I updated mobile flash and was able to watch flash videos without them lagging too badly. There’s still some lag, but the videos are watchable so long as you’re not moving too much while the video is playing. I tried out some local news sites in their desktop form and almost had no issues at all loading up the full featured version.

Another thing I noticed, when I was connected to 1X (which goes to only about 100kbit or less) instead of 3G, the default browser would just hang on the page and not load anything. Dolphin continued to load the page even while connected via 1X.

Another thing I like about Dolphin is the tab feature. You can actually pull off a few tabs on the Incredible. The gesture feature is kinda nice, but I don’t usually use it. Maybe I will in the future if I get used to it, but it’s an interesting toy for now.

In short, it seems like the best browser out right now, way better than default.

Mobile browsers & internet still have a ways to go, but I’m pretty impressed with how things are going. Seems like everything is getting developed out pretty rapidly. Soon it’ll be on par with having a laptop in the palm of your hand.

I remember when I was a kid, I wanted a laptop.. Well back then they cost $2k+ and had at most an 800MHz processor. With Moore’s law we’ll be rocking a 2 or even 3 GHz phone in no time. Add in 4G to the mix and bam. Get ready for awesomeness.

I’ll start off with audio quality, I’m no audiophile by any means, but I have had some experience with higher end headphones. I’d rate the quality as “good”.  They’re  way above the terrible headphones you get with an iPod. If you have no previous experience with higher end headphones they might be the best you’ve ever heard.

The noise canceling is where these headphones really shine, and that’s what they were designed for. When I first got them I put them on while at home, and it did get rid of the fan noise from my computer, but that’s about all I noticed. Then I took them with me on a trip to Florida. On the car ride to the airport I wore them, and it drowned out most of the noise from the car. More impressive. Once I boarded the plane and it took off, I put these headphones on and was shocked. People talking? Gone. Engine noise? Gone. Babies crying? Gone. All I could hear was my music if the music was turned up to 25% volume on my iPod. That’s amazing. When I turned off the music completely I was able to make out some people talking etc, but not much. I turned them off a few times and was instantly greeted with reality, and it was LOUD.

So in conclusion, I’d definitely pick these up if you fly a lot or ride the bus a lot. Noise canceling is superb and totally worth the money. If you want just high quality sound though, you’re better off looking elsewhere. Personally, I’m never getting on a plane again without my QC15′s. Greatest experience ever on a plane.

You can buy them here: Bose® QuietComfort® 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones

Generally, if I drink 1 2 liter per day it’ll last a month and a half. I make them very carbonated though, about what you’d get from the store. One note is I push the PSI higher than you probably should, 50PSI, I found that if I put it lower it wouldn’t get carbonated quickly enough for my liking. However, this will vary depending on how cold the water is that you’re trying to carbonate.

How To:

1. Fill 2 liter bottle with water, leave some space at the top.

2. Carbonator attachment on bottle has a pin on top, push it down and squeeze the bottle to remove excess air.

3. Attach hose to carbonator by pulling up on the attachment and pushing down.

4. Screw down pin on co2 tank until you feel it pushing down on the tank’s pin.

5. Adjust PSI on regulator until it’s at 30 – 35PSI (Or higher, depending on how cold the water is in the bottle, 50PSI works best but not recommended by most.)

6. Release Co2 via the red lever on the side.

7. Shake bottle for 60 seconds or so.

8. Turn off the co2, unscrew the valve, remove attachment from carbonator.

9. Remove carbonator from bottle and enjoy freshly carbonated water.

Soda requires different steps, I haven’t done it so I don’t know. This process might seem complicated, but it’s really easy after you’ve done it a few times, and it saves a bundle of $ very quickly if you drink a lot of it. Personally, I drink it on and off but when I’m in the mood I drink 1 – 2 bottles in a day.

So there you go.. Quick, easy & cheap carbonated water. Forgive me if I’m using incorrect terms to describe the components Kit can be found at KegConnection.

Informational purposes only, I take no responsibility for personal injury. If you utilize any information provided in this site, you do so at your own risk and you specifically waive any right to make any claim against the author and publisher of this Website and materials as the result of the use of such information.

While doing all this, EyeFinity was not the priority. The priority was more screen space to work with. However, since I had the whole setup basically, why not mess with EyeFinity?

I had to set all of them at 1680X1050 since that’s the lowest resolution out of the bunch. That gives me 5040X1050 – which looks horrible out of games. I was pretty much expecting everything to be horrible since like I said, all 3 are different monitors, and the LG screen has these horridly big bezels. So, by far not the best setup for something like EyeFinity.

After getting in game however, everything looks good. I’m shocked. The bezels don’t bother me -  I’m shocked. I was able to get the other 2 to line up with my 24″  – I’m shocked. My games are more immersive and I’m enjoying myself a lot – yet again pure shock.

So what does all this tell me? You don’t have to have the perfect setup to get EyeFinity enjoyable or working right. I’ve looked and I’ve looked – but I have yet to find anyone running EyeFinity with different monitors and resolutions like me. I am thinking about switching the 22″ and 24″ screen out for 2 more 23″ IPS Dell panels, but that is far into the future. At that point, I’ll have something to compare against and see if it’s really that much better than my current setup.

Lots and lots of people think EyeFinity is just a gimmick – well I really have to disagree there. After going EyeFinity – I don’t want to go back. I don’t think you can say anything until you’ve experienced it first hand for more than a few days. As you can see, I was very skeptical of the technology and thought it would completely suck. I was wrong.

Sure, it’s a somewhat costly setup, but if you need the monitors for productivity anyway, you can’t go wrong. Let me tell you, 2 monitors is 100x better than 1 and 3 seems like the sweet spot for me.  Sure, spaces are cool, but if you need to see a bunch of things at once you can’t do that with spaces. (also remember that one panel must be DisplayPort or you need an active display port adapter for the 3rd monitor)

Conclusion

After having this setup for awhile – I can safely say that EyeFinity is awesome. Game play is just so much more immersive – and fun. It’s really really hard to form an opinion without experiencing it first hand which is going to be a drawback for this technology to spread. Also, yes I know that Matrox has had this technology for quite awhile – but you have to buy a $300 device on top of the $300 video card which makes it even less accessible to the mainstream audience. So ATI has done something magical – introducing videocards capable of driving 3 displays (FINALLY) and combining 3 monitors into 1 display – all wrapped into a highly powerful graphics card. I won’t be switching to nVidia unless they implement similar technology.

Picture taken before all monitors were lined up correctly..

]]> http://technologyinsanity.com/technology-reviews-guides/ati-eyefinity-review-different-monitors-sizes-and-resolutions/feed/ 0 http://technologyinsanity.com/technology-reviews-guides/the-quest-for-4ghz-my-phenom-x6-1055t-thuban-overclock-adventure/ http://technologyinsanity.com/technology-reviews-guides/the-quest-for-4ghz-my-phenom-x6-1055t-thuban-overclock-adventure/#comments Sun, 09 May 2010 22:02:05 +0000 admin http://technologyinsanity.com/?p=1084 My old chip was a Q6600. Why was I upgrading at all you may ask? Well, my Q6600 could only hit about 3.2GHz, I wanted some more power plus the extra cores is a nice touch. Generally speaking, the Phenom II X6 is close to the performance clock for clock of my old Q6600. I also snagged a deal on frys.com where the processor + motherboard was only $260. I combo’d that with $80 DDR3 Corsair XMS3 ram (after rebate) from tigerdirect, and picked up a H50 cooler at retail price from newegg. ($80) I also intend to sell my old parts on eBay in the near future to help recoup some cost.

specs:

GA-890GPA-UD3H

4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333

Corsair HX520w PSU (If you don’t think this is enough.. I’ve done the calculations and even with the processor at 4GHz at max I’ll hit 480w or so, with everything fully loaded, 100%. Corsair PSU’s are slightly under rated, and will deliver 520W continuously without issue. I don’t intend to keep my CPU at 4GHz though so there really is no issue, or “pushing” the limits.)

1055T (stepping: CCBBE CB 1015BPMW)

ATi Radeon HD5850

Corsair H50

1x 320GB 72k drive

1x 500GB 72k drive

1X 1TB 72k drive

Overall, pretty cheap upgrade. Let’s start off by saying this was not exactly an “easy” venture. I thought it would be, but it in no way ended up that way. Starting from the beginning, I had to remove my old LGA775 motherboard with a Q6600.

That was pretty simple. Mounting the H50 was also pretty simple. The rest of the process was also simple, and what I’d expect.

So I power up the system, install windows, boot into windows, and all of a sudden… BAM my pc won’t start up. I keep pressing the button like an idiot and smell something burning. My worst fear was that the power supply was dead. I proceeded to disassemble my entire build, that I just put together. I took the power supply to a nearby computer to test if it worked. It worked without issue. So what’s the problem? I have to take out all my components to find out what is causing the problem. I take out the H50 radiator and fan and put it on top of my case.

I power on the system like this, and guess what? The H50 fan starts smoking and making sounds like it’s burning up! Immediately I power off the PC and take out the fan. I replace these fans with my antec fans I’ve had for quite some time. My antec 900 came with a bunch of them. No problems.

This whole process took awhile to sort out and set me back time wise substantially. Anyway, with this sorted out I went to begin overclocking my computer. I hit a wall at around 3.75 GHz, northbridge needed some more juice.

Then my ram timings/speed were getting messed up even with the highest divider. My motherboard is sensitive to the timings on ram for some reason, so I couldn’t boot with certain timings. Not cool. After struggling with the ram timings, speed, northbridge frequency etc, I was finally able to start booting at above 3.75GHz, and eventually was able to hit 4GHz. To make it stable, I had to run a lot of prime95 and ram tests. Prime stability came in at 1.5V. Worth all the hassle? Maybe not since I don’t think I’ll be running my CPU at 1.5V. I can get 3.8ish at around 1.38V. Extra 200Mhz for .12v doesn’t seem worth it. Of course, I just had to push it to 4GHz because it’s “magical” or something

3DMark06 run: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=13861077

Well, that’s that. I’m just adding some finishing tweaks to my setup and figuring out what the “best” overclock would be for performance,  energy consumption, and heat. Probably about 3.8GHz, 4GHz turbo, with C&Q enabled.

This processor is noticeably faster than the Q6600, so I’m happy with my upgrade.

UPDATE: I settled on 3.5GHz @ 1.28V. Should be close to stock watts, at 4GHz it’s a 93% increase.. 93% increase for 500MHz isn’t what I’d call a good deal considering the cost of electricity here. I leave my PC on 24/7 so I don’t want to burn up too much. Haven’t figured out turbo yet, doesn’t seem to work correctly. Only bumps voltage to 1.32v which isn’t enough to do much with. Of course, I have saved the 4Ghz profile in my motherboard in case I need it for something

Again, my Q6600 ate close to 200w at 3.2GHz so I never ran it there much. I try to keep my overclocks a little energy efficient.

The first thing I was most concerned about was the switch. This thing fires every single time since I’ve had it. The button also feels pretty good, and the locking feature is a nice touch.

I did try out the i3 atties and I thought they were pretty good, but I still like 510′s more. 510 @ 6V + 24 – 36MG PureSmoker e-Liquid seems to give me the most “cigarette” like experience. (Not sure how much VG/PG PureSmoker uses, but it usually does pretty well for me, I have some TastyVapor 10% VG and it doesn’t produce nearly as much vapor.) Vapor production in the GGTS VS Prodigy V2: HUGE DIFFERENCE. GGTS provides more vapor quicker. Taste seems to be very close but a little less than the V2.

I only have cr123a batteries (left over from the Prodigy V2 and I also picked up another set) so I can’t really comment on how it functions at 7.2V, 7.4V, 3.7V, and with different batteries. I’ll get to testing 7.4V with an i7 in the future probably, but I won’t use it all the time. I prefer being able to use regular atomizers, and at 7.2 – 7.4V you need the high volt atomizers all the time.

So far, I haven’t noticed much wrong I can really complain about. The GGTS has just “worked”. Oh wait.. there is one thing the brass/aluminum seems to get dirty easily, to keep it shiny you’d have to polish it a lot. Not really going to call this a drawback though.

So long as the GGTS holds up I really don’t think I’ll be buying more mods. I could, but I don’t think I really want to. Unlike the V2 I can’t find anything wrong with it, and it’s easy to handle and adaptable. Only thing I’m going to do is play around with different battery combinations and atomizers/cartomizers, and of course try more e-liquid. Yea, the GGTS is that good. I’ve almost got a “sweet spot”. Only “mod” I see myself possibly buying would be the AFS, and maybe some more imeoatties.

Anyway, on with the review.. All in all, I was pretty pleased with this device. (I’m using a 510 atomizer.) However, I’ll go over the negatives first. The biggest problem on this device is the switch. Mine worked fine for about a week, then I had to press harder and harder to get it to work. Eventually, I took it apart. Lost the spring right away (still haven’t found it). I replaced the spring with a pen spring, of course that doesn’t fix the issue I was having. At this point I didn’t really know how to fix it so I got my multimeter out and tried to figure out how to get it working again.

After awhile I figured out that it was the o-ring, wasn’t fat enough or something, because the washer wasn’t making contact with the 2 points in the switch. I did a little more reading on e-cigarette-forum.com to see if this issue was really wide spread. Apparently, it is. There were a few suggestions on how to fix it, the way that worked for me was taking some pliers and moving the contact points from the flat side to the round side.

About a week later, the button was doing the same crap again. The metal they’re using as contact points must be soft or something because it looked like one side flattened out. Did the same thing again, moving the contact point to a different round side. Result: fixed again.

What I’ve gained from this experience is that on the Prodigy V2 you don’t want to push too hard on the button, ever. That’s what causes it to get screwed up from what I can tell.

I’ve had no other issues with this device except for the fact I can’t stand using 3 – 3.7V anymore If they would fix the switch, I think this would be a really good device.

Vapor production is great, as you’d expect running 5V to a Joye 510 atomizer, been using it non stop since I got it. Very satisfying feeling compared to 3 – 3.7v. I go through about 2 sets of batteries per day, so about 7 hours per set.

My RYO cigarette tubes/tobacco hasn’t been touched for three and a half weeks. I intend to keep it that way.

Totals

Affordability – 9/10 – Well within range for most people to be able to pick one up.

Build quality – 5/10 – Problems with the switch, as I noted above. Otherwise, I’d say it’s pretty solid, but really the switch is pretty important so 5 points off.

Looks – 8/10 – Looks decent, especially with a silver atomizer and t-tip.

Usability – 8/10 – So long as the switch is working, it’s fine. Switch still doesn’t always work though, so 2 points have been taken off. Batteries last 7 hours per set (for me) so very good amount of time

Overall – 7.5/10 - Would still recommend to people *if* they don’t mind messing with the switch here and there or modding it with a fatter o-ring.

Right now I’m waiting on a GGTS, supposed to be very good build quality. Is $212 too much for something like this? Well the way I looked at it is if it lasts a long time who cares? The thing can handle almost any bat/atty combination so there won’t be any reason to buy different mods, unless it’s something unique like the juicebox (well, the GGTS actually has an auto feed system… ) or a double barrel silver bullet. Will write a review of the GGTS after I have about a month with it, same style as this one.

Not getting rid of the Prodigy V2 though, will be my back up device. The back up for that is the Janty eGo.

So anyway, I think the investment is worth it if you have a reason for it. On with the review…

Compared to a “cheap electric” is there really a difference? You bet! The thing spins like crazy and you can feel the plaque being removed, the smart guide shows me which area of my teeth I should be working on, and how long I should brush my teeth. I have a feeling I was never brushing my teeth for 2 minutes before

After brushing I can definitely “feel” a difference. There’s no plaque anymore, it just tears it right off. That’s a HUGE thing right there. My cheap electric never did that nor did any manual toothbrushes I ever used.

If you’re thinking about whitening more than overall teeth health (Which I’m more worried about the health of my teeth rather than whitening) it does help to whiten your teeth. I had lots of stains from coffee/cigarettes and it does seem to help remove that stuff fairly easily. I struggled with it with my old electric and the stuff wouldn’t come off, however with this one it started to come off almost immediately. A lot of it was just tar that was stuck there so it probably just needed something powerful enough to take it off.

So, overall was it worth the investment? Yea, I really think it was. I mean I spend crazy amounts sometimes on computers and other “junk” that I really don’t need, it’s just a good thing to spend a little cash on personal hygiene sometimes

Setup is pretty straight forward, and I have a model that includes self-cleaning, so apparently I’ll have to buy alcohol packs every once in awhile. I’m kind of lazy sometimes and really I think without self cleaning I would end up forgetting to clean it, so that’s a definite plus, and I don’t mind the slight added expense.

How does the self-cleaning feature work? Well you just plug it into the base and then you can hear it sucking up the alcohol and running the motor to clean everything out, it’s pretty cool, really. The base also has a blue glow which adds to the “cool factor” I guess

As far as how close it shaves, I was quite impressed. It’s definitely the closest shave I’ve ever gotten from an electric razor, and like I said it just sort of “glides” across my skin taking off the hair and not irritating me at all. So yea, quick and easy shave no hassle or fuss with anything. Quite awesome.

Pick one up from amazon here Braun Series 3 370 Men’s Shaver

Up until this point, I thought the Razer Diamondback was the greatest mouse in the world. Today, that vision has been shattered.  Today I received my Logitech G9 laser mouse. When I first plugged it in, I wasn’t very impressed with the feel of the mouse. Never fear! The G9 comes with 2 grips! I just popped in the slimmer grip and instantly loved the feel.

New problem, I felt it was too light. What do we do about that? Well we just pop in a few weights of course! That’s right, the G9 allows you to customize the weight of the mouse to your liking. At first, I popped in 4 4G weights, but I thought that was a bit heavy. I removed 2 4G weights and it seemed like that was the sweet spot for me.

Gah, the LED light is red. I don’t want it to be red, I’d rather it be blue. Wait, the G9 allows you to customize the LED color! All I had to do was open up the Logitech SetPoint software and set the LED to be blue. Wallah.

Yet another problem! I didn’t like how slow the cursor moved across the screen. Yet again, the G9 has a solution for me. I can set the DPI on the fly, I found I liked the DPI just below 3200DPI. Of course, for gaming it will be a bit different and I can just set it to my liking in game.

Click click click click.. Bah, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just spin the wheel once for long page documents? Wow, the G9 thought of that too. You can switch to free spin mode by pressing a button under the mouse.

Some other features include horizontal scrolling via the scroll wheel and of course the back/forward buttons on the side of the mouse.

At this point, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself, or rather the mouse. It’s customized to the point where it’s everything I want, and more. You can customize further, like adding in macros and adjusting how much the scroll wheel scrolls, and plenty more. It’s all there in the SetPoint software.

There’s one thing that stops this from being a perfect mouse, and that is the fact it doesn’t have SmartShift. I would love if the scroll wheel automatically went from the regular click click mode to free spinning mode by itself. Unfortunately, only the MX-Revolution has this feature.

Still, I am very happy with my purchase, and if you’re in the market for a great mouse you should definitely check out the G9. You can buy it here: Logitech G9 Laser Mouse