Let's face it. Vista is not a light-weight operating system - but it doesn't have to be such a pig.

If you are like most out there, you have a fairly large conventional hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes to spare and probably don't care much to investigate if a few of those plentiful gigabytes go missing.

Having read a handful of solid state drive reviews, I was convinced that this technology was ready for prime time and was something I wanted to invest in. Prices...

lemonlime

Its been a little while since my last update but now that I've got some reviews out of the way it is time to rock once again. I had a couple of hours to burn last night and managed a few 3DMark 2006 runs with JRW21's old X850. The initial runs went well, and the card manages an almost identical core overclock when compared to my old Sapphire card. This was positive news. To my surprise though, the memory overclocks much better. I was able to push it close to 630MHz compared to about 610MHz on my...

lemonlime

I just love getting those little post-office delivery tags at my door. Its just such an exciting experience no matter what it is.

You guessed it—I just received JRW21's X850XT in the mail! Well, it actually arrived a few days ago but I never found the time to get to the post-office. I also got a couple of other goodies including an old Maze 4 waterblock and some Zalman ramsinks that I'll be putting to good use.

JRW21's card is a Crossfire edition card produced...

lemonlime

We're back in business. Our man JRW21 was kind enough to sell his X850XT to me for an awesome price—all in the interest of LUDICROUS SPEED. Thank you, sir. I will be putting it to very good use. Being a crossfire edition card, it was produced later than the original XTs. With any luck, the R480 core fabrication was refined by that point and it will overclock better than my Sapphire card.

While I'm waiting for JRW21's old X850 to arrive, I made some additional progress. I was able...

lemonlime

In Part 5, I finished my first vmod and managed to damage my X850 in the process. I always thought I'd ruin a card with a sloppy soldering job but my soldering job turned out to be quite good—it was the hot glue that I used to hold the job in place that was my issue. So, the big lesson to be learned here is: Never glue down your mod until you are sure it works. Trying to pick off the glue caused the solder pad to rip right out of the card and take a piece of a trace with it. I had a chance to...

lemonlime

In Part 4, I ran some baseline benchmarks and managed to squeeze into the top 10 with some high-end air cooling. Not too shabby! Last night, I warmed up the iron and started practicing.

I used an old ATI Rage 128 AGP graphics card to practice on. Seemed like the perfect testing platform as it had many small solder pads and some ICs similar to the X850. To my shock—it wasn't very hard to do at all. By my third attempt, I was able to make a really clean joint. It is amazing how easy...

lemonlime

In Part 3 I did some shopping and got the volt mod gear I need for my ludicrous overclocking adventure. In this fourth installment I'll be focusing on the test bench and my initial testing of the card.

I'm fortunate that I've got some spare components around that I use for reviews. Believe me, there is nothing worse than tearing apart your main rig every time you want to do some serious benchmarking. There is also something so satisfying about a real test bench. None of this sissy...

lemonlime

Well, I've made a lot of progress since my last installment—Part 2.

First and foremost, I've done some shopping! I can't exactly start to volt mod, or even obtain the detailed soldering skills I'll need for the work at hand without an iron.

I found a great electronics shop not too far from my place called "Active". Anyone looking for vmod gear in Canada need not look anywhere else. I picked up the following:

• Weller 25W Professional Iron
• Weller fine-tip replacement
• Thin

...

lemonlime

In Part 1, I announced my intentions to take my once $600 Radeon X850 to the max.

..So, the good old X850 is going to be the center of a multi-part overclocking blog series. I've been itching to overclock something. Not 24/7 happy overclocking—I'm talking ludicrous, flaming video card overclocking.

I've had some time to do a bit of homework, and it won't be an easy feat. Modding the cooling on the card is not what concerns me. I've had quite a bit of experience in that...

lemonlime

I hate to admit it, but its true. I'm sitting here running a system at complete stock frequencies. For those of you who have known me for the last few years, this is unbelievable. Once upon a time (2003-2006) I had an unquenchable thirst for overclocking. I bought the latest gear, and pushed it to the limits. I dabbled in high-end water cooling and even phase-change cooling. I voided warranties, removed heat spreaders, lapped heatsinks and CPUs, you name it.

As "extreme" as I thought...

lemonlime

I've been pretty pleased with the results I've been getting with my newly constructed light tent. My recent Thermalright TRUE Copper review saw a lot of benefit from the relatively simple contraption and some patience with the manual mode of my camera.

As with many things in this world, "good" can always be "better". I've never quite been able to justify the high price-tag associated with Adobe Photoshop, so I've been a long time user of Corel Paintshop Pro and recently purchased...

lemonlime

Well it was only a matter of time before the world-wide economic turmoil would spoil the fun of Canadian hardware enthusiasts. It is amazing just how quickly the price of pc components has jumped in response to the weak Canadian dollar (in comparison to the US dollar). In a matter of two weeks, I've seen CPU, memory and video card prices increase by almost 20%. Thankfully, the loonie has rebounded a bit since its recent nose dive but the fact remains—hardware is more expensive than it was only...

lemonlime

I've never considered myself a professional or even a serious amateur photographer. I bought a relatively pedestrian Canon PowerShot A520 a couple of years ago and it has been serving me well. For about a year and a half of the two years I owned the camera, it never left the 'Auto' preset. The camera definitely took some great photos but I frequently struggled to get good product review shots. The camera was never my problem.

I still remember the very frustrating time I had back in...

lemonlime