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With the new ATI R520 cards coming out next week, I thought I’d try and take advantage of the older ATI card sell offs. Unfortunately I haven’t been so lucky trying to find an X850 XT at a sub $300 price lately. That is, until tonight when I received a Fatwallet topic alert about the X800 GTO2 which if you’re not familiar, is basically an X850 XT PE in disguise. The card is being sold at NewEgg and ChiefValue (NewEggs subsidiary company) for $199 with $4.99 shipping.

W1zzard over at TechPowerUp discovered that the Sapphire X800GTO2 actually has a 480 core (the same one that the X850/XT/PE uses). He also noticed that it comes with 16 pipelines, 4 of which can easily be unlocked with a simple bios upgrade.

With the 100% proven success rate of the mod and with the price being so cheap I had to jump on it.

If you’re interested you can find more details below:

Fatwallet link to deal
W1zzard’s explanation of mod at TechPowerUp
TechPowerUp forum thread with users sucess stories

Welp, last week it was the Canon SD400, this week its a new amplifier for the car, and today after having my cell phone broken since April I finally broke down and bought a Treo 650 SmartPhone. A buddy at work Charlie Smith has this phone and after seeing what he was doing with it I was sold. I was convinced I wasn’t going to pay $599 so I wheeled a deal with the sprint folks and got it for $299 having signed a 2 year SprintPCS agreement. Not bad but still more then I really wanted to pay for a cell phone :(.

Edit: SecureMart just emailed me stating the video card wouldn’t be in stock until 08/25/2005… Like I believe that BS.

After weeks of procastination I finally bit the bullit and bought a new video card. I really wanted to use my older ATI 9800 Pro but my new Dell 8400 PC only supports a PCI-E BUS so I was bound to get a new video card.

After doing some research I ended up buying a MSI nVidia Geforce 6800GT 256mb PCI-E. SecureMart.com had it extreamly cheap at only $268 bucks. NewEgg, it’s next cheapest competitor was selling it for $100 dollars more.

Now I can finally play Battlefield 2 with ultrahigh settings with a resolution higher then 800×600.

Some Reviews:
HardOCP
PCStats

It appears the Empire Series Media Center PC from Expansion Solution has redfined HTPC. With a 1000 Watt built in amplifier, integrated 7.1 playback and 110 db signal to noise ratio you’ll be hard pressed not to be satisfied with this audiophile grade HTPC system.

There is a nice review of it here

This makes complete sense. Since the form-factor of a USB drive is about the same size as a pocket knife and you’re going to be carrying around the USB drive in your pocket anyways, may as well combine the two.

Buy it here

SWISSMEMORY TM USB Victorinox
NEW: available with capacities up to 1GB!

It is the first time that an original Swiss Army Knife has been equipped with a USB Memory. It comes new also in a retroALOX style. The SWISSMEMORY TM USB Victorinox is a trendy accessory, a perfect gift and business tool. The small all-rounder integrates numerous useful tools and is available in two versions: one with a stainless steel knife, scissors, a file and a screw driver and the other without these tools, to carry when travelling on planes. Both versions include a pressurized pen and a red LED. The new 1GB Version includes a white LED.
The SWISSMEMORY TM USB Victorinox is available with a memory capacity of 64, 128, 256, 512MB or 1GB.
It is also possible to detach the USB part, a patented technology.

Last night, nVIDIA held its launch event for the new GeForce 7xxx series graphics chips. Tim Sweeney (Founder of Epic games) was on hand to show a demo of the Unreal engine running on the new nVIDIA GPU chipset. Previous demos were run at 640×480, while the demo shown last night was running at 1280×1024 quite smoothly!!!! NUTS. On a side note, Sweeney perdicts that the G70 Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX is actually going to end up better than ATI’s upcoming R520….

I came across a very cool app today called Orb from a company called Orb Networks. After you register on their website and install the small download it enables you to send media over the Internet from your PC to any connected computer for free. It basically turns your Windows computer into a restricted Internet media server. You can use another PC or certain PDAs and smart phones to access your music, photos, videos, or television signal, if your host PC has a TV tuner. All the receiving device needs is broadband Internet access, a browser, and a media player. You apparently can also schedule TV recordings remotely via a browser too. I wonder if we could program this to download podcasts and have that stream it to our phones…

PC World digs in to the DVR scene in that comprehensive way of theirs, comparing and contrasting a number of options including DirecTV DVR with TiVo, a Comcast DVR, Windows Media Center, Moxi, Slingbox, and Orb.

Read more about it at PCworld.com

Sprint and Sirius announced a deal to allow Vision customers to listen to Sirius on their handsets using the Vision network.

Does this mean we’ll be able to listen to Howard Stern on our cellys?

Sprint Corporation announced a new partnership with Sirius Satellite radio
Inc. that will offer some of its customers the possibility of receiving satellite radio over their cell phones.

The deal, which is the first one to have been struck between a wireless corporation and a sattelite radio company, is set to expand Sprint’s wireless entertainment package.

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