AMD, Business, Companies, CPU, Hardware, Intel

Arctic Silver 5 goes whoopsie or “No silver paste for me”

Recently, my friend decided to upgrade his system from AMD Athlon 5000+ Black Edition and GigaByte 7-Series motherboard to Core 2 Duo E8500, hopefully to run at 3.8 GHz (FSB1600). 5000+ worked hard for almost a year at 3GHz, a nice speed bump from default clocks. Back in July, he replaced previous cooler with OCZ Vendetta, and bought Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste (high density one) for better heat transfer. Fast forward to November, and the time for upgrade has come. Ivan decided to keep his OCZ Vendetta cooler, and we removed the motherboard from the case. This was followed by CPU cooler removal, but

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3D, AMD, Companies, Graphics, Hardware, Intel, Software Programs

Badaboom’s CPU utilization issue explained

After the first look here, I managed to again speak with Sam and Mike of Elemental fame, who got back to me regarding my comments on high CPU utilization. I’ve experienced close to 100% load on AMD’s dual-core processor, while AMD’s quad-core worked normally. According to Elemental, CPU utilization can be high on a dual-core processor if you do low-resolution transcodes (which is kinda the natural purpose of this application). This is a natural latency between the CPU and the GPU that happens during moving frames between the GPU video memory and the CPU and its (system) memory. Guys haven’t experienced this on Intel platform,

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3D, CPU, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, Mobile Computing, Software Programs, Uncategorized

UPDATED: Elemental’s video transcoder rocks the world

Back in May 2008, Nvidia’s Editors Day hosted a presentation by young guys from Elemental Technologies Inc (ETI). The demonstrated software was Badaboom, CUDA-powered video transcoder that demolished Intel’s Core 2 Quad processor when used in conjuction with GeForce 8800GTS. Months have passed, and guys worked hard on developing Badaboom in order to be ready for August release. But, their second project, RapiHD encoder for Premiere CS4 Pro needed some engineering help. So, the guys pushed back the release of Badaboom and Badaboom Pro until after the launch of CS4. It was a tough call, but with the release of Adobe Creative Studio 4 over

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Apple, Companies, Hardware, Memory & Storage Space, VR World

YES – Somebody finally made a decent Blu-ray burner!

I’ve just received word from Woodstock, IL – and this press release is something that I’ve just had to share, because the words that came out of my mouth were “Finally, darn it!” Karen Thomas sent me an e-mail with press release containing the title “OWC ANNOUNCES INDUSTRY’S FIRST BLU-RAY EXTERNAL DRIVES WITH “QUAD INTERFACE”. Now, naturally, my comment for this spinning paper (press release) would be the bin, but this device actually has some true muscle. OWC Mercury Pro is external Blu-ray burner, but it features e-SATA port. Yep, you’ve read it correctly – it does come with FireWire 400 and 800, USB 2.0,

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