[H]ardNews 8th Edition

Gigabyte GA-8SG667 Reviewage:

The SiS648 powered Gigabyte GA-8SG667 is in the spotlight at PCHardware today. Seems the gang like the board overall, read the review to see why.

I was quite happy to test Gigabyte GA-8SG667. The price of this motherboard is low but the stability and performance are on top. GA-8SG667 doesn’t come with amazing features like other motherboards from large manufacturers, but the features list is well balanced

Still More Cathodes:

Bringing the total “Cathode Count” for today at an astonishing 59! Holy cow…just looking at the word cathode is making my eye twitch. 8Balls Hardware is the latest site dishing out the cathode carnage.

The 4" cold cathode, simply put, is awesome. It's small size allows for a multitude of uses, especially if you'd like to light up a mini casing you've modded, maybe one of those small form factor PCs from Shuttle, or a custom mini-acrylic case.

Haunted Intarweb:

The internet is haunted. Really….everyday turning millions of us into mindless zombies stuck in front of a monitor with a vacant blank stare afraid of venturing into the daylight. Waitadamnminute…that’s not a ghost story, that really happens!

Manfred Boden was at his computer when letters and entire lines of text on the screen began changing by themselves. Gradually, the German cabinetmaker saw a message from a recently deceased friend take shape: "I am here ... Manfred ... Yours, Klaus." Believers in something called instrumental transcommunication (ITC) say the message Boden received nearly 22 years ago on a Commodore CBM 8032, an early personal computer, was the first known instance of a spirit using a computer to contact a living person.

[H]ardNews 7th Edition

Who is up Next?

No, this has nothing to do with our girlfriend, but there still are going to be some lucky guys...and maybe gals...maybe two at a time. The next stops of the AMD Reality Check will be tomorrow in Orlando, FL and Phoenix, AZ. All the information can be found on this page. You FL guys make sure you don't run over any Haitians on the drive in. I hear they are all over the roads down there.

Also, this year AMD is making it easier for all you guys to get together by placing signs that represent websites for you to gather under and meet each other. The signs will not be up tomorrow but should be soon. AMD is also supplying name badges this year, so stick a big "[H]" on that along with your name and meet some people that share common interests...and possibly know your girlfriend.

[H]ardNews 6th Edition

Holiday Rammin:

A few [H]'ers have brought this to our attention and it is something that seems to happen every year. Ram prices are starting to rise. On some brands such as Corsair we have seen 20% price increases in the last couple of weeks. We contacted Corsair and they pointed directly to their chip suppliers raising their prices. Something to think about if you are considering making a Ram purchase before the end of the year as it historically goes even higher. Some folks still have stock on what they bought a couple weeks ago, so now might be the time to buy while the "gettin' is good". Just our 2 cents...

Sebastien did point out a great resource located here that will graph out the latest pricing index that will show you what is going on and will give you a very clear picture.

[H]ardNews 5th Edition

Shuttle XPC SB51G:

The Tech-Report gang have a review of the Shuttle XPC SB51G posted today. The fellas know their way around these itty-bitty boxes quite well, having reviewed almost every SFF PC out there by now. What are their impressions of the latest mini-PC from Shuttle? Here is a clip from the review:

The SB51G's performance speaks for itself. This thing is just as fast as the fastest full-sized ATX motherboards we have on hand today. In fact, working with the SB51G has made me start wondering whether I wouldn't want to replace my desktop PC with an XPC system. These aren't idle thoughts, either.

Monster Fine:

I actually got this story in a couple times yesterday, but with no legitimate links to it. It looks like Nintendo got schmacked with a whopping €149 million fine for anti-competitive practices overseas. ( insert Mario and Luigi mafia joke here ). Nintendo already had the money set aside, and plan to appeal the amount anyway, but a €149 million fine? Ouch.

"Every year, millions of European families spend large amounts of money on videogames. They have the right to buy the games and consoles at the lowest price the market can possibly offer and we will not tolerate collusive behaviour intended to keep prices artificially high," said European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti.

Intel Appeals:

While we are talking appeals, Intel is filing their appeal against the Intergraph verdict announced earlier this month. You just never know how these big company suits can flip flop, Intel could very well turn things in their favor this time around…it is all up to interpretation on the part of the courts.

A U.S. district court here today barred Intel Corp. from selling its 64-bit line of microprocessors as a result of an unfavorable ruling, but then suspended the order to allow the company to appeal the decision, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Halloween Tunes:

Busted out some Rob Zombie today…seemed only fitting with it being [H]alloween and all, but what are some other ass kicking tunes that will go well with the whole [H]alloween thing? Got an idea or tune? Let me know.

[H]ardNews 4th Edition

Some of you have had some page load issues here over the last week. We knew we had a problem and we fixed it quickly but many of you still have load issues. We lost one of our webservers (dunno where Steve put it still) and that IP address was no longer good. Problem is that many of you are still looking for an IP that is not currently valid so it takes your browser (most likely IE) a moment to figure out that IP is not good and go look for one. Your IE browser caches IP addresses to make for quicker browsing...only problem is that if an IP address changes, you might simply get a terrible load time or the browser will simply tell you that the page does not exist. Here is a quick fix for 2000 and XP users.

Open a command prompt window and type "ipconfig /flushdns" without the quotes. This will, you guessed it, flush your cached DNS addresses. This is probably not a bad thing to do on a regular basis as well.

[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

Google Empire?

Does Google hold the key to success on the internet? This New.com story sure makes it sound that way. I remember just over 18 months ago when Google was just “getting big” no one made these kinds of complaints. Then again…2yrs ago no one ever heard of a “Google Whack” either.

Patrick Ahern has witnessed the power of Google--and the difficulties of trying to do business without it. Data Recovery Group, where he is president, would typically come up around the fourth listing on Google's popular search engine last year. Then in January, when Google removed the company from its listings without explanation, Data Recovery saw a 30 percent drop in business.

Our secret strategy was to name our site HardOCP years before Google came out, and then claim not to know what “The OCP stands for anymore”. That way, when Google came out…people who visited us, would have to search for what OCP stood for, making us the number one hit for OCP in the Google standings. Mwahahahaha!!!

P4 Overclocking:

Dark Tweaker does a little 2.26 P4 OC’ing here at the same time put the pedal to the medal on this 2.2GHz P4 in a separate OC-adventure. Both articles have English links located on the page if you feel the need to read…the rest of us will just gawk at the purdy pictars and grafs.

Cheater Ruins Seti@Home:

Well, it looks like someone might be cheating to get ahead in the Seti@Home project ( does that mean they find aliens faster? ), by posting numbers that some people say are impossible to achieve.

Nealon says that would mean team members producing this much work must have 1250GHz of processing power at their disposal dedicated purely to the project. In human terms, that’s around 1,250 1GHz computers doing nothing but running the SETI@home screensaver. "[SETI Netherlands] number one producer has 618,000 units, that's just one person, it’s just ludicrous," said Nealon.

That is why we actually put our processing power to a good cause, like finding cures for diseases and not looking for aliens…which we all know just want to kill us and take over the planet anyways. Join the number one Folding@Home team on the planet, and help the [H]ardFolders help do some good if you are dying to use them extra CPU cycles.

[H]ardNews 2nd Edition

More [H]ard Pumpkins:

Jason Lewis, Mike Kemble and Erwin Ma are responsible for these [H]ard Halloween decorations.

Shuttle XPC SB51G:

Got a small form factor? Don’t hide it…show everyone. T-Break shows of their little unit in this review of the Shuttle XPC SB51G.

Shuttle has improved the performance of the XPC to compete with a regular motherboards- meaning you now have a slick looking PC with great functionality and awesome performance. Sure, it's not perfect- we would like to see some improvements.

Vantec EZ Swap:

The ever so stylish Vantec EZ Swap drive rack is reviewed by the System Cooling gang today. These really are extremely handy to have, and they look good too. Bonus!

Offices and home users find them useful for the same reasons. I like the fact that during stormy weather, I can pull my hard drive, thus saving my data and operating system if anything like a lightning strike were to occur.

[H]ardNews 1st Edition

Cathode Round-Up:

8 different Cold Cathodes are rounded up and tested at Gideon Tech. We are not sure how you would benchmark a cathode, I mean don’t you plug it in…it comes on ( or doesn’t ), end of test.

In conclusion, once I got passed the initial shock of seeing 8 Cold Cathodes in a box, I was able to settle down and take a close look at this companies product. A lot of companies sell CCFL's and the only real differences between companies are packaging and quality of the phosphors in the lamp.

Bigger Cathode Round-Up:

X-Treme Cooling takes the cake for big ass cathode reviews…today. These guys line up like 30 cathodes turn off the lights, and we all know what happens next. This is a translated link, so it may be a bit hard to read.

Getting ZZZ’s:

X-Ray vision, microwave drills are just a sample of the stuff the ZZZ Online fellas have cooking in this weeks edition.

What Eli Jerby and his colleagues have created is a microwave drill that has no rotational parts, works without producing dust or noise and can cut almost anything 'non-conductive' which has a melting temp below 2000C (things like concrete, glass, silicon, stone, rock, marble, alumina and basalt).

NVChess:

NVChess is a chess game that takes advantage of advanced shader technology, so if you have a GF4 or a Radeon and you play chess, check this one out.

[H]ardNews 9th Edition - [H]ard [H]alloween

[H]appy [H]alloween:

Thanks to Ted B. for whippin’ up this [H]ard Pumpkin. Got a [H]ard [H]alloween picture you want to share? Send it to me here.

[H]ardNews 8th Edition

ASUS P4S8X Review:

Lost Circuits has a good write up on the ASUS P4S8X mainboard that you should take a look at. There have been a number of issues with the board that Michael nails down during his review. We looked the same board here. Apparently new BIOS revisions severely hamper overall memory performance, something we have heard time and time again from you guys since our initial review of the board here.

The one thing that strikes out from this review is the impact of the different BIOS revisions on the overall system performance. There are tons of additional benchmarks that we could have posted and that would all show the same, meaning that the higher (later) BIOS revisions literally kill the performance.

Dot.Com Dorms:

Check out this school that has hi-tech dorms for future entrepreneurs….or for future slackers. I’m not sure what I think of this one.

When the technology boom went bust, those dreams seemed to die, too. But rather than disregard the ambitions of its entrepreneurial students, the University of Maryland is encouraging them with the kind of amenities that earlier students could only dream about.

Billiards Tutor:

This is one of those things that makes you say “Wow”, followed closely by “what kinda person…besides Bill Gates, would have that”? Blame Bill Beeler for that one.

An interactive pool table with a laser that points out exactly where the best shots lie has been created by Danish scientists. With the help of a virtual coach called James, it can also lead you through a practice session designed to improve your play.

[H]ardNews 7th Edition

AMD Overclockin’:

Muropaketti, known best for their extreme overclocking adventures, stay true to form with this AMD 2700+ overclocking article. The results achieved this time around were made using conventional air cooling, with a little super cooling action planned in a later article. Have a look.

With default voltage we were able to raise the clock frequency only to 2,2GHz. With higher 1,85V Vcore the CPU managed to handle 2326MHz clock frequency. I ran couple of tests to make sure the CPU was stable. Althought the temperetures were above 60°C so watercooling is more than recommended if you are going to overclock these new Athlon CPU's.

IWill P4ES i845E:

I must’ve missed this IWill P4ES review the other day, but PCStats has a look at an i845E based offering from IWill and they seem to have an overall good opinion of the board.

Iwill's goal with the P4ES appears to have been to make a very stable, feature rich motherboard. In this they have succeeded by all accounts. The P4ES is very future proof and should satisfy all the needs of the average user.

OEM Hyper-Threading:

An interesting story about OEM PC’s that have been shipped to end users with Hyper-Threading disabled, but can be simply switched on in the BIOS. The article talks about the lack of applications that take advantage of Hyper-Threading, but if you ask me, why not get a new CPU that has added performance benefits lit HT and open end potential for future applications. I am all for Hyper-Threading.

Hewlett-Packard and Dell, among other workstation manufacturers, have been shipping their systems with the function turned off, according to company representatives. Right now, workstation makers say, the broad array of software used in that segment of the market doesn't take advantage of the technology yet. Users, though, can easily turn the hyperthreading function on if they wish.

[H]ardNews 6th Edition

Quadro Peek:

NVNews has a little sneak peak at the performance of the upcoming Nvidia Quadro 4 980XGL professional graphic card based on the NV28GL chip. The data has the Quadro 4 pit against a Wildcat for comparison.

Other information relating to the card is sketchy, though we are lead to believe this type of performance of the new card is to be seen across the board. We also believe that the card will be available very soon.

AMD CPU Review:

I say AMD CPU Review because the fellas at HardTecs4U have the AMD 2200+ thru 2800+ being reviewed here, on several different platforms.

The article includes benchmarks from Athlon XP 2200+, 2400+, 2600+, 2700+ and 2800+,each on Asus A7V8X (VIA KT400), Epox 8K3A+ (VIA KT333) and Asus A7N8X (nVidia nForce2) against a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, each on i845PE and i850E.

ATi Getting Respect: