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See here for video card power consumption: http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=264

Laptop GPUs use somewhat less but the numbers can be hard to find.

CPU power consumption specs can be seen on wikipedia (or on Newegg)

110W is not actually that much these days. I don`t think you are going to get down to 25W unless you get a small form factor motherboard that uses mobile chips.

Last I had heard DNF had moved to a hefty Engine like Unreal 2.5 before GearBox picked it up. I don't think a mobile platform is going to stand much of a chance running this without some severe cutbacks.

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/News/230990,smartphone-graphics-get-unreal.aspx

I ordered a new system based on an Intel CORE i5 750 2.66GHZ CPU running on the Asus Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Premium w/8 GB DDR3 1333 Mhz ram two days ago, and have been monitoring the net for signs of this mobo to actually hit the shelves. I will be running this with an unremarkable 64 GB Patriot SDD as the boot drive, until the new SATA 6 Gbps SSDs come out - which could take a awhile I imagine. I expect blazing speed from this platform, and can hardly wait for it. The only unknown is when will the mobo arrive. If it drags on and on, at least there is the option of an add on card that will convert one of the other ASUS X58 boards to USB 3 & SATA 6. I just hope I haven't made a mistake with the decision to wait. The P7P55D-E Premium motherboard will retail for $299 while the U3S6 add-on card will be $29.

Here are a host of links I collected on it this morning...

Asus Unveils USB 3.0 Motherboard
Asus Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Premium
The motherboard, unveiled Wednesday [October 28 2009], is 4.8 inches by 3 inches and is scheduled to be available next month for $299.

October 30th, 2009
USB 3.0 and SATA 6G Performance Preview - ASUS brings the goods
the P55-Express based P7P55D-E Premium is very close to hitting the market.

October 29th, 2009
USB 3.0 and SATA 6G Performance Preview

October 29th, 2009
This Is The First USB 3.0 Motherboard

October 28th, 2009
ASUS debuts USB 3.0 motherboard and add-on card
The P7P55D-E Premium motherboard will retail for $299 while the U3S6 add-on card will be $29. Both will be available November.

October 28th, 2009
ASUS brings the first mobo with SATA 3 and USB 3

October 28th, 2009
ASUS P7P55D-E Motherboard Offers USB 3.0 and SATA-III 6G Performance
North American Availability
The P7P55D-E Premium and U3S6 expansion cards will be available at ASUS authorized retailers early November at $299 and $29 respectively.

http://archive.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=7&t=9354
This lists it at 46W which is much more in line with my experience. The TDP might be 105W for some crazy reason, but my system with Athlon 64x2 4200+EE, 2x7,200rpm HDD and a 9600GSO uses about 150W when gaming so there is no way in hell the GPU is pulling down 100W by itself.

You won't be running any mid range or high end cards off of a 300 watt supply.

The Truth About Graphics Power Requirements V2

Keep in mind low end cards aren't enough to run modern games and you still need to power everything else in the system. A 500w power supply is probably the minimum I would get for a PC that is going to be used for gaming at all.

The article was indeed interesting, and believable. But it has a bad case of [Citation-Needed].

From the article:

Publication date: 28 July 2008
Originally published 2008 in Atomic: Maximum Power Computing

Don't know where the article is though.

I don't think every game has to be multiplayer, but there are some that could really benefit from it. The TES series is a great example: it would have made the game a hell of a lot more fun if I could play with even just one friend in the same world. A big part of the game is getting all sorts of ridiculous gear and artifacts and just making your character look like a badass. Tycho put it really well:

But elaborate character creation in the absence of multiplayer is, for him, a sort of masturbation. If you create a character, and no-one is there to see it, what's the point?

Having a buddy to kill stuff with and say, "Wow, check out what I found!!" or, "Come see this ridiculous cave in the middle of nowhere!" would just make it more fun, I think. Definitely would have kept me playing Oblivion longer.

On a side note, there was word of a muliplayer Morrowind hack in alpha. I don't think it ever got past that and from the little bit I read it was pretty buggy. I just tried to look it up and found this interview with some guy named _FERRET who is apparently working on a multiplayer Oblivion hack. Cool.

I would imagine that these issues are being addressed. The advantage of shared memory, if it becomes the standard, is that multiple GPU cores, and even non GPU cores could manipulate it.

That and the advantage of having a GPU for use in pipelining tasks is far too great not to head in this direction.

A good write-up can be found here: http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=15&CI ID=66653&p=1 It details the differences between GPU's and CPU's and starts to discuss the future (what's finally happening now).

There is no doubt in my mind that the days of the add on video card, as we know it, are getting short. These high end graphics cards simply have too much processing power to have them sitting idle during general computing tasks. With the ridiculously small transistors that Intel can fab these days, it makes sense to cram this power in next to a CPU core or two, a massive cache, very high speed memory controllers, and maybe even a kitchen sink.

And as stated in the article, it's not just GPU's... think co-processors for other common tasks. For example an encryption/decryption co-processor for secure web servers, floating point co-processor for various modeling systems, even heavily pipelined co-processors that can perform fast sorts and searches of databases are possible: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~ritesh/papers/gputerasort-m sr.html

I can see where Intel is going with this... and I see it being very similar to what AMD suggested a while back where you could place a coprocessor on the HyperTransport bus of a multiprocessor system. I think that AMD's implementation might actually be better, as it allows you to upgrade or replace the coprocessor without replacing your CPU, but having one in the same package as the CPU makes sense too.

"The reason most game engines are complicated is because 3D game design is not for beginners, mostly due to the broad compromises we make due to technological limitations."

And yet that's what Offset Software has done using the latest technologies.

I'm using a 9600 and have some issues with warpping effects like stealth and illusion. I'm going to try this guide out tonight, just sharing the link.
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=27&CI ID=36222&p=4/
All sorts of options to mess with.

I would certainly echo the sentiments made by several users here. If you're planning to run this on your PC, you might want to take some inventory as to what you've got. I personally am running on a AMD Athlon 3500+ with an ATI 9700 at 1024 x 768 resolution. Yes, it needs to be that low. The game still looks phenominal, but I would sure love to be able to crank it a little higher. I used to run at 1152 x 864, but close combat yielded around 4 FPS - not the greatest time for slowdowns.

However, there are a number of little tweaks you can do to get the game running a bit better. The following is a link to 5 pages of optimization techniques specifically for Oblivion, and largely revolve around editing an .ini file the game uses for its settings. They're quite simple, and yield good results.

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=36222

I have a Shuttle SN25P, PCI-X 7800OCT 256MB (7800 GT with a slightly higher clock speed and overclocking capability), 2 Gig of RAM (2-4-8), 2 78Gig 10k WD Raptors striped with 128k stripe size (defragged of course), with an Athlon 64 3200+ runing Windows XP x64 Edition. Oblivion detected on installation that I was capable of running at 1024x768 with HDR. Dungeons were normally fine, walking/running outside was fine, but any kind of battles even with rats were a major slowdown outside as well as some slow down in dungeons at times. I used Perfmon and monitored CPU, memory, and disk utilization and I found that my CPU was sustained at 70% though not necessarily peaking. I ended up dishing out the cash for an Athlon X2 4400+ (dual-core with 2x1MB cache) and everything is smooth as silk with a sustained utilization of about 50% per core. I find that a little bit interesting since according to this article about optimizing Oblivion the Oblivion core engine components are not multithreaded. There must be a lot of AI intensive things going on since I really don't see a lot of disk activity for texture retrieval.

Ultima Linux, my distribution, is a very customized little Slackware-based distribution designed for both desktop and server functionality. Very good reviews, too.

Somehow, I feel they'll have trouble enforcing the "no comment unless you paid up" policy... Heck, somehow, I doubt they'll be able to enforce the "visitors should only post to the forum, not to the rest of the website" policy either....

As a long time user of atomic, it's quite easy to see when things started to go pear shaped. A few months ago, the previously Australian owned magazine was bought out by a British company (Haymarket). The immediate effect was more advertising on the forums, and a drop in the mag's quality. Now, they've left 35000 users waiting for the next version of the site, only to be severly let down by this. It wouldn't be such a problem, but the site has been significantly rooted.

A response from gaming journos.

You can buy a Liteon 1213 drive, and re-flash it into a dual-layer capable, 16x burner. Using Liteon's notorious tool, Kprobe, the actual burn quality is improved, resulting in a disk which can be read back faster in an ordinary dvd reader. IN OTHER WORDS, if you have a 1213S, it's in your own best interest (in terms of burned disk quality) to upgrade the drive into a 1633S.

For years, Liteon has been well known for it's products being upgradable to the next model. You could buy a 401S (a basic 4x DVD-R burner), and upgrade it to a 811S (an 8x DVD-R/DVD+R burner). Or in this case, the 1213S can be made into a 1633S, with just a simple firmware flash.

More details here, here, and here.

You can buy a Liteon 1213 drive, and re-flash it into a dual-layer capable, 16x burner. Using Liteon's notorious tool, Kprobe, the actual burn quality is improved, resulting in a disk which can be read back faster in an ordinary dvd reader. IN OTHER WORDS, if you have a 1213S, it's in your own best interest (in terms of burned disk quality) to upgrade the drive into a 1633S.

For years, Liteon has been well known for it's products being upgradable to the next model. You could buy a 401S (a basic 4x DVD-R burner), and upgrade it to a 811S (an 8x DVD-R/DVD+R burner). Or in this case, the 1213S can be made into a 1633S, with just a simple firmware flash.

More details here, here, and here.

At this site. What you need to know There are two methods of modification here: 1. The firmware hacking method 2. The EEPROM correction method These need further explanation I feel. The firmware hacking method disabled the sentinel or checking routine so the firmware is forced onto the 812S hardware. Pro's Its easy. Any pleb can find a hacked firmware on the lamerWeb. Also, there are lots of really cool hacks and write strategy adjustments being worked on. If you are into tweaking - this might just be for you! Con's LiteOn are sick of this behaviour. They are now considering making it SO hard to hack the firmware, soon, these methods of hacking will be made useless. It is a little minature war which, in the end - the hackers will fall in. The EEPROM method entails you extracting your EEPROM and having it custom checksummed to make the drive a "REAL" 832S DL drive. Pro's You have a REAL 832S on your hands - no need to worry about cross flash protection or hacking woes for you!!! This is as cool as it gets. Con's It requires the process of checksumming, which requires the EEPROM to be sent to me - then returned. It also requires the use of LTNFlash - which some users are unacquainted with.

Atomic is a magazine devoted to case moding and games. An interesting read as it always seems to have interesting content.

That and they have given my free stuff. :)

For the last couple of years I have been reading an amazing mag called Atomic.

This magazine is desgined and written by geeks for geeks. There is no "filler" crap that gets lumped into there for the sake of filling pages. All the content is well thought out and created for people who know a fair amount about PCs and want to take their knowledge to a "higher" level.

One of the main selling points IMHO is the fact that Atmoic has one hell of a community. Its great to talk (and meet) like minded people and pursue your interests, and gain vast amounts of knowledge at the same time. And then the Atomic sponsored LANs are just amazing :)

Most of the issues the cover are about pushing your system to the max. At the moment they have a indepth article (series) on OCing the P4. As well as the famous Linux series they did (which was very well done). And my most fav of the magazine. The Hotboxes. A place where peopel can show off there highly modded beige monsters. A truly geeky magazine that is slowly gaining mainstream attention (just won a award for Austrlia's best Tech Mag). Well worth a look.

Atomic Magazine this month had a cover CD featuring a modified Knoppix distro for MythTV. Haven't checked it out yet, but looks quite interesting.

not out of the question, but NVIDIA is probably going to make damn sure that ATI doesn't get details about the Xbox graphics implmentation.

Splinter Cell is one game that uses NVIDIA proprietary stuff. If you don't use an NVIDIA >= GeForce3 (excluding the 4 MX series), you'll notice that the shadows in the PC version will run differently to the Xbox one, even with a Radeon 97/800 something.

Atomic MPC ran an article on how Splinter Cell was ported across four platforms. Very interesting read. The PlayStation 2 ended up being the worst of the lot.

I managed to make this work on my RedHat 9.0 box last week, after a great deal of googling and lots of trial and error. The best page I found on the subject was probably this one, and there were also some forum posts here and here.

[off-topic, but what the hell...]

-- Laura, disappointed that RedHat's mouse-configuration tool didn't handle this automagically

> a) Australians can't be nerds or geeks
I better hope some insensitive clod doesn't say that. Anyone, one of them (I can't be sure, it could be both) got forked and was called a 'Atomitican'.
. a) Maybe there are just a lot of us around. And, after all, where does Samba [samba.org] come from?. Uh, blame the Australian education system for that. My friend hates Linux because it has too much 'Saftey'. (Someone please tell me how to panic a kernel safely so I can prove him wrong)

A little company by the name of ArrayComm is currently testing a technology they call I-Burst here in Sydney. Basically, it (should) offer pervasive, roaming wireless internet access across every major city in the country, at 1Mbps per user.

What does this mean? Well, it means that if you've got I-Burst capable NIC's, you'll have a 1Mbps Internet connection at any point across all our major cities (as long as you're not moving too fast) on your laptop, PDA or even your phone (assuming there is phones to take advantage of the tech - doubtful perhaps).

This is beyond what any of the 3G's (W-CDMA, CDMA2000 etc) can offer. The only reason Australian telco's are pimping 3G is because they all spent small fortunes purchasing spectrum to run it on. Considering that these 3G solutions are a long way off, and that we should have a working commercial I-Burst service here in Oz sometime next year, 3G may just die a very quick death.

We conducted an in-depth breakdown of the technology behind I-Burst, including the special directional antennas that make it possible. You can check it out here if you're interested.

Actually, ArrayComm's I-Burst technology is far more than a fixed last-mile solution. The setup they're currently testing in Sydney is not the first deployement of this technology, but it is a first for Australia where wide-ranging, wireless broadband access is prettymuch non-existant.

I-Burst, at least in Australia, is focused on giving city areas (and perhaps suburban areas), pervasive, roaming wireless Internet access for mobile devices across every major city in the country. And doing it at 1Mbps per connection.

For more information, see this article: http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/iburst.asp

Well, considering Dan Rutter at least writes for (not sure if he works there), I'm sure that atomic magazine would be a fairly likely candidate.

For those of you in Aus, Atomic is the best computer mag I've found in Australia - hardly any ads, and interesting articles which are actually worth reading and not trivial.

This guy writes for atomic magazine. They printed this article a few months ago.
If you can, check out the mag, its pretty good. The writers are nutcases but they really know their shit.

The Dans Data article was originally written by Dan for our magazine, Atomic Maximum Power Computing.

As we're an Australian mag with a (mostly - we sell in New Zealand, Singapore and a few other places) Australian audience, its setup for 240V.

The UPS D-I-Y article appeared in AtomicMPC Issue 13 (latest issue is 18)

This can only be a good thing, regardless of whether the Chinese Government ultimately succeeds. As I said in a bit more detail here,

'China's moon mining plan is perhaps one of the best things that could have happened as far as space exploration is concerned. The world's primary space organisation, NASA, is constantly having its budget chipped away by the US government. Hopefully, China's future successes in space missions will force the US, and other countries, back into research and development of technologies needed for space flight and colonization such as nuclear propulsion, terraforming and techniques for mining resources on off-earth locations such as the moon and asteroid belts.'

Who knows - three hundred years from now, our decendents could look back on this day and say 'thanks to China pushing the world into a new space race, we managed to develop the technologies that allowed us to get off that overcrowded and overpolluted chuck of rock that we called Earth, before it killed us all off for good.'

As you can read here Telstra are in fact denying any crack taking place. They're blaming it on the users!