Eyefinity Challenge in Dallas, TX
AMD, HardOCP, 100 gamers, five ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity boxes, 5 single display boxes, and Call of Duty 4 team deathmatch. You got to like that. And one Eyefinity box to play Modern Warfare 2 on projected onto three screens giving you over 24 feet of horizontal pixel real estate.
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 Video Card Review
Just when you thought there was no way to outdo the 5800 series, AMD gives us the ATI Radeon HD 5970. It has two GPUs on a single PCB and brings with it CrossFireX in a single PCIe x16 slot. We show you if it is worth your hard earned cash.
GIGABYTE P55M-UD4 Motherboard Review
While this new GIGABYTE may look small, this micro-ATX wonder packs a punch and hits where it counts. The P55M-UD4 performs like the big boys, proving that size truly does not matter...for a motherboard.
Enermax ECO80+ 620W Power Supply Review
Enermax produces some of the best computer power supplies in the world and has a great reputation for doing just that. We take a look at what Enermax does when it gets green and drops the price point for those of us on an enthusiast system building budget with the ECO80+ at 620 watts.
Galaxy has supplied HardOCP with 8 video cards to give away to our readers for the holidays. We will be drawing one winner a week for 8 weeks. Cards will range from low end to high end. This week will draw one person from this HardForum thread for a free NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT 1GB. One entry per person. Shipping to North America only.
What do you say when an angry iPhone app developer writes you a long e-mail complaining of an issue they have with Apple? If you are Steve Jobs, you write this:
Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.
Steve
Sent from my iPhone
Here is a cute video of robots dancing to Christmas songs. The autonomous robots learned to dance at a geometric rate. They will become self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time on December 25th. Thanks to Arnold for the link.
I know, I know, this pistol-rifle system doesn’t turn your semi-automatic pistol into a real assault rifle but it is close. Besides, it is actually pretty damn cool and it looks bad ass.
BioShock 2 Multiplayer Trailer Shows Killing Spree @ Shacknews
Halo Waypoint Saturday Feature: The Duel @ Kotaku
Serious Sam HD shoots up PCs Nov 24 @ Joystiq
WoW Celebrates Thanksgiving With Pilgrim’s Bounty @ Official Site
Microsoft has flat out denied the existence of a "backdoor" in Windows 7 saying that the NSA only helped in the development of its Security Compliance Management Toolkit and nothing else. Did anyone actually think that the backdoor rumor was actually true?
Microsoft today denied that it has built a backdoor into Windows 7, a concern that surfaced yesterday after a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official testified before Congress that the agency had worked on the operating system. "Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows," a company spokeswoman said, reacting to a Computerworld story Wednesday.
I think it is pretty damn cool that Google has decided to add automatic captions to YouTube videos. It is as easy as creating a text file with all the spoken words in the video and Google’s speech recognition technology does the rest.
Because the speech-recognition technology is still a work in progress, Google is launching the automatic captioning service on the YouTube channels of just a handful of partners, including PBS, National Geographic and a few big universities. But the company promises that the technology will improve over time — and it hopes for a much broader rollout.
Cases & Modding
SilverStone SG04B-H Computer Case @ TechwareLabs
Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis @ Legit Reviews
ETC.
Novatech X16 HD Pro Notebook @ Driver Heaven
Memory/ Storage
Thermaltake BlacX Duet HDD Docking Station @ OCIA
Video
Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 OC @ Overclockers Club
The European Network and Information Security Agency just submitted a 123 page report on the risk of cloud computing. No surprises here, everyone likes the benefits of cloud computing, nobody likes the idea of trusting all their data to the cloud. Would you?
"The picture we got back from the survey was clear," Giles Hogben, editor of the ENISA report, said in a statement. "The business case for cloud computing is obvious--it's computing on tap, available instantly, commitment-free and on-demand. But the number one issue holding many people back is security--how can I know if it's safe to trust the cloud provider with my data and in some cases my entire business infrastructure?"
A law firm is trying to get a class action law suit against Microsoft started for banning modded consoles from XBL. Good luck with that. 
As has been reported widely in the media, tens of thousands of Xbox owners have had their modified Xbox consoles banned from Microsoft's online gaming service Xbox Live. Although modification of Xbox consoles is *arguably* against the terms of use for Xbox/Xbox Live, Microsoft "conveniently" timed the Xbox console ban to coincide with the release of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game and less than two months after the release of the very popular Halo 3: ODST game.
In recognition of International Education Week, Intel ethnographer Tony Salvador discusses what he observed last week at the International eLearning Summit, a gathering of educators and policymakers from 40 countries. He reflects on the difficult - but essential - task many education decision makers are faced with to ensure their education systems are moving in the right direction. Tony calls out Portugal and Macedonia as leading countries supporting education, by investing in technology for enhancing and facilitating learning in the classroom.
Some guy invents a high-tech killing machine that shocks lobsters to death instead of boiling them alive. PETA buys two lobster-shockers for a large event promoting the device. When the devices didn’t show up at the rally…PETA volunteers boiled hundreds of lobsters alive anyway to feed the crowd of hungry supporters. If that isn't the pot calling the lobster kettle black.
The animal rights group PETA bought two of the lobster devices and paid for Mr. Buckhaven and his wife to fly to the Arizona event last Saturday to demonstrate the technology. Unfortunately, the courier service lost the two machines and the animal rights people had to look the other way as volunteers killed hundreds of lobster in boiling water for hungry supporters of the resource centre.
Google toilet paper? At first I thought this might be what they use on the Google campus until I realized it is just a crappy rip-off. Heh…I said "crappy."
Seriously? Facebook is now the third most popular video site behind YouTube and Hulu? You’d think it would be one of the big sports sites or news portals but it isn’t. Oddly enough, MySpace didn’t even make it onto the list.
According to Nielsen, the amount of time Web users spent viewing videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent year over year. In October 2008, users watched 503.8 million minutes of video; they watched 999.4 million video minutes in October this year. That growth far outpaced growth in number of online video streams as a whole, which grew 26 percent year over year.
InfoWorld has an article posted today that explains why they believe Google’s Chrome OS will fail…big time. I had a feeling we’d see articles like this after watching that underwhelming webcast yesterday.
The bottom line is that while there is virtually nothing that you'll be able to do with the Chrome OS that you won't be able to do equally well with Windows, there are literally millions of things that you can do with Windows today that you'll likely never be able to do with the Chrome OS.
Speaking at Microsoft Corp.’s Annual Shareholder Meeting today, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer highlighted the strength of the company’s execution over the past year, announced record sales figures for Windows 7, and detailed the company’s plans to continue to deliver shareholder value in the long term.
Multimedia-minded consumers who prize the portability of netbooks but lament the typical lack of processing muscle now have a reason to rejoice. ASUS has launched the Eee PC™ 1201N, a multimedia netbook sporting an Intel® Atom™ 330 dual core processor and an NVIDIA® ION™ graphics processor that delivers a level of performance never before seen on netbooks. The stylish Eee PC™ 1201N also offers exceptional typing comfort through a full-sized ergonomic chiclet keyboard, and comes with a total of 750GB* hybrid storage to house and host massive multimedia collections.
If the "leaked" information in this article is accurate, anyone caught sharing files in the UK could soon be facing jail time. Uh-oh, I don’t think too many people in the UK are going to be happy about this. Well, aside from that freaky pro-RIAA dude that sends me hate mail every time I post one of these stories. 
The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements. (for example, he could authorize jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their Internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)
Advanced Micro Devices has been upgraded from Neutral to Buy. Price target increased from $8.50 to $10. Positive events lead us to believe that AMD's risk/reward is now compelling...It all happened faster than expected - AMD's capital structure improved as a result of Intel’s $1.25B settlement AND yesterday’s announcement of AMD debt restructuring actions. We believe AMD's debt of ~$3.7B will be reduced by ~25% (assuming the full $1B is tendered), while also lowering interest expense slightly less, ~20% (assuming new $500M prices between 8% and 12%).
The crew at Driver Heaven managed to sit down and have a nice little chat today with John Byrne, AMD’s Vice President of Worldwide GPU and CPU sales. The topic of conversation? Radeon HD 5000 series shortages and what the company is doing to ramp production to meet demand. This information certainly jives with what we shared with you last week.
"Yes, we are impacted by TSMC's continued problems with production at the 40 nm process, however we feel we are tracking reasonably well to where we expected to be at this point, thanks in large part to our early start with 40 nm process technology with the ATI Radeon HD 4770. Yields for the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, our most complex ASIC to date, are only slightly off from the aggressive targets we set. At the same time, we are actually tracking above target for the production of the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series.
I know all of you that live in France, Germany, Spain and the UK will be glad to hear that Sony has expanded the PlayStation Video Service to Europe. Our friends across the pond will now be able to rent / buy movies from the PlayStation Store like everyone else! You can get free stuff too:
For a limited time, the PlayStation Store will be running a special promo. Anyone that purchases Angels and Demons from the newly launched service will get a free copy of The Da Vinci Code. New registrants of the PlayStation Network will also be able to get a free download of Transformers if they create an account before November 30.
Cooling
Antec Notebook Cooler 200 @ BmR
ETC.
PCPer Podcast #82 @ PC Perspective
Samsung SyncMaster LD190G 19" Lapfit USB LCD @ ThinkComputers
Video
Inno3D Geforce GT 220 @ Overclockers Club
CNN has posted a list of the top ten internet moments of the decade. Some of these "moments" are pretty decent but are these really the top ten?
Napster shuts down (2001): Although the controversial file-sharing site bemoaned by many in the recording industry shut down in 2001, the Webbys note that it opened up the floodgates. Hulu, iTunes and other legal sites followed, as did downloading songs from less reputable sites and artists releasing their music exclusively online.
Mozilla’s Chairman posted Mozilla’s financial statements, the state of the company and its plans for the future.
Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others.
The hot new trend on Craigslist? Advertisements asking for sex…errr, I mean "favors" for rent.
The housing slump and recession have sparked ads on Craig’s List and other classified Web sites essentially asking financially distressed women to trade sex for free rent and housing. Such ads appear on the Phoenix Craig’s List site, and they’ve also appeared in other major U.S. markets.
So I watched the Google Chrome OS Webcast we told you about earlier (here) and it was, for lack of a better word, boring. Here are some of the highlights:
BioShock 2 Special Edition Details Surface @ Shacknews
Resident Evil 5 Goes Gold Again @ Kotaku
Sony 'Looking Into' Subscription-Based PSN Services @ Joystiq
Upcoming Free Xbox LIVE Weekends @ MajorNelson
Make sure you check out all the pictures Kyle posted of the AMD / [H]ard|OCP Eyefinity Challenge. If you think Eyefinity is impressive now, wait until you see it on a custom 24 foot screen.
Don’t forget, the Google Chrome OS webcast is just minutes away. Hit the link to watch the webcast (Windows Media or Real Player required).
ETC.
Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive @ PureOC
Patriot Box Office HD Media Player @ Legit Reviews
Memory/ Storage
Elixir 6 GB 1600 MHz CL9 Tri-Channel @ techPowerUP!
Motherboards
MSI NF980-E65 Motherboard @ PC Perspective
This high-tech marble maze is awesome. The only thing I would change? Make the gumball machine feed the maze a gumball, then you have to navigate the maze to get it.