones With Detachable Cable on NikKTech.
ASUS ROG STRIX XG279Q Gaming monitor on Guru3D.

Cases:
ABKONCORE H600X Sync Premium Middle Tower on NikKTech.
SilverStone Fara B1 Review: An Affordable, Stylish PC Case on HotHardware.

OCAU Retro Racing June 2020 - Super Hang-On (0 Comments) (link)
Monday, 8-June-2020 00:34:42 (GMT +10) - by Agg

The Retro Racing game for June 2020 is Super Hang-On from SEGA, way back in 1987. The arcade mode in Super Hang-On is similar to the original Hang-On racing against a timer with checkpoints extending playtime. However, there is a choice of four tracks to race on which are based on continents, each containing a different number of stages. Also, should the player reach the normal maximum speed of 280 km/h, a turbo button is enabled. Using this button allows the player to reach an even higher top speed of 324 km/h.

Click for the thread!

Misc Pics (16 Comments) (link)
Friday, 5-June-2020 13:41:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Friday again - enjoy the long weekend!

Friday Morning (3 Comments) (link)
Friday, 5-June-2020 00:08:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg

It's hard to not get bogged down in the negative aspects of the world at the moment, but at least the quest for space is looking up, thanks Axe. This past weekend, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft got all of the splashy headlines, and deservedly so for returning humans into space from Florida for the first time since the space shuttle’s retirement nine years ago. But the real workhorse behind the rise of SpaceX over the last decade is undoubtedly the Falcon 9 rocket.

OCClub looked into Ryzen memory scaling. Today we are going to tackle a question that spans multiple platforms and CPU generations. The main question of this topic is about a subject that has a very divided answer among computer techies and enthusiasts alike. Does memory frequency scaling correlate to an increase in CPU performance?

There was a major Windows 10 update recently, with details here and here, thanks metamorphosis. Microsoft's Windows 10 May 2020 Update is now generally available to download, with several new features to help with productivity, security and speed. The update -- also known as Windows 10 versions 2004 and 20H1, and formerly referred to as the April 2020 Update -- began rolling out to mainstream users on Wednesday, a day earlier than expected.

One interesting facet of that upgrade is HW Accelerated GPU Scheduling. In short, hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling enables graphics cards and integrated graphics solutions to manage the video RAM without a middle-man, and is supposed to improve performance across all graphics application program interfaces (APIs).

I'm a bit of a Thinkpad fanboy and a Linux geek so it's nice to see Lenovo certifying Thinkpads for Linux now. With its announcement, all of Lenovo’s mobile and desktop workstations have been certified to work with Ubuntu and Red Hat. And Lenovo isn’t be scattershot about its approach here: every single ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series workstation is supported. That is incredible commitment from Lenovo which will definitely be applauded by the Linux community, which continues to grow.

From the weird files, here's a video about cooking wagyu beef on a CPU. BBQ on AMD CPU (Meatsink). I'm amazed it copes with the heatsink being off before they put the meat on there.

Also fairly unconventional is this giant Kookaburra. An Australian sculptor has built a 13-foot-high electronic kookaburra -- which even makes the same movements and noises as the famous Australian bird. Farvardin Daliri has taken his 1,600-pound creation on trips around his neighborhood, towing it from the back of his car -- and he's planning to take it on tour when the lockdown is eased.

It may seem like things are getting pretty crazy out there right now, so here's some perspective. All projections of the future of Earth, the Solar System, and the universe must account for the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or a loss of the energy available to do work, must rise over time.[2] Stars will eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out. Close encounters between astronomical objects gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies.

Thursday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 4-June-2020 23:50:42 (GMT +10) - by Agg