Well it looks like I’ll be attending Fragapalooza as an NCIX representative. I’m going to bring along the Tech Tips camera so if you’re wanting to make a guest appearance to show off a talent on Tech Tips and you’re going to be at Fragapalooza, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Well I’ve finished the first of the two Corsair Dream Machines. Here’s a picture of the case I received from Danger Den last Friday with only the radiator mounted in it:

Here’s some progress on installing the 9800GX2 water blocks, which Danger Den was also kind enough to sponsor us with:

Here’s an “in progress” shot that I took on my test bench:

And now finally here are some pretty good pictures that our photo guy took of the system. These are all pre-photoshop, but it gives you some idea what a nice system this is:

By far the best Tech Tips episode we’ve yet produced. We’ve been hard at work shooting and re-shooting this episode to reduce the repetition and provide a more engaging viewing experience.

Part of the reason for the improvements is the important nature of the subject matter. After the tremendous interest in our Asus EEE (original) memory upgrade video, we felt that it would be great to do a showcase of some of the competing products in the market right now.

Also stay tuned for a follow up to this video featuring the Asus EEE 1000 which from my initial impressions is possibly better than any of the ones we have in Tech Tips #16.

Well… They’ve finally done it. They’ve topped the “Caution! Hot!” warnings on the side of coffee cups.

I just opened up an Acer Aspire One sub-notebook for a Tech Tips round up we’re going to do and the warning that was laid out on the keyboard read as follows:

“Please do not hold the Aspire One as shown, as this may injure your fingers when closing the cover.”

Well I’m not completely happy with this edition of Tech Tips to be honest. We’ve run into some technical difficulties (as you can probably tell by the video quality), and this one also took a little bit too long to get together for release for my liking. It’s been VERY busy around here with all the video card launches and other launches.

Speaking of launches, I wish I could have included the AMD nForce 7 offerings and the newer GTX series video cards in this one, but there were a couple restraining factors, not the least of which was the length of the video.

We’re going to be making a big effort in the future to keep video lengths down closer to to the 5 minute mark for big topics and 3 minute mark for small topics. Thanks for your patience as we continue to work towards improving NCIX Tech Tips.

Well this is a fun project. Corsair has asked NCIX to participate in building a couple of “show-off” systems that will accompany them to various shows and just generally impress people. Before I talk too much about the specs I’ll let you check out the goodies that arrived this week from Corsair and the other sponsors.

There are two systems and each will a liquid cooled monster powered by the following:

Corsair EPP 2.0 DDR3 memory at 1600MHz
Corsair HX1000W power supply
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU (I’ll be overclocking these a touch just for giggles)
eVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard
2x eVGA 9800 GX2 video cards in quad SLI
Samsung F1 series hard drive
LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD optical drive
Microsoft Windows Vista

Here’s a picture of one of them on the test bench (familiarizing myself with the board a little bit and making sure nothing is DOA), but unfortunately the really good pictures don’t come until I get the cases from Danger Den…