Saturday, September 12, 2009

IT News HeadLines (Overclockers Club) 11/09/2009


Overclockers Club
Corsair Dominator 2x2 GB DDR3 1600 Cas 8 Review

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ASUS Announces P7P55 WS SuperComputer Motherboard

ASUS has announced a P55 chipset version of its WS SuperComputer motherboard based on the LGA1156 socket for Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Intended as a way for users to build their 'supercomputer' using NVIDIA cards and CUDA technology, the P7P55 WS SuperComputer motherboard can support up to three NVIDIA Tesla cards along with a NVIDIA Quadro card giving users four teraflops of processing power which ASUS says is about 250 time that of a standard PC. In regular graphics mode the board can support 3-way and 2-way SLI configurations; alternatively, users can also use ATI CrossFireX for a multi-GPU setup. The board comes with ASUS Hybrid Power 16+3 power management with dynamic T.Probe phase balancing and Hybrid OS for quick online access to such applications as browsing Skype and instant messaging. It also offers TurboV EVO-enhanced overclocking allowing users a push button way to boost their CPU's clock speeds by up to 22.2% and memory access rates by up to 14.8%. The boards also come with dual Gigabit LAN ports, 14 USB 2.0 connections, 6 3.0Gb/s SATA connectors and dual Firewire ports. The boards are available now and can be be found at online stores for as low as $225US.


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ATI and Six High Resolution Displays

Sounds crazy, right? Not to AMD, the owner of the ATI brand. That's exactly what they showed off at a press conference that The Tech Report reported on. There's a pretty awesome picture showing AMD's new technology dubbed Eyenfinity pushing out a game (Dead Space) on six thirty inch Dell monitors sporting a resolution of 2560 x 1600 each(that's over 24 million pixels)! While this feat requires a special board, the more common upcoming Radeon cards will be able to support three monitors at once. It works by making Windows think that all three monitors are a single one, and then letting AMD's drivers set up the actual displays on the monitors. No word yet as to who all will support this technology monitor company wise, but AMD is in talks with Samsung, and the demo was displayed on Dell monitors.



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Pigeon Delivers Data Faster than South African ISP, Proves Very Little

A South African IT company chose to illustrate complaints about slow ADSL upload speeds by pitting the service of the country's biggest provider, Telkom against a more traditional form of transmission, the carrier pigeon. Loaded up with a 4GB memory stick at one of Unlimited IT's call centers, the pigeon (named Winston) delivered the data to the company's office in Durban 60 miles away, while the same data was also uploaded over an ADSL connection. In total it took Winston around two hours to get the data from one location to the other, just over an hour to fly the distance and then about another hour to upload the information onto computer systems at the destination. In that same amount of time, around 4% of the data was delivered over ADSL. Many South Africans followed progress of the race online through social networking sites.

While the race may have been fun stunt to pull off, how much does it actually say about ADSL upload speeds? Well let's start by working out how fast that data upload must have been to reach the 4% complete total. Four percent of 4GB is roughly 160MB, so the equates to about 1.3 Megabytes of data every minute or just over 22KB/s. As an ISPs standard measure is in bits rather than bytes you end up with something just about reaching 180Kbps. I think we can agree that even for an upload speed, that is relatively slow (or at least it would be to most of us). Now what about how fast your upload speed would need to be to transfer that 4GB in two hours? Then we are talking something a little north of 4.6Mbps, which is still outside the range of what most of our members are provided with (outisde of work and university campuses). Give a pigeon a bigger memory stick and that number just goes up.

So South African upload speeds may be slow (particularly considering this is essentially business use), but most of our connections would be beaten by a pigeon delivery service too. Of course, that wouldn't be practical for a number of reasons, though I'll let you make up your own jokes on that one (or just take a look at the comments section on the engadget coverage of this story). Now excuse me while I go and see if I can train my cat to intercept sensitive data in transit; maybe he can finally start earning his keep.


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