Stan's List

The move to Intel processors brought along many hardware similarities with their now PC brethren. One advantage not always available in PPC Macs is overclocking. Previously overclocking often involved unsoldering and soldering transistors or timing crystals on the motherboard. This, unsurprisingly, created the CPU upgrade market.

Overclocking has been a staple in the PC world nearly since the beginning. Motherboards are often judged on their ability to be overclocked. ZDNet (Germany) has the first such tool for the Mac Pro. All done in software, it is an easy way to boost memory frequency, front side bus and CPU speeds:

ZDNet uses three Mac Pros as test machines. One comes from the first Intel/Mac Pro generation (Mac Pro 1.1) with 65-nanometer processors and 1333-MHz front side bus. The others come from the third generation with 45-nanometer processors and 1600-MHz front side bus, as sold by Apple since January 2008 (Mac Pro 3.1). The first computer is equipped with two 2.66 GHz X5355 processors, and runs stable at 3.10 GHz, see figure 2. The other two have two 2.80 GHz E5462 processors. These can be overclocked up to 3.24 GHz and remain stable.

All PPC Macs are not left out in the cold. If your Mac has an ATI video card, such as a Radeon 9800 Pro or a Radeon X800 XT or before, there is ATIccelerator II. The big advantage over the previous Graphiccelerator is that ATIccelerator does not flash the video cards ROM. Only the latest Radeon X1600 and X1900 cards are not supported.

ATIccelerator II can change ATI graphics cards frequencies live, on-the-fly, under Mac OS X. It’s much more sophisticated and convenient to use than Graphiccelerator for the following reasons:

* no potentially dangerous flashing required
* no cumbersome three-steps process (dump, modify, then reflash ROM)
* no need to reboot for every frequency change
* no OS 9 required (that’s right, G5s and other recent OS 9-free Macs are now supported!)

Apple has the high end video card available for order. It has only been a week, after Steve Jobs promise a driver “in about a month”. In a note to owners of 1st Generation Mac Pro: Please select the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (1st Generation) Graphics Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro. Now the question is whether the performance will be the same as on PC, with the nVidia driver.

Go to Displays in the left hand list of links and scroll down to the second GeForce 8800GT

The top of line video card has been a built-to-order option since the January availability of the newest Mac Pro. Those that chose to order it, would have been disappointed to learn there was no specific driver. At the very beginning nVidia promised a driver, but now it is April and no driver. MacRumors has the following quote reported from Steve Jobs:

nVidia didn’t come through, so we’re having to do it. Should be ready in about a month.

Lets hope the video card is still reasonably current when it becomes useful.

Reuters reports that Toshiba will quit the HD DVD business after Wal-Mart Stores said they would no longer carry HD DVD media or players. Blu-Ray is often compared to the Betamax VHS war which was won by VHS (longer recording times), but no one doubted that Betamax was the higher quality format. Initially, Blu-Ray is capable of storing 50 GB, compared to HD DVD’s 30 GB.

The new standard promises to deliver up to 4.8Gb/s, as Techworld reports. USB 3.0 would be ten times faster than 480Mb/ per second USB 2.0. That would make USB 3.0  on paper, considerably faster than FireWire 400 and 800. FireWire 1600 and 3200 standards, that have been in the works for some time, are stalled. Even though USB 3.0 is to have a speed advantage, the present and next generations of FireWire would still have an advantage of peer to peer networking, as well as its ability to communicate to digital video camera. USB 3.0 has no such abilities. More …

As USB 2.0 stated 480 Mb/s is considerably slower than FireWire 400, it would not be a surprise that FireWire 3200 (assuming 3.2 Gb/s) is equal to or faster than USB 3.0. Any possibility of testing this idea is much in doubt.

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Waaay too much time on their hands… Where can I get me some of those blinds?

Quoting NPD figures and commentary, Forbes reports that 90 percent of all legal video downloads come from the iTunes Store. Moreover, some 1.2-million US households purchased at least one title via download in the third quarter of this buyers chose TV content 62 percent of the time.

“Even though right now the majority of downloaded video content is adult-film content,” said NDP senior analyst Russ Crupnick, “the amount of intellectual property stolen from mainstream movie studios, networks and record labels will continue to rise, unless strong and sustained action is taken to prevent piracy.” More …

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. Do not be dissuaded by the beta version, VLC has been solid from early on. If it helps put a 1 in place of the leading zero.

What’s new in this version:

Building on feedback from the 29 million downloads of VLC media player 0.8.5, VideoLAN brings you version 0.8.6 with many bugfixes, as well as a couple of new features we think you will truly enjoy.

Highlights of the new features and improvements:

* Support for Windows Media Video 9 and VC-1
* Support for VP5/VP6 and Flash video
* Support for TTA and WavPack Lossless audio
* Much improved H.264 support
* Preliminary DVR-ms, MXF support
* Shoutcast TV support
* Windows unicode fixes
* Apple Remote support
* Apple Fullscreen controller
* Universal Binary
Download

Wired rounds up a sampling of “Get a Mac” parodies, concluding “It’s really sort of a hit parade of bad ideas, sloppy execution and the occasional clever line. But mostly not. I’m just going to post them as I found them, along with my commentary. Up first: “Bored teen makes for a boring Mac and a boring PC.” More …

iLounge’s Overseas Report spoted an unique elevator found in the Apple Store in Tokyo:

Most interestingly, Apple’s flagship Ginza store has now been outfitted with video pillars that explain what’s on each of the store’s floors. The tall (rather than wide) monitors play back floor-by-floor videos (right click to download properly) that are amongst the most wicked in-store demonstration videos we’ve ever seen - like something straight out of the movie Total Recall, only better. The smaller Shibuya store is sporting an iPod Bar in addition to its Genius Bar for Macs, paralleling what’s going to take place in updates to the U.S. stores over the next year. More …