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I agree, what a bizarre decision. This article I found has the Mobility Radeon 9000 spanking the GeForce4 440 Go handily in every single benchmark, on top of having the programmable vertex & pixel shaders, unlike the GeForce. Why on earth would Apple offer a "top of the range" Powerbook with graphics that were inferior in every way to those of it's "mid-range" model??

(p.s. the ultimate Doom 3 notebook is surely a PC with a GeForce4 4200 Go!)

I just sent some pics of the Nvidia plant tour (pics somewhere in the middle)... I wonder what they'll tell me :-P

MaximumPC states that they think the Radeon 9700 will likely close the gap when anti-aliasing is cranked up. However, the Intellisample compression will supposedly vastly increase the speed of anti-aliasing on the GeForce FX (see Anandtech article). I would think that this would push the GeForce FX even further ahead of the Radeon.

The biggest thing to remember, and this has been said again and again, is that this is beta silicon and beta drivers we're seeing. Not only does the performance from early beta drivers of a card to final increase substantially as we've seen with releases in the past, nVidia has proven time and time again that they can get a hell of a lot more performance out of their cards with new drivers (See Detonator XP release and Detonator 40.xx release, both of which gave something like 25%+ performance increases to the top-level cards at the time)

I see this alot nowadays - people saying that AMD have "lost their edge", or "been taking it easy for a while" ... that is simply not true. An AMD Athlon XP 2800+ _will_ beat an Intel Pentium IV at 2.8 GHz in most benchmarks (and the 3.06 GHz P4 in quite a few - see the latest ones at THG or AT if you don't trust me), just as it is supposed to. And you can still practically get two Athlons (not 2800+'s mind you) for the same price as one high-end Pentium IV. Surely no-one here thinks that a single P4, HT or no HT, stands a chance against a true SMP system (given apps that take advantage of both CPU's)?

Furthermore, there's no app or game available on this earth, and there probably won't be for at least two years to come, where the speed difference between an AXP/2800+ and a P4/3GHz is big enough to really mean anything to anyone other than the fanatical overclocking crowd, who will spend any amount of money just to have the fastest stuff on the market, only to use it for stuff like playing Counter-Strike, which uses perhaps 20% of the total CPU and graphics card capacity. Well, if you're into that sort of stuff, sure. Get a P4 and enjoy having the fastest CPU there is .. until the next model P4/AXP is out, that is.

For the rest of us, who base our computer purchases on common sense, for speed, stability and price, the obvious choice is still the Athlon XP.

Besides, the Pentium IV still has a pretty fucked up design. See this page if you don't know what I'm talking about. I always laugh at people who whine that Windows is poorly designed, only to praise Intel CPU's in the next breath.

Anyone care to disagree? Remember, modding me down is so much easier than posting an intelligent reply.

That's what I said. Similarly configured, the powerbook would be cheaper.

Perhaps you wouldn't consider a desktop box with the Radeon 9000 a gaming machine, but since it is (currently) the fastest available graphics chipset for laptops, I'd consider any laptop equipped with one to be built with gaming in mind.

Any machine built with the GeForce4 4200 Go would have to be considered a gaming machine :)

First, you can't get a decent Geforce4 Ti for ~$100. Maybe a Geforce4MX, but that is a severly crippled GF4, so much so that even John Carmack said not to get one. A Geforce4 4200 (which is the lowest Geforce 4 is about $150.

So you don't "need" a 9700 that costs $300. How about the ATI 9500, which is the slow brother of the 9700? Much cheaper, a bit crippled, but performs on par or even better than the GF 4600, let alone the 4200. And only about $180. WITH DirectX 9 support, anti-alias glory with anisotropic filtering, all at a playable rate.

This isn't just how that the 9700 is faster (duh!) than the 4x00 series from Nvidia, but also how the whole 9x00 family is faster than Nvidia, budget and highend (I don't count the bastardized 9000). This family is all derived from the tech of the 9700.

but don't take my opinion for it, check it out for yourself.

Tech Report on 9500

Anandtech on 9500

Tom's Hardware on 9500

The Radeon 9700 has been leading for months upon months now. There have been countless articles about it slaughtering the GF4 Ti4600. This is not news.

If you want some videocard news, you should look at the newly released ATi Radeon 9500 Pro. It supports AGP 8x, something that only a couple special GeForce 4 "Ti4800" cards do, and it can be had with 128mb and 64mb of RAM for around $50-80 less than a GF4 4600.

In the benchmarks on Anandtech above, it comes within 2fps of the Ti4600 in most cases.

Not only is ATi giving Nvidia's top dog a run for it's money, but also their value products.

How long will it be before an FX board will be taxed by a new game?

This is one of the reasons why you need a faster card. 4200 is already overtaxed by UT2003 at 1024x768 with AA enabled.

The fact that AA can be disabled, and resolutions lowered, doesn't mean that a game can't make use of a faster card!

The niche is CPU Power per space area. If you go read the NVidia and ATI interviews that were linked to from slashdot a while back, (I think they were fron AnandTech) you will read a part where they talk about how NVidia loves those U2 racks because they provide amazing horsepower per space numbers.

Aha, here's the link! Look at the bottom of the page to read about performance density.

When you are doing huge computational feats, the cost of renting an extra warehouse or two to hold the computers is a cost that should ideally be avoided.

By the way, looking at these test results, you might want to know why Intel didn't introduce this hyperthreading capability earlier. Unfortunately, there were legal reasons for the delay, where Intel was in a court battle with former workstation maker and current high-tech company Intergraph, where both companies claimed to have invented the technique. Intergraph prevailed in court, Intel settled, and now is allowed to use this innovation.

Intergraph and Intel are fighting over EPIC which is the foundation for IA-64 aka IPF (Itanium Processor Family).

Basically we're at a "wait and see" point with Trident but there is the potential for the XP4 to deliver on all of their claims

there is only so many times in a day you can "go make coffee" or "check your email".

Geek Slack List

• http://www.subgenius.com/
• http://www.slackersguild.com/
• BBC News
• http://www.memepool.com/
• http://www.plastic.com/
• http://www.arstechnica.com/
• http://www.metafilter.com/
• http://www.techdirt.com/
• http://www.bottomquark.com/ (Science News)
• http://newsforge.com/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/
• http://www.anandtech.com/
• http://www.bjorn3d.com/
• http://cellar.org - Image of the Day
• http://www.collegehumor.com/
• http://www.everything2.com/
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/
• http://www.theonion.com/
• NASA - Astronomy Picutre of the Day
• http://www.majorgeeks.com - Windows Shareware / Freeware
• http://www.advogato.org/
• http://www.sweetcode.org/
• http://www.disinfo.com/ - Disinformation
• http://www.somethingawful.com/
• http://www.astronomynow.com/ - Astronomy News
• http://www.aip.org/ - American Institue of Physics - News
• http://www.adequacy.org/

• The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking 1 on Large Computations

Hope this helps =)

Check out the hot deal forums over at sites like Fatwallet.com or Anandtech. Here's a thread about cheap firewalls from the latter.

Check out the hot deal forums over at sites like Fatwallet.com or Anandtech. Here's a thread about cheap firewalls from the latter.

comdex stuff, check these links

Link 1

Link 2

comdex stuff, check these links

Link 1

Link 2

Too bad they couldn't have tested this one too...

Bringing mobile gaming to new heights
nVidia GPU Delivers Fastest Mobile 3D Performance
Nvidia to launch NV28M at Comdex - The first known notebook design is slated for Q1 next year, from long time Nvidia partner Dell

Of course, according to Anandtech's intellisample page, Here, 16GB/s times a compression ratio of 4 = 48GB/s...why don't we just reinvent fckin math for FPS in DOOM III

"NVIDIA has hinted at offering another version of the GeForce FX at a lower clock speed that would only occupy a single slot cutout, but we will have to wait until the product line is announced before we can find out what the differences will be. Our initial guess would indicate that a simple reduction in clock speed would be enough to go with a more conventional cooling setup."

And:

"The other issue that users may have is noise, luckily NVIDIA has taken steps to make sure that the GeForce FX is one of the most quiet running cards they've ever produced. Borrowing technology from their mobile parts and combining it with the FX Flow cooling system, NVIDIA is able to dynamically reduce the speed of the fan based on the graphical needs of the system. When sitting in a 2D situation the card will scale back the clock speed of parts of the 3D pipeline that aren't in use, thus allowing the fan to spin much slower. As soon as you start using the GPU for games or any other 3D intensive applications, the clock speeds up as does the fan. The idea is that if you're gaming you're not as concerned with noise as when you are typing in Word."

Link: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1749&p=6

.. how well will it fit into this tight enclosure?

An earlier anandtech article addressed that, by modifying the intakes with some tubing and silicon sealant. Picture here.

An earlier anandtech article addressed that, by modifying the intakes with some tubing and silicon sealant. Picture here.

AnandTech's coverage includes an nVidia-supplied benchmark that shows the NV30 beating the 4600 by 2.5x in Doom 3 (and the Radeon 9700 by about 40%). Of course, no one knows under what circumstances these benchmarks were obtained. I don't think any "independent" benchmarks will be available for awhile.

Click below for the version of Anandtech's very thorough review without having to load huge advertisement graphics:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=1749

Of all the things that a motherboard (or more specifically the collection of microchips known as the chipset) connects together the connection between the memory and the processor is the fastest the most important to performance. No other link, except between the processor and the motherboard even comes close in importance. Also, another issue that comes up is what is known as latency. Latency is the delay the system experiences when it requests memory access. It's not just how much data you can transfer, but how quickly you can have it after you ask.

For all those reasons it almost always makes sense, especially at today's prices, to have all the same memory modules in your system and the fastest memory your system can support. Even if you are able to recycle memory I would avoid doing so unless stability is an issue as many technical issues arise when DIMMS are mixed and matched.

The most interesting part of the reviews posted are the comparison between Hyper-threaded and normal mode. These nice graphs show that in all but one case, the speed is not harmed by having HT enabled, and indeed it improved the performance by up to 20%.
This will not make a single process speed up, but will make systems seem faster, as it is rare that you are only doing one thing at a time.

Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops

They got excellent performance reviews on Storage Review but no reviewer can travel forward in time a few years to see how the drives hold up.

The result is that we have IBM drives in all our production database servers, web servers, and app servers. And I picked the hardware. Who said no-one ever got fired for buying IBM? Guess it's true, as I didn't lose my job over it.

AnandTech had an interesting article here on the drives, and why they went bad (poor microcode that handles the interval between tracks as the drives heat up).

They got excellent performance reviews on Storage Review but no reviewer can travel forward in time a few years to see how the drives hold up.

The result is that we have IBM drives in all our production database servers, web servers, and app servers. And I picked the hardware. Who said no-one ever got fired for buying IBM? Guess it's true, as I didn't lose my job over it.

AnandTech had an interesting article here on the drives, and why they went bad (poor microcode that handles the interval between tracks as the drives heat up).

I just got a Koss Mini DVD Player for $49 and it is amazing. It plays DVD/VCD/SVCD/MP3/JPEG and is both region and macrovision free. It also lets you skip past that annoying FBI warning ;)

Some people say it gets too hot, but that is due to a crappy AC adapter. Just buy a better one and you are all set.

For more info this, check out this thread over at Anandtech Hot Deals forum.


.//chris

I went ahead and got you a link to another page in the SAME ARTICLE I linked that shows a chart of CPU usage with Radeon cards:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1650&p =6

Note that other pages in the article include the Kyro II, Matrox Parhelia, and the older GeForce 2 and 3 lines, as well as the GeForce 4. Keep in mind that the faster the card gets, the faster the CPU must be to keep it fed with data. You may not see CPU saturation with a slow card, because the card is maxed long before 100% CPU usage. In the Radeon chart, you can see that the faster the Radeon, the more CPU constrained it is. Just like with Nvidia.

The Radeon 9700 isn't there because it didn't exist when the article is written. It will be even more CPU constrained than the GF4.

I suspect you are a troll, but I'd hate to see the issue confused any further.

Graphics cards are expensive because they don't sell in large quantities. The supply of high-end video cards is low so price is high. The supply is low because demand is low. Very few people other than a few gamers per town has a geforce 4. Most people with dells and gateways have whatever old card comes in there. And a whole crapload of pre-built machines come with on-board video. And for the needs of the vast majority of people a TNT2 is more than they will ever need.

My current PC is a Pentium III 450mhz with a TNT2 32MB video card. I bought this machine when the TNT2 first came out. There have been 4 geforce cards since then. And the only games that don't run on my computer are the new UT and America's Army. Every other 3D game runs just fine on my machine.
I plan to buy a new PC soon. So I can encode movies faster and play Doom3. But I'm probably going to buy a motherboard that has the nforce2 chipset. Sure it's a crummy built in video card. But it's a geForce 4 built in. Even though the board probably wont be as fast as a KT400 with DDR400 and a video card in the AGP slot, it's a deal you can't beat. Motherboard, sound card, ethernet card, and video card for the price of just a motherboard. I probably wont use the built in sound card often, but all the operating systems I use fully support having 2 sound cards and using them simultanously, so I dont' see where I can go wrong.
To read more about the nforce2 chipset check out
Nvida or
anandtech

It wont make the fastest gaming machine, but it will still make a good enough one, for a low low price.

I don't usually use Pricewatch, because companies often list misleading low prices with expensive shipping, just to get lower in the guide and get more purchases (bait and switch). Anandtech's latest price guide shows a P4 2.53 GHz at $189, and the closest Athlon is a 2400+ at $194. So you're right, at the cutting edge. But for what I just bought, an Athlon 2000+ (1.67 GHz) for $95, a Pentium 4 would be foolish--it costs $160. Yeah, with the newest bleeding edge Athlons, AMD can't compete - like I said, they're not winning the speed war. But for the majority of their chips that have been out (anything 2200+ and older), the prices are much lower. That's why I said they were winning the price war. For those who are willing to pay $200+ for a chip, go Intel by all means.

Fine, read this and pick out a prebuilt Athlon MP 2200+ server for your server farm. It's STILL better/cheaper than buying a 3GHz P4.

Fooey. It has to do with *everything*. Yeah, your graphics card is sooper-fast. But what has to feed that card data? Your CPU. Your memory bus. Your AGP bus. UT2003 happens to be CPU-limited even with the latest-and-greatest video cards, all the way up to the fastest Athlon chips available.

Take a look at this UT2003 benchmark chart:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1650&p =3

You can see that the GeForce 4 Ti cards are ALL still getting faster the faster the CPU gets, right up to the bitter end.

That's not to say that a couple of years from now that 3D cards won't handle physics and AI onboard-- but they don't exist now, so it's hardly fair to say "A better gfx card will almost always be a bigger win than a faster CPU."

It depends on the game, and the newer they are, the more CPU they'll eat. (See Battlefield 1942)

Very few people need a 2.8Ghz Athlon right now [...]

I had no idea. While I read Anandtech, Timshardware, and BugTraq for hardware-related technical or security news, what would the Slashdot crew consider a "good" news source? Slashdot, of course, being a metanews site--where would one read daily to be informed and educated about general issues, such as gaming?

Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply?

Did you know that you are an idiot? the p4 has a 20 stage pipeline, which means the process of excecuting instructions is seperated into 20 peices, and the hardware used to do each one of those pecies works on part of a diffrent instruction at the same time. So while a multiply might take 20 clock cycles to come out of the other side of the CPU, if all you have is a program with one multiply instruction followed by a hlt or something.

Most programs, of course, have more then one instruction. With a 20 stage pipline one instruction takes 20 cycles to run, but you can also perform 19 other instructions along with it... depending on how many excicution units you have along with it.

The p4 has two ALUs, each running at twice the clock speed of the rest of the CPU. (in contrast, the athlon has 4 regular speed ALUs). So in actualy, you'd be able to run 80 or so instructions in that 20 clock cycles.

Integer multiplies are actualy performed by the floating point system, IIRC, rather then by the ALU, so they won't be as fast as addition and subtraction.

The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions. It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.

IBM is not making a mips chip, moron. They are making a Power PC chip. the p4 has only 8 general purpose 32 bit registers, but in addition has 8 80 bit floating point registers, 8 64bit integer SIMD registers and 8 128 bit floating point/vector SMID registers.

MIPS only has 32 general purpose registers, and although they can be used however you want, several of them are 'reserved' for the stack, and things like that. Also the first register is always zero, and you can't store anything in it. So in actuality, MIPS chips have fewer registers then Intel chips. PPC chips on the other hand do actually have more registers then Intel chips though, with 32 general-purpose registers, 32 floating (64 bit?) point registers, and 32 128 bit vector SMID registers.

This doesn't really help your argument, though: Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.

it's true that reading from memory takes a long time, and that's why modern CPUs don't do it very often. They use these things called "caches" you know? The vast, vast majority of memory access doesn't actually need to hit ram.

But to use those coprocessors, you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.

No, I was talking about using floating point math for integers larger then 32 bits, rather then splitting 64 bit ints up into 32 bit chunks and adding them with carry (which takes more then two instructions). MMX doesn't allow 64bit int math, as far as I know, but rather allows you to sacrifice floating-point math for accelerated 8, 16, and 32 bit math. It's always interesting in that Mac fans seem to think that Intel chips suddenly lost the ability to do integer math and floating point math at the same time when they gained MMX.

Anyway, that's really beside the point due to the fact that, as you can see, MMX no longer uses the floating-point registers.

For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not. I think one of these IBM processors will be the ideal linux machine. (It'll be low power too, so I won't need a hairdrier-loud fan like I do with my athlon :) )

since when are those separate things?

Might not hurt to learn a thing or two about how computers work before opening your mouth.

Anandtech has a very good review at http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1723. It compares and contrasts many motherboards with the chipsets on them, comparing features, etc, and it also has some very good benchmarking information. It also supports hyperthreading, which looks like it will be a very promising technology. It also points out some problems with some of these new motherboards. This chipset looks like it can offer great potential, for both the average home user, and the typical overclocker, especially the Albatron PX845PEV Pro, which has a interface that is similar to Softmenu 3. The ASUS P4PE also has great potential for overclocking, yet it doesnt look like it's as tough as the Albatron. Their technical support is also not as good. If it is USB that you are looking for though, the Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra definately offers the most functionality (10 Ports, wow!). In all, this review is quite long, with 25 pages of content, which offers more information than the mentioned review.

I know that people tend to really hate it when I post facts instead of blathering out mindless opinions.. however I'm going to go with the facts anyway.

Here's a link to some real and true benchmarks of the nForce 220 and 420 with their integrated graphics as compared to a GeForce2MX in Unreal Tournament and Max Payne.

For UT, the nForce 420 is 9.5% slower than the GeForce2 MX (at 1024x768), and for Max Payne the nForce is just under 15% slower. That's a far cry from "1/3rd the frame rate".

Ohh, and the original nForce was available without integrated graphics as well (the nForce 415 chipset).

Long story short, the nForce can and does play games just fine. It's not getting 200+ f/s at 1600x1200, but as long as you can get by with only 30-60f/s at 800x600, the nForce is up to the task. The nForce 2 should be about twice as fast since it has somewhat higher memory bandwidth and some new stuff which reduces it's dependance on memory bandwidth.

Don't be elitist. There are plenty of gamers out there that can't bloody afford the latest and greatest, much less upgrade every two years (6 months?). Some folks are actually interested in knowing what the best integrated video is, even if it doesn't compare to your Robocop 6000 SUX.

If only they had a sample of the NVIDIA nForce2 to compare. Then again, maybe they did -- anyone seen a mirror? I loaded their page once, it linked a supposed mirror, but it was for a 40x CDRW review...

everybody wants to talk to a guineapig, but no one wants to be one

Tom's Hardware Guide and similar sites get paid by their advertisers to be a guinea pig.

This is going to be a great year for competition. Just a year ago Pocket PC's had huge advantages in both hardware and software. Palm OS 4 devices were stuck using 16-bit Motorola processors that for the most part ran at 33MHz, while on the PPC the norm was a 200Mhz 32-bit StrongARM processor with around 20 times the MIPS. The PPC OS was multithreaded, the Palm OS was not. The normal PPC could run 320x240 full screen resolution; the majority of Palm models were running 160x160 with a hard graffiti area. About the only advantage Palm units had was battery life, and even that was being challenged by lithium-powered PPC units such as the iPAQ. A lot can change in a year.

Software is more equal now. OS 5 is a 32-bit, (from the 32-bit OS experience of 4 dozen former BeOS employees inherited by Palmsource), multithreaded, offers system-wide 128-bit encryption, SSL support, and has new multimedia video and audio APIs. It will run code on Intel, Motorola, and TI ARM-based processors, without recompiling thanks to translation layers. And it is lean; it can fit under 4 megs.

OS 5 also has a large advantage over PPC 2002 -- native support of the ARM V5 instruction set. The PPC 2002 OS does not, eliminating what could have been large performance increases. While the next PPC OS will undoubtedly rectify this, some analysts are predicting this may not be released until 2004. This is partly why the new XScale PPCs are not showing the speed improvements everyone was expecting over the older StrongARM PPCs. For some tasks, new PPCs actually run
slower.

Not upgrading the PPC OS to use V5 was a rational decision on Microsoft's part, as it would have made "obsolete all SA1110 iPAQ devices" and "strand[ed] an installed base of over 2 million iPAQ users", according to MS (same link above.) Palm in is a much better position. OS 5 only has to emulate the old Motorola code to run programs written exclusively for OS 4. While emulation usually slows things down considerably, the Motorola was *so* slow that the ARM V5 processors are actually running many apps faster than before (if marketing can be believed).

The Palm OS also has a huge advantage as it can already use the ARM V5's automatic clock and voltage throttling abilities. For example, if you run a CPU-intensive game the Xscale can run full-bore (200-400Mhz), while if you run your datebook it throttles back (say 50Mhz), conserving battery life. This function is so important the XScale was named after it (it "scales" itself). Current XScale PPC's don't seem able to do this little trick. (The ASUS MyPal PPC worked out a kludge for this -- a software control so you can throttle the processor manually -- and is promising a more elegant OS patch in future MyPal's to throttle automatically, "fixing" this part of the PPC 2002 OS.)

What about hardware? Well, both Palms and PPCs can now use basically the same hardware (and even vendors). ASUS is making both current PPCs and upcoming (1Q 2003) Palms. Palm OS 5 units have an advantage as they can use a varied range of ARM processors, and already some Palm OS units (like this Sony) have a higher resolution . The Ipaq is rumored to be going up to 480x320 next year, but we will have to wait and see.

Even though these particular Clieâ(TM)s are not my bag (too bulky), it wonâ(TM)t be long until the entire high-end Clie line is ported over to XScale, including the smaller form factor models.

Blue's News

It's not quite as popular as /., but it's a pretty widely respected gaming news site.

As Blue's tagline says: "Established 1995. Over an eighth of a billion visitors since 1997."

AnandTech and Tom's Hardware are also up there.

Frankly, a lot of sites have been around since 1997. Find some non-university/corporate sites that have been around for 10 years with (relatively) high hit counts and it's more meaningful.

Anandtech has a review and TechReport as well .

Anandtech recently went "backstage" at Intel and got pictures of a 10 GHz ALU running at Intel with air cooling. Pics here

-ted

I've seen this reported on other sites, and if I recall this is not a demo of production silicon at 4.7Ghz, but rather this is Intel overclocking their own hardware till it crashed to show that with some improvements the chip design is capable of these speeds, if not in consumer quantities at present.

Anand Tech has more information from their IDF report.

Printable/Low bandwidth version

Though this has no banner ads, so Anand doesn't get any money if you view this one, but take your pick.

You've garunteed that someone reading this story next week will not be able to find it! *Please* provide an actual link to the story. Surely I'm not the only one that reads slashdot in batches weekly, instead of rabidly refreshing the front page every hour? I'm lucky to have caught this one early....

For posterity

Direct link to the article