A Few Sites Worth Reading

There's thousands of articles out there worth reading, so today, we would like to bring you roundup of just few for your enjoyment.

Maximum PC reports that researchers have created a 1Gbps network using red and green handheld AAA battery-powered laser pointers. How cool is that! It took around $600 worth of kit to do it and should keep any hardcore geek happy for days simply for the novelty of it.

bjorn 3D has reviewed the Western Digital VelociRaptor and found it to be a worthy high quality hard disc drive and very fast. However, it's priced very high and is easily outgunned by SSDs now, with which it competes. Solid state electronics are inherently faster than a spinning mechanical drive - it's old tech versus new - so it looks like the days of this kind of performance drive are numbered. This drive might perhaps be best suited in something like a web server that has to run 24/7, otherwise it's hard to make a business case for buying it, when compared to SSDs.

Ars Technica has reported on a study which reckons that ignoring your email for five days leads to lower stress levels and greater productivity. I hardly think so and there are many jobs, including mine, where email is an integral part of the job. Looks like someone wanted funding for running a "study".

Maximum PC again, this time waxing lyrical about the potential for CPU-based graphics to kill off the discrete graphics card market at the low end now that Intel's Ivy Bridge "good enough" graphics are here. There's also an uncomfortable quote regarding the high end graphics card market:

Financial analyst Jack Gold chimed in on the press release to drive the point home. "Extreme gamers who want very powerful graphics cards are in a niche market already, and it's shrinking," he says. "For 95 percent of the folks out there, integrated graphics will be what they want."

Ouch. Hope it's not true about the shrinking enthusias market and it doesn't bode well for extreme graphics cards like the £850 NVIDIA GTX 690 does it? (Yes, I want one, no, I'm not getting it).

ExtremeTech asks the question"Does Ivy Bridge replace discrete video cards for gaming?" and in general the answer is no, although the author, Matthew Murray, acknowledges others' enthusiasm for IB graphics. He then goes on to review an i7-3770K using its built in graphics and finds it pretty wanting. He also has this rather satisfying paragraph in the article:

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m very anti–integrated graphics and have been for decades. Ever since I witnessed the wonder that EGA and VGA cards wrought on late-1980s/early-1990s computer games, I’ve insisted on having a discrete card in every system I buy or build for myself. (I felt, and feel, the same way about sound cards, but that’s a separate discussion.) But even if you believe that on-board video is somehow acceptable under specific circumstances, you should have your head examined if the idea crosses your mind — even for only a moment — that it’s somehow able to play games in a satisfying way.

Yup, time to wheel the shrink out!

That's it for this roundup. I'd like to thank our great techngaming forum members for these excellent suggestions. Please keep them coming!