Items tagged with heat
What if your future GPU or CPU could throttle itself back when it got too hot, rather than overheating and causing errors or a shutdown? It may be possible, but for now, this is a reality in the server realm. Overheating doesn't happen nearly as often these days when it comes to consumer computing, but once you add in overclocking, serial jobs or multiple linked computers, things can get messy when temperatures rise above a certain level. Particularly with servers, many are designed to shut completely off if temperatures soar beyond a certain point in order to save the machine from irreparable damage. But shutting down a machine in order to save it from melting, so to speak, isn't exactly the...
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Through a project known as Aquasar, IBM researchers are working on new technologies that could drastically reduce the power consumption and carbon footprint of data centers. Aquasar involves a water-cooled supercomputer that uses 40% less energy than comparable systems that use today's air-conditioned methods.In addition to saving energy, Aquasar takes the waste heat it pulls from servers and uses the heat to help warm nearby offices. By combining these energy savings, a company's carbon footprint can be reduced by as much as 85%. The Aquasar project began one year ago as part of IBM's First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) program. Recently, IBM delivered its first-of-a-kind hot water-cooled supercomputer to...
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Sony has been dealing with the fallout from overheating batteries for a couple of years now, so it should be used to the fire drills associated with running damage control on overheating products. That practice should come in handy, as the latest hot potato form Sony is an entire line of overheating laptops. In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Sony has issued a voluntary recall of about 73,000 units of its VAIO TZ-series notebooks that were sold in the U.S. between July 2007 and August 2008. The potentially affected models are:VGN-TZ100 seriesVGN-TZ200 seriesVGN-TZ300 seriesVGN-TZ2000 series Today's press release states:"Hazard: Irregularly positioned wires near the...
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We're sure you know about the issues with some NVIDIA mobile GPUs, as earlier in July NVIDIA admitted it was taking a $150 - $200 million charge to cover (emphasis ours):... anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems. All newly manufactured products and all products currently shipping in volume have a different and more robust material set. Since then both HP and Dell have admitted the issue affects their notebooks, but Apple has not. And the Apple discussion forums are starting to light up, with...
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Even in the age of green computing and lower power 45nm silicon manufacturing technologies, thermal management, specifically heat mitigation, continues to be a challenge . Maybe you're a dyed-in-the-wool overclocker or perhaps a silent computing buff that wants things whisper-quiet. Then again, even the average "Joe Sixpack" could probably appreciate how unobtrusive a computer can be and that, as savvy HH readers know, can only be achieved through robust, elegant cooling solutions. In that vein and out of the Kingdom of Denmark comes Danamics with the LM10, the world's first commercially available liquid metal-based CPU heatsink. What's that...
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There's no shortage of drama in the Desktop Graphics industry, with bitter rivals NVIDIA and AMD-ATI taking shots at each other at any opportunity. Though HotHardware Management heritage is of Italian descent and thus not shy of taking on a passionate debate, we generally like to stick to the facts, rather than dabble in rumor hearsay or mudslinging. There just aren't enough hours in the day to go down the proverbial rat-hole all that often. However, when the occasion presented itself to dig into the latest allegations of NVIDIA leveraging optimization cheats in their drivers for their recently announced GPU-PhysX port and 3DMark Vantage, we couldn't resist learning all we could...
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You probably recall AOL's 2006 leak of search user data, which actually was more like a flood. AOL published the search logs of 650,000 subscribers, which eventually resulted in some heads rolling, after the smoke cleared. Why not take a tack from Law and Order and rip a story from the headlines, eh? And that's what director Michael Alltop did.The show--which opened Wednesday and runs through June 22--is based on a now infamous real-life search log that included queries ranging from "purple lilac," "happy bunny pictures," and "square dancing steps" to "cut into your trachea," "pee fetish," and "Simpsons incest." And that's just for starters."It was something that captured my imagination and seemed...
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Why do we buy HotHardware? The answer is always to play games. You don't need to overclock and cool to use Microsoft Word. We want to go places and kill things. But as the worlds we wander through with our weapons have gravitated online, and involve thousands of other players worldwide, cheating at gaming has morphed from a harmless personal vice to a sort of crime. Slate has an interesting look at how this cheating at video games has turned from silly fun into a lucrative business. So, where does gameplay end and cheating begin? Given that virtual property now has real-world value, it's no longer just an idle question for gaming geeks. These days, there's enough nerdy talk about social...
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I've seen it before on shows like "Law and Order" - suspects caught because of electronic bridge toll records - you said you were in place X but you were in place Y - and you could in fact have committed that murder. And so on and so forth. Well, adulterers beware: E-ZPass is now being used in divorce cases. "E-ZPass is an E-ZPass to go directly to divorce court, because it's an easy way to show you took the off-ramp to adultery," said Jacalyn Barnett, a New York divorce lawyer who has used E-ZPass records a few times.Lynne Gold-Bikin, a Pennsylvania divorce lawyer, said E-ZPass helped prove a client's husband was being unfaithful: "He claimed he was in a business meeting in Pennsylvania....
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Aimbot, aimhack, cheats, or what have you is what we’re talking about today. We’ve probably all been victims of cheating at least once during the many hours we have spent playing games in front of the screen. And we all know that cheating usually spoils the fun for everyone. That might be why Intel has embarked on anti-cheat crusade, so to speak, with its research on a new anti-cheating system that would make cheating much more difficult for cheating cheaters. Known as the Fair Online Gaming System, it is unlike contemporary software-based anti-cheating technologies in that it would be built into a user’s computer and would combine software, hardware, and firmware. “Anti-cheating software can...
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OCZ's latest solution for cooling their high performance memory modules is the Reaper Heat Pipe Conduit (HPC) system. The Reaper HPC memory uses a combination of an aluminum heatspreader, copper heatpipe, and aluminum fin array to quickly dissipate heat. Heat generated by the memory is absorbed by the heatspreader, where it is then transported to an aluminum fin array which then dissipates the heat into the surrounding air. In theory this method should cool the memory modules much more efficiently than the flat heatspreaders most other memory modules sport.In this article, we evaluate the original PC2-8500 Reaper HPC kit and the newer Enhanced Bandwidth Edition PC2-6400. Click the link below...
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For the last several months, DDR2 memory development has been largly stagnent. The fastest DDR2 memory kits from last summer were, for the most part, still the fastest DDR2 memory kits this spring. We haven't seen any truly significant developments in DDR2 since Micron stepped up to the plate with their D9 chips. Although manufacturers continue to release new DDR2 memory, speed increases are fewer and harder to come by. It seems that even the mighty D9 has run out of headroom and it's becoming very difficult to produce faster DDR2 memory while still maintaining acceptible production yields. With the relative standstill in DDR2 development, manufacturers determined to keep...
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Now that summer has arrived in the northern hemisphere, there is plenty of it to go around. Computer hardware enthusiasts try to deal with it on a regular basis by incorporating gigantic fans, elaborate water-cooling systems, or even going that extra step toward phase cooling. Heat. It makes computer gamers and baseball pitchers go crazy alike - on days that exceed 32 degrees Celsius, there tends to be a higher frequency of batters being hit by pitchers. Fortunately, Orest Symko, a physicist at the University of Utah, and his team are developing ways to convert heat into sound and then into electricity. In the picture, he demonstrates by using a blowtorch to activate one of the devices he has...
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Intel plans to "turn up the heat" on AMD: "To decrease the impact of a head-to-head processor pricing war with rival Advanced Micro Devices, Intel must return to the quick development habits it used when producing its Pentium family of chips, Otellini said. Intel backed off that pace after producing the Pentium 4, and soon began to lose market share when AMD launched the Opteron chip in 2003." Intel has certainly been on a roll as of late, and here is the skinny on their future plans according to the article: 2007: Intel will transition the current Core microprocessors to 45nm, and introduce new features. 2008: Next generation core CPUs should debut. 2009: Intel will shrink the CPU...
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When you think of "discovery," you think of new inventions. But there's another kind; people using existing technology and hardware in new and interesting ways. HotHardware readers are constantly innovating with existing hardware -- you magnificent overclocking techies you. What could you accomplish with about $100,000 and a trip to Best Buy and Circuit City? Well, these two computer engineers came up with a super high resolution 27 foot wide display. Christopher Jaynes and Stephen Webb, two computer engineers in Lexington, Ky., have created a video projection system that they believe could improve everything from outdoor advertising to home entertainment. Their technology will...
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Hello everyone. Those of you that are in the market for a TV-Tuner card will have another option soon, courtesy of ATI and their new Theater 650 Pro chip and Catalyst Media Center software. We've taken a look at a reference Theater 650 Pro card at HotHardware.com, alongside a build of the new Catalyst Media Center software. Click here to check them out... And please Digg this article to share it with others. Thanks!...
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In recent months, we've seen a major step forward in the image quality of TV Tuner cards on the PC. As we recently saw with our review of NVIDIA's DualTV, an analog signal can now be cleaned up nicely with finely tuned comb filters and other technologies to bring clarity not seen with previous products. As the technology has evolved, manufacturers now have the leverage to produce TV-Tuner packages with exceptional analog image quality along with other features, such as dual-tuners, using a single cable connection. While NVIDIA impressed us with their DualTV card, ATI has been hard at work fine tuning their Theater 650 Pro processor. Building...
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More breaking news in from the Inq... The collective ears of ATI fans worldwide can rejoice as Fudo over at The Inquirer has confirmed that ATI will be changing to a new heatsink assembly design for the company's upcoming R600 flagship GPU. Although effective, the dual-slot heatsink assembly on all high-end R520/R580 graphics cards is painfully loud and obnoxious and is nearly on par with the infamous GeForce FX 5800 cooler. ATI's engineers will have to be creative in their design however as recent flagship GPU's have already taken advantage of the performance benefits allotted by heatpipes, blower fans, and using copper in place of aluminum. "We have confirmation that ATI plans to do something...
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New Chip Delivers Exceptional TV To PC Users Around The World Enjoy a new way to experience PC multimedia entertainment with ATI Theater(TM) 650 Pro and Catalyst Media Center(TM) MARKHAM, ONTARIO--(CCNMatthews - June 6, 2006) - ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY)(NASDAQ:ATYT) announced the Theater(TM) 650 Pro video processor chip for superb analog and digital TV reception for PC users around the world. The new chip offers full hardware support for Personal Video Recording (PVR) backed by unrivaled Avivo(TM) image quality. Theater 650 Pro is supported by ATI's new Catalyst Media Center(TM) software which combines easy-to-use PVR capabilities with the ability to handle any signal, any time...
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Hey folks, do you like roundups? We sure do, and we seem to be getting a lot of them lately. The most recent one to find it's way into our news box, is Madshrimp's May CPU Heatsink Roundup. A total of 29 different CPU coolers are put to the test, so make sure to check it out, especially if you're in the market for a new cooler. "Eight new heatsinks are compared to 21 other air cooling solutions from different manufactures. We have some promising entries from Spire, Aerocool, Scythe, Thermaltake and Tuniq for you today." ...
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In the need for a heavy duty Chipset cooler? JingTing, a little known company, has sent HardwareXL one beast of a cooler. Because of it's size, it might not be compatible with every setup though. "Out of the blue we received a small box containing a new kind of chipset cooler. The company that send it to us goes by the name of "JingTing". I must say I have never heard of them before, but when I took a peek at the content in the box it looked very impressive. If you have a noisy chipset cooler you might want to check out this cooler."...
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We were sent a copy of the PDF referenced in Sean's news post below. Basically, Corsair is claiming that OCZ's new XTC heat spreaders are no more effective than the somewhat standard "flat" heat spreaders used on most high-end modules. Here's a big snip from the PDF... All our tests used the RST Pro card "Stress Test" to heavily exercise the memory. The tests were run in one of our qualification ovens at exactly 68 degrees F ambient temperature. Our standard stability test includes 3 iterations of the RST Pro2 "Burn in" option, with Stuck, Weave, Jump, Primes, Parity, Pseudo Random, ATS, and Crosstalk turned on. A passing result was considered to be three consecutive...
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