Proof Youtube STEALING Money From Creators They Demonetize!

GEFORCE GTX USB DRIVE

It's April first, 2017 and the internet is awash with pranks. Google had Pac Maps and The Gnome, Amazon had an Alexa for your pets  and NVIDIA brought you GeForce GTX G-Assist



Obviously this was a tongue-in-cheek prank orchestrated by NVIDIA but it sparked an internet firestorm. Nobody believed in G-Assist but everyone wanted a USB stick shaped like a Pascal GPU. Shortly after this NVIDIA did announce that they would be giving away 1080 (see what they did there?) of these drives through a GeForce Experience raffle. The drives haven't been available retail but a limited number were available internally and even fewer were sent out to select reviewers and one actually made it's way to my desk.

The GeForce GTX USB Drive has all the angular supercar styling of the of the Founder's Edition 10 series Pascal GPUs and the similarity to their larger counterparts doesn't stop there. Each drive comes packaged in a miniature stylized replica of the actual retail box.

 While full tech specs are sparse, we know it has a USB3 interface and 64GB of storage and that's about all I could dig up.

With all the flash and sparse tech specs out of the way, let's look at performance. I tested the GTX USB drive against a Patriot Supersonic Express USB 3.0 thumb drive. The benchmark testbed is an ASUS Rampage V 10 Edition with a 5960x CPU, 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 2400MHz RAM and running Windows 10 Pro.

I ran Crystal Disk Mark on each drive with 100MB, 500MB and 1GB samples and compared the sequential reads and writes with the following results:

    Patriot USB                                  GeForce GTX USB

The GTX USB starts off really strong with almost 2x read and 3x write speeds with a 1GB sample but the read speeds slowly taper off as the sample size is reduced while the write speeds went up. I ran the tests several times and the numbers stayed consistent.

When it's all said and done, the GeForce GTX USB Drive is pretty cool and it performs well and would probably sell well if NVIDIA was in the storage business. Since they're not, the public may never see these in the numbers that they'd like.

Take Control With Corsair Commander Pro

 There's little doubt that custom lighting and cooling has become a significant part of the PC enthusiast culture and Corsair is no shrinking violet in this market and one of their latest offerings is the Commander Pro. Marketed as "the heart of your Corsair Link system" this appears to be a direct replacement for the now discontinued Corsair Commander Mini, it's a centralized control center for controlling and monitoring your RGB fans and strips, controlling fan speeds and monitoring temperatures.

Opening the packaging, things are tidy and well-presented, as we've come to expect from Corsair.

Inside the box is the Commander unit, four 4-pin fan extensions, two RGB hub cables, four thermistors and two pieces of 2-sided tape used to mount the Commander in your case. The Commander Pro has six 4-pin fan connectors with voltage and PWM control, four thermistor inputs, two RGB lighting channels and two USB 2.0 internal headers. Each lighting channel can control up to four lighting strips or six fans but controlling fan lighting requires an LED hub (not included). The Commander Pro plugs into an internal USB header and uses SATA for power.

To wrangle all of this hardware you're going to use the Corsair Link software. From there you can customize the color and effects of your lighting, the behavior of your fans and monitor the temperatures of your CPU, GPU, hard drives, motherboard sensors as well as up to 4 locations you can choose with the included thermistors.

All in all the Commander Pro is a handy little gadget and a must-get if you're stacking Corsair RGB products in your case but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. As I said earlier, to customize the fan lighting you need to purchase an additional device. Additionally, I would have liked more than four light strips per channel. If you're lighting a large case, this limitation could be problematic.

The Corsair Commander pro sells for 69.99 and is available at online retailers like Amazon,m Newegg and the Corsair store.

At Computex 2017, Gaming Laptops Lose Weight And A CPU Gains It

The gaming laptop, often an oxy-moron and frequently plagued by weight, heat and noise issues. When a vendor wants to put "real" desktop components in a laptop, heat is a significant issue and resolving it  usually involves copious amounts of copper and larger frames and howling to get air flowing over that copper and they still generated quite a bit of heat. In the old days we didn't even call them laptops, they were desktop alternatives. I had a Sager\Clevo rig with a desktop i7 CPU and SLI GPUs and it was the size of a small suitcase, was as heavy as a boat anchor and with the fans at full throttle, you'd think Dorothy's house was going to blow by

The alternative was for manufacturers to offer reduced power/voltage versions of their chips. They generated much less heat but this often came at a significant loss of performance. I have a laptop with a GTX 760m GPU and my backup system running a GTX 660 blows it out of the water.

NVIDIA is looking to break this paradigm with Max-Q technology. Simply put they're taking the best of their 1060, 1070 and 1080 chips, optimized game settings, cutting-edge airflow engineering and high-quality voltage control to produce the best possible performance at the optimal power level.

As a demonstration of this technological philosophy, Jensen Huang showed two laptops, side by side at Computex 2017. One was a 10 pound, 81mm gaming laptop from 3 years ago and one was a sleek, new 18mm thick laptop weighing only 5 pounds. The best chip, optimized settings and VRM aspect of this seem pretty straightforward so what intrigues me is the airflow engineering aspect of Max-Q. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus has a GTX 1080 GPU, is just shy of 5 pounds and is 17.9mm thin, when closed. When you open the lid the edges under the monitor side crack open a bit to increase airflow 30%. It's a really cool concept but I'm concerned about how robust that whole arrangement is.

MSI and Clevo had announced offerings running GTX 1070s at the time of the announcement but there aren't any details on how they manage heat and airflow.

Now to the elephant in the room, literally:
AMD is going after Intel i9 with the Ryzen Threadripper. According to AMD the Threadripper is their "revitalization of ultra-premium PCs for the high-end desktop market" and "targeted at the world's fastest ultra-premium desktop systems". What they left off their wire announcement is that it's a monster.

 I had thought the old Cyrix and 2011.V3 CPUs were as big as bricks could get but I was apparently wrong. I can't immediately find why this thing is the size of the side of a clapboard house but I'll keep my eyes on it.

Now of course if your laying the Monolith from 2001 on it's side in your rig your going to need a motherboard and cooler to go with it. For coolers, Noctua announced the TR4/SP3 heatsinks. Noctua produces some of the best heatpipe coolers out there so I imagine they'll do the job. I just wonder how much they weigh...

Finally, if I was assembling this boat anchor er...gaming rig, I'd put it all on an Asus ROG Zenith Extreme

The Zenith Extreme is a fairly typical example of hoe these CPUs will be mounted and shows that the mounting hardware is nearly as wide as the ram slots. The ASUS announcement alludes to it's bulk directly stating "AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper is a lot of CPU, and the ROG Zenith Extreme brings a lot of motherboard to match" That is no lie.

Corsair Announces New Fan/RGB Controller

Being firmly entrenched in the RGB craze for some time now, Corsair has announced their latest entry in the lighting and fan control market, the Corsair Commander Pro. The Commander Pro replaces the, now discontinued, Commander Mini and incorporates elements of the Lightning Node Pro and fan RGB hub while adding several new features. It's full list of features include 6 fan controllers, 4 thermistor connectors, 2 internal USB 2.0 connections and 2 RGB LED channels that support 4 RGB strips or 6 RGB HD fans each.

According to Corsair's announcement the Corsair Commander Pro "Available immediately from the CORSAIR worldwide network of authorized retailers and distributors" and although a quick search didn't turn anything up you can order it direct from them for 69.99.

An Unhappy Cyclops and Windows 10 Wallpaper

Has anyone noticed that Microsoft's new default user icon looks like an unhappy cyclops?

Maybe it's because he upgraded to Windows 10, has multiple monitors and can't set individual wallpapers. Fear not, my one-eyed friend, there's a way to get this done. Like many other Windows 8x features that appear to be missing in Windows 10, it's still there, just hidden but easy to find and no dubious third party apps are required.

• Bring up the "Run" command box by holding your Windows and R key

• Paste the following text in the box (no quotes): "control /name Microsoft.Personalization /page pageWallpaper"

• Hit Enter or click OK
• This will bring up the old style Desktop Background selection window
• Browse to where your desired photos are, right-click each photo, set it to the desired monitor and save changes

Seriously, Amazon?

In what I can only describe as an Apple-esque walled garden tactic, Amazon is going to stop allowing the sale of non Prime compatible devices like Chromecast and Apple TV, effective October 29. 

According to the Amazon Overlords:

“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” a spokesperson said. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, Xbox, PlayStation and Fire TV are excellent choices.”

So to start with Amazon is assuming their customers are idiots and can't properly research a purchase or read a product description. While I agree that there are a startling number of 85s* out there this argument just doesn't hold much water, Secondly, it's reported that fewer than 20% of Amazon users are Prime members so anyone wanting a cheap or convenient device to use other streaming services will just have to shop elsewhere.

Popular opinion is that this isn't tantamount to an antitrust violation, due to there being other outlets for purchase, although I imagine this will suck worse for Google as outlets for Apple products are far more ubiquitous but, in my opinion, this just comes off as a sleazy, underhanded move.

* 85 is an Alien 3 reference used to indicate someone has a low intelligence.

Back in the saddle, again.... again.

Many of you know about my on again, off again history with writing. All the way back to the early '00s, with PCExtremist.com and freelancing, I've wanted to both read about and get hands-on with technology and than share what I learn and how I feel about the experience with anyone that will listen. 

As my career started to take off I found less and less time to keep up with all all the diversity in tech news and had to focus on what I was relevant to success in my job and most of what I learned was either proprietary or confidential and not appropriate to share on a public forum.

In 2009 I started this blog in an attempt to rekindle my interest in flogging any hardware I could get my hands on and reporting on anything in the tech news I found of interest but over the years my dedication to this site has been spotty, at best, leading to complete silence since the end of 2012 mostly due to my dealing with spinal/neurological deficits, unemployment and the subsequent deep depression that followed.

I'm still unemployed but after a few surgeries, I'm feeling better physically than I have in a very long time. The emotional health thing is a daily maintenance task and I've been told to get off my butt and find hobbies other than feeling sorry for myself and melting my brain with the TV. Several people have said that writing again would both be good as a mental stimulus and as a possible way to showcase some of my talents to possible future employers... yay me.

This brings me full circle to the title of this (much longer than I intended) post in that I'm going to resume publishing content on this blog. I'm not sure with what, how much or how often I'll be assaulting the interned with my opinion but I'm hoping it will eventually several posts, daily. We'll see.

USS Enterprise to Boldly Go...

To be parted out. After over 50 years in service the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise is to be decommissioned and sold for scrap.

She'll start her final mission with a quick jaunt from US Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia  to a nearby shipyard to have her fuel rods removed. From there she'll be towed down around the southern tip of South America and head northward to her final destination in Puget Sound, Washington. Once there her reactors will be removed and full cannibalization will commence. She's expected to yield 90K tons of scrap.

There were several attempts to save her and make her a floating museum but the process of removing the 8 nuclear reactors will cause significant damage to the flight deck and hull. The cost to replace this damage is prohibitive, according to the navy.

The USS Enterprise, know as Big E by her crew, is the second oldest ship in the Navy and the oldest combat vessel in service. Gray Lady, you will be missed.

Zombie Flick Shot at CERN

Forget an all-consuming black hole, this movie postulates a zombie apocalypse after a burst radiation release from the LHC.
LINK
Made by physics students and filmed on location CERN, this thing looks like it's going to be a hoot

Tim Cook is a KOOK

Taking random jabs at convergence in a technology world where convergence is constantly evolving and arbitrarily saying that touch-screens don't want to be vertical... guess we all use our phones and tablets horizontally. I can just see this conversation in the workplace:
Boss: Hey! You're not supposed to be napping at your desk!!
Underling: I'm not, I'm making a call in my iPhone!

LINK

ASUS success Powered by NVIDIA!!!!

Cool /. story about surge in ASUS profits. For those that may not know the devices referenced are powered ny NVIDIA Tegra2 and 3 processors.

LINK

Robotic (Droidic?) Camouflage

If pedaling away  from certain doom isn't for you (see previous post) perhaps something like this DIY R2D2 is just the ticket. While larger than the original article it is self-propelled and has all the boops, beeps and chirps needed to successfully camouflage you from any of those pesky T800's. Just hope some roving AI doesn't jack in...

Tools of the Robot Apocalypse Disguised as Socoi/Ecological Conscience!!!

Imagine yourself waking on the dawn of the Robot Apocalypse, the machines have risen up and computers are no longer accepting human input. It's time to get the hell outta dodge but your car is lending CPU time to SkyNet. Ah-ha!, you think, I'll get on my bicycle and pedal away to safety. Unfortunately you forgot that you share a SoBi (Social Bicycle) with friends and it's equipped with a GPS tracker!!!

As you ride off into the sunset, completely oblivious of any danger, they'll know where you are...

In all seriousness, SoBi has developed these locks to better enable local administrators track usage and make their deployment more efficient. The current system requires the cyclist to call in to SoBi before and after usage.

New BIOS and Memory Woes. Beware! Wordiness Ahead...

I recently received an Asus Maximus III Gene motherboard to test out. All was well and for an LGA 1156 board, this thing was a rocket. For reasons I don’t even know, it never occurred to me to check the board BIOS to see if there were stability/OC enhancements in the newer revs. About a week ago I finally did look it up and there it was, a brand-spanking new BIOS promising better OC stability and CPU compatibility. Having hit a sub-4GHz wall (Lynnfield i7 870 native at 2.99GHz) on air cooling I jumped at the possibility of eeking a bit more out of my CPU.
The update went well, I have ASUS updater installed so I don't even have to boot to DOS (yes I said DOS, we all know that's what it is....) to run the BIOS update. Everything seemed to be fine but I wanted to be sure so I ran a Prime95 load test to be sure. About 30 seconds in, by system BSOD's. This is the same system that ran a full-blended Prime95 torture test for 8 hours the Venomous XR-T article without a hitch.... Something was amiss.

My first troubleshooting step was to return the system to BIOS defaults for the CPU and memory. This successfully stopped the BSODs but the system was running poorly, even for stock standards. I'm currently running 4GB of Patriot's DDR3-1066 memory and while old by today's standards it had been running fine in my nVidia chipped EVGA 790i Ultra for over a year so I was dubious to blame it outright but I did have some new memory coming soon. In a rare spot of patience I decided to wait until it arrived to tinker any further... Enter the newest player in our drama: Starcraft II.

Still in my patient place and completely oblivious to the root cause of my recent drop in performance, I installed Starcraft II and TRIED to run it. Load screens took forever, rendered cutscenes were choppy, audio was out of sync and, when playing in windowed mode, if I did anything else the system would bust hammer the hard disk in a read/write paging frenzy. Essentially it was unplayable and I was quickly being evicted from my patient place.

Seeing and hearing the hard drive in a constant read/write state first led me to believe that the page file needed to be set. This is a fresh install of Win7 x64 and while I had left the page size at default in the past I went about enforcing a 1x RAM minimum/2x RAM maximum to my page file on my fastest drive: 4GB and 8GB respectively. I rebooted and gleefully awaited my chance to kick some Zerg butt, I would be disappointed.

Upon rebooting the system was running even worse. My HDD activity indicator could have been a power button because now it was on constantly. I had previously lamented to a friend that perhaps it was time to move to a Solid State Drive to improve performance, thinking that my "old" mechanical drive was partly to blame for my recent reduction in performance but this could not be just the HDDs fault so, before breaking out the hammer and administering some percussive maintenance, I did the one thing I should have done at the beginning of this little adventure: check Task Manager and Sys Monitor and see if there was something else going on.

In life it’s said that it’s the little things that hurt and more often than not, your worst troubles can be caused by the smallest things. Looking back, given my experience, I should have caught this in the first 5 minutes. Windows was seeing 4GB of memory still but only utilizing 2GB max. I was puzzled at first, played around with system performance settings, wiggled and swapped memory sticks around and poked at every possible BIOS setting with zero change to the memory seen by the BIOS or Windows so I went to ASUS’s site to look for updated documentation. I downloaded and read the latest addendum for my motherboard’s manual and I discovered that there are differences in how you install memory, depending on if you have a Lynnfield or Clarkdale CPU. Yes boys and girls, not only did I feel like a total hardware rookie for not checking System Monitor in the first place, this whole escapade could have been avoided if I had just RTFM.

I have since installed the memory in the appropriate location and am back to having 4GB of usable memory in Windows. In my defense, I have *never* had a desktop motherboard (Servers? Yes) that cared which slots you put the memory in as long as you populated adjacent channels.

Ah well, lesson learned. I guess the moral is: If it's not broken Don't fix it and if fixing it breaks it RTFM. I’m off to assist Jim Raynor in his campaign against Coalition oppression and the deadly Zerg.

GeForce 400 Has Entered the Building

Our friends at NVIDIA have sent us a GeForce GTX 470 to play around with. Second most-powerful in a family of four cards, its siblings are the GTX 480, 465 and 460. The 460/465 cards are the “Budget Gamer” line coming in the mid $200.00 mark and the 480 is the headliner in the show coming in varying flavors around $500.00. The 470 is going for $320.00 to $350.00 right now from various online retailers and will be the primary focus of today’s scribbling.


So, the first thing we ask, what are the primary differences between the 470 and the 480. Let’s take a look at the raw numbers:

The physical i/o connections on the card are identical with the exception of the power connectors, the 470 uses 2–6pin and the 480 uses 1-6 pin and 1-8 pin plug. There are grumblings about there being no media connector and dings against NV’s HDMI audio but, honestly, if I’m going to plug my plasma into this bad boy the audio will be going from my HD audio card directly to my audio receiver.


Aside from the aspect of the faster GPU and bigger hardware feature set, the big difference between the GF 400 series cards and their predecessors is DirectX 11. While the current list of DX11 games is very short it is expected to grow soon and much sooner than the 2 – 3 years some folks in the online community were projecting. With HL 2 part III and Starcraft II and on the list I’m really looking forward to seeing the difference in image quality and performance.


Unfortunately my GTX 280 died a hot and violent death shortly after receiving the 470 so side-by-side benchmarks will have to wait until I get the RMA’d card back. I can say that I have seen improved performance in Metro 2033 (now maxed out and with DX 11 features enabled) Just Cause 2 and even World of Warcraft.

On top of comparing this GPU to the 280, I'm really hoping to get my hands on another 470 to play around with 3D Vision Surround.

Droid X: This Phone Will Self-Destruct In 3,2,1..

More shocking news in from the cell phone community. Motorola and Verizon have apparently decided to bring the hammer down on the Android modding community with the introduction of eFuse. One of the big draws of the Droid X is it's use of Android 2.1, an open-source and highly customizable OS. With eFuse, if you make any changes to the OS or firmware that it can't certify as factory original, it "kills" the phone requiring a hardware fix to reactivate. Normal rooting may not be able to get around this as it starts certification before the bootloader so it will detect *any* changes.

Needless to say, the natives are restless...

Proving the Rumors True, Apple Offers Free iPhone 4 Bumpers

Apple iPhone 4 users can breathe a sigh of relief. Many believed that Apple would go Marie Antoinette on them and tell them to eat the proverbial cake in regards to bumpers for their shiny new toys. It seems that free cases and refunds for those that have already purchased one are in the works.

This just in: Case refunds only apply to those purchased from AT&T or Apple, no third-party cases will be covered by the refund. While I can see their side of this and they do need to protect themselves by controlling refund costs, they should at least quantify a base refund value and offer this to those who can show valid proof of purchase. Just my two cents..

Air Cooling Goodness!!

So, I had an i7 870 and motherboard fall into my lap recently. As I fully intended to OC the bejeezuz out of it, I needed to go hunting for a good cooler and was almost unanimously pointed to the Venemous line from Thermalright, specifically the Venemous X-RT and after installing it I can't be happier.



I know what you're saying.. "James, you *need* to go watercooled, newb!" bah.. been there, done that and may yet return but I just don't have the time/interest right now for a high-maintenance cooling solution.

To make a long story short (I know, too late) at the stock 2.93GHz I'm idling at ~25c and 50c under load. I have this bad boy cranked to 3.6GHz now running 30c idling and 60c under load, this is still almost 40c under CPU max. I've tried to squeeze a little more out of the CPU but my memory can't keep up and the stability goes out the window. I'm hoping to get my hands on some Corsair XMS3 DHX sticks soon so we'll see if that helps. I've seen posts online of this CPU/Mobo hitting near 3.9GHz on air and I'd like to get there myself.

iPhone 5 Rushed Through Engineering

Acknowledging that the signal issue is indeed hardware, Apple is pushing the iPhone 5 out the door. Insiders heard engineers grumbling "Let's see them hold this antenna".