Content and news by Rob Williams

Comcast’s high-speed Internet service on Tuesday suffered nationwide outages for the second time in six days, which the cable giant blamed on issues related to its domain name servers.

I know a couple people that were personally affected by this. Complete pain in the ass for sure. Read about it at News.com.

“These cards offer blistering fast performance and come loaded with software and features. Being the top of the line, both cards will easily outperform most others. They are almost identical, except that the Platinum Edition has a default core speed of 540MHz and a memory speed of 1180MHz, as apposed to 520MHz/1080MHz on the non PE. Watch the Video to find out more…”

Check out the full video review at 3D Gameman.

“Amongst gamers, one of the most hotly contested computer components are the graphics cards. With each new model come new features or higher clock speeds and performance. Inevitably this also leads to more and more heat, and as we all know, heat is unhealthy for electronic components and needs to be dissipated, otherwise overheating and damage could occur. With these new high-end graphics cards easily exceeding $400-500, it’s important to protect your investment. The item up for review today, is unlike any other graphics card cooler we’ve seen. The Antec VCool offers 100% compatibility with any existing graphics card, as it simply mounts underneath the card in two expansion slots while claiming to lower the card temperature 5 to 15 degrees.”

Check out the full review at Phoronix.

“The Club 3D official advised HEXUS that (Club 3D) has exclusive production and distribution rights for the PhysX technology in Europe, and that the intended release date is in December this year.

An interesting development, as it’s our understanding that there seems to have been no official release date yet published by Ageia.

The only other details we were provided with was that it’s expected that software, which will make use of the PhysX hardware, is being worked on by Ubisoft’s golden developers, Crytek, and that this is scheduled to be made available midway through 2006.”

Check it out at Hexus.

“Our past overclocking ventures with the Abit NF8 was only decent and seemed to be BIOS bottlenecked. After updating the BIOS to Abit’s BIOS 15, the motherboard soared through the roof. The overclocking key has been found and the potential has been unlocked. DFI is no longer the lonely boy in the Socket 754 overclocking department.”

Check it out at InsaneTek.

If you think that case lighting is only about LED fans and cold cathodes, think again. There are many products on the market that can add lighting effects in unusual areas. Some of these items work great and some are not much more than novelty items. Sunbeam, a leader in case lighting, has provided us with a couple of interesting products: Molex Lights and LED Screws. Let’s see if these products are worth picking up or just novelties.

Check it out at A True Review.

“What we have here today is DFI’s lowest end nF4 solution, the LANParty UT Ultra-D. Many have been anxious for the release of the board because DFI’s reputation for overclocking is growing rapidly. The main attraction of the Ultra-D would be the great VDIMM access. Allowing as high as 4v to memory, the Ultra-D seems to be the best overclocking solution possible. Will it be true? We’ve reviewed Abit’s gaming board, the Fatal1ty AN8, and it was able to overclock extremely well. So now the rivaling companies go head to head here at InsaneTek, with performance, overclocking, and features all put to the test to see which board is better.”

Check out the full review at InsaneTek.

“Centon is new to an arena already crowded with veteran brands like Corsair, Mushkin, TwinMOS and OCZ. If Kingston, Crucial and PDP Systems’ success can be taken as any indication of what large OEMs can do in the enthusiast memory area, the ’boutique’ manufacturers better take notice because another new player is in town. Centon is actually not quite ready to roll out its enthusiast line to the public, but we’ve been given a first look at an overclocker-calibre dual-channel DDR memory kit. The two 512MB GEMiNI PC3200 dual-channel DIMMs we are testing in this review are rated to run at 200 MHz with 2-2-2-5 timings, at a voltage of 2.6V.”

Check it out at PC Stats!

“In this Beginners Guide, PCSTATS is going to going to walk you through one of the simplest but potentially most powerful ways to customize and simplify the management of your computer: batch files. These text files are easy to create, and only as complex as you want them to be, but they can perform many useful operations from file backups to system configuration quickly and automatically. In this guide we’ll illustrate what batch files are good for and how to create them.”

Check it out at PC Stats.

“The flagship AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ will have both its cores operating at 2.4GHz, the same frequency as the AMD Athlon 64 4000+, and we’ll be surprised if this doesn’t obliterate the already impressive Pentium Extreme Edition 840 we reviewed here.”

Check it out at Hexus!

“MSI’s new K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard is based around the nForce4-Ultra chipset, this board can use any Socket 939 Athlon64/FX processor and can be stuffed with up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR RAM. A single PCIe x16 slot provides the graphical interface and the motherboard comes equipped with quite a few integrated peripherals like an additional Serial ATA/RAID controller, IEEE 1394, two Gigabit NICs and 7.1 channel audio. In terms of expansion, the K8N Neo4 Platinum is one of the best on the market with four traditional PCI slots, one PCI Express x1 and one PCI Express x4 slot. That’s definitely more expansion room than we’ve seen on many other Athlon64 motherboards! Eight SATA devices are supported as well as four traditional IDE hard drives/optical drives.”

Check out the review at PC Stats.

“If you haven’t heard about BFG before you have been living under a rock for a long time as well as never playing any of the Doom series of games before. While the three letters might mean a Big Friggen Gun (we tamed it down a bit) to some today it means Best Friggen Graphics card to us. BFG Tech have been creating some of the most well known graphics cards across America for quite a while now thanks to features like Overclocked from the factory, Life Time Warranty and 24/7 tech support. Apart from dabbling in a few other things like mice, power supplies and etc BFG Tech haven’t really ventured much further into the hardware side of computer components.”

It’s extremely cool to see a top video card producer, now creating motherboards. Check out the review at Tweakers Austalia.

“It’s not everyday I get to review an incredibly innovative and exciting product but today is not one of those days. The kind folks over at Oakley have sent us their latest creation; Oakley THUMP eye ware. The THUMP is one part Oakley eye ware and one part 256MB MP3 player fused together to form a sexy concoction of comfort, freedom, music and style. Oakley, mainly known for their sunglasses, decided it was time to broaden their field of expertise while at the same time sticking with what they know and we are sure glad they did. Before we take a closer look at these puppies, check out what they are bringing to the table.”

Wow.. this may be the geekiest product I’ve seen this year. And since they are pure Oakleys, they will cost you close to $500US. Check it out at Bona Fide Reviews.

“No doubt that Fortron/Source is a trusted name in power supplies. They are used largely in OEM’s. In fact, FSP power supplies are in the AOpen cases I build up every day. FSP also manufactures power supplies for a number of other companies like Zalman and supposedly PC Power and Cooling’s Silencer series of power supplies. One of the best things about buying an FSP power supply is that you know you’re getting a quality unit, that will not cost you an arm and a leg.”

Check it out at SLCentral.

“With the ever increasing sophistication and realism of today’s games, there is far greater demand being placed on the graphics card. In order to play these new games it is often necessary to upgrade the graphics card. From that stems a choice, to either go for the top of the line card to enjoy the games to the fullest and break the bank, or go for a model that is just below the ultra new and fast cards, therein saving considerably on money but still being able to keep up with the latest games.”

Check out the full review with plenty of benchmarks at Tweakers Australia.

“Pushing something to the max has always been a fascination of overclockers. You overclock your system with the same purpose as car tuners tune their cars. To reach maximum performance and brag about it. You either set a goal which you want to reach using your stock hardware without any volt modifications or use a little bit of help using the OCZ DDR Booster, the easiest way to by-pass voltage restrictions of many motherboards. Of course doing it the old fashion way by volt modding your motherboard could give you the same performance increase, but this could easily ruin your entire motherboard.”

That has to be the first time I’ve seen molex connectors on a stick of Ram! Check it out at BurnOutPC.

“At the heart of Torvalds’ decision to refrain from using Bitmover’s BitKeeper source code management tool last week, a day after BitKeeper decided to drop its limited functionality free client, is a dispute between BitKeeper developer Larry McVoy and Samba developer Andrew ‘Tridge’ Tridgell. It has subsequently emerged that Tridgell was working on a clean room reverse engineered implementation of McVoy’s proprietary software, and Torvalds has come down on the side of … his friend McVoy.”

Very interesting read, check it out at The Register.

“Leading Workstation System Integrators (WSIs) have selected ATI’s FireGLâ„¢ Visualization series of PCI Express-based graphics accelerators, complimenting over 15 major OEM design wins for these industry leading products. WSIs who have recently selected FireGL graphics include Alienware, Boxx, Colfax, Hypersonic, Leading Technology Micro Inc. (LTI), Maxxvision, Monarch, Polywell, Sys Technologies, Velocity, Xi Computer and the3Dshop.com. ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY, NASDAQ:ATYT), has succeeded in securing wide-spread industry support for its FireGL graphics accelerators, delivering a broad range of solutions with industry leading performance and features at affordable prices.”

Check out the full Press Release at the ATI site.

“The Internet company on Wednesday introduced a new service that lets any small business sign up for a free Web page to appear in Yahoo’s local directory. The move will help otherwise unwired small businesses come online, said Paul Levine, Yahoo’s general manager of local services, as well as help consumers find more local information.”

Check out the article at News.com.

“When the original Dungeon Siege was released back in March of 2002, it was snatched up by hack n’ slash RPG junkies thanks to its slick user interface, adept combat system, and intricate storyline. Following in the footsteps of games like Diablo, the game struck a chord with PC gamers looking for Comment (0) -->