Tech Link (Industry): Cebit could not handle Abit

Woah, funny stuff I got from a friend sending me this info. Apparently, FUGGER's three-stager cooler was shipped over to CEBIT 2007 hall to show how powerful the Abit* boards are, unfortunately, it requires just too much power to run. Talk about xtreem cooling, but they still managed to get a smaller, more electricity-friendly cooler to work. Anyway, the part about the cooler being FUGGER's is still a rumor (Update 3/25/2007: verified it's FUGGER's, link added), and that guy in red is the world famous overclocker and modder hipro5. Check out the full news, expand this Blog post.

CEBIT 2007: Electrical installations too weak
Abit was ready to show the world how good their motherboards can overclock, and they were damn shore that they would succeed. But when you run out of luck, even the best hardware can't help.

A huge three stage custom made gas cooling unit that was brought too cool the CPU. As we were informed, they couldn't even start up the cooler because it started eating more energy than the Cebit hall electrical system could handle.

Well, instead of cooling the CPU, this cooling unit turned into a pretty expensive paperweight.

After a few days, a smaller system was used to demonstrate Abits IN9 32X motherboard power combined with Intel Core 2 Extreme x6800 @ 4813MHz, and CAS3 DDR2 memory. The bus speed was 1750 MHz which looks nice.

Source:Cebit could not handle Abit

Tech Link (Memory): Intel to sample phase change memory in 1H 2007

I missed this news from EETimes so I am posting it now. This isn't your typical sub-cooling thingy so don't mistake it for that. Anyway, if you're insterested about this technology, expand for more. I haven't really read up much about this, but the advantage is huge (compared to FLASH memory with 10,000 writes vs 100 million writes for PCM) since it's Intel driving it. And when I say Intel, it means "mass production", and mass production means affordable pricing for most usage.

Intel to sample phase change memory in 1H 2007
Peter Clarke
(03/06/2007 12:44 PM EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197800524

LONDON — Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is preparing to sample a 90-nm 128-Mbit phase change memory to customers in the first half of 2007. Mass production could begin before the end of 2007 the chip giant said.
The memory is being introduced as a drop-in replacement for NOR flash non-volatile memory although its perfromance characteristics means it could be used it a greater range of applications and come to replace in DRAM in some systems, Intel said.

Brian Harrison, vice president of the flash memory group (FMG) at Intel and Ed Doller, chief technology officer of FMG, revealed the move at a meeting for analysts and press held in California on Tuesday (March 6).

Intel has been a licensee of chalcogenide-based phase change memory technology from Ovonyx Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices Inc. (Rochester Hills, Mich.), since about 2000. Over this period Intel has been actively researching the technology even though Energy Conversion Devices has been touting the technology, without commercial success, for more than 30 years.

Intel and European chip maker STMicroelectronics NV announced they had teamed up their research on chalcogenide-based phase-change memory as a likely successor to flash as a non-volatile memory, in June 2006.

Interest in phase-change and other non-volatile memory technologies has increased markedly in the last five or six years as there are increasing concerns that flash memory may struggle to scale. Qimonda AG, formerly the memory operation of Infineon Tecnologies AG, is researching phase-change memory technology with IBM Corp. and Macronix of Hsinchu, Taiwan.

At the ISSCC in February 2007 Renesas Technology Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. discussed a phase-change non-volatile memory module for integration on microcontrollers used in embedded systems.

Doller told the meeting that Intel's 128-Mbit phase-change memory had demonstrated 100 million read-write cycles of endurance and a capability for much greater than 10 years data retention. "The phase-change memory gets pretty close to Nirvana," Doller said. "It will start to displace some of the RAM in the system."


Doller added that the samples that would be going out to customers were designed to be a drop-in NOR flash replacement. "We're going to be using this to allow customers to get familiar with the technology and help us architect the next generation device," said Doller. "That dialog is happening right now."

Doller added that the technology was showing good robustness against temperature: "We don't see any issue meeting industrial [temperature range]..."

When asked when the phase change memory would go into mass production Doller said: "We're hoping we can see production by the end of the year, but that depends on the customers."

Source:Intel to sample phase change memory in 1H 2007

Brag: Kinc and crotale sets a new 3DMark 2001 world record with 89,120 points

Well, it's not surprising anymore with the power of Chipzilla processor. The world reknown overclockers Kinc and crotale managed to break the 3DMark2001 world record with such blazing score. It seems that the race to 90k is on!

Even if the weekend is still young our OC gurus Robert 'crotale' Kihlberg and Marcus 'Kinc' Hultin have already managed to score a new world record. With 3DMark 2001 they've managed to reach 89,120 points. It might be worth mentioning that the system still needs some tweaking for optimal performance and that the CPU is still our tired ol' X6800. However, now they've managed to get above 5GHz at least, while they also used a X1950/X1900 combo, waiting for another X1950 card without too bad coldbugs. Unfortunately, it's still impossible to raise the memory frequency of the X1950 very much, but that shouldn't stop them from reaching 90,000 later on.

Specifications:
CPU/cooling: X6800 @ 5050MHz, Mousepot + LN2
Motherboard: Asus P5W-DH
Memory: Corsair 6400C3
Master card: X1950 @ 830/1143, Mousepot + LN2
Slave card: X1900XTX @ 873/873, Cascade
Power supply: Cooltek 600W

Source:Kinc and crotale sets a new 3DMark 2001 world record with 89,120 points

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Tech Link (Coolers): "Build Your Own Phase Change PC Cooling System"

I found a very neat article about making a sub-cooling system for your beloved CPU. Not that Conroe needs any more cooling than the stock one, but hey, if you're extreme then you'd probably want to try this one out. But hey, it's for the uber leet only so proceed at your own risk.

This article describes the construction and operation of a single stage vapor phase refrigeration system for the cooling of micro processors found in modern home computers.

These are the basic components of a direct-die, vapor-phase refrigeration system. Direct-die refers to the fact that the evaporator is mounted directly onto the CPU/GPU as opposed to a water chiller, where the evaporator cools liquid which in turn cools the CPU/GPU.

Source:Overlockers.Com