Archive for December 2011

Gigabyte Recalls X79 UD3, UD5, G1.Assassin 2 Motherboards

Mainboard 578 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Now I do not have this confirmed just yet from Gigabyte themselves, but the following is reported:

Last week, a Taiwanese overclocker putting his OC workbench through an relatively laxed OC stress test saw its Gigabyte X79 UD3 motherboard go bust. Its CPU VRM couldn't cope with the stress, and blew a MOSFET. At the time, people responding to his video condoled him for his bad luck. It appears now that his wasn't a one-off case of "bad-egg". Gigabyte, in its latest press release on its Chinese website, noted the issue.

Apparently it received several such complaints from overclockers where even moderate voltage-assisted CPU OC fried its VRM. The issue was found to be widespread, among three of its main socket LGA2011 products, the GA-X79-UD3, GA-X79-UD5, and G1.Assassin 2.

Apparently, the issue is caused by a bad mix of firmware limitations to complement the board's PWM circuitry, which have an effect on the PWM components causing an overheat.

As an immediate remedy, Gigabyte issued a BIOS update for the affected products. This BIOS, however, will limit the board's overclocking abilities. The new BIOS will throttle CPU when subjected to extreme stress, to save the VRM. The BIOS remedy is only for those who opt to keep their boards, or don't subject the board to extreme tuning.

The other remedy, is to return the board to Gigabyte, for a free replacement when the "right" boards are available. Gigabyte also announced a general recall of the GA-X79-UD3, GA-X79-UD5, and G1.Assassin 2, from the market. A video of the "unlucky" (not anymore) overclocker's day going bad, can be watched here.


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Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid 850 Watt PSU review

Review 567 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Cooler Master launched the new Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid PSU series. The end result as such is enticing alright, a very nice power supply rates 80+ gold, that comes with a modular design and one big massive 12V rail, which we all like so very much. Carrying a 80+ Gold certification (90% efficiency at typical load) , being modular, with included fan controller and having good looks yeah the Silent Pro Hybrid promises to be an excellent product series.

Check the article right here.


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Asus Will Continue Transformer Prime Despite Lawsuit

Generic News 1994 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

An Asus representative has revealed recently that the outfit has no plans to discontinue the production of tablets in the Transformer line, including the recently released Transformer Prime, despite the lawsuit started against the company by Hasbro.

After the trademark infringement lawsuit was filed by the US-based toy maker, Asus has conducted a series of internal assessments and found that no patents are infringed by its tablet line, said Chang Wei-Ming, an Asus spokesperson.

Chang continued by adding that the lawsuit is unlikely to affect production, reports the Focus Taiwan publication.

According to Hasbro, the Transformer Prime label might cause confusion among consumers, so the toy maker has decided to sue Asus for trademark infringement, unfair competition and trademark dilution.

Hasbro, also asked the Los Angeles court to stop the Taiwanese company from using the Transformer name in current and future products.

Officially announced in mid-November, the 10.1-inch Transformer Prime is powered by Nvidia


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New Intel Server Board Holds 1 TB of RAM

Mainboard 578 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

There will also be a quad-CPU enabled Xeon E5 Socket 2011 version, a quarter later from now as vrzone reports.

How much memory can it take? How about a terabyte?

Two QPI links on Socket 2011 CPUs do enable connecting each processor to TWO other ones, if you accept lesser inter-processor bandwidth compared to just dual-link pairing of two CPUs alone. There will be a separate Xeon E5-4600 series covering that particular market segment, which sits between the high end dual-socket E5-2600 and the enterprise RAS-enhanced even higher end E7 series (those fancy 10-core 30 MB L3 cache Westmere-EX chips and their followons).

These are good for uber-rendering workstations with many threads, as well as SMP server jobs where high per-core performance is more important than RAS capability or huge interprocessor bandwidth - E7 series have, after all, four QPI links on each CPU for that purpose.

Now, since the maximum memory load on each Socket 2011 processor is three DIMMs per channel, or 12 in total, it would allow for 48 DIMMs altogether on a quad processor board, as you can see here on the 'Lizard Head Pass' S4600LH board expected from Intel. A truly lovely platform which, if good liquid cooling system was there, could actually fit into 1U platform! Else, it's 2U, still not bad at all.

Now, remember those fancy Samsung - and other vendors' - 32 GB LR-DIMMs at DDR3-1333 speeds and taking just like 5 watts? Well, put 48 of them into this 'little' mobo, and you got... umm... 1.5 TB RAM, yes. Now, inexpensive large memory data mining and analysis ops, not to mention simulations like, for instance, impact of MRT line failure on all the car and bus traffic in Singapore down to every person, vehicle and path - an increasingly more often required app here, it seems - become very real, especially when coupled with the current low memory pricing.

And, oh yes, there are 160 PCIe v3 lanes in total on such platform. Now, how about an extender box for an 8 x dual-GPU setup as an accelerator? A eight-set of liquid-cooled OC AMD HD7990 dual GPU cards could give you up to 15 TFLOPs of double precision power to assist those Xeons on board.


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The Ender Scrolls V: Minerim Trailer

Games 1603 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

hehe Ender Scrolls  ... A mash up of the two games that a guy loves to play. The trailer was made as a way to give some lovin' to these awesome games. Made in blender in a timespan of 2 months 

Just watch it .. 
 


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Zalman F1-Series SSDs Spotted in Stores

Storage 785 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Reported earlier are Zalman's newest line of solid state drives, the F1-series, they started selling in Japan.

These are based of the SandForce SF-2281 controller and obviously come with MLC NAND flash memory. The F1-series is available in three sizes, 60 GB, 120 GB, and 240 GB; priced at 11,980 JPY (US $153), 19,800 JPY ($254), and 39,980 JPY ($513), respectively. The drives take advantage of the SATA 6 Gb/s interface, and are built in the 2.5-inch form-factor.

The drives offer read speeds of up to 560 MB/s, and up to 530 MB/s writes. The 60 GB and 120 GB models offer 4K random write performance of 30,000 IOPS, while the 240 GB one offers 45,000 IOPS.


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MSI MultiConnect Panel and Voice Genie

Mainboard 578 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

MSI announces today two new products, the MultiConnect Panel and Voice Genie.

With support for Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 3.0 wireless transfer, MSI's MultiConnect Panel provides an OC Genie button for MSI mainboard users to instantly increase system performance with a simple push of a button! The MSI-exclusive Super Charger on the MultiConnect Panel also allows users to quickly charge their smart-phones, tablet PCs, wireless keyboards, and wireless mice via any MSI X79 mainboard.

MSI's groundbreaking Voice Genie is the world's first voice control technology with system startup support without the need for keyboard or mouse operation! Aside from turning on and off the system, users can even enable and disable OC Genie, open a web browser, wake up the system, and set the system to sleep mode all via voice command! Full compatibility with all MSI X79 Series mainboards helps bring added value to the MSI computing experience with MultiConnect Panel and Voice Genie.


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Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid 850 Watt PSU review

PSU - Power Supply Units 110 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Cooler Master launched the new Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid PSU series. The end result ass such is enticing alright, a very nice power supply rates 80+ gold, that comes with a modular design and one big massive 12V rail, which we all like so very much. Carrying a 80+ Gold certification (90% efficiency at typical load) , being modular, with included fan controller and having good looks yeah the Silent Pro Hybrid promises to be an excellent product series.


Intel Medfield SoC Power and Performance leaks

Processor 721 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Intel officially introduces its next-generation Atom processors for mobile devices, code named Medfield at CES, the first performance figures regarding this system-on-a-chip (SoC) device were leaked on the Web.

The system used for providing these numbers was actually an Intel-designed 10.1-inch tablet powered by an unnamed Medfield processor running at 1.6GHz.

The CPU was paired together with 1GB of LP-DDR2 memory, a WLAN/Bluetooth/FM Radio chip produced by an unnamed manufacturer, a 1280


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Radeon HD 7950 Specifications Surface

Graphics Cards 1673 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Guru3D.com ImageI guess we'll be seeing a few more leaks on the 7950 this week, but the new 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon based 7950 specs seem to finalize, the "Tahiti Pro" or HD 7950 should look like this::
  • 1792 stream processors, 28 GCN compute units
  • 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs (derived)
  • 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface
  • 3 GB memory, memory clock around 5.00 GHz
The core clock speed, the exact memory clock speed, and more importantly, the target price-point, remain unknown. The Radeon HD 7950 is expected to be launched on the 9th of January and board partners will be free to design custom boards which is great for better cooling and overclocking potential.

 


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Intel shifts Atom development focus to embedded and server

Processor 721 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Intel has adjusted its Atom development focus to embedded and server applications, due to low demand for netbook Atom CPUs. In Q2 2012 the company will introduce the 32nm "Centerton" Atom, which is expected to be followed by the 22nm "Silvermont" in 2013 and the 14nm "Airmont" in 2014.

Intel reportedly plans to launch new members of its Atom CPU-lineup for network-attached storage devices and entry-level servers in the second quarter of 2012, according to industry sources.

The new Atom CPU, codenamed Centerton, will be made with a 32nm process with SoC design in slim architecture and low power consumption, the sources indicated.


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Rig of the Year and Month December 2011

Review 567 Published by Hilbert Hagedoorn 0

Guru3D Rig of the Month - December 2011Guru3D Rig of the Month
Each month here at Guru3D.com we feature one of you guys, your PC, your DIY project. It is quite honestly amazing how much detail and dedication you put into an PC, and every now and then it really shows.

The Rig of the Month December 2011 carries the keywords dark, excellent but most of all detail. Bill Lindsay who transformed one PC into a very stylish and clean build -- we'll call it 'the Cube'.

You can check the article right here.



Vote the Rig of the Year 2011
You can see it to your right already, each year the twelve Rig of the Month winners will get into the Rig of the Year Finals, the winner this year walks away with another OCZ Vertex 3 120GB Solid State Disk and a OCZ ZX 1250 POwer Supply !

Please have a look at the entries below and vote for your favorites, you may enter multiple entries:

Be fair with casting your vote, vote once. Any fraudulous attempts will get the contestant disqualified.

target=_self

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