Haven’t done any updates in a while, but I spent a few minutes tonight comparing this new IC Diamond thermal compound to the stuff that I already had on my Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz on the Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME (Arctic Silver Ceramique that has been curing for a couple months). The results were not all that interesting. Using Intel Burn Test (basically Linpack) as a stress testing program with Prime95 small FFT to pick up the loose bits (IBT doesn’t seem to handle 8 threads at the settings I was using) my load temperatures were the same after remounting with IC Diamond compound, and a second mount gave me the same results again. There was a degree here or there, but given that the integrated sensor on the CPU is only accurate to +- 1 degree, that doesn’t really tell us anything useful.

I’ve never really bought into the hype about high end thermal compounds, but I’ll continue to use this stuff. FWIW my initial testing was done using the grain of rice method, and my second mount was done by spreading out the compound. Neither made a lick of difference.

I’ll be moving from my Gigabyte to the DFI board in that picture over the next couple of days. Mostly I just need another USB header for the T-balancer I’ve got coming, but I also thought it might be fun to try something new. I’ve always wanted a (working) DFI…

Well I’m one of the lucky few people who has gotten to see one of these babies in person. We’re going to do a quick video of it shortly, but I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to show it off a bit. The battery came with a 65% charge on it, which translates (from Windows) to 2 hours 37 minutes while playing an .avi file wirelessly over the home network. Unfortunately it came with one of these, and I don’t have the North American equivalent handy, so I’m limited to the charge that came on the battery as far as testing goes, but that won’t stop me from ripping it apart!

Taking apart the LG X120 was a relatively simple affair. Remove the bottom screws, pull up the keyboard in the usual way, then remove the two screws under the keyboard, and the whole shell should snap apart for you. You can see that the hard drive and RAM can be quite easily changed for other models, and the fan uses a fairly rudimentary (but actually kinda clever) design to cool both the chipset and the Atom CPU. Spec-wise not a lot has changed from the X110, but the fit & finish of this new model is definitely improved. It’s stylish looking and I LOVE the keyboard/touch pad. Someone finally got it right. Too many times I’ve seen “perfect keyboard except…” and touchpads that are just ridiculously small. This 10″ model has crammed in everything you need, a decent-sized touch pad, and normal button positions. The glossy screen is very bright and vibrant, and while the speakers suck compared to a desktop, they’re not bad for a netbook, and compare very favorably to the Aspire One that I have here at home as well (won it at the staff Christmas party).

One thing I tested right away was the wireless. Unlike the Aspire One it requires no tweaking of the power saving features to properly stream my .avi files from the home server. Anyway, here’s a gallery. More to come.

Over the past week or so I’ve had the privilege of testing two stereoscopic 3D gaming solutions from graphics heavyweight nVidia and a relatively new entrant to the graphics game, iZ3D.

“So what is stereoscopic 3D gaming?”, you might ask. Basically it’s a driver that allows your graphics card(s) to render two views of the same 3D image and display them on your monitor in a way that only the right eye can see the “right” image and only the left eye can see the “left” image.  This produces a 3D effect that gives the game real depth instead of just rendering a 2D picture of a 3D thing.

The first thing to get out of the way is that in my opinion, neither technology is perfect. My first attempts with the iZ3D monitor resulted in game crashes, and the polarizing filters on the panels (yep, the iZ3D monitor uses TWO panels in one monitor to draw a left and right image) and the nVidia one gives me a splitting headache after a few minutes(but there are others in the office who can use it for hours without this issue).

We’ll be covering these on NCIX Tech Tips shortly, so I don’t want to ruin everything, but here’s a rough summary of each approach

iZ3D:
- Uses glasses that won’t have the nerd police banging at your door when you’re eating Cheetos ™ and playing World of Warcraft ™ at 2am.
- Is video card agnostic, but doesn’t allow the use of multiple video cards
- Requires a specific iZ3D monitor that leaves a lot to be desired for 2D
- Allows others to view 3D with you on t3h cheap. The 22″ monitor itself comes with 2 sets of glasses and one set of clip-ons
- 3D effect seems to be less sharp than the nVidia solution, more image separation. The right eye image is often visible to the left eye and vice versa, especially for high contrast scene
- With recent price drops the whole solution is less than $500 which gives it a significant price advantage over the competing nVidia glasses & Samsung monitor.

nVidia:
- Uses incredibly obnoxious looking glasses to achieve the effect
- Produces a flickering pattern in your peripheral vision that is distracting if you are sensitive to it
- Can be used with any 120Hz (input AND output) DLP or LCD display. While there are very few right now, this will be a definite advantage in the future.
- Active shutter glasses are excellent (they better be for $250…) and allow very little light to pass through, but some ghosting is still visible. Far less distracting than the iZ3D in my testing.
- A relatively expensive solution right now at over $600 for the monitor and glasses, but expect that to change as the panels get cheaper
- Has the advantage of using a good quality 120Hz LCD that is EXCELLENT for 2D as well as 3D. I forgot how much smoother mouse movement was at 60Hz. I’ve been using LCD for a long time.
- Works with SLI, which is a big deal because Stereovision is much more demanding on your video card than traditional 2D rendering of the 3D scenes.

Both:
- Rely on driver support from the manufacturer to make sure the games work

Actually that last point is the most important thing. It comes down to who is best equipped to optimize games for their tech. I tested both with Rome: Total War which is quite an old title at this point. iZ3D claims their drivers should work with any game (with some requiring minor tweaks), while nVidia has a full list of supported titles (and assume new ones coming out will be supported through the TWIMTBP program) on their web site. Neither listed support for Rome: Total War, but both worked with it quite well. I can’t find any evidence iZ3D has actually tested the title, but it worked nonetheless, while nVidia actually had a profile present that recommended not using 3D Vision on R:TW due to the extensive use of 2D “cheats” in the game (like the sky and other objects) by the game programmers. That means nVidia actually tested this ancient title despite the fact that it’s not even present in their list.

Well this definitely isn’t everything I wanted to say about these techs, and I still have some more testing to do, but despite the headaches, right now the nVidia solution gets the nod from me. I’ll be working with iZ3D to find out if there’s something wrong with my panel that’s causing the polarization to be so poor, and I will update with more information as I come across it. Here’s me sporting some 3D glasses:

As mentioned to me in the comments under the Tech Tips video we did on the Corsair S128 SSD hard drive, the drive does NOT read at 150MB/s sustained and the reason for the WAY out of spec performance numbers is that the drive had not yet been fully formatted. That’s my mistake and when I did some follow up testing, it read at a normal ~90MB/s….. Or so I thought.

Enter the X25-M, on which we have a Tech Tips coming out shortly. I was doing some testing with this drive, moving files from the Corsair SSD to a RAID-0 array with two X25-M 80GB drives, and I observed the transfer speeds you see above. They were verified using the good ‘ol fashioned “calculator + file size + stop watch” method and it looks the drive will actually read at about 120MB/s, but only if you’re doing more than one concurrent read. Transferring just one file (as you can see) will cap at 90MB/s. Still not the 150MB/s I originally reported, but it’s better than spec by a long shot…

Well I’m having a look at the iZ3D 22″ stereoscopic 3D gaming monitor and hopefully we’ll be comparing it to the competing nVidia solution. Initial results are mixed, but I’ve only tried it on my work PC with AudioSurf, so lots of work still to do. Here’s the unit though!

Well I picked up a cheapo laser pointer from dealextreme (it’s already dead like 2 weeks later, which sucks, but w/e) after much deliberation about whether I needed the one that can cut through garbage bags or not.

One of the more clever things I decided to do with it was write on my way using a long shutter and a dark room. It’s harder than it looks to get the writing this neat!!

Well I wish I’d found this sooner. Setting up my current Windows Server 2008 Standard I’ve had some complaints, but after finding this great blog it describes in great detail how to get your Server 2008 experience as close to Windows Vista as possible. It includes things like Windows Aero, the Vista themes, enabling wireless networking support and many other tricks!

Check it out here.

Logitech appears to have added driver support for Windows Server 2008 to their gaming peripherals. A few months back I tried to use Windows Server 2008 as a way to circumvent the problems I have with slow network transfers on Windows Vista, but I was frustrated with the lack of ANY driver support for my G9 mouse and G15 gen1 gaming keyboard. This time around I found perfect support not only for those products, but also for my G25 racing wheel.

I’m happily posting this from my G15 while looking at the headlines on my tiny blue/black LCD screen. Thanks Logitech!

I was just curious what it would look like once I removed the metal shroud. It’s very similar to the Samsung 128GB drive, but it’s kinda interesting to note that this MLC X25-M 80GB drive uses 20 4GB chips to achieve its capacity, rather than 8 16GB flash chips.

Also of note is the big Intel controller that is at least partially responsible for the terrific write speeds of this model. Expect a tech tips that covers a little bit about Intel’s mainstream series SSD as well as RAID performance!

So a few weeks ago I picked up a Parkzone Vapor remote control airplane because I had a few bucks lying around and I’ve always wanted to have one. I’d spent a fair amount of time on the simulator so I was pretty sure I was ready for flying. My first 30+ flights went well, but not this one.

You can’t really see it very well, but that’s my plane well above the street lamps. The little tiny glowing red dot in the top left of the photo. I wanted to climb the tree, but that just wasn’t going to be realistic, so all that was left to do was throw things at it until I could get it down.

After about 30 or os tosses I connected with one of the branch chunks I was throwing… More than I wanted to. When it came down, I was lucky that all I had knocked off was the rudder, so my total damage was about $20. The lesson I learned was “don’t fly above the fog in the middle of the night near a big tree”… It may not be applicable to other areas of my life, but at least this won’t happen again.