Tutorial: Super-Cool Your Graphics Card

Funny isn’t it, how CPUs get all the cooling attention? There they are, sitting in blissful tranquility beneath 8-inch heatsinks without a care in the world, while their GPU friends sat next to them sweat their bits off, desperately trying to keep up with metro 2033.

  What’s more, it’s much easier to overclock your graphics card than your CPU. No messing about with the BIOS, just load up MSI Afterburner or, whatever software bundled with your drivers, and you can muck about with the core and shader clocks, memory speeds and even those dreaded voltage settings. Indeed if you’re overclocking with a view to higher gaming frame rates, you may well find a more stable performance increase from tweaking your graphics card’s settings than either CPU or RAM.

  And yet for some reasons graphics cards rarely get any after market loving. A quick, cheap cooler upgrade can potentially halve idle and load.

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Sapphire Edge HD Mini PC

Journey with me through the recesses of time, if you will, back to 2007. If u recall, the PC enthusiasts was being all enthusiastic about the Asus Eee PC, a cute little ‘netbook’ with solid state storage and an unprecedented price point under $500

  Since then manufacturers have been going crazy trying to redefine our relationship with portable and home computing, flogging US giant iPhone, consoles-like media centre beasts and notebooks small enough for a jockey’s bum bag.

 Is the Sapphire Edge HD a PC?  Without any optical drive, it certainly isn’t a thoroughbred media centre, but its netbook-like CPU and GPU capabilities mean it falls a little way short of what you’d normally deem ‘PC’ and as portable as the tiny little black box is at a diminutive 193x148x22m, the end user is going to be singing it beneath the warm glow of the telly or in the office, rather than carting a wheelbarrow full of peripherals down to Costa Coffee to get a few chapters done.

  It’s a versatile if not entirely mobile, creature then-as suited to being in the front room as part of your media centre as it is in the office, watching you add another row to the great, sprawling spreadsheet of your life.

  The Intel Atom D510 running at 1.66GHz with 2GB o

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Intel Core i5 2500T, The Low-powered Gaming Console

We’ve already had a good look at the Intel Core i5 2500K processor; it’s getting a reputation as the go-to-guy if your budget won’t quite stretch to a 2600K but u still want a Sandy Bridge gamer’s chip.

  Although its getting all the attention as a flag ship chip in the second generation Core i5 line-up there are a couple of other interesting family members. Not because of their overclocking ability- they don’t really don’t have much without K moniker-no it’s because they’re low-power chips. The most interesting one of these low-powered chips is the Core i5 2500T

  It’s the ‘T’ part of the name that’s the important bit; it means that the chip has a TDP of just 45Watts. That may still sound like a fair old chunk of power with AMD’s  Fusion E-530 running at ust 18W but it’s a remarkable 50Watts lower than the 2500K . And with a hell of a lot of extra performances too.

  On the flip side, unlike the 2500K, the multipliers aren’t unlocked so there’s not a lot you can to improve on the default 2.3GHz clock speed. It’s not the only lower power member of the family there’s also the 2500S. The s series of chips have slightly higher TDP’s of 65Watts.

  Usually when you see the words low power next to a CPU it tends to bring up the thoughts of enfeebled performance.

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BenQ XL2410T Zowie Special Edition, A Screen Made For Gamers…

The world of gaming peripherals is odd-everyone bemoans the gamer tax’, whereby manufacturers seem to charge an extra 20% for gaming gear, and yet they are increasingly turning to professional gamers to help design that hardware. We may be doing Emil ‘HeatoN’ Christensen (dubbed the best Counter-Strike player in the world) and Abdisamad ‘SpawN’ Mohammed (12-times worldwide Counter-Strike champion) a disservice but we doubt if they have many qualifications in display device design. Yet these two CS players have been roped into help BenQ to design its first gaming- specific screen, the XL2410T

  The end result is a feature list that reads a little like the disastrous car that Homer designed for his brother Herb. For example, there’s a DisplayMode feature that replicates the screen size of smaller screen pixel for pixel-the screen can display anything from 71in, 5:4 upwards, complete with black borders. The reasoning behind this is that professional gaming tournament players use different screens and witching from a 24in 1920x1080 screen to a much smaller one could throw your game. SpawN and HeatoN wanted to practice at home on a screen that was the same size as that used in a forthcoming tournament to familiarize themselves with it, but this feature will be genuinely useful for few other people.

  The XL2410T is bundled with a Zowie EC1 mouse and a Zowie Swift plastic-topped mousepad. The mouse is reminiscent of a Razer DeatAdder crossed with Microsoft IntelliMouse and is designed by HeatoN. It works well with th

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AMD RADEON HD 6990 4GB, The Dual GPU Graphics Card

AMD’s brand-new range-topping. Antilles-architecture Radeon HD 6990 4GB. It’s a goliath of graphics card that packs 2 GPUs and it’s capable of consuming unprecedented 450W of power.

    The card is measuring in at a case-busting 305mm long, features two, full-fat Caymen XT GPUs, the same as those found in AMD’s fastest single-GPU card. The Radeon HD 6970 2GB. This means that it boasts a whopping 3,072 stream processors and as each GPU is serviced by 2BG of GDDR5 memory, there’s 4GB of memory on the card. The card’s clock speeds are a little lower than those of the HD 6970 2GB by the memory at 1,25GHz. That’s a colossal amount of graphics horsepower for a single card to contain.

  However, by using such high-performance GPUs, AMD has presented itself with a challenge in powering and cooling this beast. The company had to break the rules of how to power a graphics card as well as investigate new technologies in order to make the HD 6990 4GB a safe and reliable card to use.

  For a star the HD 6990 4GB take the PCI Express 2.0 specifications which limits expansion cards to consuming 300W of power, and chucks in out the window. By default, the HD 6990 4GB draws up to 375W of power- up to 75W from the motherboard and 150W from each the two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors on the top of the card. While this means t

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IDAPT i4 The Universal Charger

The IDAPT i4 is a universal charger that can accommodate up to 4 mobile devices simultaneously. This is useful if you own multiple gadgets and forever misplacing their chargers.

It’s said to be compatible with more than 4,000 devices, including iphone, ipad, blackberry handsets, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, satnavs, cameras and Bluetooth products.

It features three charging points that use a simple, customizable and interchangeable tip system. Its neater solutions than the usual tangled jumble of cables hanging out of your power sockets.

The IDAPT i4 looks good in its own right, smart and glossy like the gadget themselves. It’s available in 11 colors too,

The problem with such and inclusive product is that in hitting so many bases it specializes in none. It’s unlikely that you will own an iPhone as well as Samsung, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

My family owns two iPhones, two iPods and and iPad plus a couple of canon cameras that require proprietary charges. The IDAPT could charge just 2 of our devices at a time

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HIS ATI Radeon HD 6950

ATI’s new 6950 design sees the implementation of narrower stram processor unit. This allows room for an increased number of SIMD engines – the 6950 has 22, while 6870 has just 14 and even 5870 had only 20. In other words, the card is more efficient and can quickly render graphics.

This architecture gives the 6950 and 6970 fewer stream processors. Whereas the Radeon 5870 boasted 1600, the 6970 offers 1536 and the 6950 has 1048.

But its worth remembering that the number of stream processors isn’t crucial- the high-calibre nVidia Geforce GTX 580 has just 512.Ample compensation comes with the significantly larger number of texture units. The 6950 has 88 of these- eight more than 5870 and 24 over the GTX 580.

The 6950 may be cheaper than its 6970 brother, but it include 2GB of GDDR5 RAM – nVidia’s 580 comes with a ‘mere’ 1536 MB-and an 800MHz core clock.

The memory clock is 1,250 MHz and the 160GBps memory bandwidth is superior to the GTX

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