Seeing as Dave, DD and myself are avid readers, I though I'd post what I'm reading and see what happens.

Just finished Jeremy Clarkson's 'how hard can it be?'. A book of his Sunday Times articles. Lots of ranting at the world.

Just started a SciFi novel called 'the departure' by Neal Asher. I think this is his 12th novel; all good. If you've not heard of him then get 'gridlinked', his 1st novel.

Feel free to put recommendations.

I've been sitting in front of the computer now for about 15 minutes, trying to put my thoughts and feelings into words, over the death of Ray Bradbury. One thing that shocks me is that I only just heard about his passing this evening, from a friend of mine who isn't even into reading, let alone reading SciFi. Ray Bradbury was (still is, darn it! Death be damned!) one of my all time favorite authors. The man really knew how to "paint" with words the most stunning images, and knew, too, how to bring a story to life. Some of his works frightened me, not because of how graphically he described things, but more because of how plausible the scenarios he described were. I've thought on more than one occasion that, not for someone, somewhere in the past making the right decision, the world he described could well be real! Mr. Bradbury was a man that I admired, and was one of many who lead me to embrace the genre of Science Fiction literature. I'm gonna miss the old bastage.

http://www.raybradbury.com/

And now the unforgettable part of the soundtrack:

The Paperphone:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13308452

For Snowcrash and anyone else that might be interested.

The ATI HD4890 is a large 256bit card that under full load draws quite a lot of power, to help get over the high power consumption, particularly when the card is at idle, it automatically underclocks its GPU but it doesn't underclock the memory, that is a little unfortunate as the RAM requires plenty of power to run at its default speed of 975Mhz.

So how much power can we save using the ATI Tray tool and underclocking both the GPU and RAM to a speed that will be fast enough for every day mundane PC tasks including full HD video playback in Windows 7.

The answer is 46 Watts.

NOTES:
The power readings are for the entire PC (tower case).
The readings are at idle, no heavy graphics application was running.
The canter reading was the card automatically underclockling its self.

Not exactly astronomy but pics taken by satellites.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/06/01/dating-an-active-volcano-and-i-dont-mean-metaphorically/

Don't forget to look at the slide show further down the page.

I've been experimenting with the speed of my CPU, wanted to see how slow I could run it but still have enough CPU power to do the every day mundane tasks in Windows. (Not gaming)

Why?
To save power and money, make less heat and at the same time maybe extend the life of my PC.

I successfully got it to run as low as 1.2Ghz @0.85 volts, but at that speed there were signs of a slow down, the worst was in media Center where the PC couldn't successfully keep the video playback of HD content running smoothly.

I have ended up with a core speed of 1.6Ghz (roughly) and a core voltage of 0.96V, at this speed the PC seems to run almost as quick as default, not really any noticeable slowdown and HD video playback is perfectly smooth.

I have achieved this underclock by setting the multiplier to 6 instead of 8 (the default) and then reducing the FSB until I got to 1.6Ghz.

Then reducing the CPU voltage to a stable place.

Then reducing the RAM voltage to a stable place also.


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