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As per the title, chances are I’ll be rather scarce around here for the next couple of days/weeks. Early this morning I stupidly answered the door to a knock and a single young man standing at the door. Upon opening the door 2 more guys appeared and forced their way into my house and my room. While one guy fought with me the other two started tearing through my room, screaming about money. Considering how I am a very poor college student and absolutely never carry cash, their search was in vain. After a few seconds of pulling myself and the intruder on my back up half the flight of stairs, I started flailing on him, landed punches to the face and neck, and broke free. Sprinting up the stairs and out of the house, I ran across the street to my neighbor who happens to be a cop. Sadly he didn’t wake up fast enough and I thought he wasn’t home so I sprinted to a nearby campus police station. There was nobody on duty so I ran till I found somebody with a phone and called the police. With the police on the way I ran back home and within 30 seconds of me arriving, the police rolled up. Unfortunately the intruders had already left with my black Macbook and wallet.

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Today I have a long put-off review of the Gigabyte 8800GT. The 8800GT happens to be rather “old” card in the grand scheme of things however it’s still a very powerful card and very attractive in it’s current price point. The 8800GT was originally launched in October 2007 and over the course of 7 months it’s drastically dropped in price will still being a powerful player in the midrange GPU market. Gigabyte has re-worked the PCB used with this card and features a factory overclock, do these extra features make this card even more competitive?

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For the last 3 days I’ve been sitting through orientations at my new job but today was a free day and luckily UPS dropped off my new QX9650. Sadly it’s a C0 stepping, looks like C1’s are limited to QX9770’s. I’m having trouble getting 460FSB stable though but it might be the motherboard. I received a new Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 and it’s acting funky, going to try a beta BIOS in a few minutes though and maybe that’ll calm it down a bit. Looking forward to benching tonight, haven’t benched in 3 weeks. Hopefully tonight will include some high speed HD3850 benching so I can retire the cards and then stock 8800GT benching. Cross your fingers for me, firing up the cascade in 2 hours.

I typically hate to get into the rumor industry however these figures posted over at NordicHardware sound very believable. They aren’t drastically larger than the past generation yet appear to offer enough performance to perform as expected. The RV770 core, which will form AMD’s HD4850, HD4870, and HD4870X2, will consist of 480 shaders, 160 more than RV670. There will be 16 ROPs, same as RV670, but 32 TMUs, double of RV670. The HD4850 will operate at 625MHz core with GDDR3 operating at 2286MHz on a 256-bit bus. The HD4870 will operate at 850MHz core with GDDR5 operating at a whopping 3970MHz on a 256-bit bus. Due to the sheer speed of GDDR5, RV770 will have gobs of bandwidth, 127 gigabytes per second to be precise. RV670 had only 72 gigabytes per second of bandwidth so this significant jump should help keep this larger core happily fed.

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Today wasn’t so much a day as more a culmination of a few days. I’m just now getting caught up on all my work so I’ve had time to give this project some attention. I spent a few hours today calling around searching for replacement engines and suffice to say the search wasn’t very positive. In a desperation move I went to a Pull A Part knowing full and well that all the cars there would be stripped to the bone. Finding 4 240SXs on record, I began browsing the yard. The first one was an empty shell, the second one had a rusted shortblock, the third was partially dismantled, but the fourth was in perfect condition. Judging from the large marker writing on the windows, the owner had just graduated college so I suspect he tossed the car in search of a better one. Great news for me but unfortunately the block had 240k miles on it.

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During my recent trip to California, Corsair hooked me up with some of the DDR2 and DDR3 Dominators. Prior to this I have more or less stuck with OCZ since my DDR1 days however I simply couldn’t pass up these sticks. For the following week I was jittery in anticipation, these sticks had the potential to really unlock my DDR2 platform. My CrossFire benching has jumped onto the DDR3 bandwagon however my SLI platform is still utilizing a 780i motherboard, hence all my excitement. So how do these sticks hold up? Are they worth they price tag and wicked heatspreaders?

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During Gigabyte’s Spring Break they presented a slideshow to us, highlighting upcoming technologies in their P45 launch. P45 really will be a remarkable chipset but not due to the actual chipset performance itself but the features that come with it. Gigabyte has a slew of features that’ll be a part of their P45 series boards, some pertinent to overclockers and some to the average consumer. What I find most impressive about this entire slideshow though is the focus Gigabyte has turned towards the enthuasiast sector.

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While on vacation over the last two weeks I had the chance to experience a rare event. Gigabyte, the computer component manufacturer I have been working with closely, invited me along with 15 other overclockers to test their upcoming P45 motherboards in Taiwan. I flew out of Atlanta on April 26th and landed at Taipei, Taiwan on the morning of April the 28th. Here’s what went down.

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