blowtorch

Latest

  • I tried to beat an overclocking robot and failed

    by 
    Richard Lai
    Richard Lai
    06.27.2018

    Extreme overclocking is hard. I had my first taste of this delicate hobby at last year's Computex, in which, with a lot of back and forth between pouring liquid nitrogen and torching, I managed to push Intel's 4.2GHz Core i7-7700K processor to an epic 7GHz. Still, I had it easy. Professional overclockers from G.SKILL and HWBOT had set everything up in the first place. Even the pros can find this all a little mundane. EVGA's Vince "Kingpin" Lucido and Illya "Tin" Tsemenko are well-known for their GPU-overclocking records over the years, but they, too, grew tired of the tedious "monkey work," to the point where they decided to build a rig that could overclock itself. The result is the Roboclocker, a PC that can intelligently and efficiently pump liquid nitrogen to both its CPU and GPU. While this may not be the first automatic liquid-nitrogen-overclocking rig, it's the first of its kind to actually break records.

  • MMObility: MUDing on the go and a new Android castle-builder

    by 
    Beau Hindman
    Beau Hindman
    06.01.2012

    In this week's column, I wanted to give you a few mobile options to fill your time. The mobile market is anything but devoid of content or new games to explore. In fact, the problem is often finding games or apps of quality, something worth passing along in one of my columns. Often I search out different games or apps and vet them a bit, and sometimes I just grab the first thing that I find. This week I have two great apps for those who play MUDs, and one game that, honestly, I have seen many times before and often in ways that were better designed. But I'll still give them all some time on my Android phone to see just how they pan out in the long run. My patience might grow a bit thin, though. That's another benefit of the mobile market: if you're not satisfied with a new game or app you find, there are literally thousands more to choose from. It's a cut-throat world of competition.