Android: getting rid of old apps

I absolutely love that Google let's you get rid of apps that you no longer use from your apps list. I always found it incredibly irritating that my apps list was full of things that were no longer relevant, crappy or, let's face it, just plain embarrassing. You know what am talking about. Those random apps you get just for the hell of it when your still wrapped in the excitement of having your first smart phone. Or those moments your feeling a bit cheeky while browsing the Play store. Or...

いやいやいや

Gonna end up going of topic at this rate.

OK so the point is this. I finally decided that I was gonna clean up my apps list. When I initially heard that you could do this it was ages ago and they only mentioned doing it from the phone. So I thought "hmm by now am sure you can do through desktop." Apparently not.
And I honestly can't understand why.
I spent like 2 to 3 hours on my phone removing all the apps I wanted to.
And to make matters worse after you remove an app the list has to refresh and your sent all the way back to the top of the list.
Am curious why they didn't make it possible to do it in bulk. Select all the apps you don't want and the get rid of them in one swing....like an Axe to the face.
I ended up making a game of it using Battery Widget? Reborn!
How many apps can I remove for every percent my battery drops. My personal best was 5 \m/.
It would be nice if they made this process easier and am sure there's loads of people that would appreciate it.
To those that don't go through a lot of apps or have already cleaned their list up its just a matter of doing it regularly from now on or whenever needed.
If you haven't cleaned it up yet and the extra apps bother you like they do with me then um....good luck

Xbox 720 to be released fall next year.

Finally! We start seeing news of what the new consoles are gonna be like.

So the thing I find most interesting about the info that's been released is the new Xbox's graphics card.
According to what I've read the card that's gonna be used is gonna be something similar to the AMD Radeon 6670. This means that buy the time the Xbox 720 comes out its hardware is already gonna be from the previous generation, seeing as the 7000 series AMD cards are gonna be coming out this year.
The other thing is that the 6670 is a mid-range card. most PC games on the market can't even be maxed out by this card. Its less powerful than then the card in my rig which is gonna be 3+ years old by the time the Xbox comes out.

Despite this they say that the Xbox 720 is gonna have 6 times the processing power of its predecessor. Well i guess that's not much of a surprise considering how old the 360 is.
This may sound like am putting it down before its even out but trust me am not. In fact am a little jealous.
I'm a PC guy and i will be for life. The hardware on PC is better, they're easier to customize, and in my opinion nothing beats a mouse and keyboard when playing an FPS. Problem with the PC is its so damn inefficient.

Since every Xbox 720 is identical this makes coding and optimization a lot easier when building a game for a console, you don't have to worry about the infinite number of possible configurations the game has to run on.
So yeah PC's have better hardware and games look better and run faster on PC, but the what console developers can do despite there limited hardware is simply amazing. I can't even imagine what would be possible if that level of optimization was possible on the PC.

Anyway enough of that. Back to the Xbox 720.
The new hardware means we're finally gonna see DX11 on consoles.
and its looking like the 720 is also gonna have multiple displays support. To be honest i have no idea how they plan on implementing this in a console. With PC most people play on relatively small monitors so lining up 2 or 3 isn't such a big deal (well, if you have the cash that is). but most of the time, at least from what I've seen, consoles are played on TV's....big ones and usually in a space like a living room. Having multiple TV's seems a bit off for consoles but i guess we'll see.
Sticking with the visual side of things, it will be 3D capable and will be outputting at 1080p.

Seems like the Xbox is also getting a Blu-ray drive, which totally makes sense. Seeing as games only seem to be getting bigger they are gonna need the extra storage space if they wanna avoid have one game span over multiple discs. It'll be 2013, buying games that span over multiple discs would just be lame.

Am looking forward to the next-gen Xbox and am excited to see what games are gonna look like on it. Not sure what they were going for with multiple display support but maybe they'll make it interesting. Though i'll have to admit, unless the exclusives i play stop being exclusives, outright defect or stop being made, am probably gonna hold out for the PS4.

Source: IGN

Alienware!! y u no customize!?!?

I used to love Alienware PC's, and when one of my friends got one i was seriously jealous, but that was a long time ago. There was a time when Alienware were the go to people if you wanted an insane high end gaming computer but didn't want to build it yourself. Not anymore.

After Dell took over, slowly but surely, the things that used to make me lust over one began to disappear.
To be honest, when i heard that 3 high level employees left Alienware to start their own custom PC brand (Origin), i stopped paying attention entirely.

Alienwares new X51 desktop got me a little curious. so i decided to go back to check them out. It was disappointing. I can understand that they are trying to make PC gaming cheaper and more accessible to normal people. That's a good thing, the X51 is so limited now. Not to mention how expensive it is considering you can build a PC that's way more powerful for a similar (see here). I'll admit am looking at this from the perspective of a gamer that can build their own machine and is obsessed with customization, which makes me the total opposite of the target buyer but i still think they could have done better.

I decided to check out their top of the range system, the Aurora. This machine can cost you over to $3,000 fully tricked out so it has to be a beast, right? Well not exactly the product page does talk of hex-core processors and dual GPU graphics solutions but that doesn't seem to be  the case. They do indeed have the new Sandy Bridge-E Hex core processors but the Aurora is seriously lacking in graphics area.

Now the GTX 560 Ti is a great card, no really, but how can it be the ONLY graphics solution available?
You can't even decide to have two of them. You pay 3,000 bucks and get one GTX 560 Ti, that's it! The system configuration i posted in the link above will play games better than the Aurora and it costs a little over a third the price!

I just realized something while typing this....
The Aurora was never Alienware's top of the range system. That position was held by the Area-51. Wait, wait wait. The Area-51 is gone and now they have the X51. This is depressing.

they replaced this

(source)

for this!

(source)

it you got the time, then watch this video.
THAT is what i expect to see when i here the name Alienware.
The X51 is a cool option for the average person that isn't a hardcore gamer and wants an experience that's closer to what you'd get with a console.
If they sold that alongside the now unavailable Area-51 that would be cool, but it looks like Alienware is losing touch with what it built its name on. The customization and and extreme configurations that made their systems so popular are now gone.

I honestly can't see why a serious gamer would or hardware enthusiast would even consider buying one anymore. Which sucks because if you aren't a serious gamer or hardware enthusiast then you shouldn't be paying this kind of money for a system in the first place.

AMD 7970 announced!

So this is something i found that got me a little excited. Mostly because if i do upgrade my rig any time soon this will probably be the card that will replace my GTX 480.

The stock clock on this card is 925Mhz and it'll probably go over the 1Ghz mark with a decent overclock. According to the AMD site the card will also be coming with a massive 3GB of dedicated memory and memory bandwidth has gone up 88GB/s compared to the 6970 to accommodated the storage. Stream processors are at a beefy 2048.

The main thing that am concerned about right now though is heat and power usage. Being a card with a 28nm GPU its expected that it will improve in these area's compared to its predecessors, at least when compared to performance. AMD claims it will run under 300W at load and, yeah, 3W at idle. this is a huge deal for me considering my current card is a serious power hog.

The performance figures i've seen so far look pretty good and overall it seems like a decent card, the only problem now being the price. AMD/ATI cards have always had a significant advantage in terms of price as compared to cards from Nvidia. But the 7970 has an MSRP of $549 which is $200 more than the 6970 when it cam out. Depending on what on the performance of the next-gen of Nvidia cards, (assuming their prices don't go up too) it might be a lot harder to make a choice about whether to stick with Nvidia or go with AMD than I originally thought.

if you'd like to find out more about the card you can check
the AMD site
or
WSGF

My current setup.

Originally started out this blog to keep track of my progress as I built my custom computer. By the time I started building though I totally forgot that i made the blog in the first place, so that all went to hell.

Aaanyway...

Though my rig has change a few times since I first completed it, thought it would probably be  good idea to log the changes its been through and post a few pics....yay!

ok, so here we go!

Case:

Started of with a CM H.A.F 932 cause it was huge!!!! it had great airflow and gave me a reasonable amount of fan configuration options.

Replaced that with the H.A.F X mostly cause it had fan filters now, a more showy side panel window and the black interior.

Inside the case:

-Asus P6T Deluxe v2 X58 motherboard

-Intel i7 920 Processor (was overclocked to 4.0Ghz but got lazy with manually setting voltages at some point and now it won't overclock so am stuck at stock speeds, there's a very important lesson in there somewhere)

-6GB of corsair 1600Mhz memory (did start out with, 1333Mhz Memory but i over clocked those and one burnt out still have the other 2 sticks though.)

-LG blu-ray combo drive (almost  never use this and to be honest i can't wait until all our media like movies games etc. are sold on flash memory....like the PlayStation Vita!)

-Nvidia GTX 480 from E.V.G.A (started out with an Asus HD5870 which was amazing, then i added an Asus 9800GT for dedicated PhysX, which was kinda annoying with an AMD primary card. lent out the 9800GT, should probably get that back)

-Antec TruePower Quattro 1200W(which i love!). Started out with a Thermaltake Evo_blu 750W Power supply which worked perfect with my setup, OC'd CPU, OC'd GPU and OC'd PhysX card. then when i got the replaced the 5870 with the GTX480 my PC would only boot wih stock , and crash with any heavy usage.

-WD 500GB Caviar Black system HDD, WD 500GB Caviar Blue "game install" HDD

-Swithed out my CM v8 CPU fan cooler for a water cooling system.

-Scythe Kaze Master Ace bay Fan Controller.

Water loop:

Swifttech MCP665

Swiftech Apogee XT

Swiftech MCR320

EKWB mosfet and X58 Motherboard blocks

EKWB EK-bay spin reservoir 

outside the case:

Logitech G9 mouse

Logitech G110 Keyboard

Logitech G35 headset ( <3 )

Belkin n52te game-board

Asus VW246H screen

Wireless Xbox 360 controller for PC

And that's my rig as of now.
Hopefully i can update my system soon with all the new hardware that recently come out or is coming out soon. we shall see （　＾▽＾）

Denoobification: Comparing graphics cards spec for spec.....its a little complicated.

So this is something i used to do when i was still new to the subject and i see a lot of people asking about in forums. Something along the lines of someone asking if they are better off going with the graphics card that has a faster clock or more Unified Shader. Or asking whats most important to pay attention to with graphics specs.
unfortunately its not that simple, and am gonna try and explain why in the following post.

There are a lot of factors that can affect how a graphics card performs and its the combination of those factors that determines the overall performance of any card. Lets start of with the core clock for example. Assuming we are comparing two cards from the same manufacturer card a) has a core clock of 500MHz and card b) has a 550MHz.
Now with just this we begin to assume that card b) is more powerful than card a) since the core clock is 50MHz faster,right?

Now, lets add another factor and see how that affects things.
Shader cores. In a situation where both cards have the same amount amount of shader cores then the situation pretty much just stays the same.

Now lets make things a little more complicated. Now card a) has 1000 shader cores and card b) has 750 shader cores. So in this scenario even though its the core clock on card b) is higher, its actually card a) that is gonna give us better performance as it has more shader cores and the shader cores are what actually do the grunt of the work.

so these are the stats so far. with card a) being more powerful than b)

                     Card A)      Card B
Core Clock         500         550
Shader Cores    1000         750

Shaders have their own clock speeds too, so if we take that into about the the table might look something a bit more like this-


                     Card A)      Card B
Core Clock         500         550
Shader Cores    1000         750

Shader Clock      500         550

Notice how the the shader and core clocks are the same? Thats because the shader clock is based of of the core clocks, they are linked. 

This hasn't changed anything so far, card a) is still more powerful than b).

Now, though the shader and core clocks are linked, this doesn't always mean that the two clocks are the always the same. Nvidia, for example, always has a shader clock that is 2x its core clock. 

Applying this now to card a) and b), if we take card a) as an AMD/ATI card and card b) as a Nvidia card, this is what the stats might look like.

                     Card A)      Card B
Core Clock         500          550
Shader Cores    1000          750

Shader Clock      500         1100

In this case card b) comes up on top again.

Moving away from the actual GPU there are a lot of other things that can affect the performance of a graphics card.

Having larger amounts of dedicated graphics memory will really help performance when using very large textures on a 30" screen, BUT, this is only if the bandwidth of the memory bus is large enough to allow access to all of that memory quickly. If it isn't then i down't matter how much more memory the graphics card has available.

Beyond the specs you'll find on the manufacturers website or on the product box, the architecture of the GPU itself can also greatly affect the performance of the card as well.

So considering all the variables the best way to really determine what between two cards or more, which one performs better is to run real world tests with games or other programs related to what you wanna do with the cards. Which is what review sites usually do. Even then its not it not uncommon that a clear winner can't be decided and it ends up coming down to preference. Especially when both options are beyond what is really required.

Denoobification: Video Card Specs

When looking at graphics/video card performance there are a loot of different factors that come into play.
A gonna be using this post to explain the basics of graphics card specifications and how they relate to performance.

Core Clock(MHz):
The speed (or number of cycles per second) at which the actual GPU runs.
having a higher Core clock usually means that the card will run faster but this isn't always the case as i will explain later.


Unified Shaders:
This refers to the actual number of unified shaders that are within the GPU.
CUDA Cores (nvidia) and Stream Processors (AMD/ATI) is just the why the manufactures have decided to name their own versions of the unified shader architecture. In older cards vertex, pixel and geometry processing was done in separate dedicated processors. With Unified shader architecture each individual CUDA core or Stream Processor can be programmed to do any of the processes. This makes the architecture a lot more flexible and efficient.
In a situation where all other specs are the same having more unified shaders will result in a higher performing graphics card.....until some sort of bottleneck is reached.


CUDA Core/Stream Processors Clock(MHz):
This is the speed at which the unified shaders in the GPU run.
As you've probably guessed higher numbers higher does also translate to better performance assuming all other specs stay the same.

Memory(MB): This is quite simply the amount of dedicated graphics memory that comes on the graphics card.


Memory Clock(MHz): 
This is the frequency at which the memory on the graphics card operates.
Together with the memory bus width (or memory interface width) this can be used to calculate the rate at which data can be transferred between the memory itself and the GPU.

Memory Bus Width(bit): 
The memory bus functions as the connection between the GPU and the and the graphics cards memory. The memory bus width basically descibes how wide the bus is in terms of bits. The wider the memory bus, the larger the theoretical bandwidth and therefore the more data flow though at any one time.

Memory Bandwidth(MB/s):
The theoretical maximum speed at which data can be transferred thought the memory bus per second.

So that's it! Now I can't stress enough how pointless it can be to compare the specifications two different graphics cards in order to determine which one is the best. Yes it does help and it can be interesting but ultimately how the cards perform in real life situations is what matters.

If you wanna know why directly comparing stats can be pointless check here.