Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Scenic View Down the Rejang River

Paramount Hotel and town square, phase 2


Kampung Hilir

Sibu Town

Sawmill

Unfortunately, I don't have the photo of the longhouses which can be found along the river.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Sibu

A spectacular view of Sibu town taken from the mighty Rejang River. My blog will explore more of this town, which also happen to be my hometown. Note there is a sand siltation form at the middle of the river. This had cause the river getting shallow by the year and our Government is not doing anything about it. One thing famous about Sibu is the town is prone to flooding in this last couple of year (probably I will show some photo if it flooded again soon). This is some of the hardship the town have to endure. The flood always overflow from the bank as the river is getting shallow and still our Government deny that the shallow river is the main cause. Imagine the kitchen pipe is choked, the water will have no where else to flow and cause the basin to be flooded.


Sibu is also famous for its ship building industries but very much limited to barge, tugboat or express boat. Even so, the built quality is still poor by marine standard. The only reason the industry able to sustain itself is because of the cheap labour here. But it might be affected by the booming ship industry in China. We'll see what the future hold.....

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The Air Asia Story

This is one good book to read. The book tells the story of the beginning of Air Asia's eventful history from its humble beginning with only 2 aircrafts to its present day success as the trendsetter among low cost airlines in Asia. It also includes how Air Asia founder, Tony Fernandes bought over the company for RM1 and turned the airline into a successful multi million ringgit business. It sounds like a movie plot but it is actually happened here in Malaysia

Tony Fernandes background, belief and etc are well tailored in this book. It also features the business model used by the airlines to cut cost to the minimum. I also find out there are more ways for the airline to make an income besides its core business (which is selling tickets0. This is something new and I'm amazed by their creativity. The airline has a lot more avenues of income than you might have imagined

One thing I found in common between the founder of the airline and my mentor, Donald Trump is their resilience. The never give up. I believe that is how they have a successful business. The books also go through the airline past and present problem from high fuel price to landing rights.

It is quite an interesting book to read and it make you realized how cost can be further reduced and generate more income from unexpected source.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Review




Today we are going to look at a CPU cooler from Arctic Cooling, the Freezer 7 Pro. It should cost around USD30 in the market. I believe this is a good price for its superior performance compare to other high end CPU coolers and it comes with 6 years warranty. Its competitors, the Cooler Master Hyper TX and Hyper TX-2 which are slightly cheaper fall short in term of performance to this cooler. (Cooler Master products actually suck! More reviews on that in my blog)

The Freezer 7 Pro is what we'd call a "medium size cooler", the overall dimensions are 126.5H * 107W * 96.5D (mm). It sports 42 aluminium fins, 6 copper heatpipes and a copper base. This type of "configuration", so to speak, has literally become the defacto standard building blocks for all high performance coolers out there today - it offers the best possible cooling with respects to both price and weight. Speaking of weight, the Freezer 7 Pro comes in at 520g.

As you would expect, the fan is an Arctic Cooling design, not third party. The dimensions are 96H * 107W * 43.5D (mm), which makes it a pseudo 96~107-ish (mm) fan. The fan uses a patented anti-vibration system to decouple the fan from it's casing. In the picture you can see that between the fan and its casing there is a rubber connector which acts as a vibration damper. This helps absorb the vibration of the running fan and prevent its transfer to the heatsink and case. Does it work? It does indeed. There is much vibration when touching the area where the fan motor is, but on touching the decoupled fan casing there is a substantial decrease in vibration. I've come across these fans from Arctic Cooling before and they never fail to impress from the perspective of noise.

The copper base of the Freezer 7 Pro is pre-applied with Arctic Cooling MX-1 thermal paste. Hence, this cooler is ready to be installed. The cooler is quite bulky and when installed one of the RAM slot is taken by the cooler fan. Hence, you are only able to install a RAM to the motherboard if you are to using this cooler. The cooler fan grill also found to be very close (almost touching) my ASUS P5VD2-X motherboard heat sink.

The cooler also assist in the air flow and maintain the airflow from front to back of the casing (assuming you have front intake fan and back exhaust fan) due to the position of the fan and fins. The fin is exactly in front of the back exhaust fan. This helps to get rid of the hot air from the casing more efficiently. Compare to the Intel stock cooler, the hot air is dispersed around the fan due to its fan location. The installation of this cooler is exactly the same as the Intel stock cooler. First, remove the fan from the fin. Just push the retaining clip into the motherboard hole and fit back the fans you are done.

I always pay attention to computer maintenance. After few months, dust will start to accumulate at the fan and the front fin. The dust must be clean from the fin as it will block the air flow. This can be easily done by removing the fan from the aluminium fins. Clean the fan blades with alcohol swab. The aluminium fins can be cleaned by using the air compressor to blow the dust out and clear the aluminium fins gap. This configuration ensures the cooler is able to be cleaned compare to other cooler where it is almost impossible to clean it. To clean the stock cooler, u might even have to dismantle the cooler from the motherboard.

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro performed exceptionally well and quiet. It keeps my CPU (Intel 4, 2666MHz) well below 50 degree Celsius (in a tropical weather). The fan speed is around 1200-1300rpm (Max 2500rpm) and is essentially quiet due to the rubber vibration damper.

This is a good product if price and performance are taken into consideration. I highly recommended this product.