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I've always been keen to recommend Crucial in the past when people wanted RAM with a lifetime warranty that works as expected. Not until a few years ago did Crucial start offering their Ballistix overclocking RAM. Fast forward to the new DDR3 days of today and we find a new Ballistix PC3-16000 kit that offers speeds of 2000MHz! You'll be pressed to find a board that can even handle this speed, I know I didn't have one.
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My first orb was the Thermaltake Golden Orb way back when the Abit BP6 was the thing to have. Imagine having to shave a bit of a heatsink off to have it fit on your motherboard. Those were the days when you had to work hard for every once of performance. These days, you can squeeze so much out of new CPUs. Thermaltake has released a brand new orb, the DuOrb. It combines heatpipes and two huge orb coolers.
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Thermaltake makes an entire range of PC supplies including cases, cooling, hardware and much more. The last Thermaltake product I reviewed was the excellent Armor full tower case. Thermaltake is known for making great cases and the M9 looks like a mid tower case with ventilation as its prime agenda. Should the Antec Nine Hundred be worried? Perhaps...
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Antec steps up to the plate to deliver a brand new case in the "Hundred" series. Betting on the success of the excellent Nine Hundred, Antec has released a lower end model dubbed, the Three Hundred. Known as the " Versatile Case," will the new case stand out from its bigger, badder brother? Probably not, but it is at a better price point that its sibling.
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The USB 2.0 4 Port KVM Auto Switch is an economical option for those who in need of a KVM that can handle a more expansive computing setup. Let's check out this product and see if it is the solution for ones multi-computing needs...
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Quote: The Osiris turned out to be one beautiful case. Hiper has really made an excellent product, with great attention to detail. It appears refined and polished, and in no way comes off as gaudy. No matter what side you look to you will find it blends perfectly with the rest. If you are looking for a clean, easy to work with, extremely well made mid-tower case, you should definitely consider the Osiris.
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The Sugo SG02-F is described as their most affordable case yet and it offers an improved layout over the original SG01. Unlike the revolutionary differences between the SG01 and SG03, the SG02-F is just an evolution of the SG01 design with expanded support for graphics cards and is composed of a steel body. Thanks to these design improvements, this SFF case is capable of handling long graphics cards such as the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 and GeForce 8800 Ultra. The SG02-F is quite similar to the original SG02 except for turning from aluminum to steel construction and some other enhancements. With a price tag under $80 USD, does this case still deliver on the features and exceptional build quality we have become to know and love from this high-end manufacturer or have they cut too many corners to achieve this pricing?
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NVIDIA usually pleases the enthusiast community with their product launches, and no launch has been more memorable lately than the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS graphic card launch more than eighteen months ago. So when the 9800 GTX product line launched on April 1st, 2008 there was a lot of commotion surrounding the new crown prince. With such a successful debut of the 8800 GTX back in 2006, the level of enthusiast skepticism surrounding the new 9800 GTX was unquestionably high. First came the lower mid-level 9600 GT, and then the ultra-high level GeForce 9800 GX2 which utilized two G92 GPU cores. Yet title of fastest single-GPU video card remains the honor of NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX. Benchmark Reviews has already helped launch this product, and now we're back to test the performance of Foxconn's new GeForce 9800 GTX Standard OC Edition 512MB video card 9800GTX-512N.
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I honestly thought that we were running out of letters to use for overclocked 9600GT cards. BFG pretty much has OC and OC2 locked down, Zotac has AMP!, ASUS has TOP and XFX has become tired of just using XXX, now opting for words like Alpha Dog. TwinTech has opted for XXT for its top overclocked 9600GT. It's been ages since we've seen anything from TwinTech, but the last time we looked we were pretty impressed with what they offered.
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* Lenovo tests the waters in the LCD market with a product that we've been waiting quite some time for -- a 22 LCD monitor that offers a 1920 x 1200 native resolution. But is its resolution alone enough reason for you to give the nod to the L220X, or is it worth waiting for other manufacturers to follow?
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Occasionally here at OCIA.net we receive review requests from overseas = companies that we've never heard of before. Such was the case with = computer and home electronics manufacturer NorthQ. Based in Denmark, = NorthQ offers chassis, cooling and power supply products as well as = other electronics for home and car. Today I will be taking a look at = their Siberian Tiger water cooling system for AMD and Intel processors.
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To demonstrate the raw power of Nehalem, Intel first started encoding raw HD footage into 1080p Blu-ray format and while we didn't get any numbers, it handled it without a sweat at all and was on track to complete in record time with solid CPU utilization over all eight threads. Next up we got a look at a program called Deep Viewer which brings a new way at how we could be looing at old photos in the not so distance future. Intel had a monitor setup with touch capabilities and were showing off how Nehalem handled accessing and processing huge amounts of data in terms of photos and mapping in real-time.
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Under the heatsink is a whole lot of GDDR3, which in itself doesn't mean much--you can find a pile of budget cards with a gig of RAM, the extra memory incapable of boosting their meager performance--but the 3870 is plainly able to fill its frame buffer. If it were truly a budget card, it would come off as sheer marketing; with a high-end card like this, it really does make a difference. The last great ATI card was the HD 2900 XT, a spectacular misfire. But despite it's ridiculous power consumption, sub-par video processing, and tremendous heat with the blower to match, it still beat out the 512MB HD 3870. I hoped that this redesigned 3870 would have what it takes to finally put out the year-old performance despot. And it does, in almost every way.
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At this test station these two individuals were individually testing Nano processors at various speeds and temperatures to see if they pass stress testing. If you are curious what Centuar was testing you are in luck. Centaur was checking to see if the VIA Nano CPU's were stable at 1.8GHz at three different temperatures (85C, 5C and then 25C)with 1.1V on production platforms. The processors that pass testing at this stage move along to become VIA Nano L2100 processors, which are the 1.8GHz processors. I was able to see VIA Nano processors get speed binned right in front my eyes...
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How can you not love the 9600GT? It's everywhere. It seems that every company is making at least five different versions of the card; stock clocked, overclocked, 512MB, 1GB, active cooling, passive cooling, dual slot, single slot, HDMI, Display Port, DVI and so much more. It is the card that caters to everyone. GIGABYTE is here today with the heat-pipe version that carries with it 512MB of memory. Silent cards are extremely important to some people, but it was generally limited to low-end models in the past.
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The Samsung HT-X810 was one of the coolest soundbars announced at CES 2008, mostly because of the 5.8GHz wireless subwoofer. That plus Bluetooth connectivity, a USB port, HDMI output, and an on-board DVD/CD player put it ahead of most competitors, and the glossy black styling matches Samsung's HDTV line (especially our 40-incher) perfectly. At nearly $700, it isn't an entry-level product, but it's a lean, mean home theater system that can eliminate a lot of the clutter of more traditional setups.
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If you live in the US, you have probably seen TV commercials about the analog TV signal being switched off in February of 2009. For old home TV sets, there is a converter that can be purchase and the government is even stepping in to help subsidize some of the expenses for the converter. However, for thoes users who mainly use their computer to watch TV via a TV tuner, they may be out of luck unless they upgrade their old TV tuner to a new one that supports digital signals.
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So why not just get two 3870s and rub a little CrossFire into your box? There are two reasons, really. For most people, that's just not an option. Dual-PCI-Express can easily tag a Benjamin onto the price of a motherboard, and, in Micro-ATX land, it's a mythical beast that visits overclockers in their dreams. And there's another thing: regular 3870s get the lower-binned GPUs--the faster-clocking chips go into the X2s. But, lastly, the 3870 promises something else: tri- and quad-CrossFireX. But that begs the initial question: now that the release is behind us, how much awesome stuck to the HD 3870 X2, and how much washed away?
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Up on the review block today is the Super Talent T800UX2GC4 DDR2 PC2-6400 800Mhz 2x1Gb Ram, I'm sure most people are familiar with Super Talent, they makes quite a few products related to memory like USB Drive, SSD Drives and of course regular memory. The ram I have today from them is very sleek looking with it's dark blue heatspreaders, but looks don't mean much if it doesn't perform, so let's just jump right on in and see just how well it does perform...
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Honeywell is not a name you think of when you think of LCD Monitors, actually they are very new into the market. Recently they partnered with Soyo to produce LCD monitors and televisions. We got a chance to take a look at one of their latest LCD's the very affordable Topaz S 24-inch LCD monitor. Now Honeywell has a new LCD that is a more advanced and premium version of the Topaz S. Let's take a look at the Arius 22-inch Widescreen LCD Monitor!
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While most early adopters and Gen Y-ers are used to the idea of watching TV on their PC using services like Bebo, Hulu, Joost or a million alternatives, now the rest of the world is finally catching up. Have yet to join the party? It's about time you tuned in - and upgraded your monitor to really enjoy all of these groovy options as they're meant to be experienced. Thankfully, Dell's new Ultra-Sharp 2408WFP 24-inch widescreen flat panel monitor can help.
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Quote: The comfort level of the Discovery 925 is incredibly nice. After finding the right size to wear, you start to wonder why manufacturers haven't come up with a similar design yet. A friend of mine who has small ears and has always had problems wearing in-the-ear type of headsets was able to fit the Discovery 925 with no problems at all. It doesn't matter if you are left-ear or a right-ear Bluetooth wearer, you can switch between ears with ease. Some headsets like the Jawbone require you to physically change the hardware for this basic switch. After using the 925 for a few days, there is no way I want to go back to the ancient fit of an ear hook like the Jawbone or deep in the ear canal of the Gennum. These headsets are great performers, but their fit is not as comfortable, free and versatile as the 925...
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Quote: The FZ120 Zen does what I believe ZEROtherm wanted it to do, and it does a great job. It has performance very close to that of the Nirvana, is quieter than the Nirvana, and is cheaper than the Nirvana. The Zen can be found for $39 + shipping, and that's a steal. With a price like that the Zen is an inexpensive upgrade for anyone, and is almost (depending where you shop) $15-20 cheaper than its bigger brother, the Nirvana...
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Quote: The ECS A780GM-A Black Series AMD 780G motherboard wound up being quite interesting. It offers quite a few appealing features, such as a back panel full of useful connections, onboard HD audio and video with HDMI output, an integrated RAID controller, support for AMD's Hybrid CrossFire and their new Phenom processors. With such a selection of goodies onboard, the relatively low price initially seems too good to be true.
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Recently, ASUS was among the first companies to put a pair of ATI HD 3850s on a single graphics card, for a more affordable dual-GPU experience. I reviewed a Radeon HD 3850 (single GPU) earlier this year, and was very impressed with it.performance just shy of an 8800GT at $100 less. A pair on one card should be an awesome experience. Today I will be looking at the ASUS EAH3850 X2 1GB, twin 3850s with 512MB each, one of the few on the market. Will it meet my dual-3850 expectations? How will it compare to the 9800GTX, nVidia's top of the line single-GPU card? Read on and see!
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You get what you pay for. This is true in most products and when you pay for the Ballistix PC3-16000 you better get what you paid for, and you do.
Said By Takoyaki
Said By ExShinobi
Gestapo!
what the f*ck i like that oh you people still being crazy and stuff!!! YEAH!!!
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Intel has four new desktop chipsets to show off from this year's Computex trade show in Taiwan. The G45 and the G43 focus on HD video playback by way of a new Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD integrated graphics chip. The P45 brings support for faster memory and is the first mainstream Intel-made chipset with two graphics card slots. A scaled-down P43 chipset rounds out the new 4 Series. All of the chipsets use Intel's familiar LGA 775 processor interface, which means support for Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad desktop CPUs. Intel has also added a 1,333MHz front side bus to each chipset, as well as support for DDR3 RAM, as well as DDR2 or DDR3 RAM at speeds up to 1,333MHz.
Said By KHo
Hi! I'm one of five people on this site that can form a complete sentence! Welcome to the forums!!!
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My first orb was the Thermaltake Golden Orb way back when the Abit BP6 was the thing to have. Imagine having to shave a bit of a heatsink off to have it fit on your motherboard. Those were the days when you had to work hard for every once of performance. These days, you can squeeze so much out of new CPUs. Thermaltake has released a brand new orb, the DuOrb. It combines heatpipes and two huge orb coolers.
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Thermaltake makes an entire range of PC supplies including cases, cooling, hardware and much more. The last Thermaltake product I reviewed was the excellent Armor full tower case. Thermaltake is known for making great cases and the M9 looks like a mid tower case with ventilation as its prime agenda. Should the Antec Nine Hundred be worried? Perhaps...
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Antec steps up to the plate to deliver a brand new case in the "Hundred" series. Betting on the success of the excellent Nine Hundred, Antec has released a lower end model dubbed, the Three Hundred. Known as the " Versatile Case," will the new case stand out from its bigger, badder brother? Probably not, but it is at a better price point that its sibling.
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It has been a very long time since a graphics card has passed by the review bench of ASE Labs. Sapphire steps up to the plate with their release of the Radeon HD3870 Toxic Edition that hopes to earn some of your hard earned cash. With AMD's support of open source, the ATI partners are in a good position to conqueror the Linux market and the future to bright. Sapphire is the biggest producer of ATI cards and we will see how their product performs.
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The Altair A380 is an affordable slim HTPC case, with a very clean look coupled with a very durable construction. The included power supply is 80 Plus certified and can easily power today's mATX boards with multi core CPUs. Also included is an infrared remote control which is compatible with Windows Vista.
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The Intel P45 boards will sport a die shrink of the onboard components to 65nm as opposed to the previous 90nm standard. This die shrink would lead us to expect less power consumption as well as improved power efficiency. The P45 also offers official support for PCIe 2.0 with more adaptable lanes to help better support the use of multiple GPUs based on the CrossFire architecture. The P45 based boards will feature the new ICH10 series southbridge, which is extremely close in its feature set to its ICH9 brethren, but the primary difference between the two is the ICH10 series has removed LPT and legacy PATA support entirely. While not officially offering support for the new 1600 MHz FSB processors we have it on good authority that most of the P45 boards will support these chips.
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ZEROtherm has really made a name for themselves over the past year. The last 3 products we reviewed from them scored very high and all of them have received awards. But there are still people who have not heard of them. Well ZEROtherm has announced a new cooler, the ZEN FZ 120, which they were kind enough to send us. Will it perform up to what we have grown to expect from ZEROtherm? Read on to find out...
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The 80GB Zune has undeniable cool factor, given its big screen and built-in WiFi. But rather than trumping the competition, it falls in that gray area between the somewhat ho-hum iPod Classic and the rip-roaring iPod Touch. We applaud Microsoft for trying to make the hardware and software as un-Microsoft (read: user-friendly) as possible, but even this second-gen model has some kinks that need working out. And although we love the wireless sync and recently upgraded song-sharing features, we hope future generations will include more practical WiFi features like a Web browser.
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The T-Power N750 comes loaded with features and accessories. BIOS options leave nothing to be desired by even the most adventurous overclocker, giving a solid platform for AMD fans. I love the package of accessories and software included and NVIDIA finally brings PCI Express 2.0 support to SLI configs for AMD CPUs. While onboard video is less than stellar, adding a high end video card will allow for some energy savings.
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While the RadeonHD developers have been busy working on Radeon HD 3200 / 780 Series support and other features for this open-source ATI R500/600+ driver, the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support has been lagging behind. Earlier this month Matthias Hopf was successful in getting DRM working on an RS690 GPU and he has published RadeonHD DRM code into his personal development tree, but no code has yet to reach master. Meanwhile, as the xf86-video-ati driver is using AtomBIOS, they are able to spend more time working on the 3D features and other areas and less time banging on registers or even waiting on register documentation to arrive. David Airlie has been working on the R500 3D support along with Alex Deucher and Corbin Simpson. The trio has been making some great headway towards open-source 3D goodness for Radeon X1000 and HD 2000/3000 GPUs. Their most recent efforts have focused around the R500 fragment program code and today they have reached a monumental milestone.
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With more and more emphasis being put on the cooling proficiency and the quietness of cooling products, many people are beginning to look try different ways to keeping their PC chilled at a reasonable noise level. One of the most popular methods is to purchase a passive cooler, I.E. one without a fan. But can these fanless coolers really live up to their fan-covered ancestors? That's the question that begs to be answered, so Coolermaster have sent me the Z600 to check out.
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The Hypersonic Avenger AG2 notebook was just launched on May 22nd, 2008, but that doesn't mean we haven't had a sample for well over a month now. The Hypersonic Avenger AG2 notebook is the same thing as the Clevo M72R notebook, so Hypersonic was able to get a production sample in our hands before they officially started to carry this recently released 12.1 notebook. This gave us the chance to do a long term test drive, which is something we rarely get to do in the fast paced computer industry. For the past month we have used the Hypersonic Avenger AG2 as our traveling notebook...
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MSI held its ECOlution press conference in Taipei this afternoon and it was quite an upbeat event with fancy green dancers, attended by a sizeable audience of local Taiwanese press. It seems a tad strange for MSI to hold a press event of this size just one week before the Computex trade show begins in Taipei but there was plenty for us to see early before the show begins. In the following posts we will show you plenty of shots of the WIND notebook and WIND PC along with a bunch of other goodies which focus on power saving and monitoring.
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Quote: The Aeneon XTune 2GB DDR3-1600 dual channel memory kit wound up surprising me. While I didn't expect it to perform poorly, I did not anticipate that it would keep up with similar kits with tighter timings. Despite being rated for 1600MHz at 9-9-9-28 timings, it managed to perform on par with other kits with timings of 8-8-8-34 and 7-7-7-18.
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Today marks our first look at the heatpipe tower design. This design isn't relatively new to the industry but is different from what we have become used to here at ModSynergy. Regular coolers have a fan that blows downward on the heatpipe, and hot air can escape anywhere it wants to. But with tower style coolers, the heatpipes are raised vertically and the hot air is exhausted through the left side of the case. This idea seems like a much more efficient design because the hot air is being directed to where your rear exhaust fan lies. Read on to see if this indeed makes a difference. Today also marks our first review of a ZEROtherm product. ZEROtherm has recently released the new ZEN FZ120 CPU cooler and we are happy to provide you an in-depth look at what you can expect having tested this heatsink in our new workbench consisting of the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 spitting out easily 100W of juice. We'll see if this heatsink can cool down or crashes and burns. Oh yeah, overclocked results @ 3.0GHz are included (spitting out well over 100 watts of heat) so read on to see how the ZEN FZ120 performs.
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The X300 notebook has an Intel Core Duo SL7100 (1.2GHz, 4MB L2, 800MHz FSB) CPU. The monitor is a 13.3 WXGA+ TFT (LED backlight). There is a 3x3 UltraConnect II which is a connectivity suite offering wireless LAN, UWB (UltraWide Band), Bluetooth and numerous wireless WAN choices including a system that utilizes native GPS functionality that is built into the X300. The hard drive is unique in that it is a solid state drive (SSD) 64GB in size. What this means is that the hard drive is not a rotating disk in the traditional sense, but rather comprises of several chips with addressable memory arrayed in a specific format to prolong the usability of the SSD drive.
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NZXT has recently been coming out with some great mid tower cases. ThinkComputers got the chance to take a look at the new NZXT Tempest case. This case is probably different than most other cases you've seen because it has a bottom, rather than top, mounted PSU. It also includes plenty of features for overclockers, water coolers, and storage fanatics, while still displaying a sleek design. NZXT calls this the Airflow King because it includes SIX 120mm and larger fans. Don't worry, they're probably quieter than the case you have right now.
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The AMD Phenom X2 was announced quite some time ago but still hasn't seen the light of day; instead we were greeted by the X3 Phenom, a new breed of processor, first in the market to offer a Triplecore solution. This CPU is priced lower than AMD's own X4 and Intel Core 2 Duo series. In our review today we test the Phenom X3 8450 and compare it to an AMD X4 and Intel C2D.
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The Thermaltake Armor+ MX Case offer lots of great features. One bug plus with this case is air circulation. With two 120mm fans as well as a massive 23cm fan on the left side panel it provides tremendous airflow. This will keep the computer components inside the case cool in any environment. This case also has a tooless design for installation of drives in the drive bays and cards in the expansion slots. Watch the video to find out more.
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It has been over a year since ATI got into the Folding@home project and it seems that the time is right for NVIDIA to join in! Mr. Vijay Pande himself was in San Jose today and we managed to catch up with him while he was giving the presentation on behalf of Stanford University on how folding is going to work on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. This is a must read if you are interested in distributed computing.
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Intel has thrown a new chipset into the fray to replace one of its aging components. P45 is set to be the new mainstream chipset from Intel to replace its aging P35 chipset by bringing some new features and support to the table. For our initial tests, we have been handed two GIGABYTE motherboards based around this chipset, one at the top end of the spectrum and one for the mainstream marketplace. Today we test the Intel P45 Express based GIGABYTE EP45-DQ6 and EP45-DS3R.
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If you are like me, and have been happy with mid-range cards, spend a few hours at your favorite game played at the highest settings, using AA, and higher resolutions while using an upper end card, and you'll probably realize that you've been in denial for all of this time. Today I will be looking at the Asus EN9800GTX Top, a factory overclocked version of nVidia's latest top-of-the-line single-GPU video card, with 512mb of DDR3 memory. Will this video card finally make me realize that rather than being practical when buying mid-range cards, I've just been cheap? Read on and see!
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Recently ATI refreshed their line up of video cards, and they were nice enough to send one over for review, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. Added to this new card were HD AC3 audio, 1080P video output, DX10 support for Vista, and a few other suprises. The testing and review took awhile, but I wanted to make sure things were done right.
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Sony has a winner with its MDR-AS50G sport headphones: They're lightweight, they fit securely, and they sound good indoors and outside. Their in-ear design is definitely geared towards fitness nuts rather than commuters; they don't block out a whole lot of sound, which could be a plus or a minus depending on where you work out. The low price ($49.99 USD) is a big plus, since we tend to burn through exercise headphones faster than we burn through calories.