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May 15, 2008 -- Back in January of 2007 we had looked at Linux Virtualization Performance as we had compared a running native OS (at that time, Fedora Core 6) against the same operating system running as a virtualized guest OS using Xen, QEMU with the (once closed-source) kqemu kernel module, and then KVM. In this testing we had found that KVM had performed well and won a number of the tests, but it wasn't the clear winner nor it had won by a substantial margin. However, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine had premiered with the Linux 2.6.20 kernel and it has matured quite a bit over the past year and a half since its christening. With that said, we are in the process of conducting new Linux virtualization benchmarks to see how these various implementations compare today. While the full comparison isn't yet ready, due to much interest surrounding Linux virtualization on desktops and servers, this morning we are publishing some initial benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite when running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the host OS and then running it as the guest operating system with hardware-based acceleration through KVM.

May 13, 2008 -- It's been a while since last reviewing a computer chassis from NZXT (November 2006 with the NZXT Zero), but today we have our hands on NZXT's newest chassis, the Tempest. NZXT describes this mid-tower steel chassis as being the "airflow king" with four 120mm fans and two 140mm fans, in addition to being ready for a dual radiator setup for water-cooling. NZXT has also taken this case a step further by accommodating eight hard drive mounts and room for an extended ATX motherboard, all inside this case that measures in at 211 x 512 x 562 mm. We first viewed the Tempest back at CES 2008, and in this review we'll tell you what we think of this newest NZXT creation.

May 12, 2008 -- Back in March we had reviewed the Quadro FX1700 512MB graphics card, which is NVIDIA's lower-end OpenGL 2.1 workstation graphics card that's based upon the consumer G84 core. In the benchmarks that had followed, we had compared the Quadro FX1700 performance under Windows, Linux, and Solaris. We had found the performance of this Quadro graphics card performed well under all three platforms, but Ubuntu Linux had led the race. We are now preparing a review of the high-end ATI FireGL V8600 1GB graphics card for publishing in the coming days, but we have stumbled upon some results from the FX1700 that never ended up making it out earlier. Specifically we had overclocked the Quadro FX1700 with CoolBits and it had actually worked out quite well. In this article are the overclocking results from this NVIDIA workstation graphics card as well as comparing the performance to an ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB graphics card.

May 10, 2008 -- For those of you interested in trying out new open-source software this weekend, Phoronix Test Suite 0.6.0 has been released with an arsenal of new features for this Linux benchmarking platform. There are new and updated profiles with this release, new test suites, support for backing up downloaded tests, and much more. Since Phoronix Test Suite 0.5.0 are 48 official changes in the past week, which reinforces our plans on having a 1.0 release ready by early June.

May 09, 2008 -- In our article earlier this week looking at the status of X.Org 7.4, one of the features originally planned for integration in this X Server release was MPX, or Multi-Pointer X. While it's been in development for over two years and has been at an experimental state, it's been featured in popular YouTube videos as this is the technology on Linux that allows multiple keyboards and mice to be attached to a single system and MPX allows these input devices to function independently on the same windowing system. For those of you interested in this desktop technology, it's been announced that MPX will finally be merged into the mainline X.Org tree later this month.

May 07, 2008 -- There have been rumors since last year that Valve may be serious about porting Source games to Linux after Valve Software began seeking a senior software engineer with the responsibility of porting Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Valve Software has yet to officially announce Linux clients for any of its software, but at Phoronix we have received information confirming that Valve is indeed porting its very popular Source engine to the Linux platform.

May 06, 2008 -- Two months ago we had looked at the Tyan Tempest i5400XT motherboard, which was Tyan's latest product based upon Intel's newest workstation chipset and had support for dual Intel Xeon quad-core processors. We found the Tempest i5400XT to be a real winner and everything had worked terrific with Linux. Today we are looking at another Tyan workstation motherboard but the tides have turned as we look at their latest AMD dual quad-core solution, the Tyan Thunder n3600M. The Thunder n3600M motherboard supports dual AMD "Barcelona" Opteron processors, 16 sticks of DDR2 RAM, and eight SAS ports, among other stunning features.

May 04, 2008 -- If all goes according to plan, X.Org 7.4 will finally be released this month. This release isn't quite as elaborate as X.Org 7.3, which introduced input hot-plugging, EXA enhancements, and RandR 1.2 to just name a few features, but X.Org 7.4 is another update better enhancing this X server. In this article, we are presenting a release overview of the features to be found in X.Org 7.4, what's been delayed, and how this release is panning out.

May 03, 2008 -- Have you been searching for a Secure Digital card that is able to accommodate all of the pictures you take on your next vacation or looking for more storage on your Internet tablet? If so, you have likely come across the latest Secure Digital High Capacity cards that overcome the earlier 2GB capacity limitation of traditional Secure Digital cards. However, there are just so many SDHC cards on the market and they are all priced similarly from different manufacturers, so what should you choose? At hand today in this weekend review are two 4GB SDHC cards from OCZ and Crucial.

May 02, 2008 -- Last month we reported on VIA's new open-source driver efforts that was announced at the LF Austin Summit. This new strategy involves VIA providing the open-source community with NDA-free hardware specifications, code, and other resources -- in a similar fashion to what ATI/AMD and Intel have been doing for some time now. However, not everyone has been satisfied by this announcement and their new Linux website isn't yet exactly useful. We explore the VIA Linux situation in this article as well as sharing what two open-source developers have to say.

May 01, 2008 -- Less than a week after the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron", the Free Software Foundation has gone ahead and released version 2.0 (named DeltaH) of gNewSense. For those not familiar with gNewSense, this is one of the few distributions certified by the Free Software Foundation as being a truly free Linux distribution. gNewSense 2.0 is essentially Ubuntu 8.04 LTS but with a few modifications to make it more free by removing some binary-only components. New in gNewSense 2.0 is also new artwork, switching the default web browser from Mozilla Firefox to Epiphany, Blag's deblob script in the kernel, and non-free GLX being removed from X.Org/Mesa. Here are a few screenshots from this latest release.

May 01, 2008 -- A week ago Phoronix Test Suite 0.4.0 was released and today Phoronix Test Suite 0.5.0 has outdone that. This release of the Phoronix Test Suite incorporates more than 40 major changes to this open-source Linux benchmarking platform! Among the changes are new test profiles, various clean up work, sensor monitoring support, and an improved PTS Results Viewer. Development of the Phoronix Test Suite is coming along quite nicely and by early June, the public should have its hands on version 1.0.

April 30, 2008 -- Last month we had looked at the Gigabyte AirCruiser N300 GN-WI30N-RH 802.11n WiFi adapter. The wireless adapter uses the Ralink RT2860 chipset, which doesn't have a Linux driver in the kernel, but we were able to easily get this 802.11n wireless adapter working with Ubuntu when using ndiswrapper and the Windows driver. Today we have our hands on the Gigabyte AirCruiser N300 Dual GN-WI06N-RH, which is a PCI Express Mini-Card with dual-band 802.11a/b/gn support. How well does this Atheros-based WiFi card work on Linux? We'll tell you in this review.

April 29, 2008 -- Version 0.5 of the Phoronix Test Suite will be released later this week and already it has over 40 changes in this forthcoming release! There are quite a number of new profiles and features with this release, but one interesting feature that has just begun to evolve is the system sensor monitoring support. Now when tests are running within the Phoronix Test Suite, you can opt to have the Phoronix Test Suite keep track of system sensors -- whether it be your CPU/system temperature, one of the voltage rails, or even your battery discharge rate -- and upon the tests being completed the average sensor results are shown as well as a line graph of each sensor while the test(s) were running.

April 28, 2008 -- For years now Corsair has been on the forefront of leading flash drive innovations, which started with their Flash Voyager series but quickly expanded into their Flash Voyager GT, Flash Survivor GT, and Flash PadLock series. We've reviewed them all and Corsair has certainly had some talented engineers working on these products from the Flash Survivor GT that withstood being submerged into the bottom of a pool, being boiled in a pot of water, and beaten by a hammer to the Flash PadLock, which has a physical lock that will present the flash drive from being mounted unless the appropriate key sequence is entered. While they continue to face new competition -- primarily from OCZ Technology, which has many different innovative flash drives as well such as the Rally 2 Turbo, ATV Turbo, and Mega-Kart -- Corsair Memory continues to excel and release new flash products. Corsair's latest additions to their Flash Voyager GT family are 16GB and 32GB editions. At hand today we are looking at the Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive.

April 25, 2008 -- In Q4'07 we had looked at Ubuntu's power consumption with all of their Linux releases going back to Ubuntu 5.04. While Linux has improved in recent years when it comes to power efficiency and optimizations, more processes running on the desktop had canceled out any real power improvements. Following that article was a look at power consumption between Windows and Linux. We had used an old desktop system in that comparison and Ubuntu 7.10 was consuming the most power while idling but Fedora 8 Test 3 had consumed the least amount of power and had beat out both Windows XP and Vista. While using the desktop, however, both versions of Windows had consumed less power than Fedora and Ubuntu. With Ubuntu 8.04 LTS now available, we have decided to run another simple power comparison. This time we are using a Lenovo ThinkPad notebook and an AMD server as we see whether Ubuntu Hardy Heron or Microsoft Windows Vista consumes less power.