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Razer is one of the least respected computer peripheral manufacturers. Not only do they have a reputation for mid to lower-than-par quality of some of their products, and for requiring their Razer Synapse software to run on the Windows host to enable many functions on their keyboards and mice.
They are infamous for using ambiguous and misleading marketing, misusing terminology to mean different things than what is industry-standard, thus making their products appear better than they really are. In other words: more bullshit than substance. Sometimes right outside the edge of fraudulent territory.

The worst thing, though, might be Razer Softminer: A cryptocurrency mining app. It mines real cryptocurrency for Razer (it is unclear which), and in return the user would get credits in Razer's rewards program.
Considering that Razer caters to the gullible in the first place: often kids with gaming PCs, but who are not paying the energy bills, you could say that they are encouraging kids to steal from their parents on their behalf.

Most likely by mistake last Sunday Intel released Z390 chipset information. The page has since been pulled down because this chipset was rumored to be accompanied with octa-core Coffee Lake CPUs which are yet to be announced.

Next time I'm gonna web-archive their mistakes ;-)

This comes with a 20-30% tax for many workloads.

Except it didn't. All benchmarks point to a 5-10% worst case hit, and an unmeasurable hit in pretty much all desktop / user facing workloads. Despite all the initial reports I've yet to see any benchmark, Windows, Linux, server loads, office applications, gaming, databases, or whatever get into the double digits.

Here's just some top google results:
http://www.guru3d.com/articles...
https://www.techspot.com/artic...

And here's some Linux ones on KPTI:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan....

Scope this setup, operates at 28 GB/sec (faster than DDR4 memory at 2133). Eight NVMe M2 SSDs in RAID on X399 Threadripper.

Nah, you can just get a $15 adapter and put it in any PCIe 4x slot. By the way, if you really want crazy performance get a X399 motherboard with PCIe bifurcation and load it up with quad NVMe cards and you can go nuts with 28GB/s in an 8-way RAID 0 configuration. Not that you'd really notice at consumer queue depths.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Ryzen supports Windows 7. Sauce. New generation Intel CPUs do not. With the better performance per dollar offered by the AMD chips, I certainly haven't chosen Intel. My recently purchased 1600 on a mini ITX board is doing a great job as my home server.

See subject & http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22how+to+secure+windows+2000%2Fxp%22&qs=n&form=QBLH&sp=-1&pq=%22how+to+secure+windows+2000%2Fxp%22&sc=1-31&sk=&cvid=054A7045262A4C37B979591B82C2B1BD/

* Especially Guru3d (gamer's website primarily iirc) http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=246538/

APK

P.S.=> It's one of the sites where gamer's (another one was TechPowerUp, the folks that make GPU-z) got their "minds blown" by how much stalling services alone speeds up games & all else via the quote in my guide SPECIFICALLY of "CUTTING OFF SERVICES YOU DO NOT NEED TO RUN IS POSSIBLY THE BEST METHOD OF SECURING THEM, AND GAINING SPEED - AGAIN, SIMPLY SINCE YOU ARE NOT WASTING I/O, MEMORY, or OTHER RESOURCES ON THEM, PERIOD, in doing this!" ... apk

Well, Intel was right. They just aren't CPUs, but GPUs.

Too bad isn't really in the business of making GPUs: (compare Skylake integrated to GTX 780 Ti and it's no real comparison.

Even a bottom-end GPU will have 80 cores, ...

Yea, only up to 72 cores for Intel.

... the price/performance is pretty good all the way up to 1500 cores, and if you really want, you can get 4000-core cards.

A Titan Z apparently has 5760 CUDA cores.

Those "cores" mean "ALUs", but even if you demand your cores have discrete schedulers, an R9 Fury has 64 compute units (scheduler + 64 ALUs), so 64 separate threads at once, each of which has massive SIMD power.

Yet what does that really mean? The general issue is that having massive SIMD power is pretty much useless most the time for most things. So, it's used for graphics, media decoding, physics, and various super-computing related needs. Meanwhile, 99% of code still runs on the CPU. But all those GPU cores are still sucking up tons of power doing basically nothing. That doesn't seem like much of a future to me.

Well, Intel was right. They just aren't CPUs, but GPUs.

Too bad isn't really in the business of making GPUs: (compare Skylake integrated to GTX 780 Ti and it's no real comparison.

Even a bottom-end GPU will have 80 cores, ...

Yea, only up to 72 cores for Intel.

... the price/performance is pretty good all the way up to 1500 cores, and if you really want, you can get 4000-core cards.

A Titan Z apparently has 5760 CUDA cores.

Those "cores" mean "ALUs", but even if you demand your cores have discrete schedulers, an R9 Fury has 64 compute units (scheduler + 64 ALUs), so 64 separate threads at once, each of which has massive SIMD power.

Yet what does that really mean? The general issue is that having massive SIMD power is pretty much useless most the time for most things. So, it's used for graphics, media decoding, physics, and various super-computing related needs. Meanwhile, 99% of code still runs on the CPU. But all those GPU cores are still sucking up tons of power doing basically nothing. That doesn't seem like much of a future to me.

Fallout 4 runs terribly on AMD cards right now (although there was a recent update that bumps performance quite a bit) but it doesn't do that much better on NVidia hardware either. The biggest culprit seems to be the Godrays that are part of GameWorks (A proprietary NVidia set of effects that developers can use in their games) where the visual difference between the ultra and low setting is practically non-existent to most people, but the performance penalty (even on NVidia cards) is huge.

The new Star Wars Battlefront benchmarks show what an absolute mess the game engine being used for Fallout 4 is. Not only does it look a lot better, but the frame rate is significantly better no matter which company's GPU is being used. Fallout 4 is still a great game, but the performance is crap for what the game looks like graphically.

The 5350 APU has worse gaming oerformance than an intel with HD Graphics 4600. It's an utter fail http://www.guru3d.com/articles...

http://www.guru3d.com/news-sto...

Relevant text: The botnet’s Bitcoin operation was only profitable because it used stolen electricity: it used about $561,000 (£347,000) of electricity a day on its victims’ machines, while only generating $2,165 (£1340) a day.

One would have to be inhuman to let your greed cause so much damage for so little gain.

Whether the GTX 970 has 3.5 or 4 GB effective it's still more than a standard GTX 780 Ti with 3 GB, so I'm guessing you have to run some rather extreme resolutions and AA modes to see a practical difference. In fact the latter will generally beat a 970 whether single vs single or SLI vs SLI at UHD (3840x2160) resolutions.

What I do know is that my 2x970 totally trashes a single GTX 980 at a 20% price premium as they do have 2x13/16 = 26/16 the shaders, both cards shut down the fans at idle so it's extremely quiet and even at full tilt both cards together pull just 2x145W = 290W. I'm kinda surprised nobody's done a single card version yet since it's still under the 300W ATX limit.

It runs games at 3840x2160 on a Samsung UD590 beautifully, even though it's a 1ms TN panel it's not for twitch gaming as it's 60 Hz on DisplayPort with no fancy sync options and 25ms input lag but it looks extremely good. And at monitor distances you can definitively see the upgrade over 1080p while the TV benefits are more dubious. There are better setups, but for being such a high-end system the price/performance was extremely good.

not sure what scene that was, but the different was never THAT big that i saw in benchmarks.... citations: 1, 2, 3, 4

the AMD Radeon R7 SSD series is very fast, has a greatly refined Barefoot controller with accompanying firmware and Toshiba's latest A19nm NAND flash memory. It is a product you'll like and use for a long time. I also dare to state that it is one of the most reliable product on the market anno 2014, combined with the excellent new ShieldPlus warranty this is a pure win in our book, and as such it comes very much recommended by Guru3D.com

Maybe an OCZ with a sticker, but who cares, really? Quality product, good price. Not much to hate here.

Going by what modders are pulling out of the game it does appear that it is true.

Those modders are praising the wonderful graphics they get with the enabled settings, while admitting that they get stuttering and frame rates below 30 fps. Doesn't sound like Ubisoft "handicapped" the graphics to me, so much as fixed the performance issues.

I've run the game with and without the mods and if anything it improved stuttering and barely impacted my frame rates. Other gamers are reporting the same experience.

Going by what modders are pulling out of the game it does appear that it is true.

Those modders are praising the wonderful graphics they get with the enabled settings, while admitting that they get stuttering and frame rates below 30 fps. Doesn't sound like Ubisoft "handicapped" the graphics to me, so much as fixed the performance issues.

Going by what modders are pulling out of the game it does appear that it is true.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showt...

Surprised no one posted it.

Nvidia has been into the driver optimisation business *FOR AGES*, and they are already very good at it.

So good they've been killing their own cards for years now.

2010 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hard...
2011 http://forums.guru3d.com/showt...
2013 http://modcrash.com/nvidia-dis...

This has never happened once to AMD cards, because they're more conservative with their optimizations. NV isn't even the price/performance leader and rarely is. So you get to spend more, and they optimize the crap out of your drivers and card until they break it.
They're almost averaging once a year in killing cards. No thanks. While both have bugs, I prefer AMD's superior driver support that doesn't kill your card.

> on a 240GB SSD, the footprint is something like 10%. Am I the only one who feels that's absurd?

That's because Windows 7 ships with idiotic 1972 defaults. I have 16 GB of ram and a 128 GB SSD. Normally Window would waste:

18 GB C:\Windows (will vary, don't waste time "optimizing" for space)
16 GB Hibernation hiberfile.sys
16 GB Virtual Memory pagefile.sys
====
50 GB / 128 GB = 39% !!!

To get back 32 GB out of 128 GB SSD space which is 25% space (!!) I turn off that unneeded hibernation and VM crap.

Reclaim VM pagefile.sys
Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Settings (Performance) -> Advanced Tab -> Change -> Uncheck Automatically manage -> No paging file -> Set -> OK -> Restart your computer

Reclaim Hibernation hiberfil.sys
Start Menu -> Type cmd -> Right-Click the cmd Icon -> Run as Administrator -> Type powercfg -h off -> Type exit

This link provides more tips
* http://www.guru3d.com/article/...

--
"Only cowards censor"

If the game uses Direct 3D 9 or later, you can try out SweetFX and/or ENBSeries for an extra graphics bump.

If these links are to be believed, this is just another rebadge:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Sighting-of-Radeon-R9-280X-Really-a-Rebranded-HD-7970-GHz-Edition-386239.shtml

http://videocardz.com/45877/amd-radeon-r9-280x-rebranded-hd-7970-ghz-edition

http://www.techpowerup.com/191440/radeon-r9-280x-is-rebranded-hd-7970-ghz-edition.html

http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/radeon_r9_280x_could_be_a_rebadged_hd_7970_ghz_edition.html

The Nvidia Titan GPU card, with a 7 billion transistor chip at its heart, draws an additional 236 watts when it goes from idle to full load. It's not hard to imagine 200 watts feeding into the GPU chip. Other GPU cards on that page draw even more power than the Titan. The Radeon HD 6950 CFX card drew 329 watts. It's not hard to imagine the chip at its heart drew over 220 watts.

If you want to cool a 220 watt CPU you might need water cooling, but it's by no means impossible.

Rock solid by whose definition? Yours, or the rest of the actual world?

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/intel_ssd_320_firmware_fix_for_8mb_bug.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4625/intel-testing-firmware-fix-for-ssd-320-8mb-power-bug

P.S. -- This comment comes from someone who owns 5 of these SSDs and none of them have experienced the aforementioned problem, and that's probably because I upgraded the F/W almost immediately. But despite that, a bug is a bug, especially of this catastrophic nature. I can refer folks to similarly catastrophic bugs in other SSDs such as the Crucial m4, so don't think Intel is the only naughty one.

This brings back good memory for the liquid metal CPU cooler that I used a while back

A review is at http://www.guru3d.com/article/danamics-lmx-superleggera-review/

Unfortunately the vendor already closed its doors, or I would have bought more coolers from them

As i'm sure you've read it doesn't actually just spin on top of the CPU but on a baseplate, and I doubt it would just "drop" but rather just float down as the RPMs slowed.

My questions would be thus: How much will it cost, and how does it compare to heatpipes? Because as it is now you can slap something like a Hyper N520 into even your average midtower and frankly get pretty insane cooling for like $30. I have one on top of an AMD Thuban Hexa and it idles between 95f and 105f and under full load, just slamming the living hell out of the CPU, I can barely get the thing up to 124f. So while I can see a market for the server rack how does its cooling stack up to the modern heatpipe units and more importantly how high are they gonna be?

Not only do they not do anything at these speeds, they cannot do anything at these speeds except run CPU-Z long enough to get a screen-shot.

Contests to see who can run Superpi the fastest are more interesting.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=185163

Haven't they been saying that for a few decades now? Rotational media will be around for a long time to come, barring any real shattering breakthroughs in solid state media. Some markets, such as laptops and workstations which value speed over capacity, will likely transition to SSDs being the norm within the next 5 years or so, but when you need a lot of storage you'll still turn to hard drives for at least another decade or two. Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.

SSDs have already surpassed hard drives in capacity, with 16TB being offered on a single SSD. SSDs are less than $1 a gigabyte. True, much more than hard drives, but 11 years ago when hard drives were $3 a gigabyte and 7 years ago hard drives were 50 cents/gb. Now hard drives are less than 1 cent a gigabyte, so how long do you think it will take SSDs to get there?

SSDs have the huge advantage that everyone wants them. Every device needs fast access and transfer rates with low power usage in as small a space as possible. More devices means more sales means lower prices as they ramp up production. I have a feeling that by the end of 2012 people won't even be considering a hard drive in a PC anymore, everyone will just buy SSDs.

Hard drives will never win the capacity war, not when they can currently put 64 gigabytes on a space smaller than your fingernail and that includes the memory controller and case.

If you install BS Player, ffdshow, and several AVISynth packages (windows only), you can see what the interpolated effect looks like, which approximates what real high-fps viewing might look like. Here are the instructions on guru3d.com. I would recommend not using the "frame doubling" method, but instead interpolate to 60 hz native refresh rate of your LCD screen - this can be done by changing the second to last script line to "source.MVFlowFps(backward_vec, forward_vec, 60, 1, mask=1, idx=idx1)".

Fire up some 24fps movies. You will notice that things seem to happen faster, and movements are quicker. This is because your brain is no longer putting together a perceivable slideshow - you can get the same "almost looks like slow motion" effect of film from old digicams that at 15fps. This effect will pass, and you start to see that things start to look more natural, the flowing of Thor's robes, the flames of the fire, you have a higher "looks like you are there" feeling. Poorly done CGI effects stick out though, the fast motion quickly reveals artificial non-physics-based movements and the too-smooth computer camera fly-throughs.

For a good example of real 60fps vs 24fps, you had to dvr the 30 Rock live show. They shot the live show at 1080i (30fps interlaced - 60fps motion equivalent when properly deinterlaced), and it looks like video instead of film.

A roundup of reviews from the usual major sites as well as others not mentioned in the summary above: Overclockers Review, Anandtech Review, Anandtech Undervolting/Overclocking, HardwareSecrets, Bit-tech, PCPer, Tweaktown, Hard OCP, The Inquirer, Techspot, Computer Shopper, Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech, PC Mag, Overclockers Club, and Guru 3d

Is this an April Fool's day joke, or what? Others *think* it may be here http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?s=9846408bbdda18b13758e413a488c144&t=360868

APK

P.S.=> Nevertheless - I am STILL interested in obtaining, if possible, a comprehensive list of sites seized by ICE, IF anyone has such information or a lead to a legitimate link to it... thanks! apk

Voodoo from a decade ago.

Here's a link to a benchmark of 3dfx's never-released Voodoo5-6000 (modified and overclocked).

3dfx Voodoo5 6000 3700A Gold SE @201 MHz ( 3dmark2001se ): 6341 marks

Looks like you're right. An integrated nVidia ION does indeed beat it in benchmarks: http://hwbot.org/hardware/videocard/nvidia_ion_integrated/

A top of the line video card can pull a lot of power. A 6990 will idle at 195W, max at 489W, and in real world tests ran at 331W.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-6990-review/10

and many, many, moooreeee

-mainconcept http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=17
-mediashow http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-h.264 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-vp8 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-sha1 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-photoshop cs5 http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=14
-photoshop cs5 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-15.html
-winrar, faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-winrar, improves over x6 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-7-zip better than 2600k here: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41698.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-7-zip same perf as 2600k http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-POV-ray, faster than 2600k http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/10/
-POV-ray http://www.nordichardware.se/test-la...art=15#content
-x264(2nd pass AVX enabled) http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-x264 (2nd pass, better overall than 2600k) http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11108
-x264 (2nd pass +.3 than SB2600k) http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/7/
-handbrake; http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/9/
-truecrypt; http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11111
-solidworks; faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-abbyy filereader http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-C-Ray, as fast as $1k i7-990X, http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/v.../c-rayir38.png

and many, many, moooreeee

-mainconcept http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=17
-mediashow http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-h.264 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-vp8 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-sha1 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-photoshop cs5 http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=14
-photoshop cs5 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-15.html
-winrar, faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-winrar, improves over x6 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-7-zip better than 2600k here: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41698.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-7-zip same perf as 2600k http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-POV-ray, faster than 2600k http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/10/
-POV-ray http://www.nordichardware.se/test-la...art=15#content
-x264(2nd pass AVX enabled) http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-x264 (2nd pass, better overall than 2600k) http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11108
-x264 (2nd pass +.3 than SB2600k) http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/7/
-handbrake; http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/9/
-truecrypt; http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11111
-solidworks; faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-abbyy filereader http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-C-Ray, as fast as $1k i7-990X, http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/v.../c-rayir38.png

and many, many, moooreeee

-mainconcept http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=17
-mediashow http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-h.264 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-vp8 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-sha1 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-photoshop cs5 http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=14
-photoshop cs5 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-15.html
-winrar, faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-winrar, improves over x6 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-7-zip better than 2600k here: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41698.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-7-zip same perf as 2600k http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-POV-ray, faster than 2600k http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/10/
-POV-ray http://www.nordichardware.se/test-la...art=15#content
-x264(2nd pass AVX enabled) http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-x264 (2nd pass, better overall than 2600k) http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11108
-x264 (2nd pass +.3 than SB2600k) http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/7/
-handbrake; http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/9/
-truecrypt; http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11111
-solidworks; faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-abbyy filereader http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-C-Ray, as fast as $1k i7-990X, http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/v.../c-rayir38.png

and many, many, moooreeee

-mainconcept http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=17
-mediashow http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-h.264 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-vp8 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-sha1 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-photoshop cs5 http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=14
-photoshop cs5 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-15.html
-winrar, faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-winrar, improves over x6 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-7-zip better than 2600k here: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41698.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-7-zip same perf as 2600k http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-POV-ray, faster than 2600k http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/10/
-POV-ray http://www.nordichardware.se/test-la...art=15#content
-x264(2nd pass AVX enabled) http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-x264 (2nd pass, better overall than 2600k) http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11108
-x264 (2nd pass +.3 than SB2600k) http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/7/
-handbrake; http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/9/
-truecrypt; http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11111
-solidworks; faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-abbyy filereader http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-C-Ray, as fast as $1k i7-990X, http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/v.../c-rayir38.png

> When buying hardware, trying to future proof is dumb. You could try to "future proof" now and buy a $1500 system. In 3 years it'll be shit though.

That's total nonsense.

a) The gaming rig I built in 2001 lasted until 2008 -- upgrading the video card from a GeForce 2 to GeForce 4 to GeForce 6600GT kept it alive much, much longer.

b) I just priced out a complete gaming rig for a friend based on what I have. For $1300 you can build a gaming rig that WILL be perfectly fine for gaming in 3 years. By that time, you can upgrade the video card and it will play all the latest games.

You _do_ know that MOST games are GPU bound at 1920x1080, not CPU bound right?

Here are the benchmarks to back that claim up:

Sabertooth 990 FX
http://www.guru3d.com/article/asus-sabertooth-990fx-review/17

And proof that GPU's are the bottlenecks in the latest games ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063.html

I could go on, but there would be little point.

So go ahead, and blow $500 on that latest i7-2600K -- meanwhile us budget AMD guys will be putting money that we saved on buying the cheap 4-core system towards a high end GPU like the 6970, because you are forgetting one tiny, but important fact. Almost ALL the big PC games are designed to run on the 5 year old console hardware -- the PS3 and XBox 360 only have ~6 core and ~2 cores respectively, which means modern CPU's are NOT the bottleneck -- the GPU's are.

And why would I want that when I can get an AMD APU + motherboard combo for that same price, but with 80 Radeon cores for the same price as the underpowered g620 (*without* the motherboard)?

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/apu/mainstream/Pages/mainstream.aspx#3

http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-brazos-platform-tested-e350-apu-review/1

Heck, for your Intel's price and TPD, I could get a triple core A6-3500 with Radeon HD 6530D integrated on the die.

If someone is not limited to PCI due to external factors, there is little reason to get g620 over AMD's APU.

> 48-core systems (which are insanely cheap),

Cheap. 48-core. In the same sentence!
Thats.... intriguing. i googled and found a couple of links for 48 core intel and AMD systems
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/10/intels-48-core-processor-destined-for-science-ships-to-univers/ (Intel -- honest to goodness, 48 cores on a die)
http://www.guru3d.com/news/amd-shows-48core-magny-cours-system/ -- ("48 core" AMD system ... actually 4 12-core CPUs on a motherboard)

I'm guessing this is the Intel system which is only for academia.

Can you provide some more details? Prices, clock speed?

Because PCIe x16 does 128Gbit/sec and Thunderbolt does 10Gbit?
Displays need as much bandwidth as possible if you value 3d.

Man my friend who owed me money tried to pawn me his old Gateway 386/SX, it sucked!

The new Gateway PCs are a lot faster, even if not fast enough to crush the scouter. The old Gateway you're thinking of probably had a 25 MHz 386 that would run 6900 iterations of Dhrystone per second, or roughly 4 standardized MIPS. The new Gateway has a Phenom X3 that can do over 28,000 MIPS.

Fuck that shit man, if you want a good sytem get yourself a Sega Genesis!

The new Gateway can probably emulate a couple dozen Sega Genesis consoles in parallel.

No SATA SSD pushes even 250MB/sec for continuous reads in the real world, even when connected to a 6Gbps SATA controller. See the latest comparison benchmarks.

This is because the entire SATA controller typically gets a single PCI Express lane, which is a 500MB/s max. The OCZ cards use 4 lanes, so 550MB/sec or so (which are the actual benchmarks) is pretty poor use of a 2GB/sec max bandwidth.

A quick google show that this so called "news" is at least a month old:
http://www.guru3d.com/news/powercolor-radeon-hd-5970-with-12-displayport-outputs/

/. start to feel like looking in last year diary. I honesty don't know why I bother to visit /. any more.

Well, you can have that experience all over again. Check out the Asus Xonar Essence STX. Drop-dead retail packaging, gold plated connections, and uber quality capacitors. *drool*

http://www.guru3d.com/article/asus-xonar-essence-stx-review/2

Nehalem is about 800 DMIPS/Watt (75500/95W), Cortex A9 is about 8,000 (4000/.5W). The Nehalem figure is based on Sandra results for the Core i7 870 link, Cortex is based on ARM's numbers for their power efficient model link

To be fair, I don't know of a better way to test, and I'd love to see a discussion of better utilities. If I tried this I'd probably do mprime and keep an eye out for MCE's in the system logs, but don't delude yourself into thinking that core is error free because you ran prime95.

There are quite a few tools, mainly found in the overclocking communities. OCCT, Linx and Intel Overburn just to name some.

That's because those numbering schemes don't extend ad infinitum in a reasonable manner.

Besides, what are you going to call the new nehalem aka i7 920, a P6/2600? Because quite frankly at 2.6ghz it's faster than a 3.4ghz dual core, so would a customer get a P5/3400 or a P6/2600? Which is faster? Which is slower? You can't keep using Mhz as the sole indicator of performance hence the new model numbers.

Like I said before, It's hardly a mess, it only becomes a mess if you try to use it to compare to your ancient hardware. A i7 9xx is faster than an i7 8xx which is faster than an i5 and that again is faster than an i3.

Same exact thing with Nvidia, you go from the GT210 to the GT220, GT240, GT250, GTX 260, GTX 275, GTX 285, and GTX 295.

If you want to know the performance difference in absolute terms, there are plenty of guides that compare large rangers of CPUs and GPUs. Guru3d for example has an excellent chart for such purposes, http://www.guru3d.com/article/vga-charts-december-2009/1 Pick your game, check the chart, figure out what you're willing to pay for, done.

The review over at Guru3D shows that it fits between an HD4670 and a 9600GT performance-wise. As for video acceleration, you're looking at a VP4 engine.