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Additional, and IMHO better coverage at Tech Report:

Dissecting the 3DMark03 controversy

Examining graphics card performance in 3DMark03

The guys at Tech Report also has an article in which they dissect parts of the benchmark and provide what both FutureMark and nVidia's comments on the matter.

The guys at Tech Report also has an article in which they dissect parts of the benchmark and provide what both FutureMark and nVidia's comments on the matter.

...IBM GXP hard drives failing left and right.

I know I could have used them a few times myself.

...IBM GXP hard drives failing left and right.

I know I could have used them a few times myself.

...IBM GXP hard drives failing left and right.

I know I could have used them a few times myself.

AMD's delay of Athlon64 has little to do with Microsoft, and is more about AMD's problems with SOI and inability to scale the clock speed.

do not look so well... not even compared to a celeron! this is the link http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q1/via-c3/i ndex.x?pg=1

Actually, it would appear to be faster for many applications.

here are some benchmarks.

Just because they delayed release of their Clawhammer products doesn't mean they're having problems.

Yes it does. They have delayed the release many times, and that is almost always because of unforeseen problems. Most industry analysts believe it is because of manufacturing problems with SOI, and AMD has pretty much admitted this is the case. With the current yields, they probably won't be able to clock the chips higher than 1.8 GHz, and that might not even be fast enough to beat the fastest Barton chips (with 32 bit code).

http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/4685

Also, I would bet that Microsoft will wait until there is a 64 bit consumer chip before it releases a 64 bit consumer OS.

Check out the Tech Report's for more text, and a better picture of the video card that may never be.

That user interface is ugly. Try mythTV for a great Linux Tivo/MP3/Ogg/Image/MAME media center. I'm putting one together in a Shuttle XPC box. Making it as pretty as possible increases the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor).

You will have to buy at least a single-user Exchange+Server licence so you can keep it preconfigured, i.e. to run replication on Exchange and SQL Server. However, remember that you can only move the multi-user licenses around when the primary system is dead.

It is those little additional items keeping the systems legal that will cost you (more than the hardware). I've gone through this before so I sympathise.

Of course it does not help to mirror your data by adding more disks to your own computer because a fire, flood, power surge, etc. could still wipe out your local data center. Instead, you should give your files to peers (and in return store their files) so that if a catastrophe strikes your area, you can recover data from surviving peers.

Of course it does not help to mirror your data by adding more disks to your own computer because a fire, flood, power surge, etc. could still wipe out your local data center. Instead, you should give your files to peers (and in return store their files) so that if a catastrophe strikes your area, you can recover data from surviving peers.

Of course it does not help to mirror your data by adding more disks to your own computer because a fire, flood, power surge, etc. could still wipe out your local data center. Instead, you should give your files to peers (and in return store their files) so that if a catastrophe strikes your area, you can recover data from surviving peers.

You moron.

Batteries wear out.

That is not what is being written about here. The IBM 600 laptop/battery combination is causing abnormal, noticeable early death, as compared to other laptop/battery combinations, including combinations from the same manufacturers.

Perhaps you didn't read the posts, and simply decided to enlighten us with your nifty research on TCO?

Or maybe you think that the IBM GXP hard drive failure issue is also a TCO research issue?

What a genius!

You moron.

Batteries wear out.

That is not what is being written about here. The IBM 600 laptop/battery combination is causing abnormal, noticeable early death, as compared to other laptop/battery combinations, including combinations from the same manufacturers.

Perhaps you didn't read the posts, and simply decided to enlighten us with your nifty research on TCO?

Or maybe you think that the IBM GXP hard drive failure issue is also a TCO research issue?

What a genius!

You moron.

Batteries wear out.

That is not what is being written about here. The IBM 600 laptop/battery combination is causing abnormal, noticeable early death, as compared to other laptop/battery combinations, including combinations from the same manufacturers.

Perhaps you didn't read the posts, and simply decided to enlighten us with your nifty research on TCO?

Or maybe you think that the IBM GXP hard drive failure issue is also a TCO research issue?

What a genius!

This can't be possible! Can it?!?!

This can't be possible! Can it?!?!

This can't be possible! Can it?!?!

I am aware of the fact that USB 2.0 is so bad at its bandwidth allocation; I was being as generous as possible while still favouring FireWire (gotta try and look unbiased).

That said, I'd like to disagree with your drivers picture -- the drivers for FireWire hard drives are already here; they're already stable. They'd just get used INSTEAD of the current IDE drivers (or even as well as).

The only change necessary would be the BIOS recognition of the IEEE1394 interface and its ability to boot the devices. I would guess that IEEE1394 chip makers would be more than willing to write boot bioses for their chips just as secondary ATA cards or SCSI cards currently work until the BIOSes understood them.

As far as "pushing" the ceiling on IEEE1394, its already under execution -- they were too slow to get started and probably don't have the funding, but like I said, SATA's money could have gone there instead. Hostlessness is probably too big of a deal to Intel though.

If I only had Bluetooth, USB and Firewire interfaces for peripherals, I'd be happy. Oh yeah, and its not Utopia -- we could all be there _right now_.

USB2.0 + Firewire cards:
http://www.usb-2-0.com/usb-2-0-firewire.ht ml

The MSI 845PE Max2 FIR motherboard has Intel RC8254OEM 10/100/1000 bit LAN, Promise PDC20276 RAID controller for dual ATA-133, C-Media CMI8738 6-channel audio, VIA IEEE1394 FireWire controller & Bluetooth support all built in.

For the Athlon lover, see the Abit AT7 MAX with 4 USB 1.1 ports, 2 additional USB 1.1 ports via PCI backplane, connector, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 2 additional USB 2.0 ports via PCI backplane connector, 2 IEEE 1394 Firewire ports, Audio jacks with S/PDIF-Out, 1 10/100MB LAN connector, but only 3 PCI slots.

Athlon XP
0.13mu process, 37.2 million transistors, 1.67GHz
GeForceFX
0.13mu process, 125 million transistors, ~500 MHz

You might notice that there is a rather large fan/heatsink on the Athlon...

And you also might notice that rendering games at 1600x1400 with just your CPU isn't very fast.

But also keep in mind that optimizing for a specific game isn't necessarily a Bad Thing, so long as it doesn't hurt the visuals or quality. For example, if you know a certain game doesn't need/use certain features of the card, and by disabling them you improve performance, then why not. (ATI, however, vastly cut down on the texture quality in the game itself to get their increases - tsk tsk).

Geoff "Dissonance" Gasior at The Tech Report has made an interesting comment regarding how Lindows could potentially take advantage of open-source "R&D".

Geoff "Dissonance" Gasior at The Tech Report has made an interesting comment regarding how Lindows could potentially take advantage of open-source "R&D".

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

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

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

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

Tech Report on 9500

Anandtech on 9500

Tom's Hardware on 9500

Before using an IBM drive for storing important data, or for pvr applications or for you favorite videos/music, be sure you understand the consequences of using IBM drives, and understand the rma and power on issues as well.

I suggest you read ALL the posts if you have one of the IBM drives, are thinking of buying IBM, or don't know what is in your box. After you read the posts, I suggest you back up immediately to non-IBM drives.

Good luck

3 links above to three different articles on same site.

Before using an IBM drive for storing important data, or for pvr applications or for you favorite videos/music, be sure you understand the consequences of using IBM drives, and understand the rma and power on issues as well.

I suggest you read ALL the posts if you have one of the IBM drives, are thinking of buying IBM, or don't know what is in your box. After you read the posts, I suggest you back up immediately to non-IBM drives.

Good luck

3 links above to three different articles on same site.

Before using an IBM drive for storing important data, or for pvr applications or for you favorite videos/music, be sure you understand the consequences of using IBM drives, and understand the rma and power on issues as well.

I suggest you read ALL the posts if you have one of the IBM drives, are thinking of buying IBM, or don't know what is in your box. After you read the posts, I suggest you back up immediately to non-IBM drives.

Good luck

3 links above to three different articles on same site.

As long as the manufacturers don't use IBM hard drives in their PVRs, there shouldn't be any problems. Will we get warning stickers on the PVRs prodding us to back up our video vaults?

As long as the manufacturers don't use IBM hard drives in their PVRs, there shouldn't be any problems. Will we get warning stickers on the PVRs prodding us to back up our video vaults?

As long as the manufacturers don't use IBM hard drives in their PVRs, there shouldn't be any problems. Will we get warning stickers on the PVRs prodding us to back up our video vaults?

AMD is also not quiting it's "True Performance Initiative" Read an update at the Tech Report.

Something very odd about the single-drive ATA 100 results here. Anybody have a theory? To me, it looks as though the test is broken.

Almost reminds me of the "Quake III" optimized drivers.

For those who don't remember. ATI released drivers that gave high frame per second scores in Quake III. QIII being a common bench mark this made their cards appear to run very fast. It turns out that the driver looked for the Quake3.exe file and reduced the video quality to up the frame rate. If you changed the name of the file to something like Quack3.exe and ran it. The video quality improved while the frame rate dropped.

It's not that ATI has bad hardware, just horrible drivers and poor judgement.

Actually, the heat tube works quite well. Heat tubes are used in many high end servers were cooling is critical. In fact, heat tubes can be better than the traditional heat sink/fan combo. There is a review of the athlon version of this system at http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q3/shuttle- ss40g/index.x?pg=1 complete with benchmarks and comparison tests. So, if it's good enough to keep your athlon cool, it's good enough for just about anything.

Here is another good review of the shuttle-sb51g. I have yet to see a bad review of this. I have a friend who just got his hands on one and the word it is screams like a banshee (But much quieter)

3.06GHz PIV + motherboard + 512MB DDR RAM = $1025
2 Athlon MP 2000 + motherboard + 512MB DDR RAM = $695....for 80-90% of the performance of the HT PIV?

Sorry, but I can get the basics for an SMP system for $5 less than Intel wants for its new flagship CPU.

Now, if I could get 2 PIV 2.4 GHz CPUS with HT, that might be a different story...

Up here in Canada, where proposed legislation will give CD's a 59c tax and regular blank DVD's a $2.27 tax per unit, I can just imagine what they'll want to tax something that can store 19x the data. Ulp! A $43 tax per blank media would really suck.

(The proposal also has a $21 per gigabyte tax on devices with build in hard drives. Insane; a 10G device would have a $210 tax. Even though our dollars are smaller, that's still $135US additional for a 10G unit.)

I sure hope the Canadian public is vocal enough to stomp this legislation, although we're not exactly known for creating a stir :-)

This Might be of interest
first seen at 2cpu.com

Check out these articles. and here

And don't forget this

I have failed IBM drives, and a failed Maxtor. Will stick with Maxtor for now because of what IBM put me through.

Check out these articles. and here

And don't forget this

I have failed IBM drives, and a failed Maxtor. Will stick with Maxtor for now because of what IBM put me through.

Check out these articles. and here

And don't forget this

I have failed IBM drives, and a failed Maxtor. Will stick with Maxtor for now because of what IBM put me through.

Heres a mirror!

I bought five 45GB 75GXP drives a year and a half ago. Three have failed so far. Doesn't seem like a very good track record to me...

75GXP tales from hell: 75GXP class-action suit filed

How about checking out the roundup of LCD's that appeared on SLashdot yesterday the? Use either Slashdot's article or go directly to the article in question via Tech report's article link.

And yet already 128MB of RAM is giving quite a performance boost in some games! Sure you can run them with lower quality settings, but if you've got a top of the line graphics card, do yourself a favor and go with the 128MB version. It's not just fluff. See this other fine Tech-Report article.

Go read some 2800+ benchmarks, those suckers ARE performance competitive with 2.8Ghz P4's, if only we could BUY the damned things.

Tech-Report 2800+ benchmarks

notice in this POV-Ray test, the P4 needs a _1 gigahertz_ clock frequency lead to pull even/ahead (depending on ram type) with the Athlon.. that my man is brute force floating point power in action :)

The 2600+ OTOH, IS barely competitive with the 2.53Ghz P4, the 2800+ has a faster bus though, and that seems to balance things out, with the 2.8Ghz P4 still having an edge when bandwidth is the bottleneck, and the Athlon having an edge when raw computational power is the bottleneck.