Blogger's Diary: 5 Christmas movies that I'll watch

I can’t think of a better way to spend my winter vacation than watching some great movies with my family and friends. While I can’t share my media collection with you online (some people going – really?!), I can sure let you in for a sneak-peek of my favorite top 5 Christmas movies. Considering the number of fine movies that I’ve amassed over the years – it’s hard to choose only five! I’ll give it a try never the less. Please remember that the emphasis here is on Christmas and the choices are highly personal. Also, start with no.5 and then move upwards :)

Merry Christmas to you all :)

Christmastime is finally here! Being from a part of the world where summer and monsoon run a very convenient duopoly throughout the year, I've always cherished the winter time. I often consider myself gifted in the art of  finding good excuses to not to work and winter vacation has yet to fail me in this regard! For me Christmas is the biggest congregation of favorable conditions. This the time of the year when I commit myself  into all shorts of atrocities that otherwise won't go unpunished! I can eat staggering amount of cakes and cookies, buy utterly useless things or even go wild with my hardware and still get away with it - such is the spirit of Christmas! Take the incident from last year for example, when I ran some crazy amount of voltage through my now venerable i7 920 (Bloomfield, D0 stepping) for a suicidal 4.2GHz on air! Now that I look back at the whole event, I can't help feeling that it was the combined effect of Christmas and an idle brain that had put me up it. And the fact that my Nehalem survived that peril is a miracle in itself! These are situations where people find religion; for me, I was lucky enough to find my Noctua NH-D14!

Do SSDs improve your FPS? The answer is still NO!

Modern PC games are getting hungrier for resources each year. A gamer is known to the fact and as such often willing to walk the extra mile in order to get the extra performance out of his/her PC. While upgrading to a faster graphics card based on a newer GPU architecture provides the most surefire way of getting more in form of FPS, moving to a faster CPU or even a specialized network solution often boosts gaming performance. But whether or not an SSD (Solid state Drive) can be perceived as a potential upgrade for a gamer has remained a debatable topic over the years! If you ask the question to a manufacturer/vendor, they would possibly tell you that SSDs are the best thing that could happen to a gamer; but in reality things aren’t that simple! From time to time we have seen benchmarks clearly proving that games for the most part don’t benefit from SSDs. The latest dataset in this regard comes from HardOCP and goes inline with our prior observations!

ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition: The Dark Dreadnought!

Right now if you are looking for the ultimate performance in a desktop system, your options are quite limited. With AMD not pursuing the performance crown anymore, Intel is left battling itself for quite sometimes in the high-end enthusiast segment. So when it comes down to choosing a platform for your next HEDT (High-End Desktop) build, it’s either Intel’s mainstream socket LGA1150 or the higher-end socket LGA2011. With the later, you will not only get the chance to opt for Intel’s 6core/12thread Ivy Bridge-E CPUs but you’ll also encounter some of the finest (and largest!) samples of motherboard engineering. Take a look on the new Rampage IV Black Edition and you'll know what I'm talking about!

AMD launches A10-6790K: A new APU for socket FM2

While we are all waiting for Kaveri - the core-architecture that will drive AMD’s next-gen APUs, it seems that the firm isn’t quite done with its current line-up. So here comes A10-6790K – the newest member in AMD’s Richland family of APUs. Designated for socket FM2, this new model comes with a base clock frequency of 4.0GHz that can reach up to 4.3GHz in turbo mode.

Enter the Dragon: A look at MSI gaming series motherboards

Here is a tough one for you – what is common between a hardware manufacturer, RPG developer and a Chinese calendar maker? The answer is, along with many other things that come with their respective trades, they all make good use of Dragons! The Dragon, as a mighty myth of mass-marketing, always has good commercial value and as such, seldom fails to inspire the extra bucks out of the pocked of an overwhelmed enthusiast, gamer or tourist! But as with every other creature of legend, they are not easy to work with and it surely takes a little more to tame a Dragon than, say, your average house-cat! MSI, however seems to have mastered this arcane art as this leading motherboard manufacturer now has a formidable line-up in form of it's latest gaming series!

No more Winamp: The llama's journey comes to an end

Remember Winamp? The mighty little program originally developed by Nullsoft, that used to be your favorite media player back in the days? If you ever wondered about what happened to Winamp after you ditched your Windows-XP system and bought into i-gadgets then we have news for you - both good and bad. For the good part, Winamp is still with us; you can download it, skin it and take it for a spin - just like the good old days. Bad news is, this could very well be the last spin for this venerable app! A small and inconspicuous looking message on their website tells you that there will be no more whipping the llama's ass after December 20, 2013 as that seems to be the end of line for Winamp.

Happy Halloween

Dear friends, have you been feeling a bit strange and creepy lately? I mean more than what you usually do? Is there something bothering you besides the design of the new Mac-pro and price of 4K IPS panels? Is it about that sudden chill you felt in your spine as shadows grew longer and softer and finally subsided into the spooky darkness of a late autumn evening? If so, then don't be too surprised as it's that time of the year again! It's "Halloween" a.k.a "All Hallows' Eve" and you're supposed to see and feel things tonight without people raising questions about your mental state. Isn't that just great! So, don't be afraid to be scared as a good scare nowadays is a rare thing, even rarer than a good overclock from a Haswell chip!

Blogger's Diary

After being absent for some time, I'm back to blogging. Don't ask what I was doing in this time as the ready made answer will have artifacts in it and may not satisfy you. I sometime pretend to have a real life, so lets just leave it at that ;) Although not blogging, I wasn't sitting idle and kept a tab on the recent developments in the world of computing and communication. As any enthusiast would know- this is a very happening zone; every now and then boatload of new devices and technologies are coming out of the framework, triggering endless threads in the forums and starting new controversies! The seer number of such news and events can be overwhelming for most of the end-user community. Thankfully, not all of those are of any significant interest to the end-user. Here at TechnoProzium we try to focus our efforts on hardware and technologies that have a considerable impact on the mainstream and value oriented user. Speaking of which, there are some very interesting things we would like to talk about. First among those will be Intel's IvyBridge processors and the latest Z77 chipset based motherboards and then we'll take a look at AMD's upcoming Trinity desktop parts. Then there is the Kepler aftermath in GPU side of the things, specially the shiny new GTX 660-Ti! Meanwhile I made myself a new desktop build for office use which also should serve as a file server and if time permits I'll share my experience. We've some exciting time ahead of us, no doubt :)

Netbook market crumbles: Big OEMs are getting out

Last year, we asked the question! Earlier this year we were disappointed at what was going on! The clues were there and we anticipated bad things looking into the future. We told you 2012 wasn't going to be a good year for the Netbook segment, now it turns out to be the worst ever! In some very recent developments, it seems that ASUS, Acer and MSI are all set to pull out of the Netbook arena once and for all. According to news reports from DailyTech and Techreport, which seems to have originally generated from Digitimes, these manufacturers are about to resolve their existing inventory with no further plans to continue on future products!

End draws near for Windows Vista: No more mainstream support

It is easy to forget about Vista - the not so glorious predecessor of Windows 7, in midst of all the hype surrounding the upcoming release of Win-8. But there is still a considerable number of PC users out there who, for various reasons, are still hooked on to this operating system. If you belong to this category then the latest announcement from Microsoft is of significant importance to you. As of April 10, 2012 - Microsoft no longer will provide mainstream support for Vista. Mainstream support includes technical and security updates, automatic fix and patches and other operational supports. But this is not necessarily EOL (End of Life) for Vista as Microsoft offers an extended support for those in need. However, this applies only to the commercial/enterprise customers - not to the retail consumers. This extended support itself will be terminated in 2017 according to Microsoft, making Vista truly a thing of the past (If it's not already for most PC users!).

Lucid's new DynamiX software: Striking a balance on the fly?

LucidLogix may not be one of those household names in the industry, but for those among us with a keen interest in computer graphics and gaming, it certainly has earned a reputation of being an innovative and improvising entity. It's not like that there is any shortage in the numbers of companies or outfits providing graphics solutions, on the contrary - it's a very competitive market. There is a good number of graphics chip designers and manufacturers, AIB partners, OEMs and system builders competing for market share; Lucid, however, doesn't fit to any of these categories and yet delivers novel and elegant (at least theoretically) solutions for practical problems. So, when I read about Lucid laying its Hydra engine to an untimely rest - it felt kind of disappointing and anticlimactic since the concept behind Hydra was quite revolutionary. But it seems like Lucid is back once again with another impressive concept, which, just like Hydra, has the potential to shake things up quite a bit. Lucid calls it DynamiX!