Raves, rants and reviews
Raves, Rants, Reviews

World’s fastest graphics card 2016 – nVidia GeForce GTX 1080

10/05/2016. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

Jen-Hsun Huang was a microprocessor designer at AMD when he left the company in 1993 to co-found nVidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Today, nVidia is not only AMD’s biggest competitor in the graphics card market but is the largest company in its field. And that’s a good place to be, considering that video gaming is a $100 billion-a-year business, twice the size of the film industry.

What made nVidia so big and profitable? Being a step ahead of the competition for most of the time and more than often scooping the title of “World’s fastest graphics card.”

Read more…

Making operating systems safer and faster with unikernels

17/02/2016. Category: Media. Topic: , .

Technology to improve the security, speed and scale of data processing in age of the Internet of Things is being developed by a Cambridge spin-out company.

Specialised computer software components to improve the security, speed and scale of data processing in cloud computing are being developed by a University of Cambridge spin-out company. The company, Unikernel Systems, which was formed by staff and postdoctoral researchers at the University Computer Laboratory, has recently been acquired by San-Francisco based software company Docker Inc. Read more…

World’s fastest graphics card 2014 – nVidia GeForce GTX Titan Black

11/03/2014. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

Fast and powerful yet cool and quiet. No, that’s not Chuck Norris in person but the Chuck Norris of graphics cards: the supercomputer-inspired-GK110 GPU, Kepler-driven nVidia GeForce GTX Titan Black.

The original Titan packed 2688 CUDA cores; the Titan Black has 2880. The original Titan had stock and boost clocks of 837MHz and 876MHz respectively; the Titan Black powers up to 889MHz and 980MHz.

Gamers with the deepest pockets will gloat that the Titan Black not only incorporates the impressive features of the GTX780 Ti but even betters it with 3GB extra GDDR5 VRAM. Even if/when the 6GB version of the GTX780 Ti is launched, the double precision floating point compute capability of the Titan Black will top the charts in 4k gaming.  Read more…

iPad Air – “Does More, Weighs Less”

23/10/2013. Category: Gadgets. Topic: , .

“Does even more. Weighs even less.” That is how Apple introduced the Ipad Air tablet. It is 28% lighter and 20% thinner than the iPad 4. The iPad Air weighs only 469g (1 pound) and measures 240 x 169.5 x 7.5mm (9.4 x 6.6 x 0.29 inches).

There are two models: one with Wi-Fi only and one with Wi-Fi + Cellular. Both feature 802.11a/b/g/n dual channel (2.4GHz and 5GHz), MIMO and Bluetooth 4.0 technology.

The cellular technology on the Wi-Fi + Cellular model – which weighs a mere 9 grams (0.05lb) more – is as you would expect from Apple:  Read more…

Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC Gaming Motherboard

21/10/2013. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

Your father thinks you are overclocked in your head. Your mother is convinced you have gaming pareidolia. Your social networks consist of MMOGs, MMORPGs and LANs. When you did the Rorschach test, the only thing you saw was the GA-Z87X-OC.

You are not the only greedy gamer smitten by this gaming motherboard by Gigabyte. It was Tom’s Hardware’s choice of Best of Computex Award, received the Computex 2013 Design and Innovation award, the Gold Award from GameZoom, and was best overclocker for Reviewnet and a host of other geeks.  Read more…

10MB HDD Way Back Then

24/07/2013. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

Ran across an ad from July 1980 for a 10MB hard drive. Price: $3,495! Wow! An internal 250gig HDD now costs $35 and a 4 Terabyte HDD about $200.

It is interesting to see how the price of some things have gone up crazily but dropped significantly for other stuff. The old adage that “Everything goes up, only the rain comes down” is not quite true. Traditionally, the price of a motorcar has been the equivalent of a year’s average income.

Fortunately, the prices of electronic goods such as television sets, cell phones and computer items have come down as demand increased and the cost of manufacturing dropped (relatively). Read more…

E3 Expo 2013 highlights

12/06/2013. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

It was the battle of the boxes at the 2013 E3 expo. Microsoft kicked off with the introduction to their new Xbox One and Sony kicked back with PlayStation 4. Sony stole the show by announcing there will be no used game restrictions or 24-hour check-in requirements with the PS4.

Nintendo introduced new games for their Wii U and 3DS. Microsoft announced that there will be 13 games exclusively for the Xbox One. EA broke the news on 11 new-generation games for both the Xbox One and PS4.  Read more…

Cody Wilson’s 3D plastic gun

06/05/2013. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

When Cody Wilson produced the world’s first 3D gun, the wisdom of Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) probably played a part: “Law is mind without reason.”

The 25-year-old law student seemed to have thrown out all the rules and achieved what many had dreamt of and what some did not dare dream about. In the process, he has, for better or for worse, created a new global industry.  Read more…

AMD Radeon HD 7990 UltraHD graphics card

24/04/2013. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

“The AMD Radeon HD 7990 is the world’s fastest graphics card.” That is AMD’s bold claim. The specs make it easy to believe: 6GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit bus, running at 6.0Gbps for 576GB/s of memory bandwidth. The PCI Express 3.0 PLX bridge connects the dual ASICs in an internal AMD CrossFire technology configuration to provide 48 lanes with 96GB/s inter-GPU bandwidth.

At the heart of this desirable gaming gadget are two fully equipped Tahiti XT2 GPUs, each core with 4.3 billion transistors. So, that gives you 8.6 billion transistors, with 4096 Stream processors, delivering 8.2 terraflops of processing power.  Read more…

Antec Eleven Hundred computer chassis

22/04/2013. Category: Gadgets. Topic: .

Most of the major computer manufacturers produce computer chassis and most of them are targeted at the home or office PC market. These chassis usually are compact, affordable and fairly durable. Gaming chassis, on the other hand, are large, strong and in most cases somewhat pricey.

Ardent gamers are big spenders. They want the latest, fastest CPU and GPU and enough memory and hard drive space to fight a war with. Which is exactly what happens once they move in behind the keyboard.  Read more…

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