We may have mentioned once or twice how much we like Corsair’s Graphite Series 600T case. Not only did we give it 4.five/5, we stuck it on last issue’s cover too. If any program is going to win us more than, this is the outfit to do it in.

But by the exact same principle that got Susan Boyle recording contracts and Wayne Rooney a career in skilled football, it’s what’s inside that counts. Do the components inside deliver the goods, or is the pretty case a distraction from a mediocre develop?

Categorically, yes they do and no it isn’t. The AT-FX Polaris is a really potent, future-proofed, nicely-cooled, extremely overclockable machine that manages to keep a reasonable cost tag regardless of some fairly luxurious attributes.

The feature-rich ASRock Z68 Fatal1ty Pro Gen3 is a worthy motherboard for this rig. Its most enticing feature, in our opinion, is PCIe 3. compatibility. It presents not only a bit of future-proofing peace of mind by means of compatibility with PCIe three. graphics cards further down the line, but also improves the performance of PCIe-based flash storage drives such as the OCZ Revo Drive.

There’s still no word on when we may see PCIe 3. graphics cards, but then we’re waiting for Ivy Bridge for that enjoyable to begin in earnest.

Fatal-1-tified

As you might expect from a board endorsed by a rather renowned pro gamer, there is an emphasis on overclocking, too. Along with an all-in-one auto-overclocking program that tweaks everything from memory frequency to fan speeds, there wellare gold capacitors and huge heatsinks over both bridges and PLL.

You’re not starved for USB 3. or SATA 6Gbps ports either. That sets the stage nicely for a graphics card and CPU both ripe with overclocking possible. Advancetec has pumped the i5 2500K in this rig up to a very respectable 4.8GHz, and the overclocked KFA2 GTX 580 runs incredibly cool at 48஬ under load, especially contemplating that GF 110 core’s running at 800MHz.

Out of the box, the 1TB tough drive and 60GB Corsair F60 SSD are set up in a Wise Response array, which is becoming increasingly well-liked amongst method builders and with very good reason – it’s a wonderful way to bridge the gap among solid state and magnetic platter storage even though keeping costs down by opting for a smaller SSD 60GB is more than sufficient capacity to function as an efficient cache device.

In all areas, the AT-FX Polaris delivers with bags of energy. So how does it measure up against the competition?

TechRadar Labs

CPU rendering performance
Cinebench R11.five: Index: Greater is much better

AT-FX Polaris: 7.80
Phoenix Hydro X: 7.84

DirectX 11 tessellation performance
Heaven two.5: Frames per second: Higher is much better

AT-FX Polaris: 21.7
Phoenix Hydro X: 38.4

DirectX 11 gaming performance
Shogun two: Frames per second: Higher is much better

AT-FX Polaris: 47.5
Liquid i7 High: 48.8

Nicely, it’s a hugely far more enticing alternative than the last rig we looked at from Advancetec, the AT-FX Tron, priced practically identically.

Last month’s Liquid i7 High from Cyberpower arguably presents far better value with the inclusion of a screen and peripherals, but if you are already set for those then we think the Polaris matches it in the components department, thinking about the overclocking and cooling on provide.

The existing cream of the sub-£1,500 crop is nonetheless Palicomp’s Phoenix Hydro X, providing an i7 2600K and two 2 GB HD 6950s.

Advancetec’s Polaris is less expensive although, and ideal for any gamer who can afford it.

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Intel’s new Z68 chipset has a lot to offer. In short, P67 and H67 functionality are combined onto one board, with SSD caching. It might not have a tremulous impact on gaming performance, but that increased functionality is surely welcome in any desktop PC.

There’s also serious power saving potential with Lucidlogix’s Virtu software, which can turn your GPU practically off when it’s not needed.

This is where AdvanceTec has made its first mistake: the ATFX-Tron doesn’t come with Lucid Virtu installed. Sure, you can install it yourself by digging out the motherboard’s driver disk, but that seems at odds with buying a system builder’s machine – the hard work should be done for you. It seems a bit like ignoring one of the Z68 chipset’s best features.

The counter-blow to this is that AdvanceTec has set up Smart Response over your SSD and HDD for you. To be fair to AdvanceTec, it’s set its stall on this issue based on pure gaming performance – there’s a clear advantage in Smart Response, but it doesn’t want Virtu messing with frame rates.

Even so, when we road tested the Asus P8Z68-V Pro, we certainly didn’t find that the software had a negative impact on gaming performance.

Identity crisis

The apparent emphasis on gaming highlights other issues with AdvanceTec’s choice of components. Does a thoroughbred gaming rig really need a Blu-ray RW drive? Probably not. Is 16GB of RAM going to improve gaming significantly, compared to 8GB? Negative. And yet there they are, sitting in this gaming rig.

Surely the star component of a gaming machine is the GPU. We’ve waxed lyrical about how good AMD’s HD 6950 is ever since its release, and we’re pleased to see it make an appearance in the ATFX-Tron.

Again, bearing in mind that this is a gaming rig, it’s disappointing to see the 1GB incarnation of the card instead of the beefy 2GB. There’s hardly anything between them monetarily, but in gaming performance terms it’s a big deal – that extra 1GB of frame buffer makes all the difference, especially at higher resolutions.

AdvanceTec has done a good job in building the rig. Cables are fastidiously tidied and the Core i5 2500K has been handily bumped up to 4.6GHz. Other system builders have this price point sewn up for gamers, but it’s a misallocation of funds, rather than a cheeky mark-up, that’s hurting the ATFX-Tron.

Benchmarks

CPU performance
Cinebench R11.5: Index: Higher is better
ATFX-Tron: 6.96
Phoenix Hydro-X: 7.84

DirectX 11 tessellation performance
Heaven 2.5: Frames per second: Higher is better
ATFX-Tron: 14.6
Phoenix Hydro-X: 27.9

DirectX 11 gaming performance
Dirt 2: Frames per second: Higher is better
ATFX-Tron: 56
Phoenix Hydro-X: 90

Read TechRadar’s Palicomp Phoenix Hydro-X review

If you built this rig yourself it would be just £43 cheaper – as teeny as mark-ups get. It would be excellent value, if you wanted all the components you’re getting.

Ultimately, the problem is focus. This is actually a decent image manipulation/3D design rig – the RAM makes sense for chewing through hefty applications, and the SD card and other storage device inputs on the front panel would be useful to anyone working with large image files.

It’s hard to recommend to hardcore gamers, though. But consider it if you’re constantly Alt-tabbing between Illustrator and Portal 2.

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The Open Geospatial Consortium and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing have agreed to develop and use open geospatial standards.

Under the agreement the two organizations will work cooperatively to raise the awareness, acceptance, and implementation of open standards and to promote educational programs and best practices. This will involve Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) demonstrations and workshops, sensor network standardization events, and events on topics such as multi-source data fusion and multi-spectral image processing.

The ISPRS is a non-governmental organization devoted to the development of international cooperation for the advancement of photogrammetry, remote sensing and their applications. The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities developing publicly available geospatial standards.

Community sponsors of the OpenStack Cloud include 25 companies like Dell and Intel.

NASA contributed a hardware approach that powers its Nebula Cloud Platform. Nebula uses containerized data centers, lowering cost by centralizing hardware. Nebula is used for Mars images, seen in Microsoft’s WorldWide telescope. Microsoft recently unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. The “TeraPixel” sky map was generated with Microsoft’s latest HPC and parallel software assets.

OpenStack’s mission is to “produce the ubiquitous OpenSource Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.”

The $400 million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the National Science Foundation and now being built along the West Coast of the United States, will use Amazon Web Services with two 10 Gbps connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Underwater sensors, powered by 10 KiloVolt cables carrying 10 Gbps data from a Shore Station on the coast of Oregon. OOI will “bug” the ocean, forming an undersea network stretching from Canada to California.

Meanwhile, DARPA will develop an exascale supercomputer, using Intel and Nvidia processors. One exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, the speed of today’s fastest supercomputers, including the IBM Roadrunner, the Chinese Nebulae and the Cray Jaguar.

It would support massive streaming sensor data (pdf). Prototype UHPC systems are expected to be complete by 2018.

View full post on dailywireless.org

European Stocks Climb for a Seventh Day; U.S. Futures Advance
European stocks rose for a seventh day, the longest stretch of gains since September, after Spain sold $4.3 billion of bonds and BP Plc rebounded. U.S. futures advanced while Asian shares were little changed.

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