The ATI 5870 series

In recent years, few graphic cards have managed to capture the imagination of the PC building community. The recent release of the ATI 5800 series has turned the market on its end and people are lining up to get their grubby little paws on the latest iteration, the 5870 series. Its the first card on the market with native DirectX 11 graphics technology, the card boasts 2.15 billion 40 nanometer transistors, pumping out 2.75 teraflops of power,  1600 stream processors, a memory bandwidth of 153.6GB/sec and a clockspeed of 850mhz. The graphics powerhouse supports up to 3 displays simultaneously with independent refresh rates and resolutions or they can be combined into one large display using the new ATI Eyefinity system. Dual-Link DVI and displayport with a resolution of 2560×1600 is included as is HDMI 1.3 with a native resolution of 1920×1200.

5870

The 5870 can support up to four cards in CrossfireX mode for an incredible boost in power. This beauty definitely has the hunger of a beast, requiring at least 500 watts (600 is recommended for crossfire) to run a complete system. It also requires two six pin PCI-E connections. This baby is fantastically powerful, vastly outperforming its brethren, but this greatness comes at a terrible cost. Finding one of these beauties for sale has proven difficult. Retailers like Microcenter and Newegg have had a hard time keeping the cards in stock and with good reason; ATI has had major supply issues trying to churn this thing out. With demand well outpacing production, we may not see another large shipment of the 5870 till very close to the holidays. While this powerhouse does exist (and exist very well it does!) it certainly doesn’t feel like it does. Overall ATI’s new top dog very much lives up to its own hype and is king of the pack when it comes to graphics processors. Nvidia, the ball is in your court.

Relax guys, it’s a foam model.

Mouse Vomit gives us a mouse inspired by the original Nintendo controller. Coming up, eyeglasses inspired by the Virtual Boy Headset.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Super Mario Laser Cutter

Star Wars Floppy Disk

Daisy Commodore 64

Vivaldi Spring Scanjet

Beethoven’s Scanner

The processor that started it all

Assuming that you’re here because you’re a geek, chances are you’re pretty familiar with what a processor architecture is and what x86 respresents, but for those of you who don’t know what I’m on about I’ll give you a brief introduction before sending you on over to Maximum PC for a brief but very interesting read on the history of x86 and the perennial battle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. For those of you hard core geeks, head on over there now for some light relief.

So what’s x86 you say? What on earth are you on about? Well x86 is a processor instruction set, the one that won in the battle for the current generation of traditional CPUs. While not necessarily the best, we’ll likely never know for sure now that almost everything else has died out (here’s looking at you PowerPC), the x86 instruction set that almost all modern desktop/laptop processors use today is definately the most commercially successful. x86 takes it’s name from the first Intel chip to use the instruction set and has been added to and modified over the years to include 32bit and 64bit processing. While we’re a long way from that original Intel 8086 processor clocking in at about 4MHz (my graphical calculator has more horsepower than that now) the x86 architecture is still used in processors from both Intel and AMD, plus of course Via and what was once Cyrix. Looking at the Core i7 humming away in my current desktop makes me think how far we’ve come since my first 386 (I’m sorry not even I am old enough to remember using an 8086) and reading through the Brief History of CPUs both brings back good memories and reminds me of things long forgotten. So what are you waiting for, head on over for a trip down memory lane, or some rounding on your processor history if you’re just starting out.

Read

So last Thursday I woke up saying “what can I do today for Pixelated Geek?” My first thought was to finish the software reviews I have saved in the drafts. After careful thinking, I realized that I wanted to interact with people. I also wanted to write this to give you an idea of what we do here at Pixelated Geek and let you know that we are actively working to bring the coolest gaming and computer products to your attention.

I called up the good people at Razer and talked to Will  and Travis (The community manager) and said “I want to check out some products can I come over?” Travis says “Yeah no problem…” So I hop in the car and 50 miles later I’m at Razer in Carlsbad CA.

Upon my arrival it’s like any other business park. I figure there would be people walking around super uptight and business like. But as I entered their office there were two gaming stations in the lobby for people to play on if they’re bored or waiting for a meeting. Basically their cool gear is in the lobby for you to try out. I was wrong.

These are some of the coolest gaming company people I’ve met and I’ve met and talked to quite a few douche bags in this industry so far. When I got there I met Travis, Will and Tania  among a bunch of other people. We spoke of videos games, south park, hardcore gamers vs. casual gamers and misc. tom foolery. The main focus of me going up there was to test out new products.

After having a really casual meeting with Travis about other things he introduced me to their newest mouse, The Mamba.

Razer Mamba Wireless Laser Mouse

The Mamba is a wireless 5600dpi Laser mouse with wired capability. When they say wired, they don’t just mean for charging either. It turns in to a true USB wired mouse on the fly. You can adjust the dip setting you want to use. So whether you’re a long stroking mouse user with a big mouse pad, or the finger flicking type this mouse is good for you.  This is the fastest response gaming mouse on the market whether you’re wireless or wired.  It comes with this really cool docking station also that you can use. I didn’t really get to mess with the Mamba much but look out for a review in the near future.

I did however get to test and am currently using the Lachesis which is their laser mouse with 4000 dpi response and which also happened to be dropped in to my lap before I was about to leave.  I’ve been using it to play Counter Strike for the last day and I love it. It’s so accurate. I like the fact that besides the standard buttons it has 6 other programmable buttons for shortcuts or macros. I was told that this is a great mouse for fingertip players (Starcraft anybody?) because of the shape. Did I mention the fact that they gave me their Destructor mouse pad which is designed specifically for laser mice. It also comes with a cool protective case. The combination of the two… talk about 1337. You can remove the pad from the case but in the pictures I have the pad in the case cause of the fact that I’m just at a coffee shop and it’s not that serious.

Another product they’re letting me try out is the Moray ear buds. For the price the sound reproduction is excellent. Very clear, nice bass, great mids and the highs are not piercing like most ear buds in the same price range. I also used these ear buds to DJ at a night club on Friday night. I go through all kinds of ear buds from different kinds of companies. I have everything from $10 dollar ear buds to $350 ear buds.  Even in a place with a 50,000 watt sound system the noise cancelling properties of these headphones are legit. They are up there in my top ear bud choices. They also come in white or black and come with 3 different sets of inserts for different size ears. Also come with a great case.

Anyway, like I said, I just wanted to give you guys a short overview of stuff we’re working on here at pixelatedgeek. I will have more in depth reviews of each of these products and others in the future after further testing.

Special thanks to everyone at Razer for giving us a chance to take a better look at your products. I have converted and my old mouse/pad are in a bucket of other dead computer parts now.

Today was my nieces 13th birthday.  Because she is growing up and almost in high school my dad/her grandpa, bought her a compaq laptop.  Now, being the nice geek uncle I am, I told her I would help set it up for her. And by setup, I mean:

• Install FireFox 3
• Delete all Internet Explorer shortcuts
• Install AVG
• Uninstall Norton Antivirus 60day trial version
• Stop all programs from launching when Windows starts up
• Install Windows Updates
• Install Adaware
• Run Adware
• Make recovery discs

Wait, wtf? Make recovery discs? Yes. I had to make recovery discs because the box didn’t come with one.  Instead it came with this paper:

My first thought after reading this was, “Since when did this type of thing started happening?” Then I thought, “This isn’t a good feature at all.  What if the hard drive completely dies?”  You wouldn’t be able to do a full recovery when you put in a new hard drive. Or would you?  So, just to make sure, I created those recovery discs. What surprised me was that it took 2 DVDs and 2 hours to create them.

It was no big deal to me.  I just kept playing Street Fighter 4 on Xbox Live while the recovery discs were created.  But all these procedures to get a PC laptop running out of the box and smoothly completely made me hate Windows even more and OS X less.

Out of the box, OS X takes less than 30 minutes to setup.  That’s even with the software updates.

Hardware hackers  have been finding creative ways to sequence music on all sorts of interesting devices:

Also see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT692TqkGuc

Cool iPhone case.

Source: That Girl’s Site

So the big news on the Internet besides all the April fools jokes right now is this worm. Now, I know most of you have no idea what a worm actually does so I’ll explain that first.

You’re probably sitting there saying shit like “A worm is a virus” right? Well you’re wrong. A VIRUS attaches itself to existing programs kind of like cancer. It could be malignant, it could be benign. It just depends if that virus ever gets to where it’s needs to go to work properly.

A worm is it’s own shit (by shit I mean program.) It knows exactly what it’s going to do and where it’s going. Worms are automated to spread themselves collecting data along the way.  Worms are smart and create drone computers to act as send/receive stations then end up doing things like sending out porn to the e-mail lists the worms collected along the way or sending out more worms.  These drones are called the Botnet.

So here’s the big deal. The current estimated botnet for Conficker, possibly 12 Million computers.  So if there’s a Botnet of 12 Million computers do you know what kind of crazy attack that could be? Superior Pwnage. Conficker has been attacking systems for months.

What does Conficker do right now? Well it has been known to attack NetBios, and removable media. Downloads and uploads to different servers (what? I don’t know, whatever it finds on your computer), Blocks DNS lookups, stops auto update and destroys your antivirus/antispyware. (Now that I think about it I know a couple people that may have had Conficker… hahaha now I’m laughing out loud)

So Microsoft is offering a $250,000 dollar reward leading to the arrest/prosecution of the creator. What they probably should be doing, is offering the creator $250,000 cash money and a job working on windows security fixes. That would be the SMART thing to do.

That’s right you dumb broad. It did. But if you listen to me we can prevent that.

OK, so how can YOU stop the worm? Honestly YOU probably can’t STOP the worm. It’s like having sex with a condom. There’s a good chance that you won’t get the HIV wearing a condom, but there’s still a chance you could get it… So here’s your prophylactics for your computer:

1. Don’t open e-mail from people you don’t know. That’s the most stupid thing you could do. Every e-mail is a file. Who goes around opening files when they don’t know what that shit even does?

2. Stop looking at free porn sites. There’s no such thing as free. Everything comes with a price. In the case of free porn sites the most common price you pay is a huge influx of malware.

3.  Don’t have any open shared folders, make sure you password that shit up on your network.

4.  Make sure you have a dope firewall like Comodo or  even a router with a good firewall (if you never leave your house with you computer). Guess what? WINDOWS FIREWALL WORKS GOOD TOO. Also look in to Zone Alarm.

5. Password your shit up. Is your shit passworded up? Well when you start your computer do you have to enter a password? If you said no, your shit isn’t passworded up.

There’s so many things I could tell you to do but whatever.

Oh just cause you got or get one of these…

or one of these…

or these…

Shit, even if you have one of these…

don’t think this can’t happen…

Cause I will laugh at you like this…

So follow my rules.

Recently I have noticed that many HP (and other manufacturer) laptops have been having an issue with dvd drives on occasion.  They will be working from day one and all of a sudden quit working but still have power. As long as the drive it self hasn’t physically failed we aren’t out of luck. A few simple steps and you can have the driver working like new.

To start out check device manager. Expand your cd/dvd drives and check to make sure it is showing up. If they are but you see a yellow exclamation point like the image below. Then we can perform the registry fix.

Now before we get to the registry fix I have a disclaimer. The registry is a very dangerous part of the Windows operation system. This is the tool where all of your hardware, windows, profile, software, etc settings are stored. One wrong move and your computer may not boot any longer. With that being said, perform this fix at your own risk. The author, and pixelatedgeek.com cannot, and will not be held responsible for any computer damage or data loss incurring as a result of this fix. This is just a suggestion, results are not guaranteed.

The Fix:

Open up device manager and uninstall the dvd/cd driver (do not scan for hardware changes or allow windows to install a driver at this point)

Open up your registry editor and then navigate to the following path.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

First delete the UpperFilters (if any)

Next delete the LowerFilters (if any)

And finally reboot your system and allow Windows to reinstall the driver itself. This should resolve the issue.

It seems as if Windows cache’s the driver that is used for the dvd/cd drivers making an uninstall of the driver with a scan for new hardware absolutely useless. By removing the registry values it seems to remove the cache and tends to start from scratch with a new driver.