[Rant] Ordered the Logitech G602 wireless mouse!!!

Few months ago, I wanted to buy the Logitech G602 wireless gaming mouse. This is the best wireless mouse to date, with very little input lag over a wired mouse. But the mouse costs about $70 in Japan. That's still cheaper than the US price which is about $80. However, I also have some points at Sofmap, so I could have bought it at about $15 using all the points. But even then, I felt I could use those points to buy something else - like a graphics card. I still monitored the prices for months from kakaku.com but didn’t see it drop below JPY6,700. So I gave up the idea.

Until today, that is.

I was going to take a shower and I got an email. I checked it from the phone. The email was from kakaku.com . It said that the lowest reported price of the Logitech G602 mouse that I was monitoring has gone down. I thought it would be something like $1 or 2. But no, it was all the way down to $39 (or JPY3,980). No way I was not going to jump on this deal. I quickly went into the website of the store that was selling the mouse to confirm the price. Sometime glitches on kakaku.com can cause these. But this time it was legitimate. I quickly decided to buy the mouse.

[Rant] NVidia thinks two equals three. Prices dual GK110 at $3000!!!

In the last few weeks there were posts from different tech related websites that an unknown sender had sent them "stuff" with notes that muttered the same thing over and over again. "Two better than one." Many people figured out that those articles were sent to them from a marketing company related to AMD. Most people assumed that a dual GPU monstrosity is going to be unveiled from AMD in the coming days. While we haven't yet heard any concrete information about such release, there have been rumors of a R9 295x that will house two R9 290x GPUs in one heck of a dual headed monster card. The first thing that came to...must have been more than 99% of the people who heard that news is "How the heck is AMD going to cool that thing? They cannot even cool one GPU properly." But it seems AMD is bringing a hybrid cooling solution - air and closed loop water cooling - just like the iChill GeForce GTX 780 Accelero Hybrid card. Again, all this information floating around the web is just speculation.

But at GPU Technology Conference (or GTC), NVidia - out of nowhere - revealed that they are coming out with a dual GK110 based card. The forthcoming of a dual GK110 card is not surprising news as a month or so ago this news was also floating around the web. But NVidia just released the Titan Black Edition and the talk about the dual GK110 went away. And then the release of the Maxwell based GTX750 card also turned the discussion into another direction and a lot of people became more interested in Maxwell cards than a card based on dual GK110 chips. Besides, a dual GK110 card is nothing new. It's just two GK110 GPUs slapped on one PCB. You can get two GK110 single GPU cards instead. Not only the latter will be faster, they will overclock higher, run cooler, be cheaper and you can disable SLI if you need. AFAIK, you cannot disable SLI on a dual GPU card from the driver.

[Rant] Downgrade bios to improve stability on the Maximus VI Hero motherboard?

Asus has been quite busy releasing new bios updates in the last month or so. They are getting ready to welcome the "new" (*laugh*) Haswell Refresh CPUs. Intel is releasing a new chipset as well, namely the 9-series but board manufacturers are updating their boards with 8-series chipsets to support Haswell Refresh. We shouldn't need a separate chipset for the exactly same CPU architecture. Heck, we shouldn't need. A new chipset for Broadwell either. It is still going to be same as Haswell, with a die shrink.

Let's not get carried away now.

So in the last couple of months I saw about 3 firmware versions come out for my board from Asus. In addition to saying that these bring support for the newer CPUs, Asus has been putting the same string of "improve system stability" with each of them. So I updated each time hoping that it would improve the overclock of my 4770K. Sadly, it's done nothing like that. However, I didn't notice any instabilities either.