Tuniq Propeller vs. Thermalright Venemous X
Thermalright has been a company name that is synonymous with high end CPU air cooling for years now. Tuniq is one of the newer guys on the block when it comes to the elite heatsink and fan unit. Today we have a showdown of epic proportions, at least to the computer hardware cooling enthusiast. Propeller vs. Venemous X.
AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5450 Video Card Review
AMD's lowest-end discrete GPU to support DX11 is being launched today at $49-$59 MSRP, the ATI Radeon HD 5450. We will give you all the official information on this new video card, plus some power and temperature testing and a simple apples-to-apples DX11 game test using DiRT 2.
Dark Void PhysX Gameplay Performance and IQ
Dark Void was recently released with some neat PhysX effects. We’ll explore gameplay performance and show you what PhysX support will do for you in this game with plenty of screenshots and performance comparisons.
GIGABYTE X58A-UD7 Motherboard Review
The X58A-UD7 is GIGABYTE\'s newest entry into the fiercely competitive LGA1366 board arena. The board packs a lot of promise, built on GIGABYTE\'s tried and true X58 based design with some nice bells and whistles added for that extra bit of appeal including USB 3.0 and SATA III features.
What was the big news ten years ago today? AMD launched the 1.1GHz Athlon with on-die L2 cache, a Voodoo 3 3500 was $169.99 and T&L was "the future."
AMD has "demonstrated" a 1.1GHz Athlon. We ain't in Kansas anymore girls. I would have to say that is some serious stuff.
[H] forum reader polonyc2 posted a link in the forums to the DirectX end-user redistributable. The package weighs in at just under 105MB and supports Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 & 2008, Windows XP 64-bit and Windows XP Service Pack 3.
This download provides the DirectX end-user multi-languaged redistributable that developers can include with their product. The redistributable license agreement covers the terms under which developers may use the Redistributable. For full details please review the DirectX SDK EULA.txt and DirectX Redist.txt files located in the license directory.
Cooling
Spire TherMax Pro CPU Cooler @ Tech-Reviews
ETC.
How To Reverse Engineer A Motherboard BIOS @ Phoronix
NZXT’s Avatar Gaming Mouse v2 @ TechREACTION
QNAP NMP-1000 Network Media Player @ techPowerUP!
Video
EVGA Geforce GTX275 CO-OP @ BmR
You know you are a bad mofo when you hack a Trusted Platform Module chip with a needle, some acid and rust remover. Thanks to Henrico D. for the linkage.
Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.
Why on earth would Steve Jobs get so mad over a tweet about the iPad? Hell, I don’t know, why does that guy do anything he does? I’ll bet that Wall Street Journal guy (that made the tweet) will think twice next time. 
There was inevitably some cultural friction when Apple's secretive CEO took his new iPad around to New York's professionally indiscreet media. Exhibit A is a single tweet from a Wall Street Journal editor, which purportedly made Steve Jobs go ballistic.
I found the broadband bargain of the day! Only $70,000 for a basic install! What a bargain!
A couple who want a broadband connection for their home and guesthouse business have been told by BT it will cost £45,000 to have it installed. Ray and Frei Walker have managed with an old 'dial-up' service for the last nine years at their detached Victorian home in Dufton, Cumbria
I’ve watched this video twice now and I have no idea what to say....I am at a complete loss for words. 
Best PC Mods of 2009 @ Kotaku
Mass Effect 2 Remains Atop UK Charts @ Joystiq
New Fable 3 Info Will 'Really Upset People' @ Shacknews
Retail Ninja Blade (PC) Gold @ Blue’s News
This location-based operating system called the Locus OS is pretty damn slick. The operating system was designed by a guy named Barton Smith and supposedly the multiple widget desktops are designed around locations (home, work, car) and automatically switches between desktops thanks to GPS and wi-fi mapping.
Reports indicate that online video has exploded. No word on the extent of the damages, injuries, casualties or what caused the explosion but many expect a group called "nerds & geeks" to be behind this.
The online video market continued to grow in December, as nearly 178 million U.S. Internet users watched 33.2 billion videos in the month a lone, said comScore last week. When broken down, the numbers mean that 86.5 percent of total U.S. Internet users watched online videos and averaged 187 videos per user. The average length video watched was 4.1 minutes, up from 3.5 minutes in a report from last March.
Cases & Modding
Antec Nine Hundred Two Ultimate Gaming Case @ Legit Reviews
Dynatron Azenx P-Secure Secure HDD Enclosure @ Pro-Clockers
Cooling
Noctua NF-P14 FLX Case Fan @ Verdis Reviews
Motherboards
Foxconn Inferno Katana P55 Motherboard @ Ninjalane
Power Supply
Ultra X4 1050 Watt Power Supply @ TechwareLabs
I know this may be hard to believe but, a new survey claims that people do not like slow web sites. On top of that, the study also claims that consumers will go somewhere else if your website takes too long to load. Ya think? Thanks to Edward C. for this one.
Conducted by Equation Research, the study polled 1,500 people who use the Web at peak times such as holiday shopping, booking summer travel or executing trades during financial market shifts. It concluded that poor Web performance is rife in the retail, finance and travel industries, and that this has a dramatic and lasting impact on where consumers spend money online.
Sony Corporation today announced the development of millimeter-wave wireless intra-connection technology that realizes high speed wireless data transfer inside electronic products such as television sets. By replacing complicated wires and internal circuitry with wireless connections, this technology enables a reduction in the size and cost of the IC and other components used in electronics products, delivering advantages such as size and cost-reduction and enhanced reliability of the final product.
The high courts in Italy have decided that ISPs can be forced to block the Pirate Bay, regardless whether or not the site is hosted in that country.
Following a lengthy legal procedure the Court of Bergamo has once again ruled that Italian ISPs have to censor their networks and prevent customer access to The Pirate Bay. Millions of Italian Internet users will be denied access to the popular torrent site in an attempt to prevent copyright infringement.
A Vodafone employee was suspended after making obscene comments about homosexuals on Twitter. Suspended? Sheesh, I’d hate to see what it takes to get fired by Vodafone.
Within minutes of the message appearing hundreds of Vodafone customers had contacted the company through Twitter to ask whether its account had been hacked. Despite Vodafone deleting the message from its Twitterfeed, hawk-eyed users of the service saved a copy and were quickly sending it across the internet.
IBM is set to launch its new eight core Power 7 processors and systems based on the new CPU today. Expect a press release later this afternoon.
The processor is a big step for IBM, integrating eight processing cores in one chip package, with each core capable of executing four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors--systems that Power7 will compete with--typically have two threads per processing core.
According to the state run media in China, police have shut down a hacker training operation that openly advertised and pulled in over a million dollars in membership fees. Wow, a million in membership fees?
Police in Hubei province arrested three people suspected of running the hacker site known as the Black Hawk Safety Net that disseminated Web site hacking techniques and Trojan software, the China Daily newspaper said. Trojans, which can allow outside access to a computer when implanted, are used by hackers to illegally control computers.
For many software developers—particularly those focused on social computing—the world of deep enterprise computing seems far removed from a world of widgets and tweets. But social computing has become a driving force behind "Enterprise 2.0" – aimed at making large companies more collaborative and agile. Next-generation social computing tools are rapidly re-shaping the ways in which corporations create and share information. For developers the challenge is no longer whether to target enterprise IT, but how. What platform is best? How do you accelerate bringing the power of social computing to the enterprise? How can the new communication tools deliver value on existing IT investments?
MSI, the leading global All-in-One PC brand, is pleased to announce that its All-in-One PC (a top seller in the Middle East region) was chosen to be used at the 2009 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit for signing an agreement. In what was truly a historic moment, the six heads of state attending the meeting put their signatures to the agreement using the touch-screen display on msi's Wind Top AE1900 All-in-One PC. Also, at the annual conference of the UAE Computer Association, held in Abu Dhabi, 200 Wind Top AE1900s were used by the conference delegates for voting; delegates could use the AE1900’s touch-screen display to scroll through the information about each candidate. The choice of msi All-in-One PCs for use in important events of this type in the Middle East is a reflection of just how strong the msi brand is in the Middle East.
New game releases for 2/7-2/13: Bioshock 2, Dante’s Inferno @ ShackNews
Mass Effect 2 PC multi-core CPU issue workaround released @ BigDownload
Fallout: New Vegas information @ Duck & Cover
Bungie planning final Halo 2 online event on Apr. 14 @ Official Site
Star Trek Online server capacity increased @ IncGamers
Many of you are fans of Google’s Chrome browser, myself included. ZDNet spotted a new Chrome build in the dev channel that supports Javascript control, similar to the NoScript extension. The author calls it another reason to ditch Firefox. Have you already ditched FF for Chrome or are you sticking with Mozilla or IE?
Google Chrome v5.0.317.0 now officially supports NoScript-like behavior, where you can prohibit all javascript from running, except the scripts you explicitly authorize. This new version also lets you selectively choose which cookies, images, plug-ins and pop-ups are allowed as well.
Cooling
Thermalright Venomous X CPU cooler @ VR-Zone
Thermaltake SpinQ VT CPU cooler @ HardwareSecrets
ETC.
Kingston MobileLite G2 USB card reader @ LegitReviews
Steelseries 7G gaming keyboard @ OC3D
Testing USB 3.0 & SATA 6Gbps on Gigabyte P55A-UD6 @ Mad Shrimps
Motherboards & CPUs
Jetway Kuroshio BI-700 (P55 chipset) @ Hardware Zone
Intel Core i5-661 @ ThinkComputers
Video
MSI R5770 HAWK @ Guru3D
Sapphire HD 5670 1GB @ Bjorn3D
A man in New York has filed a class-action lawsuit against Symantec over their practice of auto-renewals in Norton Antivirus. Funny how a $76.03 charge could end up costing Symantec quite a bit more if this suit gains traction.
Elan charged Symantec with deceptive business practices and unjust enrichment, and asked the court to make the company refund all fees generated by automatic renewals. He also asked the court to grant the lawsuit class-action status, which would open the case to a potential pool of thousands.
Since we haven’t had a singularity swallow up the world, or at least Switzerland, it appears that the Large Hadron Collider is working as expected. MIT has an update on the LHC and reports that it’s producing a record number of energy particle collisions. I guess we’ll just have to wait until 2012 for our end of the world bonanza.
This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions. Its findings show that the collisions produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons — a factor that will have to be taken into account when physicists start looking for more rarer particles and for the theorized Higgs boson.
Oh, those crazy South Koreans! LG offers some TVs with USB ports so that you can connect an external storage device and watch your legally-obtained movies. Or, you can follow the included English-language manual and learn how to play your pirated movie instead. I wonder if their online help has a section on how to set up uTorrent? 
LG seems to understand perfectly what customers want, but we doubt that the movie studios will be very excited about this piracy endorsement from the Koreans. Whether the pirated films were included intentionally is unknown; we expect that a company employee simply downloaded the movies off a file-sharing service out of habit or convenience.
The Department of Transportation is proposing to tighten the rules around the air transportation of small batteries. Lithium batteries, in particular, are going to affected if this passes, causing shipping prices to go way up. This will likely result in the additional cost being absorbed by you, the consumer. Nice. 
The proposed changes would affect everything from power tools to defibrillators and iPads. Even button battery-powered hearing aids would be impacted, [George Kerchner] said. And by making the U.S. stricter than the International Civil Aviation Organization that governs the rest of the world, Kerchner said, it will require manufacturers and shippers to make sweeping, costly changes to how they package, label and ship consumer electronics and computer goods.
If you forgot to set your alarm and missed the scheduled space shuttle launch this morning, don’t be bummed. Due to weather concerns, the launch was scrubbed for 24 hours and will be attempted again Monday morning around 4am EST. This is likely the last night launch for the venerable Space Shuttle so if you haven’t had a chance to see one, here’s your last opportunity. If you’re on the east coast of the US, you might be able to spot it as it climbs into orbit.
Each day of delay pushes the launch time 22 to 26 minutes earlier. Future launch opportunities include 4:14 a.m. ET on Monday and 3:51 a.m. on Tuesday. Should weather or technical issues delay the launch until Feb. 22, liftoff would then be scheduled for 9:48 p.m. ET.
MacRumors reports about a possible leaked benchmark from an as-yet unreleased Core i7 "Arrandale" MacBook Pro running at 2.66GHz. The CPU is identified as an Intel Core i7-620M. Yay?
Apple's MacBook Pros are due for updates and Intel's new mobile processors are the most likely candidates. While we haven't heard any solid evidence, there have been rumblings from international resellers that Apple's MacBook Pros supplies have been constrained. Supplies can be constrained for any number of reasons, but the timing does fit with a MacBook Pro refresh.
Not sure how accurate this info is so take it with a grain of salt. That said, PPCGeeks has leaked some details about Windows Phone 7 (AKA Windows Mobile or "WinMo") in advance of the Mobile World Congress event in a couple of weeks. No multi-tasking support? No backwards compatibility? Is this really the best you can do, Microsoft?
At the Mobile World Congress event on February 15th, 2010, Windows Phone 7 will be unveilved, although at this time plans are only to unveil the user interface of the new platform . Specific indepth functionality of the device will most likely not be shown. The User Interface is based upon codename "METRO". It will be very similar to the Zune HD User Interface with a complete revamp of the "Start" screen. The UI is "Very Clean", "Soulful" and "Alive."
Scientists in Boulder, CO decided that the current atomic standard for timekeeping wasn’t precise enough. They put together a quantum-logic clock which "keeps time to within a second every 3.7 billion years." Cool - I hope I can set my Swatch to it soon. 
The clock could help resolve questions about the universal physical constants, such as the speed of light in a vacuum, or Planck’s constant, an important value in quantum physics. Physical constants are supposedly fixed over time, but some theories suggest they may vary slightly, [James Chou] said. "Optical clocks are one of the candidates that might be able to see that really tiny variation over time," he said.