Posts Tagged ‘december 2009’

BTX Hair Dryer

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

I built a home theater PC from scratch a while back. It has an Intel D945GCZLR motherboard with a Pentium D 925, a passively cooled GeForce 6600, and an Avermedia PCI-e Combo TV Tuner, all inside an Evercase ECE1341 case. I went with the best BTX CPU cooler I could find: the Thermaltake CL-P0191. This thing sounds like a lawn mower. Even with plenty of airflow into the case and plenty of room in every direction on my entertainment system, the cooler is far louder than the 14-28dBA its marketing materials claim.

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Game Theory: Offer I Can Refuse

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Facebook is the answer to a question no one asked: “How can I waste more of my time?” Compared to social network gaming, however, Facebook itself is as useful an invention as the cell phone. Actually, I do like Facebook. I’ve used it to reconnect with dozens of people I used to know. Two of them are even people I like. A year after I first joined Facebook for the sole purpose of sharing pictures of a new puppy, I find myself updating my status, making comments, and listing things like the “Five TV Characters I Wish Were Real So We Could Hang.” (Dr.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

The Missing Keys

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

I bought two laptops for my two granddaughters about a year and a half ago. Now both have missing keys. Is there a way to purchase replacement keys, or do I need to buy a whole new keyboard? These two laptops are both Compaqs sold by HP

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Fast Forward: Parallelism

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

After decades of fitful progress, parallel processing is suddenly hot and will soon be commonplace on ordinary PCs. For applications rich in data-level parallelism, performance is soaring by leaps and bounds. Multicore CPUs from Intel and AMD are all good, but the game-changers are the next-gen GPUs from Nvidia and AMD/ATI. These chips are evolving from highly specialized 3D-graphics processors for games into broader computing engines for nongame software. Nvidia is leading the charge with a new GPU architecture that, for the first time, supports general-purpose computing as strongly as it supports graphics

For the full story, go to Maximum PC