MSI Z77 MPower Review-

Like many other manufacturers, MSI is building brands
 to aid the development of their product lines.
Over the past few Intel chipsets MSI have developed their Big Bang family, such as the P55 Trinergy, P55 Fuzion, X58 XPower, P67 Marshal, X79 XPower-II and now the latest, whilst devoid of the Big Bang part from the official title, is the Z77 MPower.  MSI have coined this as ‘XPower-II’s little brother’, designed as an overclocking board to be paired with the MSI Lightning range of GPUs.  As a result, the Z77 MPower is designed with the MSI Lightning Twin Frozr IV scheme in mind. so how does the MSI fare?

 Overclocking for Z77 – Why Everyone Is At It
The motherboard market shrank in 2012, with reports suggesting that from the 80 million motherboards sold in 2011, this was down to 77 million worldwide in 2012.  In order to get market share, each company had to take it from someone else, or find a new niche in an already swollen industry.  To this extent, after the success of the ROG range, the top four motherboard manufacturers now all have weapons when it comes to hitting the enthusiast or power user with an overclocking platform.

In the past there have been attempts at pure overclocking boards, such as the Gigabyte X58A-OC, which was entirely stripped of all but the necessary components for pushing overclocks under sub-zero conditions for competitions.  The board itself was cheaper due to the functionality not present, but it did not provide a rock solid home system for many users.  The ASUS ROG range, has been releasing motherboards for both gaming and overclocking for several years, trying (and succeeding) with the mATX Gene, ATX Formula and Extreme.  All three of these boards continuously push both the gaming and OC frontiers, with a slight gaming focus on the Formula and an OC focus on the Extreme, but all boards cross over into each other’s territory very easily.

MSI Z77 MPower Overview
If I were to build a motherboard from scratch, I would first identify all my targets and then order them in terms of importance.  If the motherboard was designed to go within a specific price point, I would have a choice of raising the quality of the onboard components as a whole, or deciding to focus the cost on one particular area.  This includes power delivery, options specific to each market, controllers, PCIe layout, board layout, heatsink design, and so on.  With the Z77 MPower, MSI have hit a small road block in terms of their design philosophy – they wanted a model to bare the Big Bang name for Z77, but focus on both overclocking and gamers alike within tight budget constraints.  It happily works for some areas, but not for others, on both the gaming and overclocking side of the coin.  Let me explain.
As a gamer, I would want ample space for GPUs, a one-button OC method, plenty of rear IO connectivity with good controllers, a beefed up audio solution, and something to keep me up to date with the latest drivers and software.  As an overclocker, I want an improved power delivery, easy-to-use overclocking tools, reductions of instability, a fast boot time, and in the case of extreme overclocking, a board that is easy to prepare and can do the changes I want to do.
As a gamer, the Z77 MPower gives an Ivy Bridge oriented GPU layout with either PCIe 3.0 x16/-/-, x8/x8/- or x8/x4/x4, and with plenty of space for GPU slots one and two.  We get OC Genie for a quick CPU OC to 4.2 GHz on an i7-3770K, the rear IO caters for PS/2, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, as well as WiFi, and the Live Update 5 software onboard keeps all the drivers up to date as they are released.  On the downside is our regular Realtek ALC898 audio codec with no special design or anything above that (moot point for gamers with their own audio cards), a regular Realtek NIC, the Atheros WiFi is single-stream 2.5 GHz-only, and there are no extra SATA ports.  A brief upside in network connectivity is the addition of Realtek software to prioritize traffic over the network, and the color scheme is matched with the MSI Lightning range of GPUs.

Visual Inspection
The MSI Z77 MPower greets us with a very sleek and clean black livery with a yellow trim, akin to the Twin Frozr IV used on the MSI Lightning series GPUs.  MSI have specifically gone out of their way to make sure all the ports and connectors are black, which is something we do not normally see as many manufacturers will just use what colors they have in stock on lower priced models.  According to the marketing material, the top PCB layer is designed to protect all the traces used on the board by putting them down one layer – we see this is the case, and leads to a nicer looking product.  It is also argued that this can also help with electromagnetic interference (EMI), resulting in cleaner signals, though we have no way of actually testing that (or if it makes a difference to the end user).

The socket area is nice and clean for insulating, and big air coolers will be hindered more by any memory installed than the power delivery heatsinks.  The heatsinks covering the power delivery are all connected via heatpipe, but also low and fat with small grooves for airflow, relying on mass rather than surface area to deal with heat generation.  The 8-pin CPU power connector is to the top left of this, relegated away from the edge of the board due to the top heatsink placement.
There are three fan headers around the socket – the 4-pin CPU fan header is the nearest on the other side of the memory, partnered by another system 4-pin, and the third 4-pin is located beneath the main heatsink to the bottom left of the socket.  The other two 4-pin fan headers on board are located at the bottom.  It is interesting to note that the memory slots here use a dual-latch system, rather than the single sided latch that is started to be the norm on some Z77 boards, and can be preferred by overclockers that take out/put in hardware frequently.

The rear IO panel is designed to be full of functionality, and MSI have pressed on with a large number of rear USB 3.0 ports, despite the fact that they do not seem to work when installing an OS –  until the USB 3.0 drivers are installed.  However, from left to right we get a combination PS/2 port, two USB 2.0 ports, a ClearCMOS button, a Bluetooth 3.0+HS module (Atheros AR3011), two USB 3.0 ports from the chipset, four USB 3.0 ports from a Renesas uDP72020 controller, a WiFi 802.11b/g/n 2.5 GHz only module (Atheros AR9271), a gigabit Ethernet port (Realtek 8111E), a HDMI output, a DisplayPort output, an optical SPDIF output and audio jacks.

Titan – The World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer

What does it take to be the world’s most powerful computer? Is it still the towering colossus of a machine like that of Deep Thought from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or can it fit in a normal office building?
Well the United State’s Department of Energy can tell you exactly, since they now house the device holding this title in their Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Oct. 29, 2012—Titan, the world’s fastest open-science supercomputer, was completed this month at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, opening new windows of opportunity into the exploration of some of the world’s toughest scientific challenges.

Titan’s peak performance is more than 20 petaflops – or 20 million billion floating-point operations per second – about 90 percent of which comes from 18,688 NVIDIA® Tesla® K20 GPU accelerators. These are based on the NVIDIA Kepler™ architecture, the fastest, most efficient, highest-performance computing architecture ever built.
Researchers use ever faster supercomputers to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation across a range of scientific fields of inquiry – from developing more efficient engines and higher capacity, lighter weight batteries, to studying climate change and finding cures for disease. Titan is a milestone on the path to exascale computing, which targets building a 1,000 petaflops supercomputer.
Titan is operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s network of research labs, as an open-science system. This means it is available to researchers from academia, government laboratories, and a broad range of industries, who will use Titan to model physical and biological phenomena and seek breakthroughs faster than possible by experimentation alone.
Supported by the energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the Tesla K20 GPU, Titan is more than 10 times faster and five times more energy efficient than its predecessor, the 2.3-petaflops² Jaguar system, while occupying the same floor space. Had Oak Ridge upgraded Jaguar by simply expanding its CPU-based architecture, the system would be more than four times its current size and consume more than 30 megawatts of power.³
“Basing Titan on Tesla GPUs allows Oak Ridge to run phenomenally complex applications at scale, and validates the use of accelerated computing to address our most pressing scientific problems,” said Steve Scott, chief technology officer of the GPU Accelerated Computing business at NVIDIA. “You simply can’t get these levels of performance, power- and cost-efficiency with conventional CPU-based architectures. Accelerated computing is the best and most realistic approach to enable exascale performance levels within the next decade.”
Titan development began three years ago with Oak Ridge’s decision to upgrade Jaguar, the previous open science system leader and a former world No. 1 most powerful supercomputer. The upgrade includes the Tesla K20 GPU accelerators, a replacement of the compute modules to convert the system’s 200 cabinets to a Cray XK7 supercomputer, and 710 terabytes of memory.

The Titan does actually fit into a single room, even though it is made up of 710 terabytes (780,653,255,720,898.5 bytes) of memory, 18,688 processing nodes, nearly 300,000 AMD Opteron 6200 series cores, and over 261,000 Nvidia K20x accelerator cores! All of that hardware mumbo-jumbo allows the Titan to hit a record 17.59 petaflops in performance, meaning it can calculate over 17 quadrillion operations per second. After all is said and done, this is another win for the United States as half of the top 10 most powerful supercomputers are now located within their borders.

14-Year-Old Prodigy Programmer Dreams In Code

            

HDMI vs DisplayPort

The HDMI audio/video interface standard has become wildly successful. It’s the most common digital connection you’ll find in TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, A/V receivers, gaming consoles, camcorders, and digital cameras. Heck, it’s even showing up in some smartphones.
You’ll also find HDMI implementations in most consumer desktop and laptop computers. No modern all-in-one is complete without an HDMI input that allows you to connect a gaming console or a set-top box to the computer so you can use its display for a second purpose.
But given HDMI’s near ubiquity, you might have forgotten the other digital audio/video standard: DisplayPort. Though you’ll find it alongside HDMI in many late-model, add-in video cards, as well as in laptops marketed to business users, it rarely appears in Windows PCs aimed at consumers.
Both HDMI and DisplayPort can send high-definition digital video and audio from a source device to a display. So what’s the difference? Is one display interface superior to or more flexible than the other? We’ll try to answer these questions in this head-to-head comparison of their feature sets and typical use scenarios. But first, let's review how the two standards came to be, and what entities control them.

The connectors

HDMI connectors have 19 pins and are most commonly seen in three sizes: Type A (standard), Type C (mini), and Type D (micro). Of these, Type A is by far the most common. A fourth category of HDMI connector, Type E, is used for automotive applications. Most HDMI connectors use a friction lock, meaning that a tight fit keeps the plug mated to the socket, but some vendors have developed proprietary locking mechanisms designed to prevent the cable from pulling loose.

HDMI Licensing LLC

The three types of HDMI connectors you're most likely to encounter are (from left to right) standard, mini, and micro. A fourth connector type, for automotive applications, is not shown here.

DisplayPort connectors have 20 pins and are available in two sizes: DisplayPort and Mini DisplayPort (the latter is the port of choice for Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet). Interestingly, Intel’s Thunderbolt interface combines the features of Mini DisplayPort and adds PCI Express data connections—but that’s beyond the scope of this article. Though most full-size DisplayPort connectors have a locking mechanism that prevents them from being disconnected accidentally, the official spec does not require that feature.
You’ll find HDMI Type D micro connectors on some smartphones and tablets, but no manufacturer aside from Microsoft puts even Mini DisplayPort on its handheld devices. The locking connector common to full-size DisplayPort connectors, on the other hand, is a great feature that appears on only a few HDMI Type A cables.

The cables

The biggest problem with HDMI cable standards is that there are four of them, all of which were finalized only in 2010. Many, many older cables are not adequately labeled to identify their capabilities. Using an HDMI cable that isn't up to a particular task can yield problems including visual and audio glitches, artifacts, and audio/video synchronization problems. Here are details on the four types of HDMI cables:

• Standard HDMI Cable: Provides sufficient bandwidth for only 720p and 1080i resolution video.

• Standard HDMI Cable with Ethernet: Has the same bandwidth, but adds support for 100-mbps ethernet.
  
• High Speed HDMI Cable: Provides more bandwidth, and can carry video with a resolution of 1080p or higher (up to 4096 by 2160, but at a maximum refresh rate of just 24Hz, which is fine for movies, but terrible for games). This type of cable can also handle 3D video.
  
• High Speed HDMI Cable with Ethernet: Supports the same resolutions as High Speed HDMI Cable, as well as 3D, and adds support for 100-mbps ethernet.

Be sure to buy High Speed HDMI Cable connectors if you intend to send 1080p video from your PC or Blu-ray player to a display (ethernet is optional).

All four types of HDMI cables have a feature called the Audio Return Channel (ARC) that can send the audio from the TV tuner in your HDTV back to your AV receiver. Prior to ARC’s introduction, you needed to connect a second, audio-only cable between your TV and your A/V receiver to play sound from the TV tuner. (Note: ARC is unnecessary if you subscribe to cable or satellite TV and use a set-top box.)
The HDMI specification doesn't define a maximum cable length, nor does it state what type of material HDMI cables should be composed of. Copper wire is the most common material, but HDMI signals can also be run over CAT 5 or CAT 6 cable (for distances of up to 164 feet), over coaxial cable (for up to 300 feet), or over fiber (for more than 328 feet), according to HDMI Licensing LLC.
“Active” HDMI cables have integrated circuits embedded in the cable to amplify the signal. Active cables can be longer and thinner than passive cables (thinner cables are less likely to fail when forced to make hard bends).
DisplayPort cables are much simpler to define: There’s just one type! The current version, DisplayPort 1.2, delivers enough bandwidth to carry video resolutions of up to 3840 by 2160 pixels at a refresh rate of 60Hz, and it supports all common 3D video formats. DisplayPort cables can also carry multichannel digital audio. On the other hand, DisplayPort can’t carry ethernet data, and the standard doesn’t have an audio return channel.

The two types of DisplayPort connectors are Standard and Mini.

With the addition of a simple adapter, a DisplayPort cable can connect a DisplayPort source to a VGA display (which is very useful when you need to connect your laptop to an older video projector). Adapters are also available to connect a DisplayPort source to a single-link DVI or HDMI display. HDMI cables can be connected to a DVI interface, but that’s it.
A passive copper DisplayPort cable can support extremely high data rates (a video resolution of up to 3840 by 2160) over a length of 6.5 feet. If you want to run a passive copper DisplayPort cable as long as 50 feet, the standard says you'll be limited to 1080p resolution—but the spec is conservative, and in practice that 50-foot cable can carry enough data to support resolutions as high as 2560 by 1600 (sufficient for a 30-inch display).
An active copper DisplayPort cable, which draws power from the DisplayPort connector to operate a signal amplifier embedded in the connector, can carry video with a resolution of 2560 by 1600 over a 65-foot cable. Finally, Fiber DisplayPort cables can be hundreds of feet long.

Video and audio streams

HDMI can handle a single video stream and a single audio stream, so it can drive only one display at a time. That’s fine if you use a single monitor or a TV, but many people use more than one display these days. These use cases aren’t limited to stockbrokers keeping one eye on a ticker and the other on news headlines, either. Many gamers use two or more monitors simultaneously. And once you become accustomed to having multiple screens on your desk, you won't want to go back.
A single DisplayPort interface can support up to four monitors at 1920-by-1200-pixel resolution each, or two monitors at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution, with each display receiving independent audio and video streams. And since some GPUs can support multiple DisplayPort interfaces, you can daisy-chain compatible monitors to connect as many as six displays to one source.

Which display interface is best? 

HDMI was designed primarily for consumer-electronics applications: Blu-ray players, TVs, video projectors, and the like. Despite the confusing cable specifications, it does things that DisplayPort can’t. Meanwhile, VESA designed DisplayPort to be the ultimate display interface for computers, so it complements rather than replaces HDMI.
Unfortunately, many computer manufacturers—especially those building consumer laptops and all-in-ones—seem to have decided that HDMI is enough. Here’s hoping that this attitude changes, because DisplayPort offers at least as much to consumers as it does to business users.
HDMI isn't going anywhere, and we wouldn't want it to, but it's time to for computer manufacturers to show DisplayPort some love, too.
In the meantime, here's what you should look for the next time you shop for an HDTV, computer, or monitor:
As we said at the outset, HDMI is ubiquitous. It will appear in just about any TV you might consider buying, and it will be included in every consumer-oriented computer display. It should also be present in most video cards, in laptop and desktop PCs, and (as an input, at least) in every all-in-one PC.
Better desktop displays, desktop PCs, and all-in-one PCs will support DisplayPort in addition to HDMI. Laptops, however, have less real estate available for connectors. For the most part, consumer laptops will provide HDMI, while business-oriented models will support DisplayPort.
If you plan to use a laptop with a stand-alone display, you won't regret paying a little more to get a model that offers DisplayPort: Its support for multiple displays and its ability to connect to nearly any other type of monitor with an inexpensive adapter give it greater flexibility than HDMI possesses.

Download all your facebook data on to your PC

Facebook has added a new download button in your account that will help you move all your data out of Facebook as a zip file. It will have all your photos, videos, status messages, events and everything else that you may have ever uploaded to Facebook.
The process, as demonstrated in the following video, is extremely simple. Just go to your Account Settings page and click the “Download Your Information” link.


 How to download the “missing pieces” If you have been staying away from Facebook all this while because it was a one-way street, now is a good time to reconsider that decision because the data lock-in problem has been solved. There are however some things that you won’t find in the zip file. These include: 1. Your photos uploaded by other people Facebook lets you download stuff that you have uploaded but if there are pictures of you on Facebook that were uploaded by your friends, they won’t be available in the zip. In that case, you should use Fotobounce, an excellent app that can download all the photos where you were tagged with a click. Fotobounce is available on both Mac and Windows. 2. Facebook Phonebook Facebook provides a neatly formatted phonebook with contact numbers all your friends who have shared them on Facebook. You will miss this data in the exported zip but there’s a workaround. Later, you can import this file into Excel or Google Docs, strip the unnecessary text and you again have a nice list of names alongwith phone numbers. Update: Sorry but Facebook seems to have removed the phone book page recently

Dell XPS 12 Review:

When dell first launched their XPS brand—prior to acquiring Alienware—the XPS acronym stood for Xtreme Performance System. (Back then, it was considered really cool to use the letter X, so Extreme becomes Xtreme and we get an X rather than an E—though I suppose we’re not really any better about this in 2013.) The XPS line was Dell’s highest performance line, but over time it started to lose its luster. In 2005, Dell tried to reassert XPS dominance over companies like Alienware and Falcon Northwest, but when they later purchased Alienware the need for the XPS brand became questionable. We had Studio XPS for a bit, then XPS totally disappeared (around 2009), but now it’s back with a new role.
No longer is XPS the top performance consumer brand, as that task falls to Alienware; instead, XPS is a premium consumer line, generally offering better build quality and materials than the Inspiron line and with configurations that straddle the fence between high-end and budget offerings. Some businesses may also opt for XPS systems, as they tend to look a little nicer than the typical business laptops and they should offer similar reliability. Or at least, that’s the theory of it. The reality is that we’ve seen some good XPS offerings since the relaunch, but we’ve also seen some disappointing units with mediocre displays and very little other than appearance to set them apart from the Inspiron line.

Thankfully, that’s not the case with the XPS 12 Duo. Build quality has been generally good of late with the XPS laptops we’ve reviewed, and while there were certainly flaws I found a lot to like in the initial XPS 15 and 15z. The more recent XPS 15was a different matter, as the combination of a 35W quad-core processor with a GT 640M GPU proved to be more than the cooling could handle, and rampant throttling was the result. I thought Dell would eventually address the problem with a BIOS update, but that never came and so the “detailed first look” ended up as the final review.let’s start with the specifications rundown.

Dell XPS 12 Duo Specifications
Processor	Intel i7-3517U (Dual-core 1.90-3.00GHz, 4MB L3, 22nm, 17W)
Chipset	HM76
Memory	8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1333 (9-9-9-24-1T) Note: RAM is soldered onto motherboard
Graphics	Intel HD 4000 (16 EUs, up to 1150MHz)
Display	12.5" Glossy 16:9 1080p (1920x1080) (LG LP125WF1)
Storage	256GB Micron C400 mSATA
Optical Drive	N/A
Networking	802.11n WiFi (Intel Advanced-N 6235) (Dual-band 2x2:2 300Mbps capable) Bluetooth 4.0 (Intel)
Audio	Realtek ALC275 Stereo Speakers Headphone/Microphone combo jack
Battery/Power	4-cell, 8.3V, ~4160mAh, ~47Wh 65W Max AC Adapter
Front Side	N/A
Left Side	Volume Rocker Buttons Power Button Headphone/Microphone Jack Screen Orientation Lock Button
Right Side	1 x USB 3.0 (Powered when Sleeping) 1 x USB 3.0 Mini-DisplayPort AC Power Connection
Back Side	N/A (Exhaust vent located on bottom)
Operating System	Windows 8 64-bit
Dimensions	12.48" x 8.46" x 0.59-0.79" (WxDxH) (317mm x 215mm x 15-20mm)
Weight	3.35 lbs (1.52kg)
Extras	HD Webcam 80-Key Backlit Keyboard
Warranty	1-year limited warranty standard 3-year available ($199 upgrade for "Good" service)
Price	$1199 Base Model (Core i5, 4GB, 128GB SSD) $1699 Tested (Core i7, 8GB, 256GB SSD)

As is so often the case with review units, we have the top-end model of the XPS 12 Duo in house for review. That means we get an i7-3517U processor, 8GB RAM (4GB soldered onto the motherboard), and a 256GB SSD. As mentioned already, Dell is also using a 12.5” 1080p IPS display, which is one of the standout items of the spec sheet. Overall, the specs match up pretty well against the Acer S7; the major differences are the battery capacity (Dell has 34% more battery capacity), I/O ports (Dell doesn’t have any sort of flash memory reader), and the dimensions. Not surprisingly, the XPS 12 Duo is closer to the maximum dimensions Intel allows with a sub-14” Ultrabook, but the hybrid tablet aspect and other elements could very well make up for the increased thickness.
The base model of the XPS 12 Duo starts at $1200 and comes with an i5-3317U, 4GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD. Pricing is usually a major factor when people are shopping for a new laptop, and $1200 is likely a lot higher than most will be willing to pay. That’s going to be a problem, and we would expect a system carrying a price like this to basically get every element right, which is unfortunately not the case. The various upgrades that are available only make the situation worse. For $200 more, Dell will sell you an i7-3517U with 8GB RAM, $1500 will get you the i5-3317U with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD, or you can get the whole enchilada (like our review system) for “only” $1700. Yikes!
I’m not sure why companies insist on trying to milk their customers like this, but frankly there’s no point in even offering a 4GB model at this stage; we’re talking about $27 for 2x2GB compared to $45 for 2x4GB at retail, and with a starting price well north of $1000 we expect 8GB standard. Dell also looks to be charging roughly $250 for the 256GB SSD upgrade; granted, compact SSDs are more expensive than 2.5” models, but a new 256GB mSATA SSD will generally cost less than $300 and a 128GB model is under $150, so we’d like the upgrade cost to be closer to $100. And rounding out the pricing the CPU upgrade is also a premium charge, since Intel quotes $225 for the i5 compared to $346 for the i7 (and there’s no way Dell is paying anywhere near those prices).
As much as there is to like with the XPS 12 Duo, I find myself at the same conclusion I came to with the Acer S7: this is a good Ultrabook, but who is going to pay Apple prices (or even higher than Apple prices) for Dell hardware? Apple has built a premium brand name over the years and their user base is willing to support their prices, but there simply aren’t any Apple compatible laptops (unless you want to try and make your own Hackintosh/HackBook). In the Windows world, alternatives are a dime a dozen, so you can’t get away with the same premiums even if you’re making premium hardware. My gut feeling is that the XPS 12, like the S7, is priced about $200 too high on the base model, and about $400 too high for the top configuration we’re reviewing. But if we just ignore pricing for a bit, how does the XPS 12 fare in day-to-day use?