[H]ardNews 9th Edition

PlayStation2 Super Computer:

Personally, I think an Xbox would have been far better suited ( hardware wise ) for this, but the University of Illinois has built a super computer using $50,000 worth of PS2 game consoles. The funny part is they are using the graphics processor, and not the system processor, for this project. Blame Joe and Fam for this one.

As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the power of sophisticated but inexpensive game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2 devices. The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. Researchers at the supercomputing center believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second.

VIA EPIA M10000:

The gang at the Tech-Report have reviewed the VIA EPIA M10000 today attempting to answer the age old question “How fast is fast enough?”. The HTPC guys have worked their magic using the EPIA series of boards for a long time now, mainstream folks are starting to come around too I guess.

In the end, the EPIA-M10000 is definitely a viable platform for small form factor home theater PCs and business or home desktops; just don't try to build a gaming rig or high-performance system with the board. The EPIA-M10000's small size also makes it perfect for more inventive and interesting projects that can't accommodate larger systems or higher power requirements.

Mushkin Memory:

Ireland’s source for PC News has posted a review of Mushkin’s Enhanced Black PC3200 memory. It’s black and enhanced…not sure what the hell that means for memory performance, but now you know.

Well, today we are going to look at Mushkin's high performance PC3200 memory, the Mushkin Enhanced Black Hi Perf Level II 512MB PC3200 module.Quite a mouthful I must say. Because we intend to test the memory on a Canterwood board and a nForce2 board, we had no choice but to get 2 sticks for best performance, for Dual Channel operation.