|
Advertisement:
|
OCAU News |
Well, I didn't have to get over to Rochedale to return my 75GXP after all.. Kris from OCForce grabbed me on ICQ and let me know about these IBM Disk Utilities. If your IBM drive is making bad noises, might be an idea to run it through that and see how it fares. If something IS wrong, you DO have to wipe all your data to fix it.. but small price to pay I 'spose. It also has a drive "exerciser", which pretty much thrashes your drive for a half hour or so. Made the 75GXP pretty warm, and it was sitting on top of the case next to an open window. There are also tools there to enable SMART monitoring and other drive-related stuff. In short, a great resource for IBM hard drive owners.
I had a look at that SpeedFan program Agg posted yesterday, and it seems to be pretty nifty to me. It dosn't work on my A7V133 tho, so I emailed off the coder to let him know.. Anyway, had a bit of a chat with him and he said he'd really appreciate it if more people could send him in reports. Not that hard to do, once you've downloaded the program you just type in what sort of motherboard you have and click send report. Hopefully it'll lead to SpeedFan being a really useful bit of gear in the Overclockers Toolbox.. so get to it!
Jai from Insane Hardware wrote in to say that he's seen the Tyan Thunder K7 Dual AMD boards (like we reviewed here) in Aus for around $1,800.. which seems a bit out of everyones price range. Other rumors I've heard have said more around the $1,300 mark. Still a bit high, but remember - these boards are not intended for the consumer market.
Whilst the Telstra fiasco continues, One.Net customers are also getting thrown out to dry.. and have the crows pick at their bones. According to this SMH article OzEmail are going to collect One.Net's user database.. buut, according to this News Ltd one Dingo Blue are going to get em. To add to the confusion, IPrimus seem to be making a grab as well.. thanks to Narkov for some of the links.
Anandtech has a pretty timely guide up to building a High-End system.. or maybe untimely? Quite a few interesting technologies popped up at Computex, and they will no doubt become more mainstream in the months to come. Incidently, VooDoo is ~finally~ back from Taipie, and I've had a look at some of the photos he took - pretty interesting stuff!
Planet Hardware has a pretty usefull guide to backing up your system data, formatting and re-installing. Something I've been doing alot of the past week with the buggered hard drives. If you've got the hard drive space, keeping a known-stable ghost image of your OS and apps ready to go is a pretty handy move as well.. wish I knew about ghost last week.
The guys over at CPU review have apparently been pretty busy of late.. they've been working on v0.89 (Alpha) of their Memory benchmarking software - MemTach. Looks to be pretty useful, maybe as an alternative to SiSoft's Sandra?
It's been a while since we've seen some really extreme cooling as a part of overclocking attempts. Sure, there are always the crazy Japaneese with their raw-but-effective NO2 on CPU method, but the guys over at XOverclocker have been busy making a compressor based super cooling system. Sort of like the Kyrotech/Vapochill systems, except home-made and alot cheaper. Good to see.
It seems the next update to the Half-Life engine, v1.1.0.7 is going to bring voice-communication technology to the game, similar to roger-wilco. This comes right out of the blue for me, and it definitely seems a big plus. It's pretty hard typing commands to your teammates when you're bailed up fighting off a bunch of enemies.. but yelling at them is always effective. Yelling instructions at your teammates has pretty much been restricted to LANs, but this'll mean you can weird out your housemates and do it from home. Thanks to XG8 for the link. Also on HL-type news, DF showed me this screenshot from a game he had on cs_militia today.. how the heck did they manage that?
It seems Dan has forgotten about us again, but not to worry, Andrew has sent in the link to his latest review for us instead - he's found some more LED Torches, except these ones are smaller and more torch-looking than the previous lot. Looks pretty cool to me, Dan always gets the cool toys.
Hmm, PCExtremes are running a comp to give away a set of Altec Lansing ATP5 speakers.. buuuut it's one of those post-in-our-forum contests. Which I, and a large number of you, detest. But it's free. So meh.
Reviews: ABIT VP6 on Tech-Report. Swiftech MC462 borg socket-a cooler on The Tech Zone. AMD Duron 900MHz review on ClubOC. 64Mb Hercules Prophet II MX video card on Guru3D.
Return to OCAU's News Page
|
|
Advertisement:
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
|
Advertisement:
|
|
|