This originally appeared in the Icrontic Blogs:

I really like the functionality of my ZBoard. In fact: ZBoard is the wheelbarrow that carries the otherwise useless FPS gamer in me through late night sessions of TF2. However, the ZBoard could be much more than it is, for the user, and for its distributor, Ideazon.

If you’re not familiar with this product, it’s essentially a keyboard with interchangeable keysets. It comes with two inserts: a standard layout insert and a FPS gaming insert with a “butterfly” control pad on the left side to make WASD controls more intuitive. Beyond this, you can also purchase additional inserts for other games. I bought two of them (”Guild Wars” and “Age of Empires”) before I realized that all of the inserts are just restickered iterations of the same three keysets: The standard (of which there is only the one version), the FPS, and the strategy. These are then programmable per game, so that each key does exactly what you want it to do for each game.

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With the 2006 release of the Core 2 Duo and its counterparts, Intel adopted what they call the “Tick-Tock” approach to CPU development. Intel pledged to operate on a two year engineering cycle which would shrink the die of an existing chip within the first year and debut an entirely new architecture in the second. Thus far Intel has upheld their schedule, shrinking the 2006 Conroe for the 45nm Penryn family in 2007. If Intel is on track, and we have great reason to believe that they are, we should see the Nehalem family introduced at the end of this year.

As the first new architecture in two years, the industry is eagerly awaiting to see what the chip has in store. Boasting an integrated memory controller, a new bus architecture, and the return of hyperthreading, the chip will not only be blisteringly fast, but close the few remaining gaps between Intel and AMD. As we prepare for the impending release of the Nehalem family, let’s take a look at why it’s going to be a great time for enthusiasts

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There was once a time when Microsoft represented a vast and impregnable domain of users, software and services. To grow their impressive empire, Microsoft relied on their tremendous financial reserves to buy every competitor that excelled in the markets in which Microsoft played or wished to enter. But the Microsoft (NASDAQGS: MSFT) of today looks haggard by comparison, as years of sliding stocks have brought their share price from a dot com-era high of $56 USD to less than $30 USD. Microsoft’s yearly net revenue growth has also slipped from 29% to 18%, with an interim low of 8% in 2005. But more troubling than the loss of money is Microsoft’s loss of market authority. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s recent announcement of a cloud computing operating system is the ultimate sign of acquiescence, and a sign that the once-mighty Microsoft no longer sets the standard.

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It seems that most enthusiasts cross the line at one time or another. It is the point when fans alone just won’t cut it any longer. I still remember my first faithful dive into liquid cooling back in 2004. I put together a custom 1/2” system and modded my old Antec tower case for a dual 120mm radiator. I was able to overclock my Athlon XP well beyond its intended specifications, and took my Radeon 9800 Pro to new limits.

A lot has changed since 2004—especially in the aircooling market. Heatsinks are bigger and more efficient than ever. One look at my recent Thermalright TRUE 120 Black review proves just how far these modern towers have come. Although certainly not as popular as aircooling, watercooling still has quite a following. It has unfortunately always been just a bit out of reach for the average enthusiast—not so much due to cost, but rather the complexity.

Thermaltake hopes to bring a higher end watercooling system to the mainstream with their ProWater 850i. They have thrown a very complete watercooling system with all of the necessities into a box, and have made it univeral enough to fit a wide variety of cases. Today we’re going to take a look at the ProWater 850i and see if it lives up to its promise. (more…)

Solid State Disks are poised blow the doors off of traditional storage media. As the inevitable end-game of the great bet on flash memory, they are coming in strengthening numbers to obliterate benchmarks, make or break companies, and free-fall in price. The revolution this nascent market is set to unleash will leave few questions as it makes a staggering rise to preeminence.

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Google’s Chrome is a really interesting piece of software to me. It breaks rules about how Windows applications work and look, it’s an instantly-big player in a already-prolific browser market, and it’s a curve ball from Google: we just didn’t see it coming.

That said, I didn’t immediately see its utility. It uses the same engine as Safari (WebKit), so it isn’t changing the dialogue on web standards.  It doesn’t support extensions, so I’m not ditching Firefox any time soon (life without Foxmarks, WebDev, and Firebug isn’t worth contemplating). It was just “another browser.” It saw a lot of play, and then most people went back to their browser of choice.

Then, about a week ago, I missed an appointment. Back in college, I had Outlook open 24/7 and it managed my life for me; I lived and died by its popup reminders. Now I have Google Calendar, but I kept closing the darn thing with my browser, immediately killing its helpfulness. If I can remember to open Calendar, then clearly I don’t need its popup reminders at that point, and SMS frequently finds my phone sitting idly in my bedroom.

Of course it’s immediately clear that the “Create application shorcut” is where I’m heading with this. But then it’s stuck in my taskbar. Add Gmail and Reader, and you have a mess. That’s where TrayIt! comes into play. I currently have my Calendar on standby, Gmail open (not just the silly Notifier), and Reader ticking away, all unobtrusively minimized to my system tray. Shortcuts to all three are in my Startup folder.

Perfect.

Having Reader open all day deserves its own attention. I need to know immediately when content is published on Icrontic or when a vBulletin or Wordpress upgrade is announced. I follow about a dozen blogs of personal interest and several dozen technology sites. I could literally spend an hour making my rounds in the morning to catch up; now Reader lets me get it done in about 10 minutes. Of course I could always check Reader in my browser, but having it open and running in my system tray was the difference between a great theory and reality.

So what is Chrome for me? It’s not my browser. It’s my first foray into the Google platform (Android, Gears, and Chrome). Internet Explorer has been bundled with Windows for the past 13 years, but it wasn’t until last week that I regarded a “browser” as a literal extension of my desktop. Go figure.

As much as modern graphics cards have progressed over the last year or two, the onboard GDDR of many of these new cards remains relatively constant. It seems that 512MB has been deemed the “sweet spot” for anything but extreme resolutions, and horsepower in the GPU has frequently been given priority during new product development. Nvidia’s recent G92 and G94 GPUs are a perfect example of this. The G80 was a radical departure from traditional GPU design with its unified shaders and other architectural enhancements.

Not only did Nvidia raise the bar with the G80, they coupled additional GDDR3 to match with the 640MB GTS and the 768MB GTX. Although they were very powerful when they first hit the streets, the revised G92 with a more efficient GPU was able to outperform them by a fairly large margin and used only 512MB of GDDR3. AMD/ATI has been a bit more conservative with their GDDR with most top models offering 512MB for the last few years. For the last two product generations, AMD has been quick to offer newer types of GDDR, like GDDR4 with the 3870 and GDDR5 with the new 4870, as opposed to greater capacities. (more…)

The PC functions through a set of complex interactions between hardware and software. It may be surprising to learn that the operating system is often incapable of controlling the computer’s hardware by itself. In a sense, the operating system needs an interpreter to talk to the hardware. The interpreter that the operating system uses to talk to a specific piece of hardware is called a driver. Manufacturers often release newer versions of drivers in order to leverage their hardware more efficiently, fix bugs, or to improve performance.

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It hit me the other day: Furniture sucks. Hard to clean, expensive, hard to move, and neverchanging. For example, let’s look at the Big Red Couch at ICHQ. It’s been around forever. I believe I paid something like $800 for it when we bought this house in 2004. After all the ICHQ flophouse parties, (like the IC LAN, Oktoberfest, St Patty’s day… you get the idea) and all the couch-crashers, it fell apart. The arms are worn through, the padding on the arms is gone, it has dog hair all over it, it’s just generally sort of beat up. Repairing it would be really expensive.

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It is easy to scoff at Twitter’s bubbly Web 2.0ness and a model that, on the surface, appears self-promotional. Billed as a “microblogging” service, the service permits 140 character updates from the site, any phone, and a growing array of desktop clients. It is easy to wonder what merit can arise from permitting people to speak of themselves from virtually any locale addressed by a cell tower. Yet, a peek beneath the glossy exterior reveals a teeming world of robust and, at times, very personal communication.

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I’ve had a project kicking around in the back of my mind for a few years now. It recently came up again and I decided to really move on this.

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With OCZ’s new line of gaming hardware coming to fruition, the Alchemy Elixir keyboard has reached the market. Featuring low-profile keys, ten dedicated macro keys, and rubberized texture, we’re pitting it against two of today’s reigning gaming keyboards to see how they match up.

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I’m having a heck of a time out in sunny Los Angeles while attending the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH convention. I’ve seen a lot of cool technology and heard a lot of big names speak, so gather ’round for there’s lots to be told.

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I’m not sure what it is, but Thermalright’s products have always caught my eye. Generally speaking, their heatsinks are innovative, high quality, and perform well. I still recall the pair of SK-6s I bought for my dual Athlon rig several years ago, and more recently, the SI-128 SE that sits in my main rig today. The Thermalright product I’ll be reviewing today is not really new, but a slightly tweaked re-release. The TRUE Black 120 is essentially a reincarnation of the popular Ultra 120 eXtreme; what sets it apart from its predecessor is the black nickel plating and a few extras, like a second pair of fan clips and a tube of premium grade thermal paste. Since we never had the chance to review the original Ultra 120 eXtreme, I was happy to receive a TRUE Black 120 sample from Thermalright to add to the charts.

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I am a media freak.

Let me say that again: I am a media freak. I am also a gadget addict, a power user who streams, downloads, plays online games and is generally considered by most ISPs to be a heavy bandwidth user and a general pain in the ass. Thus, I have used many routers in the past only to have them be unstable and crash even when flashed to latest versions. As an example of my normal usage pattern, I once had a router crash on me while I was bidding on Ebay; it reset and made me lose the auction, so in response I took a hammer to it.

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