My IBM ThinkPad T42 has been with me for more than 4 years. I changed its main board, hard drive, CPU fan during these years. It is still okay for normal daily office use. But cannot use it to play 3D games at all. The display adaptor ~ ATI Radeon 7500 mobile edition cannot play most of the 3D games nowadays.

Lenovo ThinkPad T400

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Yeah… I love to benchmark PC performance. Here is another nice tool to benchmark your PC ~ Rank My PC in Facebook. It is a tool sponsored by Intel. And it is really simple to use it and fast too. The most important part, you can compare your PC performance with your friend.

Rank your PC

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Have you download the latest AMD display driver ~ ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.3? No for me. AMD comes out a new ATI Catalyst Software Suite every month. And the naming conversion is based on year and month. For example, the current version 9.3, 9 == year and 3 == month. Normally, new features or performance improvement will be added on each display driver release. For ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.3, the major feature is Windows 7 support and is a unified driver with Windows Vista. Besides, it also improves on Folding@Home (which I did not try at all for the moment). Windows Vista HDMI audio driver support
integrated into all ATI Catalyst 9.3 packages and new AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK. Finally, Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products.

Based on these features, I will skip this release. Looking forward for the next release that has 64 bit hardware support on ATI AVIVO Video Converter. Right now, it is still using CPU processing instead of GPU power. Luckily, I have a very powerful CPU ~ Intel Core2 Extreme quad-core processor QX9650.

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Help… My Panasonic TX-32LX75M TV HDMI cannot work with PC. The story goes like this… I bought a HDMI cable from Carrefour last month. It was a value HDMI cable. I tried to connect my girl friend notebook BenQ Joybook S42 to the TV with this new cable. However, I failed to get a clear picture on my Panasonic TV. It does not have problem to display at 1366×768 resolution while using PC Mini D-sub 15-pin cable. I have a clear picture. However, it failed when using HDMI cable. By the way, the BenQ Joybook S42 laptop is using Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT display card. I tried different resolutions but still failed. And I don’t believe that Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT is causing the issue. Therefore, I brought my new desktop to the living room to test. I used Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 to test. But the result is same ~ blur text and not sharp at all.

Did have a faulty HDMI cable? Well, I asked my friend to test it for me. And it is working on his TV. So it is not Carrefour value HDMI cable issue…

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Introduction
After AMD took over ATI… ATI Radeon HD 4800 series broke lot of benchmark scores and they are selling at a very attractive price range too. There are lot of model in HD 4800 series like 4830, 4850 and 4870. And we have 512MB, 1GB and 2GB version of video memory to choose from. Not to mention X2 series like 4850 X2 and 4870 X2. There one that I have is Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 Silent Efficiency 512MB GDDR5 PCI-E. How does it perform? Read on to find out…

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 Silent Efficiency 512MB GDDR5 PCI-E

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