Man oh man, I remember when I built my 8800GTX OC BFG, water cooled rig back in 2007/8. Those cards were 800 each and I got them on sale at 400 ish. They only lasted a year and died. Shame shame, then I rebuilt a new rig in 2010 with GTX460 cards at 180ish, AWESOME DEAL, now the prices are dropping! LOVE IT!
http://www.geforce.com/#/Hardware/GPUs/geforce-gtx-550ti/overview?cid=GTX550Ti_Launch_Email
Batteries are everywhere. They allow mobility of our electronic devices. These batteries are filled with chemicals that produce electricity. Electrons collect on the negative side and if you create a closed circuit with the positive and negative terminals, along with something that draws a load (light bulb) the energy will flow properly. Where does the energy come from? A chemical reaction inside the batteries. The speed at how they are produced within the battery is the batteries internal resistance. They travel from the negative to the positive terminal for the reaction to take place. If the electricity is not flowing the chemical reaction does not take place. Think, once a connection is attached the reaction begins.
What does this have to do with our discussion? I typed it out to help us all understand. A rechargeable battery is recharged when external electrical energy is applied onto the battery. The flow of electricity from the NEGATIVE to the POSITIVE side during discharge that I mentioned above is REVERSED and the batteries power is restored. Can All batteries be recharged? NO, because it depends on the type of chemicals within the battery. Think of a car, car batteries are rechargeable by the alternator in a car because they are filled with a LEAD acid solution. The rate of charging is based on the amount of power being thrown into the battery. You have to be careful though, because certain batteries can only handle certain amounts of charging.
So what causes a battery to loose its charge? Being used is one option and the other is the growth of cadmium crystals within the battery. If a battery is not fully discharged. The crystals within them will not be affected by the electrical current. So they are not reformed and can grow larger, when they grow larger, the battery looses its capacity to hold a greater charge because the space is being used. Now that I explained how batteries work, let’s answer the question…
Some batteries can be “ recharged.” Does that mean that the battery has a supply of charge that is depleted as the battery is used? YES, there’s a chemical reaction within the battery that creates the electricity. As the car battery discharges because you left your lights on and the car is off, the chemical reaction within the battery is flowing from the completed circuit. The lead plates and lead dioxide plates with all the chemicals involved are dissipating as they run out of electricity. Their supply is running out; YES they are depleted and the battery will not be able to recreate the chemical reaction to create electricity.
If “ recharging” does not literally mean to put charge back into the battery, what does it mean? How do you recharge a battery? Look at my explanation of how batteries work, when you reapply the correct voltage to a battery, the lead and lead dioxide along with all the involved chemicals, reform on the lead and lead dioxide plates, creating a recharge of the chemicals that are required to create electricity. You are not putting electricity back into the battery, you are allowing the battery to reform within the ingredients, the ability to recreate electricity.
Summarizing the questions, when the battery is giving off it’s electricity, the electrons are flowing from one side to the other, so it is loosing it’s charge. With a recharger, the flow of electrons are reversed and the original side that lost the electrons regains them.
Think:::
SIDE A ————————- SIDE B
ELECTRONS —————–>
(As the battery is loosing power the electrons move over to side B).
SIDE A ———————— SIDE B
<—————————ELECTRONS
(When the charger is applied, the electrons move back).
The battery looses power completely and dies when the chemicals and materials are no longer able to hold a charge (electrons will not be produced and flow in the chemical charge).
To hell with the specs, the features are the shit.
On board flash storage for whatever (swap file, storage, I’m thinking Linux).
Multimeter points.
On board power, reset and clear cmos (you dont have to pull the battery).
On board temp monitors and 3 bios chips? HOly hell, this board is designed for me, overclock everything and fry the bios chip. Don’t RMA, just use another chip.
Best yet, an external ipod looking device that lets you play with the bios while you are using your pc. Any clocker knows, the best way to overclock is in the bios.
http://www.evga.com/articles/00604/
Happy New Year people…. so what’s the future you say? More 3d.
Promoting 3d photos to share across the net. I myself have been experimenting with 3d photos, they are awesome but not for the wall. Not everyone walking through my house will grab a set of glasses at the front door. This year, we will see a wide range of cameras that can shoot in 3d mode.
What did I say? gigabit ethernet? No, 10 gigabit ethernet! How is it created? Simple, take current technology and combine it with another hoping there are improvements. Wrap ISCSI and Fibre channel over Ethernet through Data Center Bridging and you will have 10GbE environments.
iMAC
Today I had the pleasure of dissecting an iMAC. My relative was complaining about flickering graphics issues, along with a sudden crash (freeze). That’s a classic case of over heating folks. So I opened it up and swapped out the thermal paste. I’ll admit, apple had designed that machine to be very user friendly on upgrading the memory; but not opening it. The screws were torx based (instead of the classic flat or Philips head) and I the entire time I felt as if I were opening a laptop.
Unfortunately, there’s no option to upgrade the graphics chip. Unless you were to purchase an all new motherboard that has one built in. The power supply, hard disk, blue tooth adapter, wireless adapter, screen, dvd drive and speakers are upgradeable. It appears you could remove and re socket a new intel chip, but I didn’t try to remove the old one. I was only removing the old thermal paste and dust bunnies. One thing is definite, I did notice poor air circulation within the case. Apple relies on having the heat rise out of the top. There are 3 fans within the iMac, but based on what my relative is suffering through, it is not a good long term design for reliability. One way to improve on the units performance, is to add a case fan in the back by the IMAC words. That is where the CPU and GPU heat-sinks are. The iMac utilizes a heat pipe design, but no direct air flow on the fins. This is terrible. So I’ll run it by her and if she’s ok with it, I’ll do it and post pics. The down side to a mod of such stature, the sleep design in the back will be thrown our the door.
It’s very gay and unwelcome-d that the iphone was unable to do video until now. Even HTC phones have had that capability for years! But this post is not about the 3gs playing video. It’s about the performance of the device. Check out this site: They benched the phone with a few others and posted the results. The good news is, the phone does out perform it’s predecessor.
iPhone 3GS Smokes Competition in OpenGL Benchmarks
Initially, I wasn’t going to write about this, but I gave the product some thought in the past 2 days, and it’s a good idea. CoolerMaster has developed a universal laptop charger that replenishes the energy in more than just your laptop. Think about it, your on the road and you ipod and cell phone are low. You head into StarBucks for a cup of joe and while your enjoying the drink, you boot up the lappy for a few minutes on the net. At the same time, your phone and ipod are charging! Also, if you so happen to misplace your laptop charger and it’s no longer available, this can be a great supplement.
Yes, they have great products, I own a Real Power Pro 1250, that I got in February of last year, Let’s just say I use about 1200 wats every minute my PC is on. Yes, it’s a power hog! But the power supply is a champ!
Even though I built my PC in late February and continued to receive parts into early March, my affordable dream machine is a power house. With the release of Crysis Warhead and Crysis Wars, everyone will use the title to benchmark rigs! I know because everyone in their right mind used the original crysis to benchmark other PCS. Any who, because of the right choice of hardware, your PC can last for years; Most people would still upgrade after a year or two. But I know I’ll be happy for a while.
I’ll post some screen shots of my rig and the game(s)!
Longer battery life….. OHYES!
A Claimed 19 hours of battery life. Yes dell has released a laptop battery to drool over. It’s a shame that a lot of airlines have the capability to charge your laptop while in-flight. I guess a 19 hour life would come in handy in other ways. Like if you where stuck in a place without juice or long drives with the family.
Anyway I love the idea of extending our battery lives for all of our devices.
Check out what they have at http://www.dell.com
