DFI nForce 680i LT SLI

DFI, Diamond Flower Inc. or Design For Innovation – whatever you like best – has just launched a long anticipated motherboard, the DFI LanParty UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R. This, the latest motherboard in the LanParty series, is designed to support Intel latest processors, including the all mighty Core 2 Extreme QX6700. But what really surprises me is that DFI chose the NF680i LT SLI chipset instead of the full featured NF680i SLI. As many of you should know, DFI´s LanParty series is built from scratch thinking on high end gamers and overclockers. What DFI did here was just skipping the reference 680i LT board – the one that eVGA, ECS, Biostar and XFX offer – and design their own motherboard, this is why it includes a third “long” PCI-Express that runs at 8x for some physics love. Oskar Wu and the rest of the LanParty team at Taiwan also dropped in third party controllers (Sil 3132 for SATA ports and VT6307 for Firewire) to complete the features the high end and fully featured NF680i SLI motherboards include. They chose a digital PWM for overclocking pleasure that keeps the socket free of obstacles for your big ass heatsink, dry ice/liquid nitrogen tube or phase change evaporator. In short words, DFI built a motherboard using a mild chipset and tweaked it to the extreme.

In the future I´ll tell you about a job offer I got from DFI USA about 18 months ago. I finally didn´t accept but it´s an anecdote worth telling.

My Asus Notebook is Dying

A while ago, I bought a used Asus M5N notebook. I love this computer, is light as a feather and it´s enough for browsing, email, FTP and even video encoding (not too fast but it does the trick). But one day, a deadly vertical pixel line went off. This was the beginning of the end, the 1px thick line starting growing to 2px and now it´s about 10px wider. I´m sure it will continue growing and one day I won´t be able to see anything. I might build a Car-PC setup when the time comes, until then I´ll stick to it! 12 inch notebooks – or sub-notebooks – are quite expensive and I have no plans in getting something bigger. A portable computer is a portable computer, for gaming I can use a desktop.

Bob has a review on the Thinkpad X60 Tablet PC, that´s definitely my dream computer. I´m a huge fan of the Thinkpad series, they are extremely tough and loyal. What a pity it´s way out of my budget…

Traffic Monday

As I´ve seen with our other websites, weekends are usually a little slower in traffic. I´m not sure if this is just for our type of websites, technology news and reviews, or if this is something common for all sites and weblogs. My hypothesis is that people browse a lot at work, when they should be working, this way they can keep their weekends for themselves and their families.

On the other side, Mondays are always our best traffic days. With Tuesdays and Wednesdays, this are our best days and cover almost half of our week´s traffic. I wonder if this stays the same for weblogs, I´ve seen people don´t really post during weekends, and do it more during weekdays. Let´s see if in this weblog the pattern stays the same.

Shawn “OCIA Agent” Knight

Shawn Knight is one of the brave internet entrepeneurs who let their normal life go, so they could put all their efforts on their internet carrer. He dropped school so he could work 24/7 on his hardware review website: OCIA.net. ¿24/7? Trust me, 24/7, the man does not sleep, if he is not playing with the latest hardware, he is taking pictures around campus or enjoying his latest hobbie: blogging.

His blog is quite nice, even though I don´t love his left column – the background color is not the best for reading the categories – the rest is just perfect. He updates his blog two, three, even four or five times a day and he features an award winning picture in his header, his friend took at a Football game.

You can find a lot of pictures taken with his new Nikon D80, and also a lot of PWNAGE pictures you can use to play around at your favorite discussion forum. This is definitely a blog you have to visit before even dreaming about making an internet – content based – carrer.

He is right now running a “review my blog – get a backlink” campaign and for the comments his blog has, he has a pretty nice traffic base. You might want to give it a try and pump up your lonely website/blog just like I did

The hardware site – weblog scene

I´ve met some really cool people over the internet. You can check them on their blogs. They all relate with each other, just by being friends, colleagues or even competing hardware sites. The cool thing is, that at the end of the day, the all can join for some luch and have a great time.

Bob Buskirk
Bob runs Think Computers, a hardware review website which seems pretty new, but he looks to be doing quite well. At least it´s what he does for a living. He is working a lot in his site and working a lot is always good, he just has to be patient for the ROI to come. I met him at Antec´s suite at Las Vegas, but didn´t know who he was until I came across his blog.

Stephen Fung
I knew Stephen at China, he runs Futurelooks and a new startup tech blog called MEGATechNews. I knew him when ECS invited me to a Factory Tour at Shenzhen and invited him too. He loves photography so much he even got us in problems for a minute or two at China. A tip for visiting China: Never point your telezoom to a toll booth.

John Chow
John Chow, is a known guy in the weblog scene. He became an internet celebrity after reaching a great Technorati rating and getting dugg a zillion times. I read his blog before he was famous, but for now I´m just one of the thousands who read him everyday. I knew him at China too, he is a really funny guy and some say, he is the root of all evil. BTW you might want to check his “Make Money Online” section and if you review his blog, you will get a nice chubby backlink.

Shawn Knight
Just like with Bob, I saw Shawn before I knew he was. I saw him partying around at the OCZ Overclockfest at the Bellagio during CES 2007. He is doing one hell of a job updating his weblog at least twice a day and running OCIA.net. Check it out

Cameron Wilmot
He hasn´t updated his blog for a while, although his website, TweakTown is doing great. He is living in Taiwan, so he is just in the middle of all the action, and every time in a while gets to review things nobody has or that aren´t even launched.

PS:  Video of Video Prohibido de Primer Plano

Looking for a new cellphone

I´ve been looking for a new cellphone for some time now. I have a Nokia 6620, which is a quite nice phone, although a little bit old and definitely big. I´ve been checking a lot my e-mail account with my phone, so I´m really tempted to look for a phone with a QWERTY keyboard. At CES I met Michael, from techPowerUp! and he was using a phone that catch my attention, the Nokia E61. This phone uses a full QWERTY keyboard, a nice screen and it´s identical to the E62, but it has WiFi. ¿Why would I need WiFi in my cellphone? In Chile data plans are quite expensive, I just use a 7MB plan, anything better than that is just unlimited for 70 bucks. On the other hand, we have a lot of public WiFi connection in our country, and if cheap is good, free is better.