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Thermaltake Blue Orb II Heatsink @ Pro-Clockers
Antec TrueControl II 550 PSU @ Bjorn3D - Logitech G7 Laser Cordless Mouse @ ThinkComputers - Milwaukee 2.4v Cordless Driver @ GruntvillE - OCZ Rally Flash Drive @ CaseModGod - USB Security Key UK-01 @ ThinkComputers
Corsair’s TwinX2048-4000PT is on the review bench at R&B Mods today. If you are like me, there wasn’t a 2GB memory kit under the tree from Santa this year, so now is looking like a mighty good time to upgrade.
We have a 2gb memory kit called Twinx2048-4000PT from Corsair. With today’s more demanding games and software people are starting to buy more memory to be able to run a lag free computer.
Smart people saying stupid things is always good for a laugh. Wired has posted its 2005 Foot-In-Mouth Awards and boy are they good. It was hard to chose just one but I think this one is easily one of the biggest foot in mouth statements ever:
"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" -- Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division
USA Today looks at both the good and the bad trends in DVD movies. Some of the stuff like alternate endings and DVD extras are obvious positive trends of 2005. Retail exclusive DVDs were frowned upon.
Alternate endings. Directors have been filming alternate endings for years, but now moviegoers can see them on DVD. Director James Cameron finally gave Titanic fans the alternate ending he ultimately scrapped (Paramount, $30).
AMD today announced the AMD Alchemy™ Au1200™ processor powers Digital Cube’s latest personal media players (PMPs), the i-Station V43 series, the i-Station V43 Navi series and the SK C&C Air series. Optimized for portable entertainment devices, the AMD Alchemy Au1200 processor delivers a new generation of conveniences and features including scalable DVD-quality displays, long-lasting battery life and effortless video content transfer so consumers can easily enjoy entertainment on the go.
A frequent recipient of development accolades, ASUSTeK Computer Inc. was awarded recently by the renowned CSMOT for dedication and innovations in the field of mobile telecommunications. ASUS' engineering division for third generation (3G) mobile phones in particular, has already developed numerous patented core technologies with Intellectual Property Rights, far surpassing other competing mobile phone manufacturers in the region, while paving the way for 4G in the near future.
Hardware Zone has some good things to say about ASUS’ Extreme N7800GT 256MB in their latest review. They also said the card isn’t “revolutionary” and the bundle is getting long in the tooth and overall the price makes it hard to recommend. This cards big brother, the 7800 GTX TOP, earned our recommendation back in September.
With only lackluster overclocking and run-of-the-mill results to offer, the ASUS Extreme N7800 GT hardly lives up to its 'extreme' moniker though we had to admit that the quality and finish of the card is still top grade.
Nordic Hardware is showing off some pretty damn impressive overclocking results, getting a Celeron 1.4GHz up to 4.15GHz. Wow.
We didn't think he would stop there and he didn't. He kept pushing that poor processor even further and has now reported in 4159 MHz! That's a 197% overclock and if he can't go any further than this I have to say it would be a very sad ending as he is so close to pass a historic milestone with a 200% overclock.
Music industry sources are saying that Warner Music has been subpoenaed by the NY Attorney General in the ongoing antitrust case involving price fixing of digital downloads.
Warner Music Group Corp. has been subpoenaed by the New York Attorney General in connection with an ongoing antitrust investigation into the pricing of digital music downloads, the company said in a securities filing on Friday. The disclosure of the subpoena appeared to be the first time that the probe by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of the market for song downloads has come to light.
Christmas is over, the presents are all unwrapped…hopefully Santa brought you what you wanted for Christmas. I actually ended up with a really “geeky-yet-practical” gift that is basically an accessory for a gift I got last year. The family got me an automatic watch winder for my titanium Oakley Timebomb.
The problem with watches like the Oakley Timebomb is that it is a nice enough watch that you do not wear it every day. Since the Timebomb is kinetic, it needs to be moved every day to stay charged or you have to reset it every time you wear it. A bit of a catch 22. Solution? The Sharper Image watch winder. Pretty cool device that works on all self winding / kinetic watches. What'd you guys get?
Since the world is still recovering from Christmas, how about we do another of our famous [H]ardForum [H]appenings “self help editions”. Are you upgrading your video card any time soon? See our video card forum here. Got a new card but you have a few questions about it? Try out our handy video card FAQ. Need motherboard help? How about a list of motherboard manufacturer links? Maybe it is just memory you have a question about. I suggest our handy memory FAQ. Need help water cooling your PC? You guessed it, we have a water cooling self help thread too. Maybe you don’t have a hardware question but a software question. Problems with Spyware? We have an official anti-spyware info thread that should help. Are you a budding webmaster in need of hosting? Then you should look here. So you see, the forums really do have help for just about every topic you can think of…all you have to do is get in there and find the help you need or offer advice to those searching. As always, have fun and be safe during the holidays!!
Vantec Mach 1 MP4-7015-FC Athlon64 HSF @ FrostyTech
SanSun Arctic 500W Modular PSU @ Techniz - 3-Way Laser Mouse Shootout @ Sudhian - Logitech G-15 Gaming Keyboard @ VIA Arena - BIOS Optimization Guide Rev. 8.6.3 @ ARP - 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager USB 2.0 Drive @ Legion Hardware - 2GB G.Skill F1-4000USU2-2GBHZ Dual Channel Kit @ VR-Zone
If you are upgrading to a socket 939, SLI capable motherboard in the near future, give this ABIT AN8 SLI review at MVKTech a look. On a related note, you can see our evaluation of the FATAL1TY branded AN8 SLI here.
The ABIT AN8 SLI is a very solid mainboard making use of the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset. The nForce4 SLI chipset is the top of the line for mainboards powering the AMD Athlon 64 processor platform.
Those crazy crustaceans at Mad Shrimps have a nice Athlon 64 heatsink roundup posted today for your viewing pleasure. I’d definitely check this one out if you are in the market for a new HSF for your A64 rig.
What did I learn after more than 140 hours of testing and data processing? Testing inside a case reduces the performance differences between the heatsinks a lot!. Almost all the high end heatsink tested today deliver comparable performance, which is of course a good thing for you, the reader, as it will be hard to make a “wrong purchase”.
Internet Security Systems said last Friday that the chance of the recent Symantec security vulnerability being leveraged by a worm is “low”. Well, at least they are confident.
The vulnerability in Symantec's anti-virus line disclosed earlier this week isn't a big risk, a rival security firm said Friday. Internet Security Systems' X-force research group said in an online alert that although the vulnerability is serious, the "likelihood of this vulnerability being leveraged by a worm is low."
If you had to choose, what would you select as the 50 greatest gadgets of the last 50 years? PCWorld has a pretty decent list, check it out and see what you think of their choices..
After a lot of Web surfing, spreadsheet wrangling, and some near fistfights, we emerged with the following list. Some items in our Top 50 are innovative devices that appeared briefly and then were quickly consigned to museums and future appearances on eBay, but whose influence spread widely. Others are products we use every day--or wish we could.
Don’t let the lagging sales of the GameCube fool you, Nintendo is on a roll with over 5 million Nintendo DS handhelds selling in only 14 months. Laugh all you want at games like Nintendogs and Gentle Brain Exercises, Nintendo dominates the sales charts in both software and hardware in Japan and hitting the 5 million mark world wide for the DS is equally impressive.
Nintendo's Game Boy Advance took 14 months to hit the 5 million mark in Japan, and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 took 17 months, the Kyoto-based company said.
Everyone here at HardOCP would like to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, or whatever you may or may not be celebrating today. You guys have made it a great year and 2006 is looking to be even better. I hope your families are healthy and happy. For those of you facing challenges this season, you are in our prayers. My family has been blessed with good health and it is something that is truly invaluable. I don’t share my children too often, but as you can see below, there are a lot of smiling faces around the Bennett household this morning.
Again, a huge “thank you” for all of you that helped with the Child’s Play Charity donations this year. Everyone at HardOCP is proud to be associated with such a caring reader base. There is no doubt that you helped bring a least a little happiness to some sick kids and that is truly a blessing to them, their families, and their doctors and nurses as well. You will likely never know the true impact you are having on children and their families that need it so much.
Personal thanks to my wife Suzanne for raising good kids and taking care of me. Thanks to my mom and dad for still being daily HardOCP readers, or at least telling me that. (I guess we will know after this eh? ;) ) A big thanks to you guys for all the support you have shown HardOCP over the years. I promise to try my best to keep making it better and to make it continue our tradition of looking out for our cyber-family.
Now I am done being mushy and have a very fine bottle of small batch Kentucky bourbon (thanks to my sister-in-law “Etta” in Kentucky) that needs to be shared with wife’s side of the family that we will be spending the rest of the day with (all 50+ of them). They happen to be a bunch of coonasses from New Orleans. Oysters and crawfish for Christmas day? You bet. It is almost starting to feel like a Texas tradition.
Well tommorow is the day we all rush out and return, exchange or upgrade those presents, while the transit strike in New York may have added a kick to online shopping, many consumers may be in for a rude surprise having inadvertently agreed to far stricter online return policies then they are accustomed to. Of course we all know about the pitfalls of shipping and restocking fees, we're geeks.
As retailers set more strict return policies, unwanted gifts can cause headaches on both sides. Online retailers may receive more complaints over returns this year, if only because they are poised to post record sales. U.S. online holiday sales will jump roughly 24 to 25 percent this year, according to projections from two major market research firms.
To add to the mayhem of tomorrow it seems that Visa is dealing with a data breach again. How large it is and which client was compromised has not been disclosed, but its about par for the course these days.
The statement came in response to a News.com inquiry related to customers whose Visa debit cards had been put on fraud watch or deactivated due to a security breach. The customers include a San Francisco Bay Area man whose Wells Fargo-issued card was deactivated this week and a couple in Ohio whose card was placed on a watch.
Here is to hoping it is an isolated incident not another 40 million card breach.
ArsTechnica reports that AMD is forecasting a shortage of Athlon 64 3500+, 3800+, the dual-core Athlon 64 3800+ and the low-end Sempron 2600+ and 2800+. Do to high demand this time rather than difficulties in wafer yields, they simply burned through thier stock of packaging materials, that would be the the materials that actually house the CPU silicon on the chip, not retail boxes.
"AMD is experiencing unprecedented demand for our desktop processors and this unprecedented demand has depleted our supply of packaging components," stated a spokeswoman for the company.
The Seattle Times covers congressional response to allegations made by a series New York Times articles that the volume of information harvested by the NSA from telephone and internet communication is far far larger than previously admitted to.
"To the extent that the NSA is collecting information on people who are suspected of no wrongdoing whatsoever, it presents some very critical privacy concerns," said Marcia Hofmann, who leads the government-oversight section at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Lisa Graves, senior counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "We're seeing an administration that's engaging in a lot of legal hairsplitting to justify behavior that's not authorized by the law."
In a related story SeattlePI covers how government records show that the check and balance originally setup to monitor such eavesdropping was circumvented. The 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret and little known backwater of the federal government, wasn't being cooperative enough and was simply bypassed.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, adopted by Congress in the wake of President Nixon's misuse of the NSA and the CIA before his resignation over Watergate, sets a high standard for court-approved wiretaps on Americans and resident aliens inside the United States. To win a court-approved wiretap, the government must show "probable cause" that the target of the surveillance is a member of a foreign terrorist organization or foreign power and is engaged in activities that "may" involve a violation of criminal law.
Phoronix one of the few sites creating hardware reviews this weekend offers up the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 for your consideration. ASRock a division of ASUS offers cost effective and shall we say creative motherboards to the enthusiast market.
The engineers at ASRock certainly push the limits when it comes to creativity and the possibilities for both AMD and Intel motherboards. ASRock's products range from motherboards supporting multiple socket types to motherboards offering both AGP/PCI Express graphics support along with DDR/DDR2, and finally motherboards that offer upgradeable support for components that are not yet available to the general public. Part of ASRock's success through these bizarre motherboard designs and low cost manufacturing has been accomplished by implementing Chipsets from alternative manufacturers such as ALI, ULI, SiS, and VIA.
