MSI - Metro 2033 Game Winners
Long time HardForum user "SonicTron" is the winner of the MSI 460GTX 1G Cyclone! The other TWENTY winners of the full downloadable version of Metro 2033 have been notified via HardForum PM, so check your PM boxes now!
ASUS ROG Matrix 5870 Platinum Install
Looking to replace my Radeon HD 5970 and decided to go with ASUS' ROG Matrix 5870 Platinum that we recently reviewed. It is loaded with features rarely seen on video cards and I thought it would find a good home in my personal rig. And yes, we have a purpose behind our upgrade too.
MSI 890FXA-GD70 Motherboard Review
MSI's newest offering supporting AMD's line of processors comes in the form of the 890FXA-GD70. This board could potentially be a P55 killer, with its balance of features and performance prowess. How does it do in the HardOCP gauntlet and better yet, how well does it overclock?
GeForce GTX 460 SLI Performance vs. AMD GPUs
Our first look at the GeForce GTX 460 showed it to be an impressive product with excellent all-around performance for the price. Next our SLI follow-up showed that a GTX 460 SLI rig was competitive with NVIDIA’s own flagship DX11 products. But how does GTX 460 SLI compare with AMD’s HD 5850, 5870, and 5970 cards?
CoolIT ECO C240 Performance Review
Other companies made the closed loop self contained CPU water cooler famous. CoolIT Systems intends to make it one of the easiest to install and best optimized and efficient liquid cooling systems around. The ECO C240 doubles up on cooling surface area. Does CoolIT hit its mark?
Long time HardForum user "SonicTron" is the winner of the MSI 460GTX 1G Cyclone! The other TWENTY winners of the full downloadable version of Metro 2033 have been notified via HardForum PM, so check your PM boxes now!
A lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court against Sony and McAfee over a patent for software activation. This is the same company that is currently tied up in a lawsuit with Microsoft over the very same thing (software activation).
The patent in question #5,490,216, awarded to Uniloc founder Ric Richardson in 1996, covers a method for registering and activating software locked to one PC. The technology was developed as a way to prevent users from freely installing or copying a single software program to multiple machines.
Researchers are working on a controller that gets hot or cold depending on what is happening in the game. Kinda neat seeing a couple old peltiers being used for something like this.
The temperature difference isn't large - less than 10 degrees heating or cooling after five seconds, but the researchers involved discovered that, as with haptics, just a little sensory nudge can be enough to convince involved participants in a virtual environment that they are experiencing something like the real thing.
Cases & Modding
Lian Li PC-T60 ATX Test Bench @ Phoronix
Cooling
CoolIT Vantage ALC Cooler @ Hardware Heaven
Memory/ Storage
G.Skill Phoenix PRO 120GB SSD @ Guru3D
Kingston HyperX blu KHX1600C9D3B1K2/4GX @ Overclockers Club
I know I shouldn’t laugh at stories like this but I just can’t help it.
A woman in California has recently gone public with claims that she not only watched as a Dell tech support worker downloaded nude pics of her remotely, but that he also set up a website featuring the photos. Oh, and he used her Dell credit card to buy stuff for another woman.
How come these massive, record setting gigapixel images are always pictures of towns? Can’t we get gigapixel pictures of the beach or a beauty pageant?
It looks like Google’s strategy of knuckling under to China’s demand is working out well. Just kidding, almost all Google’s services are being blocked again.
Several of Google's Web services in mainland China were fully blocked on Thursday (PDT), including Web search, YouTube, Ads, and Blogger. Other services including Google Images, News, Docs and Groups remain "partially blocked," according to Google's Mainland China service availability chart.
I want this couch! You want this couch! Now all we have to do is wait until it moves from the concept stage to production and we’ll be all set.
This is our pre-weekend shout out to all of you out there that aren’t currently folding and could spare a bit of your PC’s resources to help a wonderful cause. Although [H]ardOCP has the #1 Folding team on the planet, we still need your help to stay there. Folding is easy, all you have to do is download and install the Folding@Home program, set your team number to TEAM #33 and you are all set.
If you still need help or have any questions, forum member "Xilikon" put all the Folding guides that a person could possibly need into one easy-to-find location. Hit the link, follow the directions and you’ll be up and folding in no time at all.
A new report, citing anonymous industry sources, claims that Facebook is postponing an initial public offering until at least 2012. I’m not sure how you can "put off" something that hasn’t seen announced before but there you have it.
This comes as no surprise as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has always been very careful on the subject. "At some point along the path, I think it’ll make sense to have an IPO. But we’re not running the company to do that. We’re running the company to serve more people," he said recently.
Redbox, the popular DVD rental kiosk provider, and wholly-owned subsidiary of Coinstar, Inc., today announced it has started rolling out Blu-ray™ titles with availability at approximately 13,300 kiosks nationwide. Redbox will rent Blu-ray Discs® at $1.50 per night plus tax and the company expects to have availability across its network of approximately 23,000 kiosk locations by the fall.
GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co., Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards and computing hardware solutions is proud to announce that GIGABYTE On/Off Charge technology also works on the iPhone 4. GIGABYTE first announced On/Off Charge in April this year by demonstrating how it speeds up iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch charging from a PC's USB port whether the PC is operational or shut down.
The funny quote of the day is brought to you by Steve Ballmer. Speaking to a group of financial analysts, Microsoft's CEO made this comment about iPad sales:
As for Apple and the iPad, Ballmer said, "they've sold certainly more than I'd like them to have sold."
Cases & Modding
Lian Li PC-7FNWX Case (German) @ Hardware-Mag
Cooling
Gelid Solutions Tranquillo @ Overclockers Club
ETC.
PCPer Podcast #115 PC Perspective
ZFS Benchmarking On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux @ Phoronix
Memory/ Storage
RunCore Pro-V 200GB SSD @ LanOC
Vantec NexStar SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter @ OCIA
I knew it! I knew it! Google is spying on us...in real time!
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."
Room temperature ice? The next thing you are going to tell me is that sex boosts brain growth! Whatever.
Researchers at Spain's Centre d'Investigació en Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (CIN2) have studied the underlying mechanisms of water condensation in the troposphere and found a way to make artificial materials to control water condensation and trigger ice formation at room temperature.
Analyst firm, UBM TechInsights announced that Intel has won two of its top awards, including the Most Innovative Logic Process Award for the 32-nm Intel® Core™ processor and the Most Innovative Memory Process for the Intel-Micron Flash Technologies 25nm Manufacturing Process. The 25nm NAND flash memory was recognized as the most advanced process in terms of feature size and for breaking technology scaling barriers.
It looks like Amazon is rolling out a new $139 wireless Kindle. Aside from the smaller design and lower price, the new Kindle will feature also feature the company’s new e-ink technology.
Amazon on Thursday also introduced the third generation of the original Kindle, which has Wi-Fi and 3G wireless technologies. The latter makes it possible to buy digital books from Amazon and download them in less than a minute. Amazon kept the price for the device at $189.
This 125 piece puzzle is actually a muzzle loading .45 cal pistol. Seriously.
Great news! You can now upload 15 minute videos to YouTube. Time to start making director’s cut YouTube videos with added content you left out of your original 10 minute videos.
YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars, said in March that 24 hours worth of video are being uploaded to the video-sharing site every minute. YouTube has been gradually adding professional content such as full-length television shows and movies to its vast trove of amateur video offerings in a bid to attract advertisers.
Clash of the Titans @ Shacknews
Halo Reach Campaign Trailer Debuts @ Kotaku
Sony Hardware and Software Sales Increase @ Shacknews
Capcom Profits Plummet @ Blue’s News
It looks like Best Buy is offering a free invisibleSHIELD to all iPhone 4 owners, regardless whether you bought the phone there or not. Thanks to everyone that sent this one in.
It's hard to say for certain what exactly this flyer means, but it sure looks as if at least some iPhone 4 owners will be able to snatch a free invisibleSHIELD 4fix (valued at $9.99 or so) from their local Best Buy. Based on a number of tips that we've received, we're getting the impression that the yellow-tagged retailer could be handing out (and installing) completely free side coverings for any iPhone 4 owner that waltzes into a store.
(Kyle's note: Zagg invisibleSHIELD sucks on a touch screen device, at least that is my experience. I sent my two Zaggs back for a refund yesterday.)
You know Steve Jobs probably isn’t too thrilled about this. Not because it is the porn industry…it’s because someone beside Apple is making money off the iPhone.
Invent the newest gadget and the porn industry will find a way to cash in. So when Apple Inc. launched the iPhone 4 and its FaceTime videoconference feature, it didn't take long for adult-entertainment companies to develop video-sex chat services and start hiring workers through Craigslist.
Cases & Modding
Antec DF-30 Dark Fleet Computer Case @ BmR
Cooling
Sharkoon Silent Eagle SE 120mm & 80mm Fans @ HardwareLogic
ETC.
Choiix Comforter Lapdesk @ Pro-Clockers
Choiix Cruiser @ LanOC
Choiix Cruiser @ PureOC
Video
PowerColor PCS+ HD 5770 Vortex @ Neoseeker
The numbers are in and, according to a 2Q market share report from Mercury Research, AMD is once again the king of the discrete graphics card market. While the full report isn’t available just yet, highlights include:
- For the first time in four years, AMD has taken control of the discrete graphics market from Nvidia, with 51.1% market share, up 10.4 points from Q2 2009. In that same period, Nvidia lost 10.4 points.
- In the lucrative Desktop discrete market, AMD gained 11 points in the year, standing at 44.5% market share. This was a direct loss for Nvidia, who fell 10.9 points in the same period.
- In the fast growing mobile discrete market, AMD gained another 2.4 points, now standing at 56.3% market share.
Somebody better tell Nextflix and Redbox to step up their game, the old lady at the library is kicking their ass in DVD rentals. Wow, who knew libraries rented DVDs?
The nation’s public libraries are loaning more DVDs each day than Netflix rents to its by-mail subscribers. So says a new survey from the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit national library cooperative, which found that public library branches in the U.S. lend out a whopping 2.1 million DVDs a day, topping the two million discs rented daily by Netflix and the 1.4 million DVD rented each day by Redbox.
Getting a letter threatening to turn of your internet service for non-payment isn’t surprising….unless of course the amount in question is $0.00. Uh-oh, you'd better cut a check before you are sent to collections! Thanks to "Insert" for the image.
The hits just keep coming for NVIDIA. First the company was named as the worst performing stock of 2010, then they lose their case to RAMBUS and now the company is warning of a 2Q revenue shortfall. Ouch. Thanks to R. Groenestein for the heads up.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based graphics chip supplier said it expects revenue for its second quarter ending August 1 to be lower than the guidance provided with the company's financial results for the first quarter. Nvidia supplies graphics processing units, or GPUs, to all major computer makers, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Apple.
Interested in a little light reading? Then hit up the torrent sites and download the personal details of 100M Facebook users. Don't tell anybody but rumor has it that you can get 5X that info if you go here.
The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.
A spokesman for AT&T says the company has no plans to interfere with an upcoming Black Hat demonstration that shows how to set up a fake cell tower to intercept phone calls. Then again, the guy behind this demo has probably already intercepted the call so he already knows this.
"If you're in the room, need to dial 911 and you have a GSM phone, you can just raise your hand and shout. In the extremely unlikely situation that someone near the room with a GSM phone connects to my demo network and also needs to dial 911, I am taking the extra precaution of ensuring that that person will be connected to someone local who can call for or send help," he said in his blog post.