After seeing this banner though, the first things that came to my mind were ebony pornography and racist hate-speech!

It gets better though. Here you can view the “Black Adventure” flash video. Guaranteed to make you laugh.

http://www.ecs.com.tw/extra/x58_campaign/global/00-flash.html

Maybe a couple of review sample boards to key websites would have been a better investment, hm?

I’m not sure how Syba escaped our notice for so long, but now that we’ve started carrying most of their product line, I can really see how large a hole they’ve filled in our product catalogue. Something we’ve been working on quite a lot lately is filling in the gaps and it’s great to see how successful some of these projects have been.

Here’s a couple shots of the USB lamp. It looks great and very shiny in person. The base feels cheap and so does the lamp head, but the metal neck feels very robust and sturdy in my hands. For scale that is a 24″ monitor next to the extended and curled up lamp.

Once the memory dies at some point when it’s not even worth the shipping cost to RMA it, you can simply pop it out of the system, and it begins its new life as a hair styling device. Kudos to Corsair for this new paradigm in computer parts design. I’m expecting to see motherboards on the market soon with a mirror on the back so that you have something to look at while you’re getting ready for that big Friday night date.

Just kidding. You don’t have a date.

As you can see, if you are running 3 modules in tri-channel, the RAM Freezer 4 is just wide enough to be able to get RAM spreaders on both sides, but you will need to remove the material in the middle of the RAM Freezer 4 in order to get a RAM spreader on the middle module. Overall with a Dremel the mod should not be very complicated and should not affect the structural integrity of the RAM Freezer.

The ES 965 I’ve been playing with had to go back to the person who owns it.

I’ve mellowed out in the last couple years going from balls to the walls overclocking (think E6600 @ 4.0GHz 24/7 with a custom -25C chiller under my tower) to being more concerned with overall platform stability and maturity (while also loving speed).

On another note, I have a confession to make. My name is Linus and I have a memory addiction. I don’t need lots of memory. Frequently with 8GB in my system I was looking at up to 7GB of “cached” memory under Vista only being used to store frequently used programs. That didn’t stop me from salivating when I saw that high end X58 motherboards were going to feature 6 RAM slots. Naturally the first thing I did was load each slot up with 2GB of RAM.

Here’s a shot of the test bench I used including the less-than-stellar stock heatsink from Intel (got an APOGEE GTZ hold down en route from Swiftech), a 6800GT that has served me well over the years, and my ghetto sleeved OCZ GameXSTream 600W (also present in the top picture with my chiller). I will be doing a complete overclocking walk through for Nehalem on NCIX Tech Tips, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with a dog CPU, all 6 RAM slots loaded up (far more stress on the memory controller), and terrible stock cooling:

- 200x base clock multiplier without much fuss
- 1480MHz C8 @ 1.66V on this random set of 3 dual channel kits of memory primed for 12 passes overnight.
- QPI speed of over 1700Mhz without much trouble
- 3.7GHz on the CPU before running into what I think was a combination of a thermal limitation (80+C under load) and having a less than steller overclocking chip

For a terrific beginner’s guide on overclocking see this thread on www.xtremesystems.org

ALMOST FINISH I7 UPGRADE LULZ XD I CAN USE MY OLD CPU FOR GAMEING?

SEEMS WONT FIT SO I HELPED TO UPDATE THE BOTTOM HALF

I WILL HAVE CPU BOTTLENECK NOW?!?!?!

It looks like with some bolts, nuts, springs, and washers, it may be possible to mount your LGA775 block on LGA1366. This picture is a Swiftech APOGEE with the stock hold down from like 2 years ago using a bolt-thru mounting kit from the D-TEK FuZion V1 (any bolts and nuts would work I think).

The second pictures is me holding up my board by the CPU block… I think it’s secure enough to get some serious mounting pressure at least as a short-term solution.

PS I haven’t tested it because my FuZion V1 is in my system right now, but I believe it would also work on the FuZion V1 with the classic hold down plate.

The performance difference is not staggering, but when combined with the reduced noise, reduced power consumption and reduced footprint (I”ll be sticking the 2.5″ drives to the back of my motherboard with industrial velcro), it’s an easy decision to make.

Here are some comparisons to some other drives that I found interesting. The mobile drive’s performance looks quite disappointing in direct comparison to the F1 750GB, but when compared to a more equivalent drive (Seagate 7200.10 160GB) it’s a closer fight.

Gigabyte really FUBARed the slot layout of the EX58-EXTREME with that weird heatsink that attaches to the northbridge… It blocks the top PCIe 1x and the PCIe 4x slot… But at least you can remove it. Boards like the Foxconn Blood Rage and the ASUS P6T, although appealing, simply won’t accommodate my expansion needs. The P6T Deluxe layout I just don’t understand… Why put the two bottom PCIe 16x slots next to each other?

The Gigabyte board has everything I need: Dual PCIe 16x physical with another that is electrically only 8x for a RAID card (3Ware tech I was talking to today says a lot of consumer boards will not properly work with an 8x card in a 16x electrical slot…). It also has a very robust cooling solution. Above you can see the naked board as well as a shot of how it’s attached to the board from the underside.

Here you can see the integrated water cooling solution with 3/8″ ID 5/8″ OD Primochill tubing on it. It fits great and these barbs are surprisingly good quality for an integrated affair. Gigabyte recommends 1/2″ OD tubing though and you can see the reason for it. With the Extreme Heatpipe dealie installed, 5/8″ OD tubing is a tight fit.

I was a little disappointed with the overall fit and finish of the water cooling solution. It does appear to be ALL copper (kudos to Gigabyte), and the base appears very flat and shiny, but the finish on the actual northbridge heatpipe assembly is VERY rough and not flat at all. I can’t imagine it will make very good contact, especially without thermal compound over the whole thing. That said, it’s good enough for my purposes and I’m not looking to set any world records.