Alright, I’ve had to do this twice now, and it’s taken a few extra minutes of annoying-ness each time to figure it out, so I’ll put it here. Hopefully it helps someone else. Yes, there’s some background. Skip to the last paragraph if you just want the answer. Read more…
Upon installing Vista x64 on an ASUS P5B-VM SE, there were a couple devices in Device Manager that were missing drivers. The first was for the Attansic L1 Network Card, for which ASUS had a driver on their site. The 2nd was an unknown device. Right clicking and going to Properties showed the location as “Intel(R) ICH8/ICH8R Family LPC Interface Controller - 2810″.
Thinking that maybe the Intel Chipset INF package might have the driver, I installed it. No such luck. Finally, I did a search which brought me to a couple other pages, the biggest help being from a post by d.chatten on ocforums.com, although a hardforum.com post was helpful as well. As it turns out, it’s for a device called the ATK0110 which may have something to do with legacy I/O.
Regardless, the link in the post was broken (asus vs ASUS), so I browsed to Read more…
I recently bought an Intel Quad Core Q6600. I’ve been doing a lot of Video Encoding for the Apple TV, and while a fine chip, the E2140 just wasn’t cutting it time-wise for quality encodes.
I grabbed some pics of the process with my new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W35 (if the blurry pics from my previous posts made your eyes bleed, these should help alleviate the pain). I also got idle/load temperatures both before & after.
Part 1: Lapping
1A: The Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (lapped using sandpaper against an already-lapped waterblock small enough to fit between the mounting pegs)
Here are a few pics of what this thing looks like when you pull it out of the box (click the thumbnail to open a larger image):
You can see they include thermal interface material on the heatsink, which I’ve read is MX-1 - apparantly it’s pretty decent stuff. Naturally, i took it off (rubbing alcohol worked well enough). Pay close attention to the 4th picture. You can see the heatsink surface is pretty rough - it’s much rougher than the Intel Stock Cooler. You can notice it in the 3rd as well. Not that it’s necessarily a *huge* deal. Smooth would be preferable, but the more important question is “is the heatsink FLAT?”. We’ll find out soon enough, time to start lapping the heatsink…. Read more…
It’s been well known for some time now that heatsinks aren’t always perfectly smooth and flat. Sometimes the machining process used when making a heatsink leaves much to be desired. A poor surface means poor contact with the CPU, which translates to less effective cooling, and thus, higher temperatures. “Lapping” the heatsink is a technique that has become common practice with modders and overclockers. It’s generally accepted that a properly lapped heatsink performs better than one that isn’t, except in the case where the heatsink was already quite smooth and flat.
But what about the IHS (integrated heat spreader) on a CPU? Read more…
March 28th: It started with a C&D (cease and desist) letter on their forums…
Daniel_K:
We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.
Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.
Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.
From there, chaos ensued. Not only did just about every major tech site pick up on this story, but Read more…
Anyone familiar with stress testing in Windows is probably familiar with Prime 95. Problem is, if you head to the mersenne.org website, you won’t find a link to a Mac OS X version.
Head to their *forums* however, and you’ll come across this thread which has links to download the latest beta version (25.6) for a few operating systems, including Mac OS X! Only downside is the link is broken (it’s missing the .org in mersenne.org). Either fix it manually in the URL bar, or click here [ftp://mersenne/gimps/mprime256-MacOSX.tar.gz] to download it.
Just so you’re not in for a surprise… the Mac version is all text-based. No fuzzy GUI like in the windows version. Run the program and a terminal window will open. However, it’s still easy to use, and still great for stress testing your machine. If you’re in the middle of stress testing and want to cancel and go to the main menu, hit CTRL-C.
While writing up an article and scrounging for information on all the BIOS settings, I came across a couple Anandtech articles for other ASUS motherboards that have *very* similar settings to the P5K-E. If you’re looking to find out what most of the memory/cpu/fsb/frequency/voltage/timing options do, check out the articles here and here.
Here’s the background. I’m a Wordpad/TextEdit kinda guy. I don’t use office suites unless I have to, and the few times I do use them, I just want to get my task done and move on to something else. I’ve got to be able to find what I want quickly which means most of the options have to be easy accessable. At the same time, I hate a cluttered interface, so having every option plastered over the screen makes me less than happy. Yes, I can be both picky and tough to please.
Moving on, for my last blog entry, I had done a small benchmark and wanted to be able to present the numbers in a chart, since it’s easier to visualize differences in nice colorful bars than it is a zoo full of numbers. Before going on, if you’re a professional user who plans to use a spreadsheet every day, this review isn’t for you. I’m really just comparing something relatively basic between 3 programs. I certainly *don’t* recommend you make a multi-thousand dollar corporate purchase decision based on what I say here. If on the other hand you’re a casual home user and are just looking for the opinions/insight of some others when it comes to a spreadsheet program for the Mac, I dare say you’ve come to the right place. Just promise you’ll research what others have said too 
I had 3 programs available to use:
So what are we looking for here? Read more…
In a prior article, I was playing around with OS X installs on regular PC hardware. I’ve kept a couple of the installations going for the time being, and have been using one of them to recode some videos that we have in DivX and XviD format into H.264 for the Apple TV I recently bought.
Recoding is a time consuming process, and with this particular system, using 2-pass encoding resulted in around an hour per 1-hour episode that’s been recoded. Looking for a way to speed up the system a bit (the E2140 is known to be a pretty decent overclocker), I looked to the BIOS. Read more…
I bought the 20″ SyncMaster 206BW to replace an old weak 17″ CRT that was showing signs of age. I also wanted something that would show a little more screen real-estate.
Monitors are one of the few things where I’m very hesitant to buy online. Picture quality can vary drastically between monitors, and in no way is one $250 model guaranteed to be anything close to another. Preference comes into play a lot here too. Something as simple as glossy vs matte can make a world of difference. I head into the nearest Future Shop, and spent a pretty long time looking at their displays.
There were 2 major things I was looking for: Read more…
