Posted 09/11/09 at 12:43:34 PM by Paul Lilly

iBuyPower on Wednesday announced its new Paladin E-series Gaming PC built around Intel's "Lynnfield" processors and new P55 chipset. Three rigs in all -- Paladin E720, E780, and E870 -- come equipped with one of Intel's new socket 1156-based Core i7 800 series or Core i5 processors, but what iBuyPower really hopes will give it an edge over the competition is an optional "Power Drive" overclocking service.

iBuyPower will overclock your processor up to 10 percent for free (Power Drive Level 1), up to 20 percent for $49 (Level 2), and up to 30 percent for a dollar shy of a C-note (Level 3). Depending on which level you choose, you'll also need to configure compatible components iBuyPower says are certified for a particular OC (Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD6 is certified for a level 3 OC, whereas the GA-P55-UD3R is certified for level 1, for example).

 The Paladin E-series is available now starting out at $649.

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Posted 07/24/09 at 08:31:31 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Fujitsu is said to be working on the “fastest rig on the planet.” While it is very common for car ads to heap praise on German engineering, the same is not true when it comes to PCs. But a slide (see below) related to the upcoming “fastest rig on the planet” is a laconic ode to German engineering.

The slide credits “German ultra clocking” for making Fujitsu’s mysterious gaming rig the fastest in the world. It also mentions that the rig features the very best “hand selected components”. Fujitsu posted a link to a teaser video - which miraculously doesn’t make even a thickly veiled reference to the gaming rig – on Twitter.

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Posted 06/04/09 at 09:22:16 AM by Paul Lilly

CyberPower this week announced a new line of high-end gaming PCs under its also new Fang series nomenclature, which it says has been co-developed with Intel and "other leading manufacturers." The company kicks off the new line with the flagship Black Mamba Venom and Cobra Venom, both of which come overclocked and sport a customized BIOS, as designated by the Venom tag.

"The Fang series with Venom incorporates a special BIOS to allow for higher overclocking," CyberPower stated in a press release. "The BIOS supports real-time readings of CPU speed and additional options for QPI signal and CPU Clock Skew features, all of which improve overclocking capability."

On the higher end, the configurable Black Mamba Venom comes standard with Intel's just-released Core i7 975 Extreme Edition processor factory overclocked to 4GHz, and EVGA X58 Classified or Gigabyte X58 Extreme motherboard, 6GB of tri-channel DDR3 memory, a pair of 300GB Velociraptors in a RAID 0 array with a 1TB hard drive for storage duties, two Nvidia GTX 285 videocards in SLI, and a 6X Blu-ray writer all housed in Cooler Master's Storm Sniper chassis.

The slightly lower end Cobra Venom sports the same processor along with X58 motherboard options, while dropping down to a single 1TB hard drive, a single GTX 285 videocard, and a combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD player housed in Azza's Solano 1000 case.

The Black Mamba and Cobra Venom will start at $4,000 and $2,400 respectively. No word yet on availability.

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Posted 05/26/09 at 04:00:28 PM by Paul Lilly

There's a reason Intel's Celeron line has consistently proven popular among overclockers. Out of CPU-Z's top 20 list of highest clocked CPUs, Celeron chips -- most of them of the Celeron 347 variety -- occupy 12 spots, or 60 percent of the list. And recently setting a new record for the No. 2 spot, Belgian overclocker 'Blind' from Madshrimps pushed his Celeron 352 chip (Cedarmill core) to 8.116GHz.

In order to ramp up that high, Blind used the Dragon F1 Extreme Edition LN2 cooler with gum filling the gaps around the socket to prevent condensation. It took nearly 1.9V to coax the Celeron past 8GHz, well above its stock 1.3V rating.

Such high voltages and extreme cooling methods limit the usefulness to chasing overclocking records as opposed to any kind of day-to-day operations, but we'll admit to being impressed at seeing a 3.2GHz  Celeron achieve almost a 5GHz OC. And hey, reaching 5.7GHz on air isn't too shabby either.

Plenty of pics and more info here.

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Posted 04/03/09 at 10:29:31 AM by Paul Lilly

Maybe the world has gone topsy-turvy on us, but Biostar, the company best known for its budget motherboards, has set another overclocking world record, this time on AMD's Phenom platform. Say what?

Using Biostar's recently released TA790GX A3+ motherboard, Japanese overclocker "PcCI2iminal" and his team (Yoko) pushed AMD's Phenom II 955 processor to 6.16GHz and 6.20GHz, respectively, claiming the top and third spots for highest OC for that processor. In both cases, liquid nitrogen cooling was used to push the processor nearly 94 percent higher than its stock speed. The fourth highest OC sits at a distant 4.09GHz using air cooling.

Last summer, a Biostar board was used to set the frontside bus world record when an overclocker who goes by the name Youngpro manged to maneuver the Biostar I45 board's FSB to 725MHz (2,900MHz quad-pumped).

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Posted 03/10/09 at 10:40:34 AM by Paul Lilly

You have to admire when a company doesn't just talk the talk, but walks the walk. EVGA, one of three Nvidia add-in board (AIB) partners to offer lifetime warranties for its videocards, not only allows end-users to overclock their cards without voiding the warranty, but arguably encourages the behavior by serving up OCing tools. Registered owners can download the company's GPU Voltage Tuner utility, and anyone can download EVGA's Precision overclocking software whether they own an EVGA-brand videocard or not.

In the case of the latter, a new version is now available, v1.5.1. Several updates have been added to the 1.5.x refresh (the majority were included in v1.5.0 released last Friday), including multi-GPU support. The overclocking tool now gives users independent access to thermal monitoring, overclocking, and fan control settings of all installed GPUs whether configured to run in SLI or not.

Other changes and fixes  include better support for GeForce 9 and older videocards, a pair of new skins, settings no longer reset at Windows startup on multi-GPU systems, fixed memory clock monitoring for G98 GPUs, and Precision now displays the graphics processor codename in the system info.

Changelog
Download

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Posted 03/04/09 at 10:00:00 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

If you’ve tried to research the differences between Intel’s top-end Core i7-965 Extreme Edition and the midrange 940 and budget 920 parts, you’re probably as confused as us. And we even have direct access to Intel. But the technical differences between these parts are enormously important for system builders when you consider the price disparity -- $1000 for a Core i7-965 compared to under $300 for a Core i7-920.

What we do know is that the Core i7-965 has unlocked multipliers going up and down (although we have to point out that we have not seen any motherboards with multipliers that let you actually set it higher. You can only do that by increasing the Turbo Mode ratio.)

One other known fact is that you cannot set the Turbo Mode ratios on the 940 and 920. OK fine. But what else is different? Intel told us as recently as two months ago that the QPI was locked at 4.8GT/s to prevent you from running it at the Extreme’s 6.4GT/s speed. Memory ratios, however, are supposed to be unlocked.

But maybe not.

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Posted 02/11/09 at 11:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

Maker’s Mark is of course the name of a fine Kentucky bourbon whiskey, but the phrase also applies to the stamp that skilled artisans apply to their creations. When you’ve finished building your custom PC, we’d encourage you to stamp it with your own maker’s mark; after all, the one-of-a-kind creation you’ll have wrought will have nothing in common with the mass-produced rigs that mainstream manufacturers churn out by the millions.

That’s one of the most exciting aspects of our hobby. Automobile buffs can tune and customize their factory-built cars and trucks, but computer geeks like us get to build something new and unique almost entirely from whole cloth. And it’s so easy that you have to wonder why anyone would buy a preassembled PC in the first place.

Thanks to the relatively open architecture that IBM stumbled into oh so many years ago (and has likely regretted ever since), we can rebuild and retune our creations again and again, boosting their performance and postponing their obsolescence. We do hit a wall every now and again. Intel’s new Core i7 CPU is a good example. Because the new processor features an onboard memory controller—a first for Intel, although AMD’s procs have had the technology for years—the company had to design a new socket architecture to accommodate the additional pins. That blocks the upgrade path for anyone using an LGA775 motherboard.

Intel has AMD on the run in the CPU front, but AMD is poking Nvidia in the behind in the graphics processor market. The result: ever more powerful, ever less expensive videocards. The two companies have shipped so many new parts that we expect things will stabilize over the next quarter or so, so now’s the time to find a great deal whether you’re building a new rig or retrofitting an old one. And if you’ve never experienced the joy and pride of building your own PC, click through to read our in-depth, hands-on guide.

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