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Raspberry Pi's new turbo mode boosts performance by roughly 50 percent, doesn't void warranties
Giving a Raspberry Pi extra voltage is a quick way to squeeze out additional processing power and void its warranty, but the folks behind the tinker-friendly board have devised a turbo mode that boosts performance by roughly 50 percent while keeping warranties intact. After studying the effects of temperature and voltage on the hardware's lifespan, the team found that dynamic overclocking and overvolting doesn't affect the Pi's health appreciably. As a result, speeds can be pushed from 700MHz to 1GHz only when additional horsepower is needed, and things are reined back in when the CPU grazes 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius). Benchmarks show the extra computing oomph makes the Pi 52 percent faster on integer, 64 percent speedier on floating point and 55 percent snappier on memory tasks. The new mode is available in the latest firmware update, which also includes temperature and frequency widgets, better analog audio, improved USB performance and support for WiFi dongles out of the box. For the technical nitty-gritty and more details on the upgrade, hit the source link below.
MSI GT780 GX rumored specs appear online
There's no official word about this laptop, and if any of you are caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge. Still, you can't stop a good rumor, which is why details have emerged about a supercharged edition of MSI's GT780DX that dials the original hardware up to 11. The GTI 780GX has a 17.3-inch 1600 x 900 display (with the option to boost it to 1920 x 1080) and weighs a workout-worthy 3.85kg. Justifying that heft is a Core i7 Extreme Edition 2920XM CPU which'll hit 4.16GHz in Turbo mode, thanks to a "Cooler Boost" heat-sink that'll stop the laptop from singeing your flares. Paired up with such a meaty chip is 16GB of DDR3 RAM, a GeForce GTX570M (itself with 3GB of DDR5 inside) and space for two (two!) HDDs that each hold up to 750GB. You'll also get a Steelseries gaming keyboard, THX Sound and a 9-cell battery. Given that the laptop doesn't officially exist yet, there's no word on pricing or availability but we'll keep our eyes peeled.
Opera 11.10 launched with company's 'most expensive ad ever'
Opera has always been the little browser that could, and the company is now embracing that spirit more than ever with its new ad campaign for the just-released Opera 11.10. To that end, it's launched a new ad campaign that it proudly boasts is its most expensive ever -- a record-setting $8,517.26, including a hefty $1,500 that they splurged on some "trendy Swedish clothes." Of course, the browser itself is the real story here and, while it's an incremental upgrade, it does boast a few fairly big new features, including support for Google's new WebP image format, a "SpeedDial" for your favorite websites, and a turbo mode that promises to compress and load web pages faster when you're on a slow connection. Just how does that work? We'll let Opera's Christen Krogh explain in the no-expenses-spared video after the break.
Intel Nehalem processor gets "turbo mode," blinking red lights
Well, one of the two at least. As Extreme Tech reports, Intel let out word of the hereto unheard of "turbo mode" for its Nehalem Core i7 processors at its big Intel Developer Forum this week, with it describing it as an "entirely new process technology for power." More specifically, the mode, or so-called "power gate," turns off cores that would otherwise be left idle when they're not in use, and reroutes the power budget that normally would be applied to those cores to the active cores, which promises to further boost their performance without wasting power. According to Intel, that'll be a standard feature across the entire Nehalem family, including the first mobile versions of the processor that'll be at the center of the Calpella platform, which is on track for a launch sometime next year.[Via PC Magazine]
How-to overclock your Nintendo DS
If you've gotten just a little too good at your Nintendo DS games and are looking for more of a challenge -- and also looking to void your warranty -- now there's a way to hack your console for making everything run almost twice as fast. A Japanese modder has just posted step-by-step directions (in Japanese, unfortunately) for re-wiring a DS Lite to perform at a claimed 1.7x speed, complete with a toggle switch in case you decide that turbo mode isn't appropriate for all occasions. It looks like you have to be pretty handy with a soldering iron to tackle this particular project, so if you've got the skillz and about four hours to waste on tinkering around with your DS's sensitive circuitry, then accelerated performance -- and funny-sounding audio -- will be your reward.[Via Maxconsole]
