Lowyat.NET: Latest topics in Hardware

Any of the best pc casing for gaming that u like?,

spideysam — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:25:52 +0800

Any of the best pc casing for gaming that u like?
wan know which is the nicest?? can show me the image?? Want decide which the nicest 1...

somebody can tell me?,

thomas1234 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:31:01 +0800

somebody can tell me which website can find all hardware properties ?

Asus P6T Deluxe Pictures (X58),

low98944 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:48:50 +0800

X58- Northbridge

Nehalem-Sockel 1366

16- phase power-supply system

Source: http://www.pcgameshardware.de

laser printer, choosing laser printer

ggoo — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:33:20 +0800

hi... i dotn really know much about laser printers.. and i'm planning to invest in one.. it uses a catridge right? and how many printing does the catridge last till it has to be replaced? and with a budget of rm500+- what kind of laser printer specs can i get? do tell me the brand, and the specs and also the pros and cons of laser printer...

thx in advance.. cheers..

ASUS Eee Box B202, Sell in Malaysia?

philipcs — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:47:58 +0800

anyone know when this little thing will arrive Malaysia?

I am comparing this little pc with Acer L320

However, my main purpose is put next to my LCD TV for movie and music only.

Ancient AMD Athlon 64 Beats Intel Atom,

juine — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:27:33 +0800

[center][/center]

QUOTE

A few years ago, AMD was the king of performance per watt with its K8 architecture, while Intel kept pushing the Pentium 4 faster and hotter, until it basically had to chunk its NetBurst architecture. So this is something of a nostalgia trip for AMD fanboys: In Tom's Hardware's tests, a 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+ using the years-old K8 architecture "beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power" and "outperforms [it] in several benchmark tests" even though the Atom chip is running at 1.6GHz chip. How?

In part, because the K8 architecture is just damn good, but also because AMD's 780G desktop platform is more modern—so it has more features too—while the Intel 945GC chipset is old and busted. The AMD system is quieter too, because it doesn't even need a cooling fan. So while the 8-watt Athlon 64 2000+ processor technically uses more power, the AMD system on the whole consumes less than the Intel setup, idling or under a full load. AMD winning at something—between this minor victory and ATI's latest on top of the world, it's almost like the good ol' cutthroat days again.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Atom-A...cient,1997.html [via Gizmodo]

Intel Will Disclose DTS Specs for 45nm processors, Finally, accurate temperature monitoring

kmarc — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:56:20 +0800

Great news! We can finally monitor the core temperature of 45nm CPUs when Intel discloses the DTS specs!

This will only be revealed at the upcoming IDF : http://www.tomshardware.com/news/IDF-DTS-T...ature,6154.html

Vote for your RAM!, Second one... More RAM selections...

adib1992 — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:03:11 +0800

Hi all... This My second poll for RAMs.. I've closed the older one.. This poll have more RAM selections.. Vote for your favourite RAM...

Thanks for voting!!!

Vote for your RAM!, Why you like it?

adib1992 — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:44:51 +0800

hey dudes... please vote for your favourite RAM... i need the result for survey.... thnx for voting!!

Human Brain vs ATI 4870 GPU,

cscheat — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:47:28 +0800

Guy, found this on the net ! funny !

Human brain has 100x more compute capability than ATi RV770 GPU

Source;
http://forum.donanimhaber.com/m_25688835/tm.htm

New Samsung monitor help on colour profile!, weird yellow casting on image viewer..

yvliew — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:29:50 +0800

I just bought a Samsung 2253BW and I can't seems to get the color profile right. I have tried using natural Colour software provided by the monitor, doesn't work. What should I do?

When I open image using Windows photo gallery, the yellow casting shows up making the photo color incorrect. When I open photoshop, it says my monitor profile is defective. I don't know wat to do. Please help!! Thanks in advance..

[attachmentid=561282]

DFI Lan Party DK X48 thread, user report in

thaisxs — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:28:21 +0800

Seeing alot of LT x48 selling their board n change to DK x48
i wonder wat r the reasons?

this is my 1st lan party board

the duck knight

love this logo

v1 match perfectly with the dk design ( copper)

share ur exp here
looking forward some oc geek to post their pic

My motherboard panel lost,

samlee860407 — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 13:46:12 +0800

Post on wrong section, sorry >.<

Gainward HD4850 GS vs HIS HD4850 ICEQ4 turbo-x, Which one is better?? need help plz

Mrx_Rf — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:05:25 +0800

Want to buy new gc but have difficulties to choose between these two.

Gainward have higher clock but HIS must be able to overclock further rite?

Can anyone provide benchmark, idle temp, full load temp, etc.

Plz your help really needed. tQ

Nvidia Shows Off Raytracing,

juine — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:34:56 +0800

QUOTE

Nvidia have produced a proof-of-concept demo that shows how standard (albeit powerful and heavily tweaked) graphics processors can be used to render raytraced scenes in real time.

The demo showed animation running 30 frames per second at 1,920 x 1,080. Nvidia cranked the demo up to 2,560 x 1,600 but would not reveal the frame rate. This could have huge implications for in-game graphics, although as the system currently requires 4 parallel Quadro GPUs with 1GB memory apiece, costing around $10,000 a pop it may be a couple of years before this hits even the most hardcore PC gamer's desktop.

Quoth Nvidia, "the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application." Which certainly sounds impressive. What this appears to mean is "Look! A shiny car that we can move around real quick!" and, you know, that may well be enough.

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/604656/nvid...920-x-1080.html [via Kotaku]

The future is here!

IN DEPTH OF FOXCONN BLACKOPS–the x48 motherboard, dedicated to gamers

windwithme — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:58:44 +0800

After a couple of years of entering branded Motherboard market,
FOXCONN has started a gaming product line Quantum Force from the P35 chipset based MARS featuring overclocking, performance and gaming in 2007.

Lately we see another Quantum Force “BlackOps”, a X48 chipset based motherboard,
launched. BlackOps is a bit behind on schedule comparing to other manufacturers’ X48 motherboards, but we’ll find out if it’s worth waiting now.

The package is as huge as 45 x 13 x 29 cm with rich accessories. No surprisingly, the package design is targeted at gamers.

Here’s the manual, quick guide, I/O panel, FOXCONN “Quantum Force” shield sticker and the IDE cable.

SATA cables, USB rear bracket, and screws

7.1 channel audio capability SONAR Audio card based on Realtek ALC885 chipset
And an additional 12cm fan for Chassis to releasing system temperature

Here’s FOXCONN BLOCKOPS

In this part of the board
A total of 3 PCIe x16 slots support ATI CrossFireX technology. When all of them are running, it operates at x16+x16+x4.
3 PCI slots.
It uses Broadcom 5786/5788 Gigabit LAN chipset.

In this part of the board
6 SATAII provided by ICH9R southbridge and support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10
LEDs to show system message and the Power/Reset/Clear CMOS button
Dual BIOS design, and an the blue jumper can reset the board easily

In this part of the board there are connectors include:
24 pin power supply connector
1 IDE connector
1 Floppy connector
4 DDR3 DIMMs support 800/1066/1333/1600 MHz

In this part of the board
It supports 45/65nm Quad/Duo processors
8 phase PWM design

Bad News for Nvidia,

juine — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:47:48 +0800

Is this posted?

QUOTE

With the latest Nvidia drive to make people jump onboard the PhysX bandwagon, we did a quick and dirty test with the help of Nvidia’s own particle fluid demo. We actually have a PCI PhysX cards from the days of Ageia and we thought it’d be interesting to put it up against a Geforce card to see how both perform against each other.

There were a few unexpected surprises that we ran into, first of all we noticed that the Ageia solution was unable to render as many fluid particles as the Geforce option, which in this case was a Geforce 8800GT. In fact, it couldn’t even do half the amount of fluid particles that the Geforce 8800 GT card was able to do.

Now this might just have been down to faster hardware, but we noticed that the render was stuttering on the Ageia hardware and we couldn’t quite figure out why, as this wasn’t an issue when using the Geforce PhysX option in the drivers.

Running Fraps revealed that the Ageia card only managed about 15fps while the Geforce 8800GT was doing on average about 24fps. Again, we simply put this down to the Geforce solution being faster. Then we happened to glance over at the CPU usage widget in Windows Vista and noticed that there was a massive difference in CPU usage between the two.

The Ageia card only used between 30 to 40 percent of the CPU, taking into account that at idle at the desktop about 20 percent of the CPU is being used. Switching to the Geforce 8800GT the CPU usage jumped up to between 75 to 80 percent and at times even higher.

Even running the demo in pure software mode doesn’t use as much CPU as the Geforce PhysX option, although the demo is vastly slower using the software mode, which relies purely on the CPU. Oddly enough the software mode would produce the same amount of fluid particles as the Geforce card, no matter if the Geforce or Ageia option was ticked in the drivers.

This makes us wonder if Nvidia is playing fair and square, does the GPU actually do all the PhysiX calculations or are Nvidia offloading a whole bunch of calculations onto the CPU. Is this just a demo issue, or is there something more to this? At this moment we don’t have an explanation as to what is going on, but we’re sure that we’ve just stirred up yet another hornets’ nest.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=c...d=8859&Itemid=1

This yr seem very bad yr for Nvidia... but don't worry tomolo will be better.

Extreme cooling?, how "cool" is your rig?

Luftwacko — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:43:33 +0800

Hey guys, I wuz wondering how ya'll cool your rigs? Do you buy custom heatsinks? More fans? Water-cooling system? Or do you submerge the whole rig into cooking oil, mineral oil, baby oil etc.? Or shove the whole rig into your freezer? (or maybe liquid nitrogen or dry ice? )

Just curious

Gaidward HD3870 (512) vs Asus 9500GT (512), which is better? need help

dadarouch — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:32:19 +0800

hi guys.. my friend needs help in choosing between those two GCs.. can help? i've been using Nvidias only.. so i cant really help him out..

the two GCs are the DDR3 version..

thanks alot for ur replies

AMD Showcases Cinema 2.0, Photo-realism Closer to Developers' Rch

pikacu — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:13:11 +0800

AMD Showcases Cinema 2.0, Photo-realism Closer to Developers' Reach

QUOTE

This technology called Cinema 2.0 makes producing photo-realistic human characters possible. It can be used in scenarios such as producing a full-on CGI movie or parts of it, where computers generate the actors' computer-animated replica that's the most photo-realistic in today's time. For example, the woman in the picture below is computer-animated. Believe it!

http://www.techpowerup.com/68335/AMD_Showc...pers_Reach.html