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Archive for the ‘hardware’ tag

Latest Sapphire 4850 X2 BIOS goes some way to silencing noise issues

Posted on 31st Jan 2009 at 00:27 by Tim Smalley with 9 comments

Tim Smalley
At several points during the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 review we published a week or so ago, we complained quite vocally about the amount of noise the card produced when it was sitting idle. Although not quite as loudly as the card itself.

It was so loud that we unanimously decided that the card wouldn't go anywhere near one of our own home PCs - I'm probably the most tolerant to noise in the bit-tech office and it was even far too loud for me.

Following the review, Sapphire admitted that it was "aware that [the 4850 X2] had some issues with noise on the first pass of these boards." At least we weren't alone.

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Tags fan noise, fan speed, graphics, hardware, sapphire 4850 x2

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard

Posted on 30th Jan 2009 at 11:05 by Richard Swinburne with 4 comments

We've tried and tried and tried over the last few months to get this motherboard to work, and eventually we sometimes just have to call it a day. And that's often one of the hardest things to accept because we've ploughed so much time into it.

One of the benefits of our new blog is that there's now a medium for us to forewarn you about those products that come into our labs but don't make it through the review process after many, many man hours trying - for example, this board has been on and off the test bench for nearly three months now. It gives us a chance to name and shame products that really don't meet the grade at all - we hope it won't happen too often but you never know... this could become more regular than we'd expect.

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard Hardware Fail #1: ECS X58B-A Motherboard

To cut a long story short, our first board was sent back to ECS in Taiwan after our initial failed attempts to get it working. The company claimed it was faulty and sent another they guaranteed as working - it even came with a nice "It works!" sticker on the box.

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Tags bios, ecs, epic fail, hardware, motherboard, x58b-a

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography

Posted on 27th Jan 2009 at 17:38 by Richard Swinburne with 5 comments

Urgh, another day, another hardware failure. I was aiming to have a review of DFI's LANParty 790FX-B M2RSH done this week - it's all tested (albeit slower in every-single-benchmark compared to the MSI DK 790GX Platinum), and I literally only unplugged everything for some photography, before putting it back on the test bench again for some more stress testing.

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography Hardware Death #1: DFI motherboards don't like photography

Sadly, the LED readout says only 88 and the fans spin up to their full flow without a hint of relent. Changing every piece of hardware later has no impact - something static must have hit it, which is surprising considering I passed on wearing nylon underwear today.

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Tags amd, dfi, hardware, hardware death, lanparty, motherboard, rip

Where's the innovation? Right in front of you!

Posted on 27th Jan 2009 at 14:56 by Tim Smalley with 3 comments

Tim Smalley
It's fair to say that the current economic crisis has hit the technology industry - we've seen big layoffs at many of the biggest tech companies, with AMD, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sony and Western Digital all announcing significant workforce cuts. However, some companies argue that it's not just the recession that is killing their revenues - they're citing the rise in popularity of netbooks as a major catalyst as well.

Frankly though, the industry appears to be looking for a scapegoat and the success of low cost, ultra portable devices like netbooks seems fitting from the industry's perspective, but that doesn't make it right.

For example, Microsoft blames the rise of netbooks on its lower profit margins because it has to sell Windows at a lower price in order to compete with Linux-equipped netbooks. While that is fair enough, it is not a reason to hate netbooks - instead, Microsoft should think of it as another sale, because the netbook was and never has been sold as a replacement to traditionally more powerful machines.

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Tags economic crisis, gpus, graphics, hardware, innovation, recession, scapegoat
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