The Easecase is sold on eBay and is made to order. You can choose the design, leather, inner lining, strap, and personalized it with your own initials. Here’s some picture to show you the pouch I have now.

Easecase Pouch

I chose to have a hole in the middle of the pouch so that I can easily push my Blackstone out of the pouch, and my initial on it .

Blackstone Fits nicely in the case

The Blackstone fits perfectly in the case and it holds the Blackstone in place so it will not slide out even with gravity pulling it downwards. The workmanship is very good.

Red inner lining

I chose red to give it a posh look. Although I’m very happy with the pouch, I still think the price is a bit steep. Maybe $10-$20 cheaper will make it a very good buy.

HTC Touch HD aka Blackstone

It has been almost a month now since I first own this phone. I promised another review and here it is.

So far I had flashed 4 different ROMs from different developers. They’re all competitively good but I decided to stick with Dutty’s Xtreme ROM. There is great potential in the phone, but sadly there’re limited support to it, therefore community developers are really appreciated on the xda-developers.com.

Battery Life
The phone now drains significantly more battery than its stock rom. It’s not a good thing, but it’s nobody to blame, but the phone. I don’t blame the phone though, I blame technology. Well you got to work out the math to understand why,
Stock ROM = Stock performance
Cooked ROM = Better performance
Better performance = Greater clock cycles = Greater heat generated = Greater power consumption (BAD)

So to conclude all the mathematical equation to you, faster = bad. Hahaha. Just kidding. What I trying to say, everything comes with a price. With better perfomance on the Blackstone, you need to sacrifice the battery life of you phone.

I’m quite happy with it because it definitely last me for the day with heavy usage. Last me for 2 and half days with adequate usage and could last longer if I disconnect myself from the world, literally.

Call quality
Calls are clear and crispy. I can hear very clearly throughout a phone call and even video call is amazingly clear. For once I was listening to music and speak through my headphones without a mic! See how amazing the phone is. It’s not the wonders of my Sennheiser, it’s just how speakers works, it can be use as microphones too.

Music Player
Music quality is superb! I can’t say more about it. It can be really loud on my Sennheiser and the quality is above what I expected from a mobile phone. It also automatically stop the music when there’s an incoming call.

Sluggishness
I guess this is unavoidable on Ms Windows based system. No matter it’s on a mobile device or a desktop platform, it’s still to blame on the OS architecture.

Finger friendly
Very indeed! You can’t beat the iPhone on this, but it’s nearly there! Job well done for introducing Touchflo3D on the device.

Internet
Wifi, Data connection through HSPDA, 3G are all smooth and responsive. I surf the Internet like I normally do at home without any shortcoming! Actually there’s a tiny little flaw, that the phone doesn’t have a cursor so I can’t browse over Facebook images to see who was tagged. This is actually to blame the website and Opera mobile browser!

SMS & e-Mails
We must admit that we can’t live without SMS and e-Mails nowadays. I can check both type of messages without much effort. With the schedule settings, Blackstone will download my mails using IMAP. I can delete it on my phone and it propagates to the mail servers and vice versa, automatically!

Memory Storage
Too much, don’t know what to do with the free space. Maybe I should put more music in it, but I can’t even finish listening to all of them! Moreover now 32GB SDHC is available in the market, try eat that iPhone!

Touch
As the phone’s name implies, we have to operate this phone using touch 98% all the time! 2% will be clicking the power switch, soft reset button and the volume keys. 98% of the time!! So you better expect the touch responsiveness is good! It does live up to its name fortunately. Still it can’t beat the iPhone in this, but you can do a lot of other things with the Blackstone.

FEDEX Package arrived

It cost me a bomb though, but it’s well worth it. It’s not just any ordinary phone, it’s a smartphone, the iPhone-killer, the Blackstone, whatever you want to name it.

HTC Touch HD Box

HTC Touch HD Unboxing

The package, being shipped from Hong Kong comes with an adapter for the charger. I’m cool with the adapter because it is a lot cheaper compare buying it locally. The box is not much of a eye catcher, but the lid is magnetic. Uncovering it awaits the Blackstone, shimmering.

Accessories

HTC Pouch

The package comes with all the standard accessories, 8GB Micro SD card, extra Stylus, pouch, USB cable, charger, manuals and Cds. The disappointing part of the purchase is the cheap pouch that HTC includes. I pay so much for it and I get a microfiber pouch? Comon, at least do it leather. I got my previous Dopod D810 which comes with a leather pouch. Not very fashion trendy though, but it’s leather.

5mp Auto Focus Camera

The phone is designed to be very sleek and simple. Only 4 touch sensitive buttons on the front, a generous 480 x 800 pixels touch screen, light sensor, ear piece and a front camera for video calls. At the rear there’s a 5mp auto focus camera covered with a brushed aluminium plate. Nice.

The stylus is magnetically sticked to the phone. It’s convenient that you don’t need force to pull or put it back, but it does comes out easily when you try to squeeze the Blackstone out of the pouch. The MicroSD slot is located inside the back cover, which is not very convenient but not a big fuzz to me.

HTC Touch HD

The Blackstone comes with the new improved Manila 3D. I’m so impressed of HTC trying to make Windows Mobile to be finger friendly. The touch screen is remarkable, although not a multi-touch screen like the iPhone, but it’s good enough for its job, even better after a little tweak. The camera is only acceptable but I am not bothered much, I never expect much from a phone’s camera.

I flashed the Blackstone with the newest radio version 1.12.25.16 and it is just excellent! Calls are crystal clear and the best is the GPS receiver! I can easily get full coverage on a fine day in less than a minute time! The battery usage is minimal too, thanks to the better 65nm CPU. Compared to the older models which is 90nm processors, it draws minimal power consumption which gives the Blackstone up to 6 days of standby.

I also flashed with a couple of ROMs and I decided to stick with the best – L26’s ROM. Version 9 of the ROM is coming out later today, I might write another review on it and about all the software in it.

Sennheiser PMX 60

This is the best headphones I ever had, only compared to those earphones that I ever owned. I got so sick of those earpiece falling off my not-so-big-ear-hole.

It is quite good actually. The low, mid and high are all equally good. For someone who seek for sound quality below the AUD100 mark, this is the headphone to go. It’s design is attactive too, not too eye catchy, but looks cool if someone notices you with it.

My girl with the headphones on..

“You may continue using this free version only if you take at most four flights (two return flights) in any 12 months and you do not own an SUV. If you do not quality you must uninstall the program or order the Pro version.”

Wordweb 5.0

Speechless….. Fortunately it has a button to disable it.

A while after I cheer over the success of overclocking my new computer, I decided to try out OSX86 on my intel machine. There are just so many things you can do with your PC, it reminds me of modifying my ride.

I went through so much trouble installing the hackintosh. It was dramatic, I lost both my XP and Vista operating system in the process of installing the hacked OSX for PC. I initially thought that my SATA hardisk has to be running on AHCI mode in order to get OSX86 up and running. The problem is AHCI mode has to be enabled BEFORE installing Windows XP. It’s easy to change the drivers for Windows VIsta but not for Windows XP. I followed the instructions here but sadly, my Windows XP failed to boot.

BSOD is something nobody ever wants to experience, yet I’m sure everyone will at least seen it once. Then it went bad to worse, I accidently deleted the partition table on my drive. I know I can fix it back but it’s just too much trouble. I decided to install everything from scratch. There goes, the long process of installing them on AHCI mode, XP – OSX86 – Vista.

Gearing up

It’s troublesome that Windows XP installation disk does not come with AHCI drivers, you have to load the drivers first by pressing F6 before the installation starts. The problem is I don’t have a floppy drive and I couldn’t load the drivers, so I used nLite to bundle the AHCI drivers with the Windows XP installation disk and it worked.

I continued with the hackintosh installation using the comprehensive guide of installing Kalway 10.5.2 for Intel. It worked fabulously until I try to install Windows Vista. Although Vista installation allows me to load the AHCI drivers from my thumb drive, it did not work! It just keep failing while trying to install, giving all those unhelpful errors like I know a damn of what they are saying.

So I decided to install Vista in IDE mode and planned to change the drivers later to AHCI mode. It worked perfectly previously but not this time. Microsoft has to make things complicated, it worked fine, but why not now?? I was so fed up that I switched back to IDE mode and run everything normally, luckily everything including Windows XP will rollback to IDE drivers without a glitch.

Conclusion

Finally everything works like it suppose to be. Windows, crash as always. Mac OS X unfriendly as always, with all those fancy names they got for the icons and I have no idea what they suppose to do until I click on them.  All has their pros and cons. Vista is known to be slower than ever when it comes to file transfer, but XP obviously has the eXPerience to copy faster. Vista’s interface is no doubt fancier than OS X, but for the practicallity, many will still stick to XP.

With lightning speed hardwares hitting the shelves every week, the dark side of Vista is barely visible. So if you’re low in budget of upgrading your computer, I suggest sticking with Windows XP. For geeks like me who feel like taking the risk, go try out OS X86 on your Intel PC. Although alot of hardware might now work without drivers, but at least it’s as fun as overclocking.

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Zalman VF1000, OCZ Vendetta 2 & Scythe Kaze 1900rpm

I’m quite concern of the heat generated in my case because of all the acoustic dampening foam which comes with the NZXT Hush. Let me show you the stock ATi Radeon HD4850 from Sapphire.

Sapphire ATi Radeon HD4850

You can see how puny the stock cooler is.. This powerful Graphic Processing Unit’s performance is overwhelming for its price. I guess this is how they cut down the cost for it.

Sapphire ATi Radeon HD4850

You can see how puny it is, the rotor of the cooler is no bigger than a 5c coin. Fixing the Zalman VF1000 onto it requires removing the stock cooler. It’s child’s play removing the screws at the back of the card.

Naked ATi Radeon HD4850

The memory controllers are surrounding the GPU’s chip. Zalman’s memory heat sinks come with double-sided thermal sheets so they are easy to install.

ATi Radeon HD4850 with Zalman VF1000

The copper heat sink is mounted onto the card after sticking all eight memory heat sinks. The Zalman’s VF1000 package comes with a Fanmate 2 controller too. I put it to rest for the memory heat sink’s adhesive to bond. I opened up the fancy box by OCZ and found myself a tower of fins.

OCZ Vendetta 2

You can see how huge it is and how many 5c it can fits, thus totalling the price =P. The tower is connected by 6 heat pipes and it comes with standard LGA775 push pins. Thus you do not need to remove your motherboard to install this gigantic tower.

Cooling in action

It is put up to test after all the installation, including the Scythe Kaze at the rear of the chasis. The Zalman VF1000 LED fan is suprisingly quiet at around 1300rpm. It can spins at full throttle at 2500rpm with just abit of wind sound, simply astonishing. The silent killer reduces the heat of the GPU by 30°C at both idle and full load. The OCZ Vendetta 2 performs as well as the VF1000, just abit louder. Considering the size of the fan, it is acceptable for noise it generates. The Vendetta able to reduce the heat of the Q6600 by approximately 15°C at idle.

Other than the silent killers, the Sythe Kaze works extremely well too, at an extreme level of noise either! I’ve decided to control the load of the fan by using SpeedFan. This utility by Almico allows you to customized the fans in your rig, controlling them when to kick in and when to shut up. This tutorial helped me alot. The Sythe Kaze spins queitly after throttling the speed. It only roars when needed. =)

Before...

and after.

]]> http://www.philchoong.com/tech/2008/09/07/cooler-the-better/feed/ 3 http://www.philchoong.com/tech/2008/09/04/q6600-32ghz-overclocked/ http://www.philchoong.com/tech/2008/09/04/q6600-32ghz-overclocked/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:50:52 +0000 blurblur http://www.philchoong.com/tech/?p=3 Here I celebrate the opening of my new tech blog and passing the SIX SEVEN hour mark of stress test on my Q6600 processor chip.

I successfully overclocked the 2.4Ghz to 3.2Ghz and running it on stress using Prime95 utility. The temperature readings are as follow:

• Room temperature: 21.8°C
• Motherboard temperature: 35°C
• CPU temperature: 58°C max
• Core 1-4: 65°C max

My humble system’s Hardware are:

• Gigabyte EP-45T-DS3R
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping with OCZ Vendetta 2 installed
• Sapphire ATi Radeon 4850 with Zalman VF1000 installed
• Western Digital 7400rpm 160GB Hardisk drive
• Pioneer DVD ReWritable Drive
• All assembled in NZXT Hush Casing (Black)

and my overclocked settings are:

• 400MHz x 8 = 3.2GHz
• DRAM frequency: 1333MHz
• CPU Voltage: Auto, reading 1.34~1.36v

I’m quite happy with my newly built rig. I’ll update more about my rig later. Stay tune!

Crysis

Been playing this game for days now and all I can tell you is that it’s aweesomme! It’s too awesome to the point that it eats my GPU for breakfast and now crunching on my RAM for lunch.. It uses up nearly 1.6GB of my 2GB ram while I’m shooting the Aliens.

On top of that I’m running it on top of Windows Vista Ultimate for the best results in graphics. Vista usually uses up approximately 0.3GB 650MB of ram on a fresh boot. So what is there left for me?? T_T