[Rant] Had to buy a USB 3.0 cable that plugs to the motherboard header

(Click on the image to go view the item on eBay)

My Silverstone Raven RV-03 case has two front USB3.0 ports. But there is a catch. Instead of having connectors that would plug into one of the motherboard headers, it has the regular USB male jack. So for you to get them to work, you have to plug them to USB ports on the back of the motherboard. What actually happens is you simply move two ports from the back of the motherboard to the front I/O. Usually they would plug to a motherboard header without wasting your back panel USB ports.

[Rant] Gave up Carbonite because it is too slow

Like I mentioned a while ago, I’m not going to renew my subscription to Carbonite. Why? Because it is too slow to backup data once you pass that 200GB mark. I have another 1.4TB left and that’s going to grow bigger with time.

It would be cheaper to buy a new hard drive and ship it to Sri Lanka with someone.

Thus, this is not the off-sight backup service for me.

But I don’t know if there is a service that would work for me. I don’t feel like spending any more money one backup. Heck, I haven’t had any hard drive fail on me. And I do have a local 1-to-1 backup. Maybe I should take that drive out of the PC and make it an external drive. That would protect the data from an accidental hardware failure or security issue such as viruses.

[Rant] Haswell refresh?

We all know how much of a crappy chip Haswell is when it comes to overclocking. (Refer this post about temps and this post about FIVR). All I have managed is a measly 4.3GHz out of my Core i7 4770K. (Refer this post) My old 2600K was capable of 4.5GHz, so the Haswell upgrade hasn’t given me a big boost. It’s still faster but not fast enough.

Intel is releasing Haswell Refresh CPUs soon and already MSI and Asus have claimed that their current boards will support these new CPUs with a bios update. Why this is important is because it seems Intel is going to release a new chipset – the 9 series – along with these new CPUs. That doesn’t sound right though. The 8-series is very strong, and there isn’t anything architecturally new with Haswell Refresh which requires a new chipset. They should do it for Broadwell. This is a weird move if they release 9 series this soon.

Anyways, what's actually new about these CPUs? Are the faster? Are they going to overclock higher? Will the die be soldered to the heat spreader?

From what I can see, they are only bringing a slight clock boost to the existing line up and Iris Pro graphics (perhaps).