Hardware - Astronomy News

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Mar 4 00:53 2007

Hard Disk Failure	Permalink

Hard Disk Failure Much Higher than Reported Carnegie Mellon University recently conducted a study that found that HD failure rates are actually much higher than reported. If you are in the market for a new drive, I’d suggest giving this one a good read. The Carnegie Mellon study examined large production systems, including high-performance computing sites and Internet services sites running SCSI, FC and SATA drives. The data sheets for those drives listed MTTF between 1 million to 1.5 million hours, which the study said should mean annual failure rates "of at most 0.88%." However, the study showed typical annual replacement rates of between 2% and 4%, "and up to 13% observed on some systems." Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Feb 13 20:38 2007

ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA MoBo	Permalink

The ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA Socket AM2 AGP motherboard is a real bargain for all AGP video card owners, because it makes possible the use of usual AGP (8x) video cards on the latest AMD Socket AM2 platform and is in addition available for less than 50 Euro! It is hard to believe, that ASRock is able to offer additional features for this price, but they do! The nForce3 250 board offers Windows Vista compatible 7.1 surround sound over six 3.5mm connectors, has five PCI Slots, four DDR2 Slots and some overclocking options. All in all ASRock deserves once again the the Overclocking Pricetipp award (02/2007) of the Redaktion ocinside.de, because the company ASRock makes it possible with the AM2NF3-VSTA to upgrade enormously inexpensive to the current Socket AM2 technology. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Feb 13 18:34 2007

DirectX 10 Graphics Card	Permalink

Partners of Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest supplier of standalone graphics processors, on Monday unveiled graphics cards powered by Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS graphics processing unit (GPU) with reduced memory amount onboard, which allows them to sell the new Microsoft DirectX 10-compatible products at a reduced price that will allow more gamers to get the latest graphics technology. The new flavour of the GeForce 8800 GTS features 320MB of memory, two times less than on the previously released model, but sports the fully-fledged GeForce 8800 GTS chip with 500MHz clock-speed, 96 stream processors at 1200MHz , 24 texture mapping units and 20 raster operation units and 320-bit memory bus. The new graphics boards will cost starting from $299, about $100 less than the price of the cheapest GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Jan 26 01:48 2007

AMD's Barcelona	Permalink

Could AMD's answer to Core be right around the corner? According to them, their planned Quad-core Barcelona, scheduled to be here in a few months, will not only be faster than existing Core based CPUs, but also come out ahead of Intel's Xeon 5300 series. And not just by a small margin, either, but considerable amounts: "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent" The quad-core chip will also outperform AMD's current dual-core Opterons on "floating point" mathematical calculations by a factor of 3.6 at the same clock rate. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Jan 11 13:46 2007

ACube Systems	Permalink

Alternative Holding Group, Soft 3 and Virtual Works created today ACube Systems Srl, a company born to take care of the production and commercialisation of the Sam440ep product line. Sam440ep will be the first manufactured motherboard. The heart of Sam is the PowerPC 440, a System On Chip (SoC) made by AMCC under a licence from IBM. The main characteristic of a SoC system is the presence, together with the CPU, of a number of integrated peripherals which allow to build a complete system with a huge savings of both development and debug time, with less components and space used on the PCB. This also results in a significant cost reduction for the customer. As a consequence, the board doesn't need the classical northbridge / southbridge combination because a part of their functionalities are implemented in the CPU, and the balance is provided by other components and devices. The availability is planned for the first quarter of 2007. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Nov 20 00:35 2006

Harddrive	Permalink

Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB 16MB SATA II 7200rpm Hard Drive WD Caviar SE16 SATA II hard drives combine 300 MB/s transfer rate and 16 MB cache for industry leading performance. Yes, these reliable drives are lightning fast, but they still deliver technologically advanced acoustics and cool operation. Fast - The one-two performance punch of 300 MB/s transfer rate, state-of-the-art performance for SATA drives, and 16 MB cache make the WD Caviar SE16 family the fastest desktop-class hard drives available. Cool - Cool operation means the highest reliability even in high-heat environments such as personal video recorders. That's why these drives, the coolest on the market, are the drive of choice for the world's leading consumer electronics manufacturers as well as the world's leading PC makers. Quiet - The technology that Tom's Hardware called "very fast and nearly silent" is repeated in this family of drives. Western Digital has minimized noise to levels virtually below the threshold of human hearing with WhisperDrive technology. And to cut seek noise, SoftSeek technology streamlines read/write seeking algorithms, resulting in the drive operating more efficiently when accessing and writing data. - Large 250GB capacity - 7200 rpm spindle speed - 16MB buffer size - Average Seek Time 8.9 ms - Non-operating shock £43.95 ex. £51.64 inc. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Nov 9 15:01 2006

GeForce 8800 GTX	Permalink

Nvidia’s newly announced G80 graphics chip will support Microsoft DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0, Nvidia’s GigaThread technology, Nvidia Quantum Effects technology, floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting and much more... Asustek and Nvidia use GDDR3 memory operating at 1.70GHz. Read more The ATI X1950 XTX in Crossfire mode was currently the fastest gaming platform and did beat even the Quad SLI 7950 GX2 by quite a margin. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Nov 8 13:31 2006

The HPCx machine	Permalink

The UK's fastest-proven supercomputer used by the academic community has doubled in size and performance. The HPCx machine, based in Warrington, is now capable of operating at speeds up to 15.4 teraflops, or 15.4 trillion calculations every second. The speed boost follows the addition of more than 1,200 processors to the four year-old, IBM-built number-cruncher. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Oct 23 19:35 2006

Hardware	Permalink

Power Supplies After years of endless diatribes from tech sites of all stripes, it would seem that the Power Supply has finally begun to receive its proper due as a key core component to any computer system. With the dawn of the Dual Core, Dual Video Card (or quad even) CPU, users basically had no choice but to re-evaluate their power supply requirements. Today we will be looking at a multitude of different power supplies each with a unique set of specifications. The big question is: have we moved from under appreciating the importance of a good Power Supply to the other extreme, where we now have companies pushing outlandishly powerful units that are surely more than anyone but the most hardcore will ever need. We will be staying away from the 700W+ units today as it is our belief that they're a bit of overkill, at least for now. With the next generation of video cards projected to consume upwards of 300W, Kilowatt PSU units may soon become a necessity. Don't believe that it's true? Read on and see how these sub 700W units perform! Read more __________________

* Astronomy