Tag Archive for 'PC Hardware'

Concept Designs by Mac Funamizu

Published on January 21, 2010 in Technology. 1 Comment Tags: , .

As an IT nerd working amongst Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineers I have over the past couple of years become intrigued and fascinated by conceptual designs of large scale machinery, right down to the smaller desktop based futuristic designs.

I have been following Mac Funamizu’s work for quite a few years now and have always been in awe at his thought processes that results in his conceptual designs. Mac Funamizu is amongst the best, he is a web/graphic/industrial designer working in Tokyo, Japan. His blog petitinvention has a wealth of some of the most gorgeous designs I’ve seen.

These are some of my favourites.

This first design is a transparent futuristic desktop known as Zafiro. It resembles designs that wouldn’t be out of place in Sci-Fi movies such as The Island, or Minority Report. Transparent OLED panels are already out and about today, but not perfected just yet. Several transparent OLED designs were shown off at the CES show this January.

Zafiro concept

Aluminium Bevel

Data disk docking?

Deformable metal keyboard

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Samsung NC10 Netbook Review

Published on December 4, 2008 in Technology. 4 Comments Tags: , .

Awww it’s so ickle and cute!

It’s also been a while since I wrote a hardware review so here comes one based on what seems to be the present rated netbook on the market. The Samsung NC10 Netbook. This little bugger is to be the replacement for my Dell XPS 1530, which is soon to be given a new home!

You can find the review surprisingly in the reviews section!

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2

Published on August 13, 2008 in Technology. 7 Comments Tags: .

OK, Is it wrong to be turned on by this hunk of hi-tech kit? It is amongst the most over the top, powerful cards I’ve ever set my eyes on! Featuring a colossal 1.91 Billion transistor count, and a dual 256 bit memory interface giving you a gigantic 230GB/sec of memory bandwidth it certainly packs a  punch against modern graphics cards.  It is a greedy bugger though demanding in excess of 280 watts of power!

That sexy slab of PCB contains 16x128mb GDDR5 DRAM chips, so thats 8 per GPU!  – 2GB in total. No dual GPU board has had me this excited! Nom nom!

Review @ Anandtech

Dell XPS M1530 Notebook Review

Published on January 13, 2008 in Technology. 16 Comments Tags: , .

Does it impress?

Oh yes! After almost blowing £1,100 on a better specification XPS laptop, which was sadly from the older XPS range I ended up being talked in to buying the M1530, the bigger brother of one of the best laptops from 2007, the M1330. Despite having a 2-3 week delivery delay on their laptops they managed to get it to be extremely fast. I ordered the thing online on the 3rd January, and it arrived on the 7th of January.

I have spent the past few days jotting down notes and have come up with my first review of 2008! Top dogs!

SATA HDD Stage Rack

Published on October 26, 2007 in Technology. 2 Comments Tags: .

How neat is this? The pictures tell the whole story anyway.

This is the SATA HDD Stage Rack, which is a Mac and PC compatible device that connects via USB 2.0. Simply plugging in a hard drive ala Atari 2600 Cart style will allow the drive to show up on your computer. There are two versions – the 2.5" for notebook drives and 3.5" versions for standard desktop hard drives. The stage rack sadly does require an external power connection, however I know little else right now. It also has a glowing bl00 light – these things are important in any device! I can only find this device on Amazon US so far, but I want one!

My ‘Junk Cupboard’ is packed with old hard drives, mostly of the IDE variety sadly so I’m hoping that an IDE version gets released in future. The button at the front looks like an eject button to ‘pop’ release the drive safely too. Hopefully these devices won’t be too costly.