Tech News
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Flashback Friday - Dual Pentium 450Mhz
Believe it or not, there was a time when processors only had a single core and to get better performance you had to double up. For this Flashback Friday I give you a Tyan Tiger S1832D Dual Pentium motherboard. This particular motherboard was designed for Pentium II based processors however I was running dual P3 450Mhz procs and matched it up with some PC-100 memory.
It is actually rather painful to think back on those days knowing that we can buy 8 and 10 core processors but when this system was built it was considered an elite enthusiast PC that I used mostly for 3DStudio MAX rendering, animation and AutoCAD. Of course I played games on this machine and it ran flawless.
Of course after a year or so I upgraded to a dual Pentium 3 800 EB based system and this particular motherboard became part of a development server.
Some interesting things about this board is the single AGP slot (important at the time) and a jumper based CPU selection. Those jumpers would set the FSB and multiplier and was an easy way to overclock the system at the hardware level. Tyan was/is a US based system board designer and was well known for their server board designs and multiprocessor motherboards for workstations.
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SethBling Builds a Working Atari 2600 in Minecraft
I have been known to play a little Minecraft from time to time and even built a few Redstone circuits. Nothing complex just a few hidden doors, lights and stuff like that. Redstone itself is pretty easy to understand, you flip a switch, the redstone lights and something happens. Flip the switch again and it goes back to the ready state.
A computer works in much the same way, On = 1 and Off = 0. Extrapolate that outwards and you can build a computer program, processor, memory etc all within the confines of Minecraft.
SethBling has published a video showing off his Atari 2600 emulator and three games. Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Pac Man. Back in the day these ran from a cartridge and at about 1Mhz on the 2600. For the Minecraft version it takes about four hours to render a single frame.
This makes the Atari game unplayable but does prove a point that given enough time you can do just about anything in Minecraft.
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20 of the Worst PC Setups – November 2016 @ ThinkComputers
Back when I was in college I had this "hand me down" coffee table that was wooden with a glass inlaid top. It was maybe 2 feet off the ground at about the same height as the seat part of a couch.
Well I used that coffee table as my computer desk for 6 months and used my couch as a place to sit down. I didn't have a proper desk or chair at the time and while my drafting table would have worked great I needed it for drawing. Needless to say, it wasn't very ergonomic.
Point is, we all have had a bad PC setup, some are forced on us, like mine, and others are just people being stupid. Lets see which is which
I’m sure at some point you’ve had a bad PC setup. Maybe moving into a new place, waiting for a new desk to arrive or you just ran out of room. I can remember my horrible PC setups from when I was living at the dorms in college. If you have ever ventured over to the Shitty Battlestations sub-reddit you will find a lot of horrible PC setups. We will are going to pick 20 each month and feature them as 20 of the Worst PC setups for that month. Here are some of the bad ones from November!
I've been thinking about putting something like this together, If you have any ideas on how to collect the bad setups let me know.
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Hardware Asylum and GeIL Memory Holiday Hardware Giveaway
Hello Everyone, I wanted to wish you and yours happy holidays!
It has been a great year and I'm looking forward to what 2017 brings. To help close out this year on a high note I teamed up with GeIL Memory to give away some awesome computer hardware!
We have three GeIL DDR4 Memory kits up for grabs along with a SilverStone Primera PM01 Case and Zotac GTX 1050 Graphics Card
Good Luck!
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Noctua NH-D15S versus NH-D15 CPU Cooler Review @ Legit Reviews
You know, I was super excited to see what kind of cluster this review would turn out to be and wouldn't you know it, I was totally bombarded by ads, so much in fact that I had to exit the site. Yep, done and done.
Had I actually gone to the site to check out the review I could have told you that the NH-D15S and NH-D15 are virtually identical with the S edition coming with one fan while the D15 has two. The performance advantages of having two fans is pretty good though as I have noted in my own reviews it depends on many factors and the fact that you get a diminishing return as the second fan is getting warmer air from the first.
Lets see what Legit has to say.
Noctua – This is a brand that you have likely heard of throughout the years, but if not, you really need to look into them more. Noctua is well known for their highly successful and high quality CPU coolers, cooling fans, and thermal pastes. It has been a while since we’ve looked at a product from Noctua, so today we’re going to take a look at a cooler that is nearly identical to one that we previously reviewed, but with a couple revisions. This particular cooler, the NH-D15S, was originally released on August 28, 2015, so it has been around for a while, but still performs like a king. Take a look!
Umm. uhhh. I get the gist and I'm no expert but.. ya.
Well, anyhow check out the review if you want and fire up the adblocker. You'll need it. Then, if you are curious check out my review of the Noctua NH-D15 150mm D-Type Premium Heatsink. It ws published in June of 2014 and was the version with the 150mm fan shaped like a 140mm. In that review I test a single fan vs dual fan performance with a whopping 4 degree load difference.
OR if you want to see what the actual NH-D14 looked like head on over and check out my review of the Noctua NH-D14 Heatsink which is still hosted on Ninjalane. It was published back in April 2010 and strangely enough showed a similar C/W curve to the D15. Humm, I wonder why.
.Now I'm getting the itch to test both coolers head to head, Lets see, where did I put that D14.. Humm
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AUKEY KM-G3 Keyboard @ techPowerUp
Not sure I would trust a no-name brand keyboard on Amazon but, that isn't to say it is bad either. Though if you think about it why buy a low dollar unknown keyboard when you could just as well buy something more well known OR pick up something at the thrift store with 10 years of human slime between the keys and cigarette ash.
I mean just sayin.
You might not have heard of AUKEY, and I thought I hadn't when they contacted me to review their new keyboard, but then I looked at the USB hub I had ordered from Amazon and realized that it was made by AUKEY, as was one of my power packs for my phone. AUKEY seems to be one of those brands that hide in plain sight as they have a lot of products on Amazon and seem well regarded.
It does seem to have RGB lights and features "Outemu Blue Switches" along with a clear plastic top so, overall not a bad combo?
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Throwback Time: Foxconn WinFast NFPIK8AA
Member when AMD ruled the enthusiast performance world with their A64 architecture? I member I also member when NVIDIA SLI was limited to only two GPUs. This wasn't due to internal politics or some sort of driver limitation. No, it was hardware based and largely because CPU performance at the time wasn't all that good. DX9 games still didn't use the GPU all that much and video cards were still migrating away from the AGP realm.
In this throwback Thursday I’m going to show you a little known enthusiast motherboard from Foxconn called the WinFast NFPIK8AA. This was a workstation class motherboard that not only supported dual graphics cards but was double everything. Dual cards, Dual channel memory, Twice as many SATA ports and Dual NVIDIA CK8-04-IO4 chipsets. The board required Opteron based AMD SledgeHammer processors and registered DDR memory.
The board really was a workstation class machine and allowed system builders to use PCI Express video cards in a professional capacity instead of just to play games. Having twice as many chipsets onboard doubled the normal PCI Express bandwidth and doubled your storage capacity which was important back then due to hard drives being smaller. Big RAID means big storage and speed.
I ran this motherboard for a short while and was even able to overclock it despite having a locked multiplier and registered memory. This was accomplished by using the low latency Patriot memory and lots of trial and error.
Saying “they don’t make them like this anymore” is an understatement as this board is extreme even by today’s standards. While we sit back and watch CPU performance stagnate and PCI Express lanes double every few years there is some comfort in knowing that there is a reason for all of this.
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Realforce RGB @ LanOC Reviews
The force is real with this one. I mean with a name like Realforce you'd better start pumping that iron and draggin that sled because you'll be in for a real workout.
Or, you know it could be just a compact keyboard with RGB lighting effects and a marketing department who is completely out of ideas. I know, I've been there.
Over the past few years the market for mechanical keyboards with RGB backlighting has gone crazy. The problem though is all of those RGB keyboards have had Cherry switches, knock off cherry switches, or a few custom switches designed by companies like Logitech and SteelSeries. One of my favorite mechanical switch types is Topre, but with the exception of a few knockoffs you haven’t been able to get Topre keyboards with any backlighting, let alone full RGB backlighting. So when Realforce introduced their upcoming keyboard, the Realforce RGB I had to check it out. Of all of the keyboards I have my Realforce 87u is one of my favorites to type on, but the lack of backlighting or even easy to read legends in the light forced me to keep it put up. So it will be exciting to see how Realforce’s new keyboard performs to see how it compares.
Keyboards are huge business and while a plain rubber dome is all you need to make letters appear on the screen there are some people out there that want a little more from their PC experience and need to make a little more click in life.
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MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Quick Silver OC 8 GB @ techPowerUp
The video card is the heart of any gaming PC and while CPU and Storage play a part there is no better bang for your buck or dollar for your dingle than with a quality video card.
To put it more ellequantly you need to repurpose that fistfull of stripper money and drop it into the panties of your favorite video card builder. I mean seriously, spend money on a video card.
MSI's GTX 1070 Quick Silver does away with the red-and-black color theme and uses stylish silver instead. Thanks to the powerful cooler from the GTX 1070 Gaming Z, the card is the coolest and quietest GTX 1070 we ever tested. It also comes at a rather affordable $425.
OMG, not $425!! That price seems "reasonable"? The card comes with a new accent color and higher core clock so why not give it a look. Of course, the question now is. "Will EK be making a full coverage waterblock for it?"
answer: reasons.
btw: I'm really diggin the back metal on this card. bravo MSI, bravo!
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Asus X99 DeLuxe II motherboard review - Moar Rawr Pew Powar
There was a time when I was able to review Asus hardware. Thing is Asus has this "Ferrari" nostalgia surrounding it where it is so well known that people just want one, even if it isn't all that practical. I can understand this perspective and for the most part the status is well deserved.
As a hardware reviewer I extract joy from not only using the gear but also sharing my thoughts with everyone else. Sadly, my views are not shared by many in this industry who are after the paycheck associated with a quick sale of the hardware and not so much of the hardware.
Guru3D has a review of the Asus X99 Deluxe II. I didn't read the entire review but can ass-er-tain from the first paragraph and photos that this is a full sized motherboard shrouded in a black and white color theme.
Should be good right?
We test and review the new Asus X99 DeLuxe II motherboard, you can pair it with Haswell-E and Broadwell-E series processors and get your gaming groove on to 10-cores processors. Yes ASUS hits back in all black and white, but not just that as this X99 motherboard is simply LOADED with features and options that will impress. The Asus X99 DeLuxe II motherboard has it all, and then some more. The perfect infrastructure for an uber-enthusiast class PC perhaps ?
Umm..
More Powa I guess?
