[H]ardNews 7th Edition

Refreshing WindowsXP:

Tweak3D shows you how to give your WindowsXP install a little refresher-upping (I just made that word up) or something like that. Most of you can benefit from this write up, I see a few things I can do to my rigs right now. Check it out.

At Tweak3D, we insist on having our PCs run squeaky clean: as fast as possible with the given hardware. We like to turn off silly graphical effects and clean up hard drives for maximum efficiency. So today, I've written a short guide on making your aging Windows XP installation run like new. Reinstalling the OS usually takes too much time and effort, so for now we'll just 'refresh' our Windows XP install with a few tricks of the trade.

Leadtek A350 GFFX 5900:

Here is a quicky one pager review of the Leadtek Winfast A350 THD MyVIVO video card. This is the card with the goofy looking HSF that resembles a radio with two speakers. The review doesn’t have much for pictures of the HSF though, just a few of the normal press photos. The fellas give it a whopping 10 out of 10, so there must be something to it.

As mentioned before, the A350 is entirely encased in an aluminum heatsink. The top piece is Leadtek’s Twin Turbo-II cooling system. Underneath the cover is a copper heatsink that attaches to the GPU with aluminum, which then covers the memory chips. The cover houses two 50mm fans, which are quiet, yet surprisingly efficient.

Something not mentioned in the review, and it is hard to see from the one picture they used, is the fact that the fans are covered with screens that get clogged fairly quickly. Something to look for if you have this card.

Carbon Black Thermal Paste:

If you are of the thinking that “thermal compound is thermal compound”, you wouldn’t be alone. But a new approach to thermal paste might be yielding some really good results.…check this stuff out.

The problem with current commercial pastes is that they have focused too long on the thermal conductivity of the material, and not on the fundamental principle of a thermal paste, which is gap filling. Silicone based ‘goop’ from radio shack is fairly thermally conductive, but the size of the particles and the terrible spreadability cause it to be more of an insulator than a conductor.