Every few months or so, an aspiring malware coder comes across a new attack vector to hit us with. I remember when the "Shared Task Scheduler" was first used to keep a virus in memory on every boot, even a boot into Safe Mode. Later things like winlogon scripts surfaced, and more recently userinit.exe replacements. Just Friday I was confronted with a whole new beast, who comes at us by the name of "XP Internet Security 2010." 

Now I've seen "Internet Security 2010" and some others, which use nasty userinit.exe replacements to stay loaded, but this new one is of particular interest because of the way it takes over a system. I noticed that there were no entries in the HiJackThis log of a machine, so I figured it was surly a rootkit. However, that may not be the case. In one of the two infections I've seen, the software was using the standard class definition system to infect the system.

As expected, CeBit was a total gold-mine for Fermi news. This is the chip that will live inside the new GTX 470 and GTX 480 chips from NVIDIA. It is a beast of a chip too, more than doubling the number of processing cores from 240 in the current GT200 to 512 in Fermi. Here's what we're talking about, in terms of block diagrams:

                          GT200                                                                              Fermi

The new Aliens vs. Predator game dropped last week, and I spent a few hours with it over the weekend to get an idea of how it looks, performs, and plays overall. This is one of the titles I was really looking forward to for it's use of advanced technologies like tessellation and DirectX 11 shadow rendering. Needless to say, it's another disappointment in an ever-growing list.

I really expected this title to shine because the Alien is such a difficult being to render on common graphics hardware. They have a huge number of polygons to draw, and with light sources and shadows to calculate for each bend in their bodies, the design team really had their work cut out for them. However, they had a shortcut: DirectX 11 tessellation. Just check out this video:

I was just reading a system guide from one of my most favorite websites, and I was honestly surprised about the idea of USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gb/s interfaces dictating whether a product was good enough to make the grade. In particular, we're talking about Gigabyte boards here with the NEC SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and Marvell SE9128 high speed SATA3 chips. We also have Asus promising "True USB 3.0" speeds on their boards by using second-generation PCI-Express lanes instead of first-generation ones. This whole thing reeks to me.

I am thrown back to a system I built a friend back in the Athlon XP days. We had a little extra cash in the budget, and decided to go with a brand-spanking new Western Digital Raptor 36GB hard drive to speed up his boot times and application load times. The downside was that Raptors only shipped with SATA interfaces, a brand new thing on the market. At this time you couldn't get an NVIDIA chipset with native SATA, so it was either a stinky Pentium 4 or a VIA motherboard for the brand-new, rocket-fast Athlon 2500+ Barton.

Some of you might have been following my difficulties with the Asus EAH5850 video card. It began with screen flickering and overall instability here, which then progressed to a total hack job to fix the screen flickers here, and now finally I've updated to the newest Catalyst 10.2 drivers from here. However, there have been both good and bad developments.

On the good side, the display standby issue has been resolved as of the latest 10.2 drivers. All flickering is still gone, and I've gone into MSI Afterburner and setup a new fan profile to ensure the GPU doesn't get over about 75C. This is all good news.

On a rather bad note, I can now produce a Windows BSOD on call, simply by opening up any H.264 video. That includes hi-def Blu-Rays and movie rips. This is caused by ATI's display driver, and Windows claims that is has tried to restart the driver and a timeout occurred. Regular XVID, which I expect is not AVIVO-accelerated, runs just fine.

So, I've gone from a screen flicker and instability to a hot GPU that likes to crash Windows. I can achieve a full-blown BSOD by either enabling Overdrive or opening an H.264 video. I will say, it is very fast though.

As I wrote back here, the Asus EAH5850 card has issues with screen flickers when using dual monitors. This occurs whenever any overclocking utility is used, whether it be the ATI Overdrive or MSI Afterburner. While I might have been satisfied with the slower clock speeds, I got really frustrated when the flickers came back every time I launched Far Cry 2. Also, on boot the flickers were there, and I would have to enter the CCC and enable/disable Overdrive every time I rebooted the system. It was time for a fix.

Since I knew the issue was with the dynamic clocking of the memory on the board, I decided to lock the RAM at 1250 MHz. This is safely below the maximum 1300 MHz that I had achieved in testing, and should still provide a very good boost to games. While I was at it, I decided to lock the GPU at 875 MHz, again just below the 900 MHz maximum, to make sure that no dynamic clocking was going on whatsoever. I just really wanted a nice, stable GPU, and dynamic clocking doesn't seem to help with stability.

In order to lock the frequencies, I would need to hack the card's BIOS to eliminate the low-power modes. I accomplished this, with some frustration, with a set of tools specifically designed for ATI cards. You can find them here:

I guess I'm a bit of an FPS guy at heart, despite my recent fascination with RPGs. That's why I grabbed a copy of Bioshock 2 as soon as I could. It's a true FPS, with an awesome storyline, great characters, immersive environment, and the RPG-like ability to make decisions that will effect the outcome of the game. Granted, those decisions are mostly limited to whether or not you kill the "Little Sisters" for more Adam, much like the first Bioshock, but it still adds a bit to the standard plot.

I thought I'd take this chance to show off how I game. Here's a screen grab of my dual-monitor setup (click away for full resolution):

My left screen is just slightly lower in reality than the center, which is why they are setup like that virtually.

Having two screens gives me access to the temperatures, voltages, clock speeds, and usage stats for all of the devices in the system at a glace, plus my iTunes. I can make sure that everything is running as it should, and if there ever is a problem, I can get right to the heart of it without having to leave the game. I highly recommend a setup like this for any die-hard gamer, especially ones that like to overclock their systems like I do.

I've decided to hold off on the CPU cooler roundup simply because it really wasn't all that exciting. I found that most of the coolers performed within a few hairs of each other, and the only big difference was the mounting technique and price. Needless to say, the Xigmatek Dark Knight will remain the standard heatsink on most of the Nordic systems until something better comes along. More interesting, however, has been my experience with the Radeon 5850, specifically Asus's EAH5850.

In all honesty, the last ATI card I owned was around the 9600 series I believe. I think it was an All-In-Wonder card, and it was definitely an AGP model. Since then, there have been more GPU refreshes than you can count on one hand and more driver updates than I'd like to even think about, so I decided to give ATI another shot.

Actually, I lied a bit back there. I have built a couple of machines on the Radeon IGP lately, specifically the 785 chipset, and I was pretty happy with them. If you have a Phenom II X2 555 chip, it's totally worth the poor south bridge performance for the chance to unlock a core or two with ACC. You will also get better overclocking with a 785 board than an 8200 or 8300, so the CPU speed might outweigh the hard drive and USB performance issues that are still there some 5 years after launch. The board I've been using is the Asus M4A785TD-V Evo, and it's highly recommended.

As a system builder, I consider 2009 to be a turn around year for many reasons. First and foremost, the economic recession started to lift, and the entire PC market saw increasing revenues in the second half of the year. It even has affected Nordic PC, as we had our best quarter ever in Q4 this year. That means more awesome PC's to more awesome clients. Hardware also had some really interesting developments, including big changes in CPUs, GPUs and Windows.

This time last year, we were all reveling in the glory that is the Intel Core i7 processor for socket 1366. Core i7 increased instructions-per-clock (IPC) by around 10% or so over Core 2, lowered memory latencies by moving the memory controller onto the CPU die, and brought back Hyper-Threading while introducing new technologies like Turbo Boost and better Virtualization support for servers. They did all of this while reducing the overall system power consumption, which is great news for the server crowd. But let's face it, Core i7 in the 1366 socket was a server and workstation processor crammed into a desktop.

Intel gave us a really neat tool when they launched Core i7 called Turbo Boost. This dynamically adjusts the CPU speed based on the workload it has and some other factors like voltage and temperature. It's a really neat idea that kind of automatically overclocks the CPU, without all of the hassle of testing for stability. The idea is that when you need all four of your cores, you'll get a moderate single-bin boost, but when your only using one or two of them, the gain is bigger.

With the initial run of Core i7s on the LGA 1366 socket, Turbo Boost was fairly insignificant, only giving a maximum 266mhz overclock by default. This is accomplished by raising the CPU's multiplier by 2 "bins." When all four cores are loaded, an Intel Core i7 900 series CPU will only raise the multiplier by a single bin, or 133mhz. When Intel launched Lynnfield, or the Core i7/i5 for Socket 1156, we got a peak at what Turbo Boost's potential could really be.

On my Core i7 860, Turbo Boost will raise the CPU speed from 2.8ghz all the way up to 3.46ghz, or a maximum of 5 speed bins. That makes it quite competitive in single-threaded workloads with the much more expensive Core i7 960, however in multi-threaded workloads that advantage diminishes. When two or more cores are loaded, your gain is more likely to be only 2 bins, but still more than the single bin you get with a Core i7 900-series CPU, and that gain keeps the 800-series running with the big dogs.