Dorothy’s magical ruby slippers took her home if she clicked her heels thrice and repeated, “There’s no place like home.” While this pair of shoes by Steven Rodrig won’t take you home no matter how many times you click your heels, it’s the pair that all geek girls who have a passion for data will want to have. Not because they want to wear it or anything (because it looks incredibly painful if they were to do so) but because they just want to marvel at the awesomeness of it.
Steven used old printed circuit boards from discarded computers and electronics to create this unique pair. He’s actually well known for his PCB art, and these shoes dubbed as “There’s No Data Like Home” have been featured numerous times. In fact, it was displayed at an exhibit recently in New York before Steven finally decided to part with it and listed it on his Etsy shop.
There’s No Data Like Home sold for $350 a couple of days ago. If you missed out, then you might want to check out Steven’s other PCB creations at his Etsy store.
VIA [ Red Ferret ]
As Bitcoins have become more valuable, they've also become much harder to accumulate using the mathematical process known as "mining." This air of futility hasn't fazed ASRock, however, as the company has revealed two new motherboards that promise to help DIY-ers to "join the gold rush now!" The H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC are both Intel socket boards, with the latter being Haswell compatible, and their main party trick is to carry extra PCIe slots and power connectors so you can exploit the compute power of up to six graphics cards simultaneously.
What ASRock doesn't specify, however, is how much profit one of its fully-loaded mining motherboards might deliver. So, although we're quite deliberately not experts at this stuff (aside from a bit of armchair interest), we plugged some numbers into the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator, based on six Radeon HD 7990 cards running in parallel, and discovered that this monster of a system might never actually break even, due to its ridiculously high energy costs. This could well explain why all the big boys use dedicated ASIC boards for mining these days, instead of consumer-grade hardware.
Filed under: Desktops
Via: Bit-tech
Source: ASRock [1], [2]
The ink is still fresh on Intel's formal blessing of Thunderbolt 2, and as promised, there's already a product on the market from perennial early bird ASUS. The Z87-Deluxe/Quad ATX is the first motherboard to pack the tech, which combines four of the original 10Gbps Thunderbolt channels into two bi-directional 20Gbps ports. That's four times the speed of USB 3.0 if you're keeping score at home, allowing two 4K displays to be driven at once, or faster-than-SATA-6 SSD speeds, for instance. Otherwise, it's as well-equipped as you'd expect from a bleeding edge mainboard, with 4th-gen Intel (Haswell) CPU support, 10 SATA-6 ports, 8 USB 3.0 ports, and 3 PCIe 3.0/2.0 x 16 slots. There's no pricing or availability yet, though Thunderbolt-equipped motherboards tend to be expensive. Still, if you wear the "early adopter" name-tag with pride, hit the PR after the break.
Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals, ASUS
Via: Legit Reviews
The ink is still fresh on Intel's formal blessing of Thunderbolt 2, and as promised, there's already a product on the market from perennial early bird ASUS. The Z87-Deluxe/Quad ATX is the first motherboard to pack the tech, which combines four of the original 10Gbps Thunderbolt channels into two bi-directional 20Gbps ports. That's four times the speed of USB 3.0 if you're keeping score at home, allowing two 4K displays to be driven at once, or faster-than-SATA-6 SSD speeds, for instance. Otherwise, it's as well-equipped as you'd expect from a bleeding edge mainboard, with 4th-gen Intel (Haswell) CPU support, 10 SATA-6 ports, 8 USB 3.0 ports, and 3 PCIe 3.0/2.0 x 16 slots. There's no pricing or availability yet, though Thunderbolt-equipped motherboards tend to be expensive. Still, if you wear the "early adopter" name-tag with pride, hit the PR after the break.
Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals, ASUS
Via: Legit Reviews
After winning yesterday's Corsair Overclocking competition at Computex, the same folks were brought over to ASUS' ROG event earlier today, where they overclocked an Intel Haswell Core i7-4770K from its typical 3.5GHz to a staggering 6.88GHz -- just a tad less than yesterday's 6.98GHz -- on an ASUS Maximus VI Extreme motherboard. As a bonus, the DRAM frequency was also pushed to 4.1GHz, which is believed to be the fastest yet on Haswell. As usual, the overclockers poured liquid nitrogen onto the chip every now and then to keep it cool, thus giving us the above photo opportunity.
