PC Hardware-Related Companies Buy Out Season

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: July 24, 2006 - 5:00 AM PST I think all PC hardware-related companies are for sale these days. In almost 20 years in the business I’ve never seen so many merger and acquisitions involving big players at the same time. That is the life of a high-competitive industry with very small profit margins. Here is a small retrospect of what happened recently. AMD bought ATI today, in a transaction valued at USD 5.4 billion. This is probably the most important change in the PC hardware industry in the last years. What will happen on the CPU and VGA market is still subject of a lot of speculation. Macrosynergy: This XGI-related company was bought by ATI this month. We’ve seen some headlines saying that ATI has bought XGI, but this is not totally accurate. What ATI has bought was Macrosynergy in Shanghai plus related personnel working out of XGI's Santa Clara, California location. ATI’s idea behind this acquisition is to increase its presence in mainland China plus getting some extra research and development people to join them. ULi: This chipset maker was bought by nVidia on February 2006. It was originally part of ALi until they decided to put all their chipset products under a new company. This acquisition should help nVidia to improve their chipsets. ABIT: This motherboard manufacturer is struggling since the Taiwan Stock Exchange found out that their results were manipulated. By the end of 2005 they had already migrated half of their production to ECS manufacturing. In January 2006 Taiwanese PC maker USI announced their proposal to buy ABIT, depending yet of approval from Taiwan Stock Exchange and the involved parties. USI’s proposal was to pay around USD 10.5 million for ABIT plus 20 million of shares of the new company USI would open to hold ABIT, a real bargain, since it includes all ABIT trademarks and manufacturing facilities. However, rumor says that ABIT’s president was recently arrested for manipulating ABIT’s financial statements (we couldn’t confirm or deny this story) and maybe the Taiwan Stock Exchange won’t approve this acquisition. ECS: Tatung merged with ECS in January 2006. By the agreement, Tatung is now the largest ECS shareholder, with 30% of the available stocks. As payment, Tatung gave ECS their desktop PC segment, which had USD 60 million in cash, USD 136 million in inventory and USD 2 million in fixed assets at the moment of the merger. This was an interesting deal, since both companies were healthy. Maxtor: Seagate announced that they will buy Maxtor in December 2005, in a USD 1.9 billion transaction. Just to remember that Maxtor had bought Quantum in 2000 paying USD 1.3 billion for it. Chaintech: BTC bought part of Chaintech and then Walton Advanced Engineering bought 25% of Chaintech in September 2005, changing the company name to Walton Chaintech, aparently leaving the motherboard business and probably entering the memory business. Around the same time Chaintech USA started to share BTC’s building in Fremont, CA in order to cut expenses, and as far as we know just one employee from Chaintech USA is still on the company. There is also a rumor dated back 2003 that Gigabyte and MSI would merge, which regained some strenght last month after DigiTimes published a piece called "Industry makers concerned about potential Gigabyte and MSI consolidation". If there is any other merger or acquisition missing on this list, please let us know. The big question now is: which company in the PC hardware industry will be the next one to be sold? Any guesses? Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (3) top

Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Review Corrected

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 25, 2006 - 10:41 AM PST Just to let you know that we have corrected our Athlon 64 X2 5000+ review. When we published it for the first time, Athlon 64 X2 5000+ was installed with 1 GB DDR2-800, while other systems were using 2 GB RAM. We installed 2 GB DDR2-800 and ran all benchmarks again, and corrected all charts and text. The performance of Athlon 64 X2 5000+ improved a little bit and it ended up with it having a performance identical to Athlon FX-60. AMD promised to us a Athlon 64 FX-62. Let's wait and see. By the way, http://www.hexus.net fell in the same mistake. They are comparing AMD systems with 2 GB against Intel systems with 1 GB. Even worse, Intel systems use a different hard disk drive than AMD systems are using. And they are saying that their comparison is unbiased... Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Talking About Power Supplies...

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 22, 2006 - 7:08 AM PST Look what I found here in my junk closet: an Apple II power supply. For its time (1977) it was a breakthrough, since until then switching mode power supplies weren’t used. Designed by Rod Holt, it doesn’t differ a lot from power supplies used on current-day PCs, as we’ve seen on our Anatomy of Switching Power Supplies tutorial. We disassembled it to show you how it worked. click to enlarge Figure 1: Apple II power supply. click to enlarge Figure 2: Apple II power supply. click to enlarge Figure 3: Inside the Apple II power supply. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (6) top

Trashing an Aiwa Sound System

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 14, 2006 - 7:42 AM PST After setting my Siemens cell phone on fire and smashing my DVD player using Tae Kwon Do moves, I promised to destroy that famous Aiwa shelf system where its CD player stops working after some time. I met at least five close friends that had an Aiwa system with this problem, all of them promised to give me their systems so we could build a bowling, but they backed out, as they were using the stereo as an amplifier for their PCs. Only a very brave friend, who, by the way, works here with us, decided to donate his Aiwa stereo to us for breaking it. We thought about several possibilities for our “V for Vendetta” session. Set it on fire was out of question, since I had already set my cell phone on fire. The best idea we had was buying a hockey mask, getting a chainsaw and making a Jason “Friday the 13th” Voorhees photo session. But were the heck can we arrange a chainsaw in this concrete jungle where I live? We decide to make a beautiful Brazilian Voodoo with it, see how beautiful it was on Figure 1. The set was perfect: seven red candles, popcorn, cachaça (sugar cane alcohol) and a beautiful picture of Saint George. But even this didn’t fix the stereo. click to enlarge Figure 1: Not even Brazilian Voodoo (“macumba”) fixed the Aiwa sound system. So, let’s go to the beach... click to enlarge Figure 2: The stage for our “V for Vendetta” session. click to enlarge Figure 3: The last farewell. click to enlarge Figure 4: Let’s play! Zoom, zoom, zoom... click to enlarge Figure 5: And Zooooooooooooooooooooooooooommm! Oh yeah. It wasn’t fun. It didn’t break like we wanted: just the top cover broke. Wow, look at this, a soccer goal! Perfect! Let’s hang the bandit! click to enlarge Figure 6: Hanging our Aiwa stereo. Well, on Figures 7 and 8 you can see a Tae Kwon Do kicking technique that due to space restrictions was left of my Tae Kwon Do demonstration when I trashed my DVD player. We are talking about the jumping side kick, a.k.a. Tuyu (or Timyo) Yop Tchagui. click to enlarge Figure 7: Tuyu Yop Tchagui. click to enlarge Figure 8: Tuyu Yop Tchagui. Ah, now we are talking, the front panel went outer space! But what else can we do with it? Shall we go to the water? click to enlarge Figure 9: Going to the water. How about building a sand castle? click to enlarge Figure 10: Building a sand castle with the Aiwa stereo. click to enlarge Figure 11: Building a sand castle with the Aiwa stereo. click to enlarge Figure 12: The finished artwork. Before anyone asks, I threw the trashed stereo in the trashcan after this session. Who will be my next victim? My lousy cordless phone from Uniden that doesn’t recognize the handsets anymore, even after resetting it zillion times with all possible ways, following the orientation from their support staff. They said the phone is really broken. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (1) top

Ops, Error Fixed

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 11, 2006 - 4:31 AM PST Just to let you guys know that the last three graphs on the Far Cry results for the HIS Radeon X700 AGP Review were wrong. I've just corrected them. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Buy Hardware Secrets Stock

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: April 15, 2006 - 8:13 AM PST And from several other websites. But all with play money. On Alexadex website you can buy and sell stocks from any website. It works like this: once you registered, you get $10.000 in play money. With this dough you can buy stocks from any website. Then just wait for the stocks to go up, sell them and start all over again. There are people there that have already “cashed” more than $1 million (the winner so far has “cashed” more than $1 billion). It is an addictive pastime. The valuation and devaluation of the stocks are proportional to the website traffic, measured by Alexa. Since Alexa is updated only once a day (sometimes once every three days), the valuation of your “stock portfolio” can delay a bit, like on the real stock market. On tip is to be on “unknown” websites with “valuation potential”, i.e. with growth potential. By the way, one way for you to help Hardware Secrets to grow (and its “virtual stocks” to valuate) is by installing Alexa toolbar. With this toolbar installed on your PC, Alexa knows that you visited our website, increasing our stats there (these stats are used by potential advertisers to check our size; more advertisers mean more budget for tutorials and reviews…). But there are people that don’t like this toolbar because it can be classified as a “spyware”, since it monitors which websites you visit. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Athlon 64 With Its Metallic Cap Removed

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: April 7, 2006 - 8:19 AM PST Have you ever seen an Athlon 64 wihout its metallic cap? Oh, didn't you know that its metallic cover is just a heatsink? Yesterday our socket 754 Athlon 64 3200+ burned and we decided to open it to take a look on how it looks like without its metallic cap. In fact it looks a lot like Athlon XP, but with a bigger die. Anyway, see for yourself, the picture is below. click to enlarge Its heatsink is really glued to the die, so we had a bad time trying to removing it without breaking the CPU. As you can see, we chip off our chip (what a infamous selection of words). Don't try doing this with a working processor! Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (1) top

We Donated Several Boards to Charity

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: March 26, 2006 - 1:24 PM PST Yesterday I decided to organize our lab and I separated all boards that we were not using anymore to give to a charity named Favela On Line (On Line Slum). We gave away 10 video cards, 2 motherboards and several other hardware parts. This material will be used to assemble and upgrade computers used by poor people in my hometown, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On the picture below you see part of the material we donated. click to enlarge Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

A Nerd in Legoland

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: March 20, 2006 - 8:26 PM PST Even though I dress in a fashionable way, wear cool haircuts and go to nightclubs to dance (a lot) electronic music, I cannot hide the truth: I am a nerd. This is easily proven by what I did last weekend. I was driving to San Diego and saw the sign “Legoland 3 miles ahead”. I couldn’t help myself: I needed badly to check Legoland with my own eyes. What drives a human being is still a mystery. All I can say is that I pulled over and five minutes later I was more than eager to spend USD 53 plus USD 8 for parking to check the theme park based on my favorite toy from all times – Lego, of course (Technic series, that one that came with engines, cranks, pulleys and pumps, to be more exact). click to enlarge Figure 1: Welcome to Legoland. I was expecting to see some oversized models made by people working at Lego and with no budget restrictions (try making something big with Lego and you will know what I am talking about), plus play a lot. On the main entrance two old friends of mine saluted me, but this time entirely made of Lego bricks. click to enlarge Figure 2: Darth Vader made of Lego bricks. click to enlarge Figure 3: R2-D2 made of Lego bricks. I wanted to play with Lego, of course! So I went straight ahead to the “Imagination Zone” where I could found places for playing. On the first place, “Build & Test”, you can build your own Lego car and put it in a racetrack to compete with cars made by other kids. click to enlarge Figure 4: Building Lego cars. But the “Mindstorms” place was the best. There you take a 45-minute lesson on how to program a computer to remotely control your Lego robot. Then you play a “mission” with it (a cool “Mars Rescue” stuff). click to enlarge Figure 5: Lego Mindstorms. click to enlarge Figure 6: Programming your Lego robot. click to enlarge Figure 7: “Mars Rescue” scenario. At the center of the park you can find “Miniland”, a series of scenarios made using Lego bricks. It is quite impressive. click to enlarge Figure 8: San Francisco made of Lego bricks. click to enlarge Figure 9: Detail of the San Francisco set. I liked the space shuttle made of Lego bricks amazing (yes, I was 11 again for a couple of minutes). click to enlarge Figure 10: Space shuttle on the NASA set. But what really impressed me was the Volvo X90 replica made using Lego bricks. At the distance I though it was a real car. It uses over 200,000 Lego bricks and weights impressive 2,930 pounds. This because the model is hollow, otherwise it would be heavier. click to enlarge Figure 11: Volvo X90 replica made using Lego bricks. click to enlarge Figure 12: Volvo X90 replica made using Lego bricks. click to enlarge Figure 13: Volvo X90 replica made using Lego bricks. Another really cool thing at Legoland is that you can buy Lego bricks by weight (USD 6.99 per quarter pound). Legoland is also full of attractions for kids, like merry-go-round, rollercoaster, mini car, mini golf, etc. If you have kids up to 10, I think they will like it. Even though there were some things I found cool and posted here, I think it was too expensive (USD 61) for just watching Lego models (ok, I have to confess, I tried the Technic rollercoaster). I should have saved the money and gone watching Shamu at the Sea World instead. For more information: http://www.legoland.com Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Case Made of Fans

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: February 15, 2006 - 5:15 AM PST This guy from New Zealand solved his overheating problem with a very curious (and funny) solution. He built up a case using... fans! There are 70 of them. Really amazing, see the pics below. If you want more info on this project, check his website at http://www.peteredge.orcon.net.nz/casepics.htm. Funny enough he claims that it didn't improve CPU temperature at all, however the system/motherboard temperature was pretty stable at 23-24º C (73~75º F). This solution should be very noisy... click to enlarge Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top