Tech News
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Gigabyte BRIX Pro Mini-PC Review @ Madshrimps
Just like the Mini Cooper, and more recent Fiat 500 invasion, compact is apprently the new cool. The small form factor PC emergence over the last year as we reported couldn't have been more pronounced than at the most recent CES event in Las Vegas. Since seeing the BRIX for the first time there, apparently a new hot-rodded version has been released - the BRIX Pro.
Does size really matter? On some human levels it might, though a different trend has been observed in the PC market over the last year. Compact is the key word, featuring mITX sized motherboards and idem ditto enclosures. These compact PCs are playing a more and more important role in every manufacturers' lineup: Mini PCs, NUCs, they are all amongst us now. For most users the bundled power is more than plenty as the size maters the most. Nevertheless combining the raw power of a desktop setup inside a mini sized housing is a step in another direction. Gigabyte is having big success with their BRIX boxes, time to step up one level. Today we are going to test one of these Gigabyte supercharged versions: the BRIX Pro.
I do feel that there is a growing niche for these, especially as device interconnectivity continues to flourish and the PC starts to find itself in new spots like the family room, where the bulk of a full or half-tower chassis footprint may not fit in modern entertainment centers. -
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 8GB and R9 290X 4GB Video Cards in CrossFireX
This honestly sounds like the premise to every Buddy Cop movie made in the last 20 years. "Two video cards, one a professional who likes to work solo, the other a dedicated by-the-book kind of card. They're going to be partnered together for the case of their careers!"
We throw a HIS Radeon R9 290X 4GB in with the new R9 295X2 8GB and see what kind of magic we can make happen. Let's take a look at the gaming numbers now!
Cinema silliness aside, it's a good read, and worth a look to see how well two powerhouse cards handle everything that can be thrown at them. -
Mionix Avior 7000 Gaming Mouse Review @ Madshrimps
With optical sensors now reaching sensitivities and polling rates once only accessible by laser, I wonder how long before the two sensor technologies are virtually indistinguishable from one another? Or are they nearly there now? Food for discussion.
Along with the Naos 7000, Mionix has also launched an ambidextrous model baptized Avior 7000. This product shares all the good features from the Naos, including the Avago ADNS-3310 IR-LED Optical Sensor which tracks with a maximum DPI of 7000, 128Kb of on-board memory for storing profiles, 4 rubber coating layers or illumination control via software.
It's also a pleasant sight to see more ambidextrous designs released into the wild, and it doesn't look half bad either. Very sleek design traits shared with other competitive mid-range gaming mice we've seen and reviewed. -
KingFast Encrypted USB Key Review @ ModSynergy.com
I can't tell you how many times I misplaced, left behind, or forgot my USB drive at the labs on campus, or at a buddies house, and I know I'm not alone. I'm sure everyone has a horror story about losing their own drive at one point or another. Those experiences taught me two valuable lessons in life. Never keep anything on it I wasn't willing to lose, and always keep a backup of those files somewhere if I did.
The KingFast Encrypted USB Key aims to secure and protect any information you save onto it with its hardware based AES256 data encryption, self destroy function, among other features in its arsenal. Read on to see how you can best protect your data with an Encrypted drive such as the one from KingFast.
With the storage amounts for these drives climbing into multiple gigs of space. Having a way to secure the data on these highly mobile, and very compact (read: small, tiny, easily misplaced) drives is a great step in the right direction. -
Asylum: Review Block - Headset Showdown!
It appears that there has been a steady stream of gaming headsets and audio devices coming into the market lately by familiar faces, joined recently with a few new companies looking to carve a name for themselves. So let's find out how these titans of treble and behemoths of bass stack up with their new offerings for our eardrums.
Headsets
Tt eSPORTS Level 10 M Gaming Headset (Iron White) Review @ Madshrimps
Ozone Onda PRO Review @ Vortez
Cooler Master CM Storm Pitch Gaming Earphones Review @ Madshrimps
BitFenix FLO Headset Review @HiTech Legion
Sennheiser G4ME ONE PC Headset Review - BCCHardware -
Running Slackware Linux on Hyper-V: Pro Tip
Over the past few weeks I've been working on a Linux project. My project isn’t complex just a new application server that will be running within a Hyper-V VM. Slackware is my distro of choice and I was happy to see that the latest versions supported Hyper-V.
As part of my testing I installed Slackware 14.0 on my server and installed and ran like a champ. Of course when Heartbleed got fixed I figured it was time to upgrade my project to Slackware-current (14.1) and that is when things got interesting.
I spent the better part of 8 hours trying to figure out why Slackware 14.1 would install on my Hyper-V machine but would not run after the initial install (eg first reboot) . The log showed a kernel panic and basically froze. As it would turn out the Hyper-V modules were not loading in the correct order and when the Kernel tried mounting /dev/sda2 (my root partition) saying it couldn't find it.
Turns out the fix is pretty simple and I'm here to pass along some information.
Some background on my setup:
Windows Server 2008 R2 running Hyper-V
Slackware 14.1
VM using two cores and 24GB virtual drive
I'm using XFS as my filesystem and have swap space at /dev/sda1The error I was getting was somewhat cryptic"kernel panic - not syncing : VFS: unable to mount root FS on unknown-block"
Basically the error is saying that the system cannot mount the root filesystem as indicated in Lilo. You could have a similar situation had this been a RAID or a new disk using a different filesystem. To resolve this issue I needed to create and load an Init Ramdisk (initrd.gz) that contained the driver modules needed to load the root FS.
Here is the process to follow:
- Boot the system using the install disk and login as root.
- Mount the target partition "mount -t xfs /dev/sda2 /mnt"
- Set /mnt to root "chroot /mnt"
- Change directory to "/boot"
- Make the initrd, There is a helper script to get you started but for Hyper-V it doesn't apply since you need to load the Hyper-V system bus and storage service (hv_vmbus hv_storvsc) to load the drive, use the following command "mkinitrd -c -f xfs -r /dev/sda2 -m hv_vmbus:hv_storvsc:mbcache:xfs -u -o /boot/initrd.gz"
- If your kernel version is different from your boot media add -k [kernel version] (ex '-k 5.4.38') to the build string.
- Add this to lilo.conf by adding "initrd = /boot/initrd.gz" right after the boot image line
- Run "lilo" to set the configuration
- Reboot
- Update (5/3/20): I was testing out Slackware64-Current (Slackware 15) and kept getting an memory allocation error when mounting the drives on boot. The fix was to change vmlinuz (symlink to -huge) to vmlinuz-generic in lilo.conf.
They say you can recompile the Kernel to include Hyper-V support however, considering that both vmlinuz-generic and vmlinuz-huge kernels include support as modules you shouldn't need to. The difference is that "huge" loads all of the drivers and is why I could install the OS on my VM. When the system rebooted it switched over to "generic" and just didn't load the modules in time.
Overall I'm just happy that I got it working and am still confused as to why Slackware 14.0 worked out of the box and why Slackware 14.1 failed.
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Roccat Easter Egg Hunt Contest
How would you like to wake up Wednesday morning as a winner of a brand new Kone Pure Optical gaming mouse, Siru gaming pad, and Ryos MK Glow keyboard? That would be awesome, right?!
The folks over at Roccat want to give you the shot to be one of three lucky individuals to win that prize. All you have to do is search Roccat's social media sites for the (not-so) hidden 24 letters, and then put the letters together to form the winning phrase and send your guess off to win@roccat.org. Contest ends on Tuesday the 22nd of April, so get hunting!
Links to the social pages are below:
Youtube Contest Rules & Details - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX3bcGjZVRk
Roccat Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ROCCAT
Team ROCCAT - https://www.facebook.com/TEAMROCCAT
Twitter - https://twitter.com/ROCCAT
Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/roccatst...Happy Easter!
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Cyberpower Inc. Becomes the Exclusive Distributor of V3 Components in North America
Cyberpower has announced that it will now offer an alternative to it's traditional water cooling builds. So for an enthusiast build, if coolant, pumps and radiators aren't your thing, and you're looking for a no-mess, compact alternative, Cyberpower may have a solution for you with a thermoelectric cooling option - the V3 Voltair.
“We are very happy to have Cyberpower Inc. as the exclusive distributor of our products in North America. Cyberpower Inc. offers the logistics capacity and market reach to help make our products available to a much wider audience than we would be able to on our own,” said Chuck Morris, Product Manager at V3 Components.
“Cyberpower Inc. has successful partnerships among both etailers and the retail channel that it will use to offer V3 Components products to customers.
In addition to distributing products from V3 Components, Cyberpower Inc. will also be making the V3 Voltair CPU cooler available in their custom-built PCs, said Eric Cheung, CEO of Cyberpower Inc. “This is the beginning of a strong partnership in which we can utilize the innovation of the V3 Components team and collaborate on future product innovations.”
As the ever-increasing curve of technology adds more power behind the chips being released, and as the ability to overclock becomes easier and more accessible for starting enthusists, it will be interesting to see how TEC technology continues to evolve to meet the increased demands asked of it. -
be quiet! Dark Rock 3 Review @ techPowerUp
Is it possible to have your cake, and eat it too? Can you have both a high performance heatsink that also runs whisper silent? The folks over at be quiet! sure thinks it's possible with the latest generation of Dark Rock tower coolers, the Dark Rock 3.
be quiet!'s Dark Rock 3 is a great single-tower cooler as it offers up stylish looks with the performance to back it up. Take into consideration its exceptional build quality and warranty and you have a cooler that might just be best in class.
While they do appear to have added a second set of clips for a dual fan option to address our primary critique of the Dark Rock 2, though the same mounting brackets do appear to be used in this iteration as well. -
DXRacer M-Series Game Chair @ LanOC Reviews
Ever want to feel like you are in a high-end sports car while playing your favorite video game? Well, that is what it will appear like if you sit in one of the DXRacer chairs.
I’ve spoken about it in a few previous reviews but it’s really important to remember that there are a few things beyond your PC itself that will really improve your gaming experience. A few of the obvious examples are your keyboard and mouse but there are others that you might not even consider. A perfect example of something that most people skimp on is their chair. The ironic thing is that your chair is used more than any other product at your desk. As someone who spends both their work and recreational time in front of a PC, a high quality chair is even more important. I have been using the same “racing” style office chair for nearly 10 years now, after being repaired multiple times the chair has seen better days. When I came across the chairs from a company called DXRacer they fit the bill perfectly. Let’s see if their M-Series Gaming Chair can keep me gaming for the next 10 years.
I have seen quite a few online gamers using similar chairs and while I prefer the elegance and style of a Herman Miller Aeron it just doesn't scream "I am a professional gamer" over Twitch.tv.
