[H]ardNews 2nd Edition

Sapphire Atlantis 9800XT:

If you are interested in the baddest video card on the planet right now, the Radeon 9800XT 256MB would be a pretty safe bet….but which flavor of 9800XT should you get? HotterthanHellHardware is here with a Sapphire Atlantis board to help you answer that question. Here is a clip from the review:

You can't evaluate a video card using benchmarks alone, so before we got down to the business of testing the Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 XT's performance, we spent some time with a few popular games. There's no point is dropping serious money on a video card, if the games you want to play look terrible - especially when there are so many options at the moment.

Battle Hardening:

Here is an interesting tech article on battle hardening buildings with a bomb blast simulator. Battle [H]ardening = cool. Thanks Blair.

“These controlled and repeatable tests we will do with the blast simulator will allow us to create and validate computer tools that can then be used to tailor the design and assessment of important facilities,” said Frieder Seible, principal investigator on the bomb blast simulator at UCSD.

LN2 Motherboard Dunking:

Cooling your system with LN2 is one thing, dunking your whole damn system in it is another. OcTools thought this would be a good idea so they are sharing their experiences with you. Goggles? Check. Liquid Nitrogen? Check. Big Brass Balls? Check.

There was argument as to whether what sort of cooling we would use for this sequel. The intercooler with pump was definitely out of the question as we would just use the same FC-40 we used in the last experiment. Initially we thought of just making the intercooler's bore a bit bigger but we later realized it is impossible to pump that Fluorinert once it hits its pour point. Plus the thought of total liquid nitrogen immersion also crossed our minds