Computer/Hardware News

[|Fever| Deenie]

This is where I will be posting some interesting computer and hardware news for all of you to enjoy.

[|Fever| Deenie]

Some advice, if you are on a plane do not pretend you have a bomb in your jacket. It may get you arrested.

Unfortunately an NVIDIA exec forgot these golden words of wisdom and has been ordered to appear in court on March 8th for making a false bomb threat on a plane from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

Mr Yoshing Lui, 47, was arrested after he allegedly told a flight attendant he had a bomb in his pocket when he was asked if there was anything important in his pockets as he gave her his jacket to put away.

Can society not take a joke anymore or was the flight attendant correct in calling the police? Either way bomb jokes are not very funny.

[justic3]

This is a major woopsie in my opinion. I think people are just so damn tight all the time and cant take a joke. Out of all people, why would an NVIDIA exec attempt to blow up a plane. Seems a little ridiculous, but I guess if you were on that plane youd want them to be taking active measures for such an incident.

[|Fever| Deenie]

The launch of the Radeon HD 5000 series has been a noticeably different than other major GPU launches in the last half-decade. Process problems over at TSMC and a lack of a competitive card from NVIDIA has resulted in a level of demand that until this year could not be satiated. Cypress chips were going out the door to stores practically as fast as they came out of the fab, leaving card vendors with too few chips to do custom card lines. What we have seen up until now has been limited to reference cards, with only minor variations such as a different cooler or a BIOS that allows voltage control. The supply of Cypress chips has only finally reached the point where there’s a suitable number of them for card vendors to produce a custom design.



Today Sapphire is launching a pair of Radeon HD 5850 cards: the 5850 Vapor-X and the 5850 Toxic Edition. Both of these cards use a new custom design – a custom PCB, custom chokes, and of course a custom cooler – making the set of them the first custom 5850 on the market. Both are factory overclocked, with the Vapor-X clocking in at 735MHz/1050MHz, and the Toxic at 765MHz/1125MHz, and are otherwise identical. Sapphire tells us that only the Toxic will be launching in North America, while the Vapor-X will be available elsewhere. As such, today we were looking at their 5850 Toxic Edition.

Diving right in to things, the most distinctive feature of course is the cooler on the Toxic. It’s one of Sapphire’s trademark vapor-chamber coolers as found through their entire Vapor-X/Toxic line, and is designed to be more efficient and quieter than the standard heatpipe-only coolers found on reference cards. Compared to the reference cooler it’s also open-ended, meaning unlike the reference cooler it’s not a blower that exhausts all air outside the case. Rather with a large, centered fan, the Toxic’s cooler pushes air out both the front and the rear of the card.

Cracking open the cooling apparatus we find a fairly large heatsink with 3 heatpipes embedded in it, running down to the vapor chamber in the base plate. The use of 3 heatpipes means the heatsink is asymmetrical, with more pipes going to towards the rear of the card than the front.



With the cooler removed, we can see the rest of the custom kit on the Toxic: the custom PCB and chokes. Right away you’ll notice that Sapphire’s custom PCB is longer than the stock PCB; 10.1” versus 9.5”. The result of this is not only more space that Sapphire has filled with capacitors and chokes, but the entire board is basically shifted to the right compared to the reference board. Meanwhile we can see Sapphire’s custom “Black Diamond” chokes, which are grooved for better airflow and heat dissipation.

One particularly interesting deviation from the reference design is that rather than trying to attach the main VRMs to the cooler, Sapphire has given the VRMs their own small heatsink. This heatsink sits below the larger heatsink attached to the GPU, and catches airflow from the fan bound for the rear of the card. Based on our past observations, the cooling on VRMs on the reference 5800 and 5900 designs has been sketchy – for our 5970 in particular we found that the VRMs would overheat under a modest overclock. Our 5850 reference samples have not provided similar problems thanks to the lower operating voltage of a 5850, but this should still prove to be a better method of cooling the VRMs than the simple metal bar on a reference 5850.

The fact that the card deviates this much from the AMD reference design means that some considerations need to be taken in to account compared to the 5850. At around 0.5” longer than the reference design, the Toxic can get close to impeding whatever may lie behind the card. Sapphire kept the 5850’s rear-facing PCIe power plugs rather than going with 5870-style top-facing plugs, so you have to factor in the additional space required by the cables. In our Spedo case, this is as long as a fully installed card can get without running in to the case fan behind the video card.

The open-ended design also changes cooling considerations slightly. With the card venting hot air out the rear of the card along with the front, we found having a fan behind the card to feed it fresh air to be counter-productive – we were better off removing the fan and letting the card blow air back. On the plus side, the fact that the cooler on this card is open-ended on both sides means that unlike the full sheath on the reference card, this card is compatible with tool-less locking mechanisms such as what’s on our Spedo case.

Moving on, besides the card the rest of the package is unremarkable. The card comes in a full size box, which contains a manual, driver CD, a mid-length Crossfire bridge, a DVI-to-VGA adaptor, and a pair of molex-to-PCIe power adapters. Sapphire doesn’t make their own set of overclocking tools, and with the 5850’s overdrive limit of 775/1125, you’ll need 3rd party tools to do any serious overclocking.

[|Fever| Deenie]

On the heels of a move into the social networking sphere, Google on Wednesday announced that they are ready to tackle another role: Internet service provider.

Google plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the U.S., and is promising speeds up to 1 Gbps. These will be fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections that are "100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today," according to Google.

"Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone," Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, Google product managers, wrote in a blog post.

Speeds up to 1 Gbps are important to handle emerging technologies, Google said, and it urged participants to "think big with a gig." That type of speed "will enable new consumer applications, as well as medical, educational, and other services that can benefit communities," the company said. "If the Internet has taught us anything, it's that the most important innovations are often those we least expect."

Google has not yet selected the communities where it will build these networks, and is instead asking for city and state officials to tell the search engine giant where it should go.

"Today we're putting out a request for information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public," Ingersoll and Kelly wrote.

Google stressed that its networks will be open access, "meaning we'll share our network with other service providers, giving users more choice," Kelly said in a video message.

What type of communities does Google want?

"Above all, we're interested in deploying our network efficiently and quickly, and are hoping to identify interested communities that will work with us to achieve this goal," Google wrote in its FAQ. "We also want to want to work with a community where we can bring significant benefits to residents and develop useful proofs-of-concept that can have a broader impact."

Google said it wants to be able to accelerate broadband deployment in regions other than its test communities, so factors will include "level of community support, local resources, weather conditions, approved construction methods and local regulatory issues [as well as] broadband availability and speeds that are already offered to users within a community."

Comments and suggestions are due by March 26, and Google hopes to select its target community or communities this year. Pricing has not yet been determined, nor has a roll-out date been set, but Google said it will "offer service at a competitive price."

"We expect that we will provide this service to a minimum of 50,000 people and up to as many as 500,000 people, most likely in multiple communities," Google said.

In addition to providing Internet service, Google said it hopes the project will also open the door to next-generation apps, new deployment techniques, and openness and choice.

"Like our WiFi network in Mountain View, the purpose of this project is to experiment and learn. Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there's still more to be done," Ingersoll and Kelly wrote. "We don't think we have all the answers—but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone."

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, praised Google's announcement.

"Big broadband creates big opportunities. This significant trial will provide an American testbed for the next generation of innovative, high-speed Internet apps, devices, and services," Genachowski said in a statement. "The FCC's National Broadband Plan will build upon such private-sector initiatives and will include recommendations for facilitating and accelerating greater investment in broadband, creating jobs and increasing America's global competitiveness."

The FCC must deliver a national broadband plan to Congress by April.

"Google's proposed experiment with building ultra-fast, open broadband pipelines in a handful of communities follows a trail already blazed by Verizon's FiOS network, which has fiber optic cables capable of speeds comparable to what Google proposes," Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, said in a statement. "The FCC should use these examples to set forward-looking goals for the future of broadband throughout the United States."

[rover]

im a google supporter! its great for everything (almost like duct tape). and i think this is a real good idea for them. im def looking forward to this

[|Fever| Deenie]

This is pretty cool technology.

Behind the scenes video from an NVIDIA engineering lab here in Santa Clara that captures one of the cool capabilities of Optimus, NVIDIA’s new technology that automatically optimizes your notebook for performance and battery life. The video demonstrates Optimus’ capability to immediately power on and off the GPU when an application needs it – all while the system is up and running.

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[|Fever| Leftovers]

Some advice, if you are on a plane do not pretend you have a bomb in your jacket. It may get you arrested.

Unfortunately an NVIDIA exec forgot these golden words of wisdom and has been ordered to appear in court on March 8th for making a false bomb threat on a plane from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

Mr Yoshing Lui, 47, was arrested after he allegedly told a flight attendant he had a bomb in his pocket when he was asked if there was anything important in his pockets as he gave her his jacket to put away.

Can society not take a joke anymore or was the flight attendant correct in calling the police? Either way bomb jokes are not very funny.

When I was in the Navy my friend was going on leave. When he was at the Airport. The line was long and he said what the Nvidia executive said. What do you have to get in front of the line and he was arrested and never made it back home. And he told me not to tell his parents. Airports don't take that matter lightly.

[|Fever| WhiteWolf]

INTEL 6 CORES! http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=47932

Status Launched
Launch Date Q1'10
Processor Number i7-980X
# of Cores 6
# of Threads 12
Clock Speed 3.33 GHz
Max Turbo Frequency 3.6 GHz
Intel® Smart Cache 12 MB
Bus/Core Ratio 25
Intel® QPI Speed 6.4 GT/s
# of QPI Links 1
Instruction Set 64-bit
Instruction Set Extensions SSE4.2
Embedded No
Supplemental SKU No
Lithography 32 nm
Max TDP 130 W
VID Voltage Range 0.800V-1.375V
1ku Bulk Budgetary Price 999.00
Memory Specifications
Max Memory Size
(dependent on memory type) 24 GB
Memory Types DDR3-1066
# of Memory Channels 3
Max Memory Bandwidth 25.6
Physical Address Extensions 36-bit
ECC Memory Supported No
Graphics Specifications
Integrated Graphics No
Package Specifications
Max CPU Configuration 1
Package Size 42.5mm X 45mm
Sockets Supported FCLGA1366
Halogen Free Options Available Yes
Intel® Silicon and Support
Find Compatible Motherboards
Advanced Technologies
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology Yes
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology Yes
Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) Yes
Intel® Trusted Execution Technology No
AES New Instructions Yes
Intel® 64 Yes
Idle States Yes
Enhanced Intel® Speedstep Technology Yes
Intel® Demand Based Switching No
Thermal Monitoring Technologies No
Execute Disable Bit Yes

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115226

Cooling Device: Cooling device not included - Processor Only (for less then $100 more you can get it with the cooling device BUT its not worth it, you will need Liquid cooling.)

Thinking about getting this, not sure.

[|Fever| Aug]

Some advice, if you are on a plane do not pretend you have a bomb in your jacket. It may get you arrested.

Unfortunately an NVIDIA exec forgot these golden words of wisdom and has been ordered to appear in court on March 8th for making a false bomb threat on a plane from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

Mr Yoshing Lui, 47, was arrested after he allegedly told a flight attendant he had a bomb in his pocket when he was asked if there was anything important in his pockets as he gave her his jacket to put away.

Can society not take a joke anymore or was the flight attendant correct in calling the police? Either way bomb jokes are not very funny.

I think he was referring to his hardware in his pockets not a bomb. Por guy was just trying to hit on the flight attendant. The man needs some dating tips IMO.