ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Driver - Everything you want to know and why you should care

Subject: Graphics Cards | August 14, 2009 - 05:58 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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With five months of ATI Catalyst driver blogs under our belt, we are seeing a growing engagement from the community via this blog site. Please keep up the great comments and suggestions and we will endeavor to answer as many as we can. So, without further ado – let me introduce the ATI Catalyst 9.8 Driver Release!

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Driver

AMD demos DX11 hardware at QuakeCon 2009

Subject: Graphics Cards | August 14, 2009 - 03:50 PM | Ryan Shrout
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Cause your own brown outs

Subject: Cases and Cooling | August 14, 2009 - 03:07 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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At 1500W, the new SilverStone Strider is for the seriously power hungry machine and believe it or not, it has a 80 PLUS Silver certification.  It weighs in at 4.2kg (9.25lbs) and is 220mm (8.5") long, so make sure you are not going to put this beast in a microATX case.  Pure Overclock was disappointed with SilverStone in one particular area, this PSU comes with a 3 year warranty instead of the more common 5yr warranty.  Apart from that the build is solid and this is a PSU that could even cause jealousy.

Pretend you need it for school

Subject: Systems | August 14, 2009 - 02:09 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Having just updated the PC Perspective Hardware Leaderboard early this week with various components like MSI's new flagship X58 motherboard, a sub $200 HD4890 and some incredible deals on DDR3; it seems only appropriate to offer other choices.  PC Stats has finished updating their three system recommendations.  Their budget and mainstream PCs are both AMD machines, the X2 245 powering the $500 machine and the X4 920 inside of the $1000 build.  The $2000 machine is where

The most popular kid at the Prom

Subject: Storage | August 14, 2009 - 12:13 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Indilinx has gone from a company that only the most hardened of storage geeks used on a daily basis to one of the more common names dropped in tech discussions.  This is all thanks to the rise of the Solid State Drive and Indilinx's Barefoot controller.  A quick peek at Allyn's SSD Decoder Ring shows you just how popular a controller it is.  This implementation is paired with Elpida RAM and Samsung NAND in the

Drop us a hint, will ya?

Subject: General Tech | August 14, 2009 - 11:51 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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nVIDIA's chipset business may not be doing as badly as we thought.  They are still providing chipsets for Apple's products and it seems that Jobs' crew is quite happy with what nVIDIA has provided as they are going to be picking up two new ones.  Three MCPs are expected, a pair for Intel based systems including those Apples and a single solution for AMD systems.  The information is pretty sparse, DigiTimes has the parts of the story we know.

LIVE at QuakeCon 2009 - opening presentation and John Carmack Keynote

Subject: General Tech | August 13, 2009 - 05:06 PM | Ryan Shrout
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Cry Havok and let loose the PhysX war

Subject: Graphics Cards | August 13, 2009 - 02:58 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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In one corner is the CPU calculated physics software called Havok and in the other corner is what used to be Ageia's and is now nVIDIA's proprietary GPU physics program, PhsyX.

This dragon doesn't require a treasure trove

Subject: Cases and Cooling | August 13, 2009 - 02:37 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Value cases have certainly changed in recent years.  What once was a cream coloured case with 2 5.25" bays and an 80mm exhaust fan has changed to cases like the  ~$50 Lancool DragonLord PC-K56.  Tool less design, 120mm exhaust and intake fans, 5 5.25" bays, 8 vented expansion slots in the back and even rubber grommets for watercooling.  Check out this value priced case at Pro-Clockers.

AMD has a new gift for their fans

Subject: Processors | August 13, 2009 - 01:04 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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The Deneb based Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition processor is AMD's new top of the line product.  The core is running at a nice and speedy 3.4 GHz, but the memory controller, HT link, and L3 cache are untouched, still  running at 2 GHz.  AMD has set the price at $245, a nice attractive price for a drop in upgrade.  Josh tests this 140W processor as far as it can go and a bit bey

Still down with the ACC

Subject: Cases and Cooling | August 13, 2009 - 12:15 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Advanced Clock Calibration, what can't it do?  First it was the dual and triple channel Phenom IIs seeing their unused cores being unlocked and forced to become useful.  Then as people got wind of that ability there was a huge upswing in returned CPUs as everyone tried to find a CPU whose disabled cores were flawless.  Now it turns out that the Semprons  know the same trick.  The $40 Sempron 140 can

Corsair Launches World’s Fastest High Capacity USB Flash Drive

Subject: Storage | August 13, 2009 - 12:00 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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Fremont, CA. August 13th, 2009 - Corsair®, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer memory, power supplies and flash memory products, including solid-state drives, today announced the 128GB Flash Voyager GT, the world’s fastest 128GB USB flash drive.

The newest Flash Voyager GT is based upon a revolutionary design that employs a unique dual-controller architecture to achieve SLC-levels of performance using MLC NAND flash memory.

Watch us record the PC Perspective Podcast LIVE!!!

Subject: Editorial | August 12, 2009 - 09:57 PM | Ryan Shrout
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Are you ready for This Week in Computer Hardware LIVE right here or by visiting http://live.twit.tv/??  Lot's of great topics on the agenda for tonight!!!  On the road to QuakeCon 2009!!

It's about the cooling, not the arm strain

Subject: Mobile | August 12, 2009 - 05:10 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
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If you are the proud owner of a gaming laptop, your problems are a little different than the average mobile user.  You are neither concerned about weight, nor about battery life, your top concern is heat.  Laptop coolers have been around for a while now, first to deal with the inefficient cooling of older laptop lines and now to cope with gaming laptops and desktop replacements.  The Thermaltake Massive23 CS
may be the first one with a 230mm fan to provide the air flow, the multicoloured LEDs are just icing on the cake. 

The EVGA P55 FTW motherboard takes a bow

Subject: Motherboards | August 12, 2009 - 03:42 PM | Ryan Shrout
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The gang over at Anandtech have posted a preview of the EVGA designed P55 FTW motherboard for the upcoming Lynnfield platform.  I'm going to just post a single picture here to wet your appetite but you should over to their site for all the details. 

Catalyst 9.8 to be previewed at QuakeCon 2009

Subject: Graphics Cards | August 12, 2009 - 03:35 PM | Ryan Shrout
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It looks like AMD GPU fans attending QuakeCon 2009 (and you really should) will get a bit of an early dig into the world of the Catalyst 9.8 drivers.  According to this post on Catalyst driver lead Terry Makedon's twitter page, users interested in getting the first taste of 9.8 should be following him:

SLI coming to P55 chipset and Lynnfield CPU, but what about 3-Way?

Subject: Graphics Cards | August 12, 2009 - 03:23 PM | Ryan Shrout
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A couple of days ago news began to spread that (surprise!!) SLI support was coming to the world of Lynnfield and the P55 chipset.  Why this was a shock to so many people was confusing to me as motherboards had been advertised with "SLI Support" since Computex in June.  We saw examples from ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte as well as several other brands.

Lucid HYDRA chip could be coming on high-end MSI motherboard

Subject: Motherboards | August 12, 2009 - 03:03 PM | Ryan Shrout
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The gang over at techPowerUp! got some VERY interesting images of an upcoming motherboard from MSI codenamed "Big Bang".  This motherboard not only sports the upcoming Intel P55 chipset for Lynnfield processors, but also includes the LucidLogix HYDRA chip that we have discussed many times before.