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The Radeon X1950 beats the NVidia cards in every single test save for the "synthetic" crapmark test that has nothing to do with reality.

Interesting, that's not what I've been seeing in tests. In fact, in most tests it seems the 8800 GTX beats the X1950 XTX

In context, it's clear the GP was referring to the NVidia cards that were reviewed by the article. And he's mostly right. In only one (of many) actual gaming benchmark did any of the Nvidia cards reviewed outperform the X1950.

Where I believe the GP is mistaken is in his conclusions about the article. The article itself says, in conclusion:

The 256MB version of the Radeon X1950 Pro is faster in most games, and by a pretty good margin, too.

The article notes, correctly I think, that the X1650XT is not a good card for gamers to buy. It notes that the 1950 won't do DirectX10, and the budget NVidia cards may not be fast enough to do it well either.

However, it's also instructive to have a look at this review at Hard OCP. There, in two demanding games (Oblivion and STALKER), the 8600 GTS appears to win handily over the 1950XT. If those benchmarks are accurate, it suggests the ExtremeTech article may draw conclusions that are too favorable to the X1950.

Ah well, interesting times for all gfx card consumers!

Here are some links to other interesting reviews of these products:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=3 92 tested under Vista 64-bit and shows the 8600 GTS behind the aging ATI X1950 Pro
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM yNCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA== tested under XP and shows better performance on the 8600 GTS
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=8409 tested under XP but not a lot of newer games

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articleprint.html?ar t=MTMxOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Can anyone link to a plagairized copy without all the fucking assholishly intrusive advertising?

Yes. First, get this and this. Then try this URL to read it ad-free.

Try joining this century and using an adblocker. I'll give you a pointer, blocking http://hera.hardocp.com/ will get 95% of them.

Maybe the most free TVs given away ever? O_o

"(The article dismisses Linux desktops in the enterprise in a single bullet item.)" And how is this still considered a noteworthy article?

Insightful, my eye. The bullet in question, from TFA, was:

The learning curve and disparity of Linux distributions is too high for easy general office use.

And that is different from this noteworthy article on using Linux on the desktop how? Because that is basically what I get from that article even though it is an article in which the author is actually *trying* to use Linux as a desktop OS.

If we are so blinded by our religion that we cannot see what is wrong with our chosen OS for a given application we are worse than Microsoft. The fact of the matter is that the bullet is valid and more than enough said for why the choice is between Mac and Windows as it has been for aeons. What's sad for Linux is that Apple has done basically what Linux should have done ages ago, especially since this is not the first time Apple has done it, that is, take UNIX and put an Apple-cool user-friendly face upon it (A/UX being the first attempt I know of, with a System 7 style interface as well as a command line).

This time they even used Open Source tech and shared back most of what they did. The GUI is not open source, but you'd think that it would not be hard to replicate or build something similar. Tech-wise it is no more challenging than what already exists in 5000 forms on Linux. The difference here is in design. Interface design has always been the worst part of software so it is no surprise that it would be especially bad in the FOSS community. It's just that you'd think people would eventually get with the program or that some company or group would have obfuscated the ugliness by now.

What I like best about Mac OS X is that like the mythical Linux distro that does not exist everything you can do in the GUI can be done in the command line, and except for the additional step (they should use a daemon to get rid of it, too) of sucking the changes into netinfo you can even change things by using vi on the text files as God Intended. Yet grandma can just pick it right up and it Just Works so she can browse for recipes and do her taxes and make DVDs about her grandkids from videos she shot with the included camera, hook the puter up to the TV and use the included remote to watch them, etc. In other words rather than being simply a vehicle for pushing an agenda and a cudgel for punishing the user for daring to want to use their computer as Linux and Windows seem to be, Macs seem to be more about empowering the user to do more with their computer than they might have thought they could, which is what PCs are for. The main thing that worked as an obstacle in the past for Macs getting into the office space is that they're too damn much fun to use to be productive in some people's eyes and they don't have the word "business" in the title like the other guys do.

Nothing is stopping Linux from becoming every bit as cool except the will to make it so. Most of the stuff that gets in people's way could be easily fixed; it's just that what is not easily fixed is the attitude of Open Source developers that they don't care about [l]users. As long as that does not change the best we can hope for is some entity that is willing to clean up the mess and do as good a job as Apple, which does not look like it is going to happen anytime soon. Look at the long list of failures the author of the 30 days article puts out there.

I will say that it is too bad that the transgaming tech is as bad as it seems to be. Who wants to pay for something that flat does not work even on its best titles? I've been hoping for a long time that it would become something useful and decent as it is the main hope for Linux as a home system that can play games. Maybe if they were helping wine more it would be better; maybe they have run out of

Sure, "discuss" all you want. But you wont be discussing with me and you wont get any response until you actually file bug reports and try to come up with solutions to the problems you find. That is what I consider to be constructive work and not just general hand-waiving. Not long ago there was an article called 30 days with Ubuntu posted on Slashdot. It detailed problems the author found in Ubuntu Linux. That is useful information and inspired me to submit a few patches to fix the authors problem. Judging by the number of bug reports submitted each day to popular free software projects, it seems others are too capabable of constructively discuss and help Linux improve.

Yours and this articles authors complaining, however, is dead weight. There is nothing I can do about a complaint such as "geek developed UI's." The reason those UI's look "geek developed" is because not enough people have taken the time to constructively critisize them. As a developer, there is nothing I'd like to hear more than constructive feedback on my UI's. But as commens such as that it is "wild assed" does not help.

http://consumer.hardocp.com/articleprint.html?art= MTI5OCwxLCxoY29uc3VtZXI=

It'll be interesting to compare the performance of the built-in GPU unit in the new Fusion AMD processors, and the latest PCIe.

Not really. AMD's primarily targeting the mobile market with Fusion.

Hell no - it's the OEM.

Case in point, I reviewed the Dell Dimension XPS 400 for HardOCP. It had a ton of "craplets" on it - and they caused unbelievably slow performance, and they often prevented other apps (such as Sims2 and Quake4) from running, but the OS never went down hard.

I can see how Microsoft can be concerned - I bet you Intel is too - as at the time, Dell's practices (which have since changed) made their processors look slow - when it was really the craplets. (At the time, Dell was only using Intel, but AMD was the choice of boutiques and the home builder.)

At the end, though, if an OEM puts a program on a computer and it is not at the customer's bequest, then the OEM has to take responsibility for testing to make sure that the system shipping is stable and functional.

What a bunch of hypocritical ninconpoopery. Although, that's only to be expected when reading SlashDot and Microsoft in the same sentence. I was impressed to see a few people actually backing the 3v1l suxx0rz, however. I haven't read all the posts and this one won't get read either, but I couldn't not put something down.

Bill Buxton recently spoke at CSCW 2006 and had a great talk. One of the things he talked about was his recent hiring by Microsft Research. He took a lot of flak when he moved there, but here he presented the reasons he joined. Basically, Microsoft funds and embraces research, and they encourage people to publish what they find. This can be seen in reality when you look at the mass of publications that come from or are touched by Microsoft Research at many of the academic conferences I attend regularly (like SIGCHI, CSCW, UIST, etc...). I have known many people who have done many internships at MSR, why would they go back if it is so terrible?

A good example of research personified is the new side-bar in Vista. This idea was not stolen from anywhere. It was originally published here and in that paper you'll see the original prototype was written by a research intern, who was inspired by work he and I were doing together at the time in our graduate programs (and that work is cited by this paper as well). Am I peeved that MS hasn't bought out my MSc Thesis? No! Is he peeved that MSR furthered and then included his prototype in a shipping product several years later? No! Most of the numpties here would be peeved, though. Whatever. We work at the same company now, and I can honestly say it's a discussion we've never had.

It was amazing to see the zealots in the CSCW community turn on Buxton. Buxton is long resepected and almost revered in this research area, but the overpowering hate of MS broke through even his passionate and relevant points. It's almost as bad as religious extremism. During the question period, one attendee called out MS (using Bill Buxton as the face) for not releasing easy ways for him to get projects he was working on in after school programs with kids onto the XBox. "Why can't I compile and run this stuff on an XBox without paying lots of money to MS? If MS is so great, why don't they enable people to use their stuff?" Bill said "well geez, contact me after the conference and I'll look into it." Anyways, it's unrelated to Bill, how about this??? And a month after his talk, no less. MS knows that enabling people on their systems is the way to go, and they work towards that. Slashdot will accuse them of stealing the idea from OSS, I can't wait.

(Now) classic Slashdot riff: "PS3 is teh suxx0rz! My XBOX 360 pWns! Gonna get a Wii too!" followed by a post in the next article by the same person "M$ is teh suxx0rz! Evil evil bad horrible!" Again, if you don't want to use MS products, then don't! It's that simple! I run Windows because I don't have to think about it. It has the tools I want, accessible and running. I run a Linux file server, because it's inexpensive (cost: a bunch of hard drives and an old pc I'm not using) and it works just for what I need. This is hardly Gap or Nike or Enron or McKesson (personal experience dictates I say that here :D) we're talking about, here.

A point about OS's. The classic definition of OS has changed and evolved over the last few years (greatly simplified): An OS initially was a human operating a loom. Then it evolved to a series of cards running a loom. Then it was a bunch of cards running a census tabulator. Then it was a bunch of cards running a bunch of vaccuum tubes (pop!). Then it was a bunch of cards running big mainframes. Then it was an incr

Actually, the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) in Vista does move the majority of the video driver into ring3. Without the WDDM driver you don't get the fancy-pants accelerated UI. A lot of people focus on the obvious improvements in Vista, which are few, but there are a lot of underlying changes which will move to fundamentally overhaul the platform. WDDM is one of them. Combined with the DX10 requirements for graphics cards they will soon have all of the scheduling and memory management features as the CPU.

http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=MTkyNzgsLCxo bmV3cywsLDE=

HardOCP QuadFX Review.

I'd go with the QuadFX platform just so I could swap in two quadcore AMD chips mid-2007, or one quadcore and one Torrenza platform coprocessor... if I had a few $thousand lying around and could make proper use of all that firepower. I suspect that quadcore + coprocessor combination is going to be really, really interesting within a year.

Even if you spend $3000 on a PC and you will never get the kind of graphics that the PS3 is capable of running at a 1080 resolution.

It depends on the game. In the [H]ardOCP review, this appears to be the first card that can do Oblivion with maxed in-game settings (the grass has been the problem area in the past, even with top-of-the-line cards) at very high resolutions and high AA settings while retaining solid framerates - the settings they considered ideal in their testing were 8x AA at 1600x1200 and 4x AA at 1920x1200. That would be impressive for a SLI setup, let alone a single card.

How worthwhile that is depends, of course, on just how killer a person wants their gaming rig to be (I can't imagine ever buying a $600 graphics card myself). But, given that the performance seems to exceed that of any other graphics card (or any two, for that matter), it's pretty clearly the card to get to ensure maximum gaming PC penis size. :)

Today marks the announcement of NVIDIA's next generation GeForce 8800 series GPU technology code named "G80." We have two new hard-launched video cards from BFG Tech representing the 8800 products. Gameplay experience TWIMTBP?

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI xOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/08/geforce_880 0/
Although the toms article is pretty worthless as most benches are cpu bound with a fx64 cpu.

my favorite has to be this page, 8800 GTX SLI/3.80GHz Core 2 Duo SLI
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2053791 ,00.asp

I didn't mention anything about cue marks for reel changes.

I mentioned the CAP dots that screw up a frame that I see. Apparently not everyone sees them but I do. I also can't view those fuzzy 3D stereoscopic images no matter how hard I try.

http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=ODQzMyxPY3Rv YmVyICAsMjAwMw==
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy

The idea is the it is supposed to screw up the compression for pirated movies but it ends up being an annoying eyesore.
I haven't seen any for IMAX prints but regular cinema for tentpole pictures I see them every time.

I believe it was Infinium.
At least, that's who [H]ard|OCP sued.

As a side note; does anyone have any info on what AMD are planning, if anything, to compete against the Core 2 Duo in the near future? I read something a while back about them switching to 65nm at a new fab, but I don't follow the processor market that closely anymore.

AMD has a couple of interesting products comming out:

- First is 4x4, comming out in 4Q2006. This is essentially a dual-socket platform designed for the high-end desktop and low-end workstation/server market. This isn't a product for everyone, but it will make for a very price attractive dual-socket workstation. To start with, it will support two dual-core chips for a total of four cores. AMD has stated that later, when they release quad-core chips, 4x4 will support two of them for a total of eight cores. It's a niche market, but a neat idea.

- Second, AMD is releasing a new core in 2Q2007. This core has double the number of FP (floating point) pipelines, double the L1 cache bandwidth, larger reorder buffers, a L3 cache, and will come in dual and quad-core versions. This chip is going to be a beast, and will be supported in any current socket AM2 mother board. For more, read this: HardOCP, HardOCP. This new core is the direct answer to Core2/conroe, and I expect it to be a good one. It looks really good on paper, and after seeing AMD's delivery of K8, I expect the new core to live up to the hype.

As a side note; does anyone have any info on what AMD are planning, if anything, to compete against the Core 2 Duo in the near future? I read something a while back about them switching to 65nm at a new fab, but I don't follow the processor market that closely anymore.

AMD has a couple of interesting products comming out:

- First is 4x4, comming out in 4Q2006. This is essentially a dual-socket platform designed for the high-end desktop and low-end workstation/server market. This isn't a product for everyone, but it will make for a very price attractive dual-socket workstation. To start with, it will support two dual-core chips for a total of four cores. AMD has stated that later, when they release quad-core chips, 4x4 will support two of them for a total of eight cores. It's a niche market, but a neat idea.

- Second, AMD is releasing a new core in 2Q2007. This core has double the number of FP (floating point) pipelines, double the L1 cache bandwidth, larger reorder buffers, a L3 cache, and will come in dual and quad-core versions. This chip is going to be a beast, and will be supported in any current socket AM2 mother board. For more, read this: HardOCP, HardOCP. This new core is the direct answer to Core2/conroe, and I expect it to be a good one. It looks really good on paper, and after seeing AMD's delivery of K8, I expect the new core to live up to the hype.

Why is the submitter only pimping the HotHardware review? Here's more (in no particular order):

HardOCP
Guru3D
Anandtech
Bjorn3D
PCPerspective
nV News

Why don't you slow down there yourself, cowboy? Read.

Then, if you're not reading [H]ardOCP reviews, you should be. What you're describing is exactly the tack they take in their evaluations, trying to look at performance under conditions gamers care about instead of seeing how high they can jack the frame rate at low resolutions. Even when comparing two cards, they don't force a card into conditions that make a game unplayable just to make the tests match, and instead simply tell you what settings didn't make it into the test (i.e., turning down grass detail in Oblivion, lowering the AA level for a card, etc.).

The company's website still features the Lapboard as coming soon. I hope that they get the Lapboard out the door and into the market as it has some promise and seems feasible to design. However if it does appear in stores it will still have heavy competition from Logitech, Microsoft and all the other usual suspects.

so it is not a stretch to believe this service will be launched sometime in the very near future

  If the [P]olice do something wrong, they should be [P]unished just like the rest of us!

Do these [P]olice work for [H]ardOCP or something?

How big an issue was the GPU in that test? None, or some? When they dropped a quality level down, the gap increased.

Another OCP comparison, without GPU limitations.

Not if you ask hard OCP http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTE wOCwxLCxobmV3cw==/

Check out the Hard OCP benches... I trust them more than what's it's hexus

Gaming: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTE wOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA
Music/Video encoding: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTE xMCwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

Check out the Hard OCP benches... I trust them more than what's it's hexus

Gaming: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTE wOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA
Music/Video encoding: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTE xMCwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

"Real World" testing of the new core2 duo's over at HardOCP seems to suggest that the hype is, well, Bullshot (Penny Arcade). He also savages... no, investigates, the other benchmarks with his normal subtle-but-robust manner :) It seems that the top of the line Core2Duo just barely beats an FX-62 numerically in actual game performance; statistically there is no difference whatsoever... As with all things, it comes down to perspective. I have no doubt that Intel are catching up to AMD, may indeed have caught up. However, I simply do not believe they have gone from lagging significantly to leading significantly at the same clock speed; Time, I suppose, will tell.

Gone is the inquisitive thuka-thuka-thuka of a floppy disk scan on bootup.

If the POST BEEP ever dissapears, I think the beauty and mystique of a computer coming to life will have been lost forever.

I suspect Apple did not expect the cost of "good" Indian customer support (by Apple's standards) to be so high. Outsourcing companies advertise their "cheap" costs (like Dell $299 PCs), but the good Indian support (like Dell XPS) costs considerably more.

Sure:

Hard OCP CPU scaling

"Our CPU scaling experiences really helped us understand just how important the CPU is to having a great gaming experience. In real-world gaming situations with a slower CPU such as an AthlonXP 2500+ or a Pentium4 2.4GHz, the video performance becomes extremely bottlenecked by the CPU. We were forced to reduce resolution, AA and AF settings, as well as in-game quality settings in the case of FarCry just to get playable performance."

This is an older article but they did one recently on pretty much the same thing. Try searching for "video card cpu scaling" on Google and you should get some results. Tom's Hardware also does some CPU comparison stuff.

In fact, the elevator uses Windows Vista. You have to confirm your desire to exit the elevator 7x before it finally lets you out.

[7 steps to deleting shortcut in Vista]

Apparently it takes a good deal of effort to delete a shortcut in Windows Vista. I have a feeling this humorous picture sequence anonymously posted on Flickr won't last too long so I'm reposting it here and linking the original image. Chances are that by the time the retail version ships, deleting a shortcut will be much the same as it is now but this is worth a posting for a laugh.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=151250154& size=o
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTE0OTExOD g5NUxRSkp0S3J6aTZfMV8xX2wuanBn

This is not news. It's demise was predicted 3 years ago at HardOCP. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEy

I do feel bad for the investors. However I can't understand how they didn't see the warning signs.

Here's another "benchmark":

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTA 2NSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Small selection:
- HardOCP
- X-Bit Labs
- HotHardware

up to date list here

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articleprint.html?ar t=MTA2NQ==

Much better than the posted story which is nothing more than an advertisement for Hardware secrets.

When will /. editors review entries to prevent this abuse? If anything, when new hardware is released we all know multiple sites will cover the release. That means, put links to the more popular review sites into the story instead of helping one person get his ad hits.

Found via digg

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTA 2NSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

For now, one or two games aren't going get a recommendation for spending the requisite $300, especially when we don't know the extent of what other developers are doing.

Changed my mind completely about a new system I was planning to buy. No dual cores for me, thank you. I'll either grab an FX-57 when AM2 comes out and drops the DDR1 systems' prices, or I'll wait until the end of the year, see if Conroe lives up to the hype and how Vista affects either system.

The "printable" link, text is all in one page and no ads:

http://consumer.hardocp.com/articleprint.html?art= MTAzOQ==

On another note, I used to work at Best Buy. I really needed a job at the time and couldn't find work anywhere else. I certainly know my stuff about computer hardware and software, so did a few other employees. One was even a computer science major fresh out of university just waiting for a real job opportunity to come by. Of course, a few employees knew absolutely nothing. So it's sort of a mixed bag, you could get lucky and find an honest and knowledgeable salesperson or you could get someone who knows nothing about computers and just wants to sell you an extended warranty.

On that note, stores are given a quota of extended warranty sales per day (usually they want 10% of profits to be extended warranty. Extended warranties are a major cash cow for these stores. Thus, employees (especially computer and home theatre) are told to promote the extended warranty and go through the checklist of it's features to EVERY customer, even if they flat out refuse upon first mention. So try not to go /too/ hard on the employee who mentions it to you, their job is on the line.

My recommendation: buy online, avoid the sales pitch, do the research yourself.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTA wMiwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA

http://consumer.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0L DgsLGhjb25zdW1lcg==

~~~~ On Dell's Web site, the XPS series is marketed directly to gamers and high-performance power users. The XPS series is under the gaming tag, and they claim right on the front page of the Dell.com site that, "We take your gaming experience as seriously as you do." The next line: "XPS show just how serious we are" is more telling. If the Dimension XPS400 is any indication, Dell considers computer gamers a joke. Harsh, yes. But we think it's accurate. ~~~~

http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=MTgxNTgsQXBy aWwgICAgLDIwMDYsaG5ld3M=

~~~~~ f you've read our [H] Consumer evaluation of Dell's XPS 400, you'll remember that "value-added" software got in the way of our everyday use of the machine. Well, I've recently been made aware of a third party's attempt to remedy this situation for those of you that may not want to mess around with uninstalling unnecessary software yourself, or would rather have an unattended way of completing the job. It's a sad state of affairs when you buy a new computer these days and it comes pre-loaded with a ton of garbage software that brings your new machine to a crawl. If anyone's bought a Dell PC in the last few years, you probably know what I'm talking about. ~~~

http://consumer.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0L DgsLGhjb25zdW1lcg==

~~~~ On Dell's Web site, the XPS series is marketed directly to gamers and high-performance power users. The XPS series is under the gaming tag, and they claim right on the front page of the Dell.com site that, "We take your gaming experience as seriously as you do." The next line: "XPS show just how serious we are" is more telling. If the Dimension XPS400 is any indication, Dell considers computer gamers a joke. Harsh, yes. But we think it's accurate. ~~~~

http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=MTgxNTgsQXBy aWwgICAgLDIwMDYsaG5ld3M=

~~~~~ f you've read our [H] Consumer evaluation of Dell's XPS 400, you'll remember that "value-added" software got in the way of our everyday use of the machine. Well, I've recently been made aware of a third party's attempt to remedy this situation for those of you that may not want to mess around with uninstalling unnecessary software yourself, or would rather have an unattended way of completing the job. It's a sad state of affairs when you buy a new computer these days and it comes pre-loaded with a ton of garbage software that brings your new machine to a crawl. If anyone's bought a Dell PC in the last few years, you probably know what I'm talking about. ~~~