Slashdot Mirror

There is a pretty intriguing article at HardOCP about the 360 GPU. It's sounding pretty stunning.

from the tradersnation article:

TIMOTHY M. ROBERTS - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (founder)
Strong track record of founding and launching variety of successful companies.

*lol*
Yeah, HardOCP debunked that for us already. Idiots, all of them.

Their CEO has a very very long history of failed buisness ventures. Hard OCP reported this over 2 years ago and then Infinium tried to sue them.

No surprise at all really. It's one of the biggest example of vapourware ever....

Here's the HardOCP article which they got sued for. Loads of dodgy looking stuff here:

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEyLDI=

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/20/infinium_l abs_gets_litigious/

Read all about it here.

There, now I've done my karma-whoring for the day.

HardOCP did a great expose on this company.

Of course, they then sued HardOCP and were generally nasty, so I'm pretty happy about the way this all turned out.

"(Update 05/13/05) I have had a couple of readers that commented on Microsoft stating that the Xbox 360 was "water cooled." While this might be technically true, it carries a very heavy marketing spin in order to glom onto an enthusiast technology. To be succinct, the Xbox 360 is not water cooled in the way we, meaning just about every computer hardware enthusiast on the planet, tend to think of water cooling. The Xbox 360 motherboard we were shown did have a CPU heatsink in place that utilized a heatpipe. Yes, a heatpipe does have liquid in it and some H2O as well, but is usually primarily ammonia. In a heatpipe, the liquid at the "hot" end vaporizes, and is moved to the "cold" end of the heatpipe by a pressure differential and convection. Once the heat is transferred to the fins in the cold end, the substance condenses and the process repeats. The CPU cooler we saw on the Xbox 360 processor looked very much like this CPU cooler seen at Plycon except the Xbox 360 cooler was taller than wider and only utilized one copper heatpipe tube."

Link -> http://www.hardocp.com/articleprint.html?article_i d=768

It's not actual "water cooling" it is a heat pipe which has water in it, it also has amonia in it.

http://hardocp.com/ Check the announcement.

This is just marketing for PC ricers who think watercooling is "leet".

Or you can jump right to their conclusions.

Or you can jump right to their conclusions.

Or you can jump right to their conclusions.

But if you're naive about the net and you go online maybe once a month...then you're a raw piece of meat in a pool full of sharks.

I am one of those naive that really don't have a clue what hardware review sites to trust. My comfort is that I am probably far from alone, in this matter.

To assist me and other naives(sp?), please join this silly poll and review the following sites (regarding credibility) with a scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 is "No credibility at all" and 10 is "Perfect credibility, these guys wouldn't post a biased review for world domination":

About PC Hardware Reviews
Ace's Hardware
Anandtech
Ars Technica
Beyond 3D
Cnet Reviews
Dan's Data
Dev Hardware
Extremetech
Firingsquad
[H]ard|OCP
Hardware Analysis
Hardwarecentral
Hardwarezone
IT Reviews
OcPrices
Overclockers.com
ProCooling.com
The Tech Report
The Tech Zone
Tom's Hardware
TrustedReviews
Viperlair
Xtreme Resources

If you know only a few of them, give your opinion on those.

Maybe someone with the right facilities could set up an independent poll?

"unsupported" games may work but to try you have to make your own "application profile" if Nvidia has not released one. Basically all this involves is specifying which mode to use for specific programs.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzExLDM=

I'm sure its pretty annoying for the average gamer though, to edit some obscure file every time they want to play a new unprofiled game. But then again Nvidia fanboys who are crazy enough to spend 1200$ on a pair of video cards will doubtless have no problem with this.

I'm currently looking at the Shuttle SN45G (Athlon XP) or even the SN85G4 (Athlon 64) cases. They both appear to have the CPU near the back and use heat pipes to place the heatsink and fan above the back panel connectors. As shown here and here. I had previously been looking at large heatsinks like the Thermaltake pipe 101 or even the monstrous Thermalright XP-120. But if the Shuttle cases come with their own heatsinks/pipes, then I could still replace the fans with some nice quiet ones, if they aren't quiet enough that is. For video, the nVidia FX-5200 is the quietest fanless video card available, according to one MythTV HOWTO I read. The proprietary nVidia drivers support XvMC, which will take some load off of the CPU.

I'm currently looking at the Shuttle SN45G (Athlon XP) or even the SN85G4 (Athlon 64) cases. They both appear to have the CPU near the back and use heat pipes to place the heatsink and fan above the back panel connectors. As shown here and here. I had previously been looking at large heatsinks like the Thermaltake pipe 101 or even the monstrous Thermalright XP-120. But if the Shuttle cases come with their own heatsinks/pipes, then I could still replace the fans with some nice quiet ones, if they aren't quiet enough that is. For video, the nVidia FX-5200 is the quietest fanless video card available, according to one MythTV HOWTO I read. The proprietary nVidia drivers support XvMC, which will take some load off of the CPU.

Core? I'm not so worried about which core my chip is using... I just want the best performance for the price. I'm not overclocking anything... so as long as it's stable with the default heatsink... I don't care about new advances in power consumption or anything.

Let's look at the current prices for some of these chips at pricewatch:

$624 - Athlon 64 4000
$261 - Athlon 64 3500 939pin
$180 - Athlon 64 3200 939pin
$146 - Athlon 64 3000 939pin

Now just looking at these prices.... where is the jump? On my budget $120 to go from the 3000+ to the 3500+ was a good idea... but to go up another $360 wasn't... so I found my sweet spot.

Now let's look at the performance numbers.

Here are some application benchmarks from a HardOCP review of my mobo... note the fairly small difference between the 3500+ and 4000+
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDU=

And... here are the gaming benchmarks...
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDY=

And... fairly small performance difference for the price margin.

So take these two things together and I bought a reasonably priced CPU that was just marginally less capable than the fastest one on the market (without getting into EE's and FX's)... yes I did my research.

As for your comment on SLI not giving almost double performance... it's obvious that SLI gives better results when the graphics hardware is more stressed... like you mention, higher resolutions is one way to do that... and you are correct that 1280x1024 doesn't tax a 6800GT too badly... WITH THE CURRENT CROP OF GAMES.

Note that I didn't buy two of these NOW because I don't need it... NOW. But in the future when the 6800 is starting to look sluggish (yes, it will happen even at 1280x1024) adding another 6800GT will give close to double the performance... even at 1280x1024.

For evidence of this I turn to your same set of benchmarks. Look at the Doom3 benchmark:

http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/200 41222/vga_charts-06.html

It is well known that Doom3 is harder on hardware (and yes I realize it favors Nvidia a little as well) than HL2. Now whether that is because HL2 is more awesomly (is that a word?) coded is up for debate. The fact of the matter is that Doom3 is more difficult to run at high frame rates.

Look at the 1024x768 with AA and AF Benchmark. The SLI speedup is around 30 Frames or about 50%. Not bad. Now look at the 1600x1200... the speedup is right around %90 (almost double). Somewhere inbetween that would be 1280x1024.

I submit that this benchmark shows that games in the future (the 1600x1200) that tax the hardware more will give a close to double speedup. At any rate it will be way more than some %15...

As for Dual-core... I said in my original post that I want that for compiling. It will directly speedup (almost double) my parrallel "makes"... which is extremely important to me (I will be in grad school getting a degree in Computational Engineering about that time... so compiling large Finite Element codes will happen frequently).

I'm not worried about what it does for gaming. The SLI is futureproofing my gaming... the 939 dual cores are future-proofing my compiling (and other parallel capable CPU intensive tasks... like video encoding).

So... I'm not sure what you're arguing with about dual-cores... I never claimed they helped out gaming.

It's fairly obvious from the tone of your post that you won't ever see that SLI can be a good thing for upgradeability... so all of this probably fell on deaf ears. But I hope you atleast understand how some of us are not "Asinine" for wanting this type of technology....

Friedmud

Core? I'm not so worried about which core my chip is using... I just want the best performance for the price. I'm not overclocking anything... so as long as it's stable with the default heatsink... I don't care about new advances in power consumption or anything.

Let's look at the current prices for some of these chips at pricewatch:

$624 - Athlon 64 4000
$261 - Athlon 64 3500 939pin
$180 - Athlon 64 3200 939pin
$146 - Athlon 64 3000 939pin

Now just looking at these prices.... where is the jump? On my budget $120 to go from the 3000+ to the 3500+ was a good idea... but to go up another $360 wasn't... so I found my sweet spot.

Now let's look at the performance numbers.

Here are some application benchmarks from a HardOCP review of my mobo... note the fairly small difference between the 3500+ and 4000+
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDU=

And... here are the gaming benchmarks...
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0LDY=

And... fairly small performance difference for the price margin.

So take these two things together and I bought a reasonably priced CPU that was just marginally less capable than the fastest one on the market (without getting into EE's and FX's)... yes I did my research.

As for your comment on SLI not giving almost double performance... it's obvious that SLI gives better results when the graphics hardware is more stressed... like you mention, higher resolutions is one way to do that... and you are correct that 1280x1024 doesn't tax a 6800GT too badly... WITH THE CURRENT CROP OF GAMES.

Note that I didn't buy two of these NOW because I don't need it... NOW. But in the future when the 6800 is starting to look sluggish (yes, it will happen even at 1280x1024) adding another 6800GT will give close to double the performance... even at 1280x1024.

For evidence of this I turn to your same set of benchmarks. Look at the Doom3 benchmark:

http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/200 41222/vga_charts-06.html

It is well known that Doom3 is harder on hardware (and yes I realize it favors Nvidia a little as well) than HL2. Now whether that is because HL2 is more awesomly (is that a word?) coded is up for debate. The fact of the matter is that Doom3 is more difficult to run at high frame rates.

Look at the 1024x768 with AA and AF Benchmark. The SLI speedup is around 30 Frames or about 50%. Not bad. Now look at the 1600x1200... the speedup is right around %90 (almost double). Somewhere inbetween that would be 1280x1024.

I submit that this benchmark shows that games in the future (the 1600x1200) that tax the hardware more will give a close to double speedup. At any rate it will be way more than some %15...

As for Dual-core... I said in my original post that I want that for compiling. It will directly speedup (almost double) my parrallel "makes"... which is extremely important to me (I will be in grad school getting a degree in Computational Engineering about that time... so compiling large Finite Element codes will happen frequently).

I'm not worried about what it does for gaming. The SLI is futureproofing my gaming... the 939 dual cores are future-proofing my compiling (and other parallel capable CPU intensive tasks... like video encoding).

So... I'm not sure what you're arguing with about dual-cores... I never claimed they helped out gaming.

It's fairly obvious from the tone of your post that you won't ever see that SLI can be a good thing for upgradeability... so all of this probably fell on deaf ears. But I hope you atleast understand how some of us are not "Asinine" for wanting this type of technology....

Friedmud

Actually you can create your own game profiles to enable SLI. They are stored in an XML file to hack in the System32 directory called NvApps.xml.

NVIDIA's SLI Shortchanges Gamers?

A nice article.

Here are some more sites covering it... all about the same content, really:
viperlair.com
hardocp.com
techreport.com
thetechzone.com
tweaktown.com
thetechzone.com
hothardware.com
hexus.net
pcper.com
legionhardware.com
thetechlounge.com
bigbruin.com

Here's an actual review:
[H]ard|OCP,

and here's a better picture:
Legit Reviews

(and notice how I "quote" you), I presume that you'll be able to cite the part of the article that says "the failed businesses [are] a tragedy to the man's resume."

What I notice that they actually said was:

"We liken investors giving Mr. Roberts money to people playing dice in Vegas. You just have to roll enough times and sooner or later you'll get a winner. Obviously, this isn't a solid winning strategy in Vegas or the business world."

You'll notice that I've again used quotation marks to indicate that this is something that they actually said, rather than something that I just believe that they might have said.

The results are in sooner then I expected.

Here is the copy of the legal document where Infinium admits that the article "does not constitute unfair competition under .. or an unfair business practice, trade disparagement, trade libel ...".

I want to be crystal clear here. Fondue commented "Well, it's not exactly ambiguous that Infinium were libelled [sic] - it should be obvious to all but the most credulous observer...". Fondue is flat out wrong.

The rest of their rant is similarly misguided.

Startups are not allowed in the US anymore? True some mistakes were made by IL. Too bad Kyle can't understand that companies have to start somewhere when they don't start with a couple billions.

Ah, thank you for that wonderfully misinformed opinion. This gives me the opportunity to point out the obvious lies, deceit, and chicanery(thank you Penny Arcade) produced by the Infinium Labs 'company.' Please, observe the Infinium Labs HQ--yes, that is a mail depot.

Startups are not allowed in the US anymore? True some mistakes were made by IL. Too bad Kyle can't understand that companies have to start somewhere when they don't start with a couple billions.

Ah, thank you for that wonderfully misinformed opinion. This gives me the opportunity to point out the obvious lies, deceit, and chicanery(thank you Penny Arcade) produced by the Infinium Labs 'company.' Please, observe the Infinium Labs HQ--yes, that is a mail depot.

And I'm not even convinced that they even have a service (or for that matter, any units). This article (linked to in the original post) really makes for a good read. The resume of Infineum's "Chairman and CEO" reads like a catalogue of dotcom revolution woe, and there are also some amusing pictures of Infinium's "headquarters" (an empty unit in a strip mall, apparently, with their mail being dropped off at the Mailboxes, etc. next door). I honestly can't figure out why in God's name anyone would invest money in these guys.

I saw this mac case mod awhile back in Maximum PC, I think. Guy took a G4 tower and crammed non-mac hardware inside....They called it the Rotten Apple. Nice paint job as well. Take a look, it at HardOCP -

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MzUx

Just a note,

Intel has been using strained silicon since Prescott. They made the same claims before releasing it. But we can see now that it really doesn't make much of a difference so they're removing the emphasis from clock speed and optimizing for lower speeds.

Nothing to see here. Old news.

Believe it or not, this card barely outperforms the X800XT AGP. The only thing this one might do better is with cooling. See for yourself [H]ard|OCP.

You mean the "rumors" aren't officially "news" until they appear on /.? Forget what we've been reading since Febuary on http://www.anandtech.com, http://www.tomshardware.com, http://www.theinquirer.net, http://www.arstechnica.com, http://www.hardocp.com, http://www.aceshardware.com, and of course http://www.intel.com, it's not true until it appears on /. ...

PSSST!!! I've heard the rumor that Apple is planning on ditching Motorola's chips for IBM processors in their upcoming Macintoshes. Has anyone elseo heard about something called a "G5"? Some say it might also be 64 bit? Heavens-to-Betsy, let's post it to /.'s FP.

IF you'd RTFA you'd know that it doesn't render halves of the screen. It uses load balancing similar to that found in multiprocessor systems. While most applications aren't written to use two cpus simultaneously, the system can distribute the total system load very evenly provided no single process uses 100% of a CPU.

So it's not rendering "halves" of the screen, each GPU is doing an equal share of the rendering work so that while the work of one card may only be a small portion of the screen they both did the same amount of mathematical work. I read about this four days ago on http://www.hardocp.com/.

Other than the fact that this is old news. I would have figured that the focus would be more on the new nforce4 chipset http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce4_family.html familiy. There are three board types in this family The Nforce4 Standard, the Nforce4 Ultra, and the Nforce SLI. As a matter of fact Asus is releaseing an sli board based on this right now called the A8N-SLI with a slew of added features that you could expect out of and asus board including dual gigabit ethernet ports! Why the via board is even being covered is beyond me the nforce is a much more better chipset. Here is a [H]ardOCP benchmark page here http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njk2. Enjoy. ;)

[H]ard OCP are currently running a less-than-complementary article about Valve, CS:S and Steam. It's an interesting read.

I think Intel knows that they are not going to get a lot of kind press today.

I think Intel has put this launch where they think it can do the least amount of damage by actually being noticed.

Intel's new Pentium 4 3.46 Extreme Edition processor touting its 1066MHz FSB and supporting 925XE chipset bring nothing new to the table in terms of real-world performance.

"Is this a paper launch?" Quite frankly, I don't know, and I don't see any real reason to care.

So there you have it folks - the 1066MHz FSB does absolutely nothing for performance.

We can only wonder what Intel is thinking, releasing an entirely new chipset just four months after they released the original. Either the 1066MHz FSB is going to make its way to CPUs faster than we have anticipated, or Intel has just introduced the world's first useless FSB improvement for the next 9 months.

But given that Intel isn't planning on ramping clock speed up too high anytime soon, we'd say that the 1066MHz FSB is best left for late next year, when more useful implementations of it will appear.

I wonder if the system covers:

1) Starting up a website,generating hype, and bilking investors out of cash.

2) "creating" a fake console out of a shoebox or dumb pc case

3) Slagging third party websites and suing them.

4) Delaying the whole process so that your scam becomes freaking obvious. Cmon, go offshore with the cash already.

If it does, I'm in!

See http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEy

"The nForce4 is really little more than an nForce3, but with a much deeper feature set. Of course SLI will likely be the big selling point this year...hopefully. I say "hopefully," because thinking back on the nForce3 Ultra launch, we saw many moons between the nForce3 reference board and actual retail samples from motherboard makers. Not to belittle all of the progress that has made it into the new nForce4 feature sets, but I have a feeling that those goodies will not be selling many nForce4 retail motherboards, at least not this year."

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?article id=592&cid=1
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/athlon64-fx55 /index.x?pg=1
http://www.bit-tech.net/review/364/
http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=266
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 666
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=331
http://www.amdreview.com/reviews.php?rev=fx-55-400 0
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/processors/amd 4000_fx55/
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlo n64-fx55.html
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=614

Why should Anand get all the attention?
Feel free to also check http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc1

HardOCP did a review of the Visiontek Xtreme 2GO drive, which survived a trip through the washing machine. Might be a good choice for durability.

It IS a viable concept. Look at Stream? It took me a matter of moments to download an run Counter-Strike. Even if the system isn't perfect, its still a proof of concept

After seeing the "prototype" that HardCOOP got. It took a YEAR to develop that? They didn't even have any software for it!

It would of taking less than 3 weeks to get the prototype plastic box and case, as well as being under a $10,000 development hardware budget.

Six months is NOT enough. While it might be a simple matter of getting the spec's of the system up, the software is going to be the issue. I also doubt they will even come out.

ID's official minimum system requirements can be found here. The article discusses experiences with min-spec systems as well.
Looks like my ATI 9200 *might* cut it :-)

ID's official minimum system requirements can be found here. The article discusses experiences with min-spec systems as well.
Looks like my ATI 9200 *might* cut it :-)

It seems that HardOCP has a mirror of the wherisphantom site up now..

Here's the link to the orignal HardOCP article detailing their investigation.
Link to Original HardOCP article
This looks a good piece of investigative journalism by a website. Kudos to them for providing the public an unbiased set of facts.

Dude, I don't care to persuade you that it was a hatchet piece, in my opinion it was. You pretend it was merely a factual representation but it was full of speculation and opinion, and read the worst into everything after starting out with an assumption. The irst article wasn't critical, are you on crack? I suggest you read it.

You assume in your pro-HardOCP frenzy that I'm somehow anti-HardOCP. My remark on their suing in Texas was a neutral observation in response to a posters question, I know Kyle lives in Texas.

This isn't about the hotglue article, it never was, it's about this peice . and HardOCP actually sued Infinium, so which lawsuit this is is not exactly clear to me. There were lawsuits in different jusisdictions flying both ways.

I've read the evidence, what's your point. You did read the original hatchet piece that started all this didn't you?

Just because someone doesn't agree with your fanboy attitude towards HardOCP doesn't make them a troll. Geeze, Kyle sued HardOCP in his own district hoping for a more favourable judgement based on local law In my opinion.

But ultimately I don't really care about this case, it is amusing to see posters like you being so blatantly one sided about this. Yes he's a community driven site and OK, Infinium has what you could call vaporware, but physical examples exist out there. This was the least SLAP like SLAP case I've seen and Infinium's response was a predictable responses to a hatchet peice IMHO.

HardOCP is a gaming website. Last year, they ran an article questioning the Infinium Phantom Console which had been announced, but no one had yet seen.

The article did some probing into the company, and some of their claims, such as the history of the president of Infinium.

Infinium stated they would sue HardOCP over the letter, and sent e-mail to tell HardOCP to change or remove parts of the article. HardOCP didn't cave, and so, there was a lawsuit, and now it's progressed to this (which isn't really a win).

HardOCP is a gaming website. Last year, they ran an article questioning the Infinium Phantom Console which had been announced, but no one had yet seen.

The article did some probing into the company, and some of their claims, such as the history of the president of Infinium.

Infinium stated they would sue HardOCP over the letter, and sent e-mail to tell HardOCP to change or remove parts of the article. HardOCP didn't cave, and so, there was a lawsuit, and now it's progressed to this (which isn't really a win).

HardOCP is a gaming website. Last year, they ran an article questioning the Infinium Phantom Console which had been announced, but no one had yet seen.

The article did some probing into the company, and some of their claims, such as the history of the president of Infinium.

Infinium stated they would sue HardOCP over the letter, and sent e-mail to tell HardOCP to change or remove parts of the article. HardOCP didn't cave, and so, there was a lawsuit, and now it's progressed to this (which isn't really a win).

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTk4