Tech News
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NZXT S340 Elite Case Review @ ThinkComputers
Tempered glass is everywhere, in your shower, in your car and now on your PC. Given how popular tempered glass side panels have been it is no surprise that case makers are scrambling to figure out how to retrofit their popular designs to handle the heavy glass.
They can even give them new names like "Elite"
One of the best parts of PC building is the seemingly limitless number of choices available when it comes to hardware. But sometimes this can be a bad thing and you are simply overwhelmed with options and choosing what part is best for you can be tough. Take cases for instance, there is literally a sea of computer chassis’ on the market and picking which one suits your needs and desires can be a daunting task. Luckily we here at ThinkComputers have your back and today we are taking a look at NZXT’s latest mid tower chassis, the S340 Elite. This mid tower comes equipped with a full Tempered Glass side panel and several features that should make it very friendly to VR. Follow along as we find out if the S340 Elite stands out of the crowd or if it should be thrown back with the other fish.
Oh, and i guess VR is a thing now too. The technology has been around for years and is just now getting a resurgence and enough attention to get people excited. I guess that is two things now. tempered glass and... VR in the same package.
Who knew?
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An Interesting Discussion on Reddit about Overclocking
I'm a firm believer that reddit (https://www.reddit.com/) is a rather pointless web platform filled with millennial idiocy and pr0n but, every once in awhile there are interesting things to be found. For instance, in the /r/overclocking subreddit you would image there to be discussions about overclocking but, instead you normally find folks asking for technical help with questions formed as clickbait to find out if water in their PSU is bad. *roll*
One thread caught my eye and I’m going to repost my interaction here, just for fun.
Title: Good, cheap X79 Motherboard?
I'm looking for a good and cheap X79 motherboard to pair along with my Xeon E5-2670, but I can only find Intel X79 motherboards under $200 and I don't have much of a budget for the motherboard so I'm scrambling to find a good and cheap X79 motherboard for overclocking the E5-2670 and as an overall good motherboard. Do you guys have any recommended X79 motherboards?Also, I'm beginning to dabble into overclocking and GPU overclocking seems easy enough with MSI Afterburner, you just max out the settings and look at the stress, right? (I'm a newb at overclocking. Will be using a EVGA GTX 1060 6GB SC as my GPU.)
I'm completely lost on overclocking CPUs, though, so if anyone could help me with overclocking an E5-2670, that be amazing.
Will use a Cryorig H7 and Kingston HyperX 16GB 1600mhz DDR3 RAM.
Thanks everyone!
Ok so the question mark is suspect but I figured hey, let’s reply and see what happens.
What really bothers me about reddit is that some readers really are asking for help while others appear to be unable to make a decision on their own. This poster appears to frequent Overclock.net given their knowledge of the LGA 2011 Xeon so it makes me wonder why they even bothered asking.
Here was my reply.
GTX 1060 isn't all that good for overclocking, Sure you can crank a few extra Mhz but the performance gain isn't all that much. Then again I'm speaking from LN2 exp and for me "on air" overclocking is kinda pointless.
As for the X79 mobo it depends on what you want to do. Not many of them support Xeon CPUs so you'll be limited by making sure the UEFI supports your CPU "and" has overclocking adjustments. For the most part all of the big mfgs support what you will need so it comes down to features you want and if you plan to go subzero at some point.
No solid recommends but, I'm a fan of the X79 Dark, X79 ROG "whatever" and the MSI X79 Xpower. All do great on LN2/SS, if you want air the Asus P9X79 is good along with most anything from Gigabyte or MSI. (seeing a trend here? thought you might)
Whatever you decide make sure the VRM is cool else you'll run into stability problems and invest in a decent cooler. Not saying the Cryorig H7 is a bad cooler but, I find it difficult to take any heatsink you can buy at Walmart serious. #justsayin Think AIO or a single 6-pipe tower with dual fans (push+pull).
It would seem my GTX 1060 comment ruffled some feathers and spawned three independent replies and by far this is the best one.
[–]flipmatthew 1 point 1 day ago*
You saying air overclocking is pointless is stupid, sounds elitist, and goes againstthe point of overclocking: Get the most performance for you dollar. I have a full water loop, I get that it's better, but don't shit on it. Air does really well now too.[–]redmax_4930K@5.1Ghz 1.45v 1 point 1 day ago
I'm not trying to sound like I am against overclocking, I do it all the time and even have special equipment to get the most from my overclocking. The point is the actual performance gains from overclocking are getting smaller (duh). Sure, you can say I have a GTX 10XX card running at 2Ghz but if you're already pushing 100FPS in a game that extra 10 isn't going to do you any good.Likewise getting the most from your dollar is an illusion when you can't buy a waterblock for a GTX 1060 or cannot buy a VRM block for an X79. Same is true when board makers overbuild a PCB but are unable to offer the tools required to unlock the card.
Casual (air/water) overclocking is bought these days and how far you push it is based entirely on how much you spend.
[–]flipmatthew 2 points 22 hours ago
Great points!! Always nice to hear a different perspective (also, it's sad but true that a lot of it is bought todayThere were some others, mostly arguing that the GTX 1060 overclocks soooooo well and how could I ever say it didn't. The way the NVidia marketing is written (which is evil good btw) it makes it seem like the Pascal cards are amazing overclockers. And they are if you look at base clock vs overclocked boost clock. Thing people don't realize is that the cards run on boost 100% of the time and often boost past what is advertised when conditions are good.
So ya, the card is overclocking itself and most manual tweaks just cause the card to become unstable. #thanksnvidia
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Flashback Friday - Dual Pentium 450Mhz
Believe it or not, there was a time when processors only had a single core and to get better performance you had to double up. For this Flashback Friday I give you a Tyan Tiger S1832D Dual Pentium motherboard. This particular motherboard was designed for Pentium II based processors however I was running dual P3 450Mhz procs and matched it up with some PC-100 memory.
It is actually rather painful to think back on those days knowing that we can buy 8 and 10 core processors but when this system was built it was considered an elite enthusiast PC that I used mostly for 3DStudio MAX rendering, animation and AutoCAD. Of course I played games on this machine and it ran flawless.
Of course after a year or so I upgraded to a dual Pentium 3 800 EB based system and this particular motherboard became part of a development server.
Some interesting things about this board is the single AGP slot (important at the time) and a jumper based CPU selection. Those jumpers would set the FSB and multiplier and was an easy way to overclock the system at the hardware level. Tyan was/is a US based system board designer and was well known for their server board designs and multiprocessor motherboards for workstations.
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SethBling Builds a Working Atari 2600 in Minecraft
I have been known to play a little Minecraft from time to time and even built a few Redstone circuits. Nothing complex just a few hidden doors, lights and stuff like that. Redstone itself is pretty easy to understand, you flip a switch, the redstone lights and something happens. Flip the switch again and it goes back to the ready state.
A computer works in much the same way, On = 1 and Off = 0. Extrapolate that outwards and you can build a computer program, processor, memory etc all within the confines of Minecraft.
SethBling has published a video showing off his Atari 2600 emulator and three games. Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Pac Man. Back in the day these ran from a cartridge and at about 1Mhz on the 2600. For the Minecraft version it takes about four hours to render a single frame.
This makes the Atari game unplayable but does prove a point that given enough time you can do just about anything in Minecraft.
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20 of the Worst PC Setups – November 2016 @ ThinkComputers
Back when I was in college I had this "hand me down" coffee table that was wooden with a glass inlaid top. It was maybe 2 feet off the ground at about the same height as the seat part of a couch.
Well I used that coffee table as my computer desk for 6 months and used my couch as a place to sit down. I didn't have a proper desk or chair at the time and while my drafting table would have worked great I needed it for drawing. Needless to say, it wasn't very ergonomic.
Point is, we all have had a bad PC setup, some are forced on us, like mine, and others are just people being stupid. Lets see which is which
I’m sure at some point you’ve had a bad PC setup. Maybe moving into a new place, waiting for a new desk to arrive or you just ran out of room. I can remember my horrible PC setups from when I was living at the dorms in college. If you have ever ventured over to the Shitty Battlestations sub-reddit you will find a lot of horrible PC setups. We will are going to pick 20 each month and feature them as 20 of the Worst PC setups for that month. Here are some of the bad ones from November!
I've been thinking about putting something like this together, If you have any ideas on how to collect the bad setups let me know.
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Hardware Asylum and GeIL Memory Holiday Hardware Giveaway
Hello Everyone, I wanted to wish you and yours happy holidays!
It has been a great year and I'm looking forward to what 2017 brings. To help close out this year on a high note I teamed up with GeIL Memory to give away some awesome computer hardware!
We have three GeIL DDR4 Memory kits up for grabs along with a SilverStone Primera PM01 Case and Zotac GTX 1050 Graphics Card
Good Luck!
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Noctua NH-D15S versus NH-D15 CPU Cooler Review @ Legit Reviews
You know, I was super excited to see what kind of cluster this review would turn out to be and wouldn't you know it, I was totally bombarded by ads, so much in fact that I had to exit the site. Yep, done and done.
Had I actually gone to the site to check out the review I could have told you that the NH-D15S and NH-D15 are virtually identical with the S edition coming with one fan while the D15 has two. The performance advantages of having two fans is pretty good though as I have noted in my own reviews it depends on many factors and the fact that you get a diminishing return as the second fan is getting warmer air from the first.
Lets see what Legit has to say.
Noctua – This is a brand that you have likely heard of throughout the years, but if not, you really need to look into them more. Noctua is well known for their highly successful and high quality CPU coolers, cooling fans, and thermal pastes. It has been a while since we’ve looked at a product from Noctua, so today we’re going to take a look at a cooler that is nearly identical to one that we previously reviewed, but with a couple revisions. This particular cooler, the NH-D15S, was originally released on August 28, 2015, so it has been around for a while, but still performs like a king. Take a look!
Umm. uhhh. I get the gist and I'm no expert but.. ya.
Well, anyhow check out the review if you want and fire up the adblocker. You'll need it. Then, if you are curious check out my review of the Noctua NH-D15 150mm D-Type Premium Heatsink. It ws published in June of 2014 and was the version with the 150mm fan shaped like a 140mm. In that review I test a single fan vs dual fan performance with a whopping 4 degree load difference.
OR if you want to see what the actual NH-D14 looked like head on over and check out my review of the Noctua NH-D14 Heatsink which is still hosted on Ninjalane. It was published back in April 2010 and strangely enough showed a similar C/W curve to the D15. Humm, I wonder why.
.Now I'm getting the itch to test both coolers head to head, Lets see, where did I put that D14.. Humm
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AUKEY KM-G3 Keyboard @ techPowerUp
Not sure I would trust a no-name brand keyboard on Amazon but, that isn't to say it is bad either. Though if you think about it why buy a low dollar unknown keyboard when you could just as well buy something more well known OR pick up something at the thrift store with 10 years of human slime between the keys and cigarette ash.
I mean just sayin.
You might not have heard of AUKEY, and I thought I hadn't when they contacted me to review their new keyboard, but then I looked at the USB hub I had ordered from Amazon and realized that it was made by AUKEY, as was one of my power packs for my phone. AUKEY seems to be one of those brands that hide in plain sight as they have a lot of products on Amazon and seem well regarded.
It does seem to have RGB lights and features "Outemu Blue Switches" along with a clear plastic top so, overall not a bad combo?
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Throwback Time: Foxconn WinFast NFPIK8AA
Member when AMD ruled the enthusiast performance world with their A64 architecture? I member I also member when NVIDIA SLI was limited to only two GPUs. This wasn't due to internal politics or some sort of driver limitation. No, it was hardware based and largely because CPU performance at the time wasn't all that good. DX9 games still didn't use the GPU all that much and video cards were still migrating away from the AGP realm.
In this throwback Thursday I’m going to show you a little known enthusiast motherboard from Foxconn called the WinFast NFPIK8AA. This was a workstation class motherboard that not only supported dual graphics cards but was double everything. Dual cards, Dual channel memory, Twice as many SATA ports and Dual NVIDIA CK8-04-IO4 chipsets. The board required Opteron based AMD SledgeHammer processors and registered DDR memory.
The board really was a workstation class machine and allowed system builders to use PCI Express video cards in a professional capacity instead of just to play games. Having twice as many chipsets onboard doubled the normal PCI Express bandwidth and doubled your storage capacity which was important back then due to hard drives being smaller. Big RAID means big storage and speed.
I ran this motherboard for a short while and was even able to overclock it despite having a locked multiplier and registered memory. This was accomplished by using the low latency Patriot memory and lots of trial and error.
Saying “they don’t make them like this anymore” is an understatement as this board is extreme even by today’s standards. While we sit back and watch CPU performance stagnate and PCI Express lanes double every few years there is some comfort in knowing that there is a reason for all of this.
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Realforce RGB @ LanOC Reviews
The force is real with this one. I mean with a name like Realforce you'd better start pumping that iron and draggin that sled because you'll be in for a real workout.
Or, you know it could be just a compact keyboard with RGB lighting effects and a marketing department who is completely out of ideas. I know, I've been there.
Over the past few years the market for mechanical keyboards with RGB backlighting has gone crazy. The problem though is all of those RGB keyboards have had Cherry switches, knock off cherry switches, or a few custom switches designed by companies like Logitech and SteelSeries. One of my favorite mechanical switch types is Topre, but with the exception of a few knockoffs you haven’t been able to get Topre keyboards with any backlighting, let alone full RGB backlighting. So when Realforce introduced their upcoming keyboard, the Realforce RGB I had to check it out. Of all of the keyboards I have my Realforce 87u is one of my favorites to type on, but the lack of backlighting or even easy to read legends in the light forced me to keep it put up. So it will be exciting to see how Realforce’s new keyboard performs to see how it compares.
Keyboards are huge business and while a plain rubber dome is all you need to make letters appear on the screen there are some people out there that want a little more from their PC experience and need to make a little more click in life.
