Comments on: The Nothing Card

by: zerodgz

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:12:13 +0100

That wouldn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. The noise generated by processing/video hardware stems from the various rapid electrical pulses going hither and yon all over the circuit traces, which act as little tiny antennae. The power supply has next to nothing to do with it, even if it's a lousy one. Bad power supply output might make a given device not work right or not work at all but it wouldn't have any significant impact on how noisy the device was while working and/or not working.

To shield sound hardware (say) from stray EM noise a Faraday cage sort of thing would be effective, and could be easily implemented by some judicious placement of some aluminum foil or something. Preferably grounded to the metalwork of the case.

I'd be a lot more impressed by this card if it were a big old chunk of eff-off shiny copper that just connected the ground pin in a PCI-E slot, because in that case I could be reasonably assured of it doing something, even if that something weren't particularly useful.

Plus, it'd look cool.

by: davolfman

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:19:59 +0100

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I think it might actually serve a useful purpose. What I think it is is some sort of bandpass filter (forgive me if I'm using the term wrong, my dad's the electrical engineer, not me) across the power lines. I think the intent then would be to reduce the noise things like graphics cards and disk controllers induce in the analog output audio of either onboard or add-on card sound. Whether it would be effective or not would be a different matter then.

by: tpgp

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:44:45 +0100

Boing Boing Gadgets reviewed a superior product last week.

by: frasera

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:03:35 +0100

too bad it costs so much. at say 10-15 dollars it would make a fun gag gift.
thats all its good for.

by: Itsacon

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:54:27 +0100

What's the fun in that? :-)

by: Jax184

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:20:39 +0100

A less brute force method would be to remove the caps and see if it still performs the same.

Or for that matter, make your own grounded plate.

by: Itsacon

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:24:01 +0100

The theory on the large PCB acting as a ground-plate insulator between the graphics card and other components would be easy to test. Get a hacksaw and make it smaller. If Newegg is giving them away, I have no doubt Dan can get a few from his mates at Aus PC to test that. And I don't think he has any problem with taking a hacksaw to a device that smells like an EMPower modulator...

by: mlipphardt

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:08:19 +0100

Um, phrantic, I'm afraid you are wrong. Black is the proper color for speed. Even Dan sez so. http://dansdata.com/black.htm

by: maxshcherban

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:11:45 +0100

OMG, this is one the funniest IT stuff I've ever seen :) Thank you for this insight, man!

Chazzozz commenter, you seem to know a lot about design companies from the inside ;)

by: zerodgz

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:04:59 +0100

You know, this card serves another very important purpose: Providing something for those of us who were suckered into buying PCI-e motherboards to support our shiny new graphics cards only to discover that there's absolutely nothing ELSE worthwhile to stick in our multitudes of 1x slots. Network card? Built into my motherboard. Sound card? Decent one built in. SATA card? I have eight ports on my motherboard. IDE card? Surpise! They don't bloody exist in PCI-e (or if they do, they didn't when I built my PC). Etc., etc.

So I may as well just stick a big old slab of do-nothing fiberglass in there just so my video card doesn't feel lonely. God knows nothing else useful is going in there.

Oh, and another "benefit:" It'll probably slightly impede airflow to your video card if you stick it in the adjacent slot.