Recently I built a mega gaming PC. Very close ot the top of what AMD can put out before the price gets silly. I was very impressed with the PC and it came at a good time. I had decided to start doing unboxing and review videos and this seemed a good time to start. I really like this card. It felt really well built. I now have the poster on the wall. It outperforms a Titan a little and is much cheaper.

The system was built on an Asus Sabertooth motherboard and they are awesome. Check out the video on the graphics card though. Its a fantastic card.

As many of you Drupal 7 website administrators will know you can often find your site slowing down considerably once you have installed a lot of modules. For anonymous users this is less of a problem. The bit that is irritating for Drupal admins is that its the admin pages themselves that seem to take all the time to load. Some people even report admin pages taking over a minute to load. When adding a single piece of content can in some cases mean 3 or 4 page loads this can be unbearable.

Mulgrew Enterprises has now partnered with Naked Wines to bring you an amazing offer on some great wine just in time for Christmas. Lets face it we are a tech company, we don't sell wine but we are fans of it and we know most of you will be getting some for Christmas. All you need to do is click on the voucher image opposite or go directly to Naked and type in the code. Its not single use either so you can pass it on to all your friends.

Antec's nano diamond thermal compounds are superb. Especially when you can tell the missus you have bought a box of diamond. I've tested the formula 7 most of all and we use that on almost every PC we ship. As a minimum we use Formula 6 which is excellent but does not stand up to such temperature extremes. That sentence does not really do Formula 6 justice since its got a very wide stable temperature band and excellent cooling.

I've tested it in my workhorse PC which has an AMD FX-6100 six core CPU, 8GB RAM, a GTS 250 and two OCZ SSDs on an ASUS M5A99X EVO motherboard. All at stock settings. I was previously using Arctic silver as my thermal compound before discovering diamond based compounds and these were excellent. The diamond suggests that best performance is achieved after a few thermal cycles so you need to get your PC up to temperature for a while and then let it cool a few times. I initially checked the temperature was OK and then checked back after a week to see how it had gone. It was 4°C Cooler.

Review of Draytek Vigor AP800 + Unidirectional Aerial ANT 2510 

I've used a Draytek router before. It was amazingly good. It takes around 10 seconds to reboot, which if mind blowing. The Netgear WNR2200 I've also tested on the same connection is pathetic by comparison, and I'd consider the Netgear to be a decent router. The Netgear takes well over a minute to reboot. In fairness the Netgear is an entry level router and the Draytek is a top of the line model. The Draytek also had hugely impressive wireless range and speed and after some through testing of the WAN interface it trounced every other router I tested both in latency, throughput and reliability.

Recently I was called upon to bridge quite a large gap. I was told to use whichever method was most cost effective, wired or wireless. Running cables would really have cause a massive jump in cost and disruption as the only feasible route would have been to dig up the yard. Wireless it is then. 

Ever since I started using SSDs I've noticed the longest step in installing anything was how long it took to copy the files from the CD/DVD, after that most things are pretty much instant. With this in mind I thought I'd try installing from an SSD. I'd already read about installing from USB stick so I figured it wouldnt be too difficult to adapt the process and shave off loads of time from the install process.

I've spent the morning experimenting with cloning my Ubuntu LAMP server. My existing server is a virtual server setup with virsh. Both host and guest are Ubuntu server 11.04. The host is setup with nothing but the requirements to run virtual servers and control it via ssh so I don't have to leave the monitor connected. The guest is a LAMP server running a couple of Drupal sites. The server I'm setting up now is running on a Windows 7 x64 host through virtual box. I'm testing this so that in the event of a hardware failure of my host server I have a backup server ready to go.

Well I thought it was about time I started posting a blog of activities in the workshop. I test a lot of software on my PC and it was looking a little long in the tooth. It runs on Windows 7 and has been since release. Back in the days of XP I had an automated install disc which reinstalled Windows and all my commonly used programs with virtually no intervention from myself, it even included all the Windows updates and my device drivers. All I had to do was select the target hard disc drive and wait less 40 min. Almost all the software I used was installed automatically.