Spring has Sprung

"Spring has sprung, the grass's ris,

I poned the daisies with the lawnmower."

Welcome to spring, the antidote to winter and the precursor to a long summer - volcanoes permitting. You know, I never thought I'd say "it'll be a good summer apart from the volcanoes" but you can get all sorts from Iceland these days.

Having mowed the lawn in a half-arsed kind of a way and cleaned the BBQ with my whole arse I'm left wondering what the coming months will bring. I've got a bunch of new stuff to review - more coffee blogging and Valve are about to release the Engineer update for TF2. I've put in seventy-somthing engineer hours in TF2 and I'm going to notice the difference if I keep playing the game.

And there is some politics thing going on. Like the homeless people of our country and the American electorate will the Brits vote for change or will we be in the Brown for another term?

Has labour become too laborious and will the rising liberals reach the political radar?

Technology is moving on with and without me, I've got that missing RAM to buy and am still running two fileservers in tandem because I havn't migrated my data ... yet. There is a nagging SSD to buy and my CPU cooler makes more noise than... well than I want it to. I've

I've joined the eBay community - to the shock an horror of some philosophies and the "why did it take so long?" of others.. To summerise, I like to munt. Munt being the verb form of munter, in this context it means I like to buy shit I don't need. Tyler Durden would reprimand me, but at least I'm not working I job I hate for the privilege. In fact, I'm working a job I love. FYI Google "Ninja Theory"

So what am I reviewing today? I'm reviewing spring. Blossoms in the trees, sun in the sky and a layer of ash grounding all flights. What's not to love? Like many of us, I'm pretty much solar powered so when the dark days of winter decline the spring sun turns me into a regular Duracell bunny. We've had the first BBQ of the season and are planting the garden.

With all this life-affirmation and potential, spring definitely gets a 2-over-pi out of one.

Keep It Cool

Since the conflicts of the ancient world have bought collateral damage, and so the cost of constructing and configuring a HTPC has been my desktop computer. I've been all too eager to take parts from and build testbeds, the significant fraction of which have been pre-blogged and the end result left me at a loss of one video card. The Desktop PC is now part of the plan and there are three changes to make straight off the bat.

• A CPU Cooler
• A Video Card
• Four more gig of RAM

I've put the RAM on ice just for the moment, as memory prices have doubled since I last looked and to be honest the other two are higher priorities. I'm still using a stock cooler and have a noisy nVidia 7800. The Gainwood 7800 GT is a good card, and actually capable of running all the games I want to play at a decent frame rate but between its wind-tunnel cooler and the CPU fan the noise is unbearable.

So I've made the switch to a Domino-ALC CPU cooler and a fanless GeForce 9800GT.

The 9800GT is a pleasant upgrade from the 7800, providing good antialiasing at 1280x1024 and faster-than-you-need frame rates in the latest titles from Valve and whichever Total War game I'm playing through at the moment. Don't you find world conquests just kind of blur together?

Passive cooling is obviously its advantage over the framerate and image quality increases although they are both noticable and very much appreciated. Thankyou very much Gigabyte and nVidia, this is The Way It's Meant To Be Played. The card is a brick sized array of fins and heatpipes and does get hot to the touch but not (yet) scarily so.

While I understand it is both feature-poor and slow, being still several generations behind the cutting edge, it meets and exceeds all of the quality and speed bars I've set and is silent to boot so I can't in all honestly come up with a complaint. Its a 9/10 product, based on being fast, silent and pretty. Its loses half a mark for being second-rate technology and another half-mark because speed freaks can buy faster cards for less. View speed benchmark and price comparisons online to make up your own mind. The review score will gradually decay over time, maybe a point per year I based on how much bias I put on speed and the requirements of new games.

Next off the mark is the Domino ALC from CoolIT Systems. Its a Peltier Heat Exchange, connected to a high surface area radiator with a water based working fluid and 120mm exhaust fan. From a technology perspective its got quite a geek chic including a blue-backlit LCD temperature, fan and water pump speed indicator and I'm pleased it hasn't clocked a temperature above 40'c yet. Of course, this means its either not drawing much heat from the CPU and i'm going into meltdown or its drawing loads of heat and cooling it really well. The constant hot airflow from the exhaust fan makes me think the latter and believe its very good at cooling.

What the Domino is not good at, is being quiet. All of the coolers I've had from Noctura, Scythe and Zalman have been quieter and carry a lower retail price. Fundementally, you can spend less on a quieter cooler. If you care about its cooling more than its volume then it'll get a comfortable 9/10, but I value the peace and quiet enough to relegate it to the 8/10 range.

The High Tech feelgood factor of all the technology in the Domino is almost enough to pull it into the 9/10 (or higher!) range but I'm reviewing it as a cooler NOT as a 'gadget'. The Domino has staying power for as long as it can be mounted on a CPU so should stay with me through and beyond my next PC upgrade.