How Much Power Do I Need For My New PC

If you are adding a triple crossfire to your brand spanking new CPU system and wondering how big of a nuclear reactor you need to power this thing; I got you covered.

Check this site out to calculate how much power you need to run your system by selection all your components from a drop down menu:

eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite v2.5

New Technology: USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s

Some of us tec savy gusy have been waiting for this:  the arrivel of USB 3.0!

Even though its not full blown yet,  ASUS has exposed a high-end motherboard with onboard USB 3.0 ports. This P6X58 premium motherboard also features SATA  6GB/s ports, another first.

Currently,  USB 2.0 is standard and what we all use.   The new 3.0 ports have a blue tab while the 2.o will have a gray tab. It would take a 2.o about 30 seconds to download 1GB on a flash drive and 3 seconds for a 3.o to download the same 1GB.   Unfortunately, there are no devices on the market yet to harness this technology.

The same goes for SATA 6GB: there are no devifes that support SATA 6 as of yet.   Currently, SATA  has a speed of 3GB/s.

SATA (serial ATA) is the current connection standard for hard drives, disk drives, and solidstate drives.   There are some solidstate drives that have maxed out the current standard and thus are the most to benefit form the upcoming standard.

What does all this mean to the average PC user: not much. (for the hard core games a whole lot, and they already know what this means)

This is fairly new technology, all though its good to see that it is out on hardware rather then paper, means that devises that support USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s will come out soon.  Imagine downloading your hi resolution 600 or so pics form you camera in a matter of seconds via USB 3.0.  Or booting you pc in less than 10 seconds (via SATA 6GBs and a solidstate hard drive). I expect the mother board to be over $400.  The average user probably will not see this stuff at home until another two years or so.

More in depth stuff about the ASUS P6X58 is found here.

Opera Unite

Opera released a new service called Opera Unite.

In a nut shell:  This software will make folders assigned by you on your person computer accessible to anyone you allow access to.

Basically, you can put your pictures and music to a pictures folders and a music folder and have access to it through almost any web browser.  You can sit at work and have access to all your mp3 files right from your desktop at home.  Send the web address of  your pictures folder to your parents/grandparents and they can view them via the software from your desktop at home.

You don’t have to upload it anywhere, like flicker or picasa.  Its hosted in your desktop cutting the middleman.

The downside:  Your desktop will have to be on and connected to the Internet for people to have access.  Slim chance, like with all other web based applications, for breaching into your other desktop files.

The best thing to do if you like this concept is to have a second hand desktop for Opear Unite. Where this desktops soul purpose it to host your files that you want to share.  That way, a would be hacker would have access to only those files.

The upside:  You don’t have to pay a hosting service anymore to host your shared content.  Now, your website can reside in your desktop.  No more hosting fees for your website! This also gives web developers to come up with new services for people to use.

Opera Unite has a handful of services it is offering: File sharing, photo sharing, music/video player, web hosting server, a chatting service, and a place to leave messages for one another.

There are some thing to watch for:  how the Recording Industry Association of America will react to all your music will be accessible to people and will it be looked at as a peer-to-peer service.   Will the make Opear a fore to deal with in the web market. How will google and firefox react to this and will they come up with competing services.

Whats important is that Opera has to market this to many people as possible.  If this doesn’t catch on like facebook or myspace, it will not help Opera to take it to the next level.

It will be interesting to see how this will work out.