Common Paradox Tech Blog

The Asus P7P55-M is a mid-range P55 motherboard sporting some of the latest features but also chops a few out to try and keep the price competitive.

For anyone who’s been living under a rock this last year, or perhaps ignoring any hardware news that might tempt them to spend money, the new Intel P55 Express chipset is Intel’s way of benevolently letting the majority of us afford Core i7 technology.

The P55 Express chipset heralds a new approach for Intel to desktop chipsets. Over the years we’ve become used to the northbridge/southbridge double act, a Memory Hub Controller backed up with a slightly dumber, but equally essential ICH South Bridge.

As the Lynnfield processor contains all of the logic required for the DDR3 dual-channel memory controller, plus a 16- lane PCI-e controller, the P55 is demoted to being a glorified southbridge chipset. Handling the meat and potatoes of the I/O world, with up to 14 USB 2.0 ports, six SATA 3.0Gb/s ports, networking and up to another eightlanes of PCI-e to be dolled out.

This means the thing that can differentiate one board from another is just how and what features each manufacturer decides it’s going to implement. For this board Asus has opted for a single x16 slot, so any spare graphics card is going to have to find another home.

There are other options for the PCI-e split, such as twin eight lane x16 slots or even adding a third four-lane x16 slot.

Back in the day

The lack of legacy ports supplied by the P55 can be seen as a good thing but no PATA channels means ASUS has to add a VIA controller so we can still use our PATA optical drives.

It’s opted for eight fixed back-plate USB ports with a single FireWire and Gigabit LAN, but no eSATA. Six more USB ports can be added via onboard headers, while there are six onboard SATA 3.0Gb ports.

Memory support offers dual-channel DDR3 from four DIMMs, which can be populated with up to 16GB of memory. This AsusS board has good overclocking support for speeds up to 2200MHz.

Oddly its DIMM slots only use a single securing tab but this seems to work well enough.

Testing times

Despite putting in good memory throughput of 16.42GB/s the gaming performance was for some reasons behind that of the MSI board and the other systems on test, scoring 15,387 in 3DMark06. This result was played out to a lesser degree with the other benchmarks in the suite.

An x264 encoding score of 65.05fps was just under two frames behind the MSI P55M-GD45, while the Cinebench score of 13,419 lagged by about 600 points.

• Read TechRadar’s MSI P55M-GD45 review

A key advantage not instantly apparent is the power draw of the Core i5 architecture. Idle it runs at 111W verses the AMD’s 154W, while under full load it’s 179W against the AMD’s much higher 226W.

Using the supplied Turbo V overclocking tool we were a little disappointed by the lack of overclocking the board demonstrated. Managing to take the FSB from 133MHz up to a stable 149MHz.

Despite this the board is equipped with a full selection of overclocking tools with the BIOS. But considering its basic features and lacklustre performance it’s hard to recommend over some others out there.

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andy1307 passes on this from the NY Times: “The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace. American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race … While the Russians have continued to focus on treaties that may restrict weapons development, the United States is hoping to use the talks to increase international cooperation in opposing Internet crime. Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “European researchers have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence that could allow computers to respond to behavior as well as commands, reacting intelligently to the subtle nuances of human communication. It’s no trivial feat – many humans struggle with the challenge on a day-to-day basis.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with a New York Times piece about the tumultuous transition to electronic devices, instead of printed materials, for text. “Newspapers and novels are moving briskly from paper to pixels, but textbooks have yet to find the perfect electronic home. They are readable on laptops and smartphones, but the displays can be eye-taxing. Even dedicated e-readers with their crisp printlike displays can’t handle textbook staples like color illustrations or the videos and Web-linked supplements publishers increasingly supply. Now there is a new approach that may adapt well to textbook pages: two-screen e-book readers with a traditional e-paper display on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other to render graphics like science animations in color.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SubComdTaco writes “Harvard has announced their approach towards an implantable cancer vaccine (press release here). To anyone familiar with how the immune system works, this appears to be a synthetic lymph node, an intriguing bit of biomimicry. From the Science Daily article: ‘A cancer vaccine carried into the body on a carefully engineered, fingernail-sized implant is the first to successfully eliminate tumors in mammals, scientists recently reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The new approach, pioneered by bioengineers and immunologists at Harvard University, uses plastic disks impregnated with tumor-specific antigens and implanted under the skin to reprogram the mammalian immune system to attack tumors. The new paper describes the use of such implants to eradicate melanoma tumors in mice. … The slender implants… are 8.5 millimeters in diameter and made of an FDA-approved biodegradable polymer. Ninety percent air, the disks are highly permeable to immune cells and release cytokines, powerful recruiters of immune-system messengers called dendritic cells. These cells enter an implant’s pores, where they are exposed to antigens specific to the type of tumor being targeted. The dendritic cells then report to nearby lymph nodes, where they direct the immune system’s T cells to hunt down and kill tumor cells.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jbeaupre writes “The Economist reports on progress by a company called Saltworks on using saline gradients to do the heavy lifting of desalination. In essence, Saltworks uses solar energy or waste heat to concentrate sea water. They then use the ionic gradient between the concentrated brine and two sea-water streams to pull ions from from a 3rd sea-water stream. It appears to work with entropy by trading the reduced entropy of the desalinated water against the increased entropy of ‘mixing’ the brine and the other sea-water streams. The article only discusses Na and Cl, but even just removing these ions is a step in the right direction.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet, has been working on a new open source project called Swarm. The concept is to allow a computer program to be distributed across multiple computers in a manner almost completely transparent to the programmer. The system observes the program executing and figures out how the workload should be distributed for maximum efficiency. Swarm is implemented in Scala. Its at an early-prototype stage, and Ian has created a good 36 minute video explaining the concept and the current implementation.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

StumbleUpon is swinging open the doors to some new features today that they hope begin to change its offerings as a web service. Founder Garrett Camp said the new approach lands itself “somewhere between a Twitter and Google.”

StumbleUpon’s prior services gave users the ability to bookmark, share, and randomly peruse the best of the interwebs. They are building on that service by indexing all the pages deemed worthy of the StumbleUpon community and making them searchable and sort-able. Further, they introduced a “Discover” tab that acts like a news feed, to keep you up to date on your friends’ stumbles and bookmarks.

“It is halfway between search and discovery. It is not as comprehensive as Google and not as real-time as Twitter,” says Camp.

What do you think of StumbleUpon’s new offerings?

Image Credit: TechCrunch

Microsoft today takes the wrappers off their latest generation of mobile software and services, and our good friend George Ponder from sibling site WMExpert.com gives us the details in his complete Windows Mobile 6.5 review. The pre-amble sums things up well from an iPhone point of view:

For some, the launch of Windows Mobile [...]

No doubt you’ve opened an e-mail and thought, “Hmmm, not sure what to do with this. I’ll deal with it later!”—and promptly closed the message. If you do this over and over again, it doesn’t take long to end up with several hundred (or thousand) messages in your Inbox.

Developing a new approach to processing your Inbox will help you to gain more control, improve your response time, and keep up with critical actions and due dates.

Tip #1: Set up a simple and effective e-mail reference system

The first step toward an organized Inbox is understanding the difference between reference information and action information.

Most people receive a considerable amount of reference information through e-mail. Sometimes as much as one-third of your e-mail is reference information. So it is essential to have a system that makes it easy to transfer messages from your Inbox into your e-mail reference system. An E-mail Reference System is a series of e-mail file folders where you store reference information to ensure you have easy access to it later. Learn more about setting up an E-mail Reference System. Once you take care of filing your reference information, you can use the next three steps to handle e-mail you have to do something with, your action information.

Find three more tips for claiming victory over your email at the full article on Microsoft At Work, here.

By Sally McGhee, Consultant and Productivity Expert