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If by "bad gaming experience" you mean running the game significantly faster under DirectX 10.1 on ATI cards - I'll live with the supposed bad gaming experience.

See Anandtech - NVIDIA's Dirty Dealing with DX10.1 and How GT200 Doesn't Support it

and TechReport's GTX 280 review showing a Radeon HD 3870 X2 with top score for the original DirectX 10.1 release of Assassin's Creed at 4X AA - 2560x1600.

The chart you linked to is 3DMark, in which the new GTX 280 does in fact top the list. However if you slide a few pages to the games section its a very different picture. http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/10 Call of Duty, which is topped by the 9800GX2
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/11 Half Life 2, is alot closer and lets face it both cards should be rolling through HL2 w/o any issues, however the GX2 is again on the top, by a small to tiny margin
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/12 ET:QW finally a real split, the GX2 tops out the 1920x1200 resolution and below, but the GTX280 takes the crown come high end 2560x1600
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/13This Chart shows Crysis and Assasins Creed info, both of which the 9800GX2 tops the average with a 10-20% margin.
So it isnt as clear cut as you make it sound at all. Everyone has their own opinion on which is more important, for me, I'll take game performance over numbers crunching, though I do use 3DMark as well.

The chart you linked to is 3DMark, in which the new GTX 280 does in fact top the list. However if you slide a few pages to the games section its a very different picture. http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/10 Call of Duty, which is topped by the 9800GX2
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/11 Half Life 2, is alot closer and lets face it both cards should be rolling through HL2 w/o any issues, however the GX2 is again on the top, by a small to tiny margin
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/12 ET:QW finally a real split, the GX2 tops out the 1920x1200 resolution and below, but the GTX280 takes the crown come high end 2560x1600
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/13This Chart shows Crysis and Assasins Creed info, both of which the 9800GX2 tops the average with a 10-20% margin.
So it isnt as clear cut as you make it sound at all. Everyone has their own opinion on which is more important, for me, I'll take game performance over numbers crunching, though I do use 3DMark as well.

The chart you linked to is 3DMark, in which the new GTX 280 does in fact top the list. However if you slide a few pages to the games section its a very different picture. http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/10 Call of Duty, which is topped by the 9800GX2
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/11 Half Life 2, is alot closer and lets face it both cards should be rolling through HL2 w/o any issues, however the GX2 is again on the top, by a small to tiny margin
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/12 ET:QW finally a real split, the GX2 tops out the 1920x1200 resolution and below, but the GTX280 takes the crown come high end 2560x1600
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/13This Chart shows Crysis and Assasins Creed info, both of which the 9800GX2 tops the average with a 10-20% margin.
So it isnt as clear cut as you make it sound at all. Everyone has their own opinion on which is more important, for me, I'll take game performance over numbers crunching, though I do use 3DMark as well.

The chart you linked to is 3DMark, in which the new GTX 280 does in fact top the list. However if you slide a few pages to the games section its a very different picture. http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/10 Call of Duty, which is topped by the 9800GX2
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/11 Half Life 2, is alot closer and lets face it both cards should be rolling through HL2 w/o any issues, however the GX2 is again on the top, by a small to tiny margin
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/12 ET:QW finally a real split, the GX2 tops out the 1920x1200 resolution and below, but the GTX280 takes the crown come high end 2560x1600
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/13This Chart shows Crysis and Assasins Creed info, both of which the 9800GX2 tops the average with a 10-20% margin.
So it isnt as clear cut as you make it sound at all. Everyone has their own opinion on which is more important, for me, I'll take game performance over numbers crunching, though I do use 3DMark as well.

TR: Does the removal of this "render pass during post-effect" in the DX10.1 have an impact on image quality in the game?

Beauchemin: With DirectX 10.1, we are able to re-use an existing buffer to render the post-effects instead of having to render it again with different attributes. However, with the implementation of the retail version, we found a problem that caused the post-effects to fail to render properly.

TR: What specific factors led to DX10.1 support's removal in patch 1?

Beauchemin: Our DX10.1 implementation was not properly done and we didn't want the users with Vista SP1 and DX10.1-enabled cards to have a bad gaming experience.

The 9800GX2 may be cheaper but it most certainly is not faster, even considering your links. From Anandtech, the charts show a significant speed increase with the new hardware.

In fact, from the article:
The GTX 280 delivered real-world benchmark numbers nearly 50 percent faster than a single GeForce 9800 GTX running on Windows XP, and it was 23-percent faster than that card running on Vista. In fact, it looks as though a single GTX 280 will be comparable to--and in some cases beat--two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.

Which leads me to the question, are you trolling?

and in some cases beat â" two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.

Bullshit. The 9800GX2 is consistently quite a bit faster (TechReport's very detailed review here), and it costs around $450, while the GTX 280 costs $650 (with the younger brother the 260 at $400), with the only drawbacks being more power drawn and higher noise. Even then, I think it's a no-brainer.

Don't get me wrong, these are impressive single-GPU cards, but their price points are TOTALLY wrong. ATI's 4870 and 4850 cards are coming up at $450 and $200 respectively, and I think they'll eat these for lunch, at least in the value angle.

I for one, Now plan on purchasing a new space heater soon for my box (NOTE: Nvidia GT200 has a TDP of 236W!)... so long as I can FINALLY have Crysis playable at resolution!

-Another good article on the GTX280 (GT200 GPU) at TR: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14934

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934

Conclusion: 9800GX2 is faster and cheaper

• 10.2" screen
• 1GHz processors (doesn't apply to Atom or C7-M)
• 1GB memory
• 80GB storage

Nvidia doesn't target solely gamers, otherwise GF 6100/6200/7300/7600/8200/8300/8500 wouldn't be available at the moment. Add to that that possibly the most profitable market segment now consists of cheap laptops, where it's certainly better to have full platform available to OEMs.

Also, those early tests
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14584
suggest that Isaiah, when it comes to performance per clock, is finally comparable with AMD/Intel. Who knows what we'll see later...

PS. Games are _the_ only thing (and not that many people play them...) now for which you'd need faster CPU than cheapest one...plus it's still better to have slower CPU/faster GPU than other way around.

• March 4, 2008: AMD demos 45nm server and desktop processors
• September 12, 2007: AMD K10 Family Chips Support DDR3 Memory - Documents.

• March 4, 2008: AMD demos 45nm server and desktop processors
• September 12, 2007: AMD K10 Family Chips Support DDR3 Memory - Documents.

Yeah, it's fixed with the latest driver, but they had to disable most of the TCP offloading. I had the same problem on my NF4 board. I chucked the NV Active Armor firewall software and never had a problem since. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/9483

Yeah, it's fixed with the latest driver, but they had to disable most of the TCP offloading. I had the same problem on my NF4 board. I chucked the NV Active Armor firewall software and never had a problem since.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/9483

• "The NDAs have lifted on the Core 2 Duo reviews, and you can surf on over to your review site of choice for a boatload of benchmarks and bar graphs. The Tech Report's Core 2 Duo review was the only one that didn't make me want to jab my own eyes out with my mechanical pencil after reading it, so it's the only one I'm actually going to link up here. In fact, I was so frustrated after reading a few of these reviews, that I surfed over to CNN and read up on the latest developments in the Middle East to lighten my mood."

To add further: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606/7
This is from image processing benchmarks and you can see the X3 is barely beating the X2s in most cases.

Here is for video encoding: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606/8
Again the X3 is near the bottom and in many cases being outperformed by X2s.

I'm not sure where you're getting view about the X3s outperforming the Intel chips, but outside of a few isolated cases they are near the bottom of almost every benchmark. And in a number of cases losing to a not so new X2 models.

To add further: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606/7
This is from image processing benchmarks and you can see the X3 is barely beating the X2s in most cases.

Here is for video encoding: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606/8
Again the X3 is near the bottom and in many cases being outperformed by X2s.

I'm not sure where you're getting view about the X3s outperforming the Intel chips, but outside of a few isolated cases they are near the bottom of almost every benchmark. And in a number of cases losing to a not so new X2 models.

The Tech Report has their usual in-depth coverage here: link

A couple more reviews that aren't as, um, positive:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=550&pid=2
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14606
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/23/amd_phenom_x3_8750/1

err.. link:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606

Some of the other reviews to check out:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=548&pid=2
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14583
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_new_fastest_hard_drive_ever

In that case it is using low graphics settings that no one would actually use. In reality the graphics card would bottleneck and the numbers would barely budge and the impact of a sound cards is even less than these big jumps in CPU speed.

Doh! should have read the original article, but I am really not interested in sound cards:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14500/4

Actually gaming test. Do you really think it is worth paying $100 for that negligible increase in peformance. Again I think it is completely pointless for anyone other than those whose personal ego is attached to their benchmark scores.

"Anecdotal evidence" is an oxymoron.

Show me some actual tests on a multicore CPU done by some HW site. I have seen review sites do CPU scaling features and CPU impact is minimal in most games.

Unless you remove the Vidcard botlleneck, the CPU impact is trivial.

Here is an example test with Graphics set real low to avoid being the bottleneck:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/12772/3

Note even here, CPU has small effect. Only the slowest processor really have much impact. But this is an artificial situation, pretty much everyone runs with as much eye candy as their graphics card will support making the GPU the bottle neck and the CPU just about irrelevant.

The few cycles saved might matter to the largely irrelevant fringe with Triple-SLI/Quad Crossfire rigs, who's ego is tied to benchmark scores, but to the vast majority it is a complete non issue.

As TFA says, Asus's card does the same thing in Vista, but performs the EAX acceleration (including the latest version 5.0) using the CPU. Also, they performed an EAX 5.0 listening test in Vista (on page 6) and EAX seemed to "work" just fine. From TFA:

• After an afternoon of gaming, I came away quite impressed with DirectSound 3D GX. Creative may be correct in saying that it doesn't deliver a genuine EAX 5.0 experience, and I wouldn't be surprised if its emulation isn't an exact 1:1 replica of EAX effects. But that didn't diminish my gaming experience in the least. Bioshock is packed with aural ambiance, and the underwater city of Rapture was every bit as creepy with the Xonar as it was with the X-Fi. I couldn't detect any difference between the cards in Battlefield 2, either, even in intense firefights loaded with explosions, gunfire, and frantic cries for a medic.

As TFA says, Asus's card does the same thing in Vista, but performs the EAX acceleration (including the latest version 5.0) using the CPU. Also, they performed an EAX 5.0 listening test in Vista (on page 6) and EAX seemed to "work" just fine. From TFA:

• After an afternoon of gaming, I came away quite impressed with DirectSound 3D GX. Creative may be correct in saying that it doesn't deliver a genuine EAX 5.0 experience, and I wouldn't be surprised if its emulation isn't an exact 1:1 replica of EAX effects. But that didn't diminish my gaming experience in the least. Bioshock is packed with aural ambiance, and the underwater city of Rapture was every bit as creepy with the Xonar as it was with the X-Fi. I couldn't detect any difference between the cards in Battlefield 2, either, even in intense firefights loaded with explosions, gunfire, and frantic cries for a medic.

The article's author has posted a short follow up piece after someone pointed out that some of the RightMark Audio Analyzer results don't make any sense. The X-Fi's frequency response is all over the place in the loopback (and only the loopback) tests, which causes most of the RMAA results to come in far lower than they should, or indeed where they did score when the card was initially reviewed a couple of years ago. The Xonar still does well regardless, but the RMAA results are effectively useless right now. I suspect the issue is that they used Vista; RMAA is a very peculiar program and has not been certified for use on Vista in all cases because of the UAA screwing with things.

Also, for the sake of being pedantic, the X-Fi they used isn't Creative's best (hence the submission title is wrong); the Xtreme Music was the low-end model and was discontinued last year, to be replaced by the Xtreme Gamer. The Elite Pro is still Creative's highest-end X-Fi.

So sure, if you decide to slap the "PC" label onto everything, then yeah, the PC market is doing fine. Meanwhile, I don't think nVidia is going to have a strong season selling top-end video cards to only the people who bought Crysis

Nvidia doesn't make any money selling these high-end cards. These high-end cards exist for only one reason: inexpensive viral advertising. If your top-end card gets the most 3dmarks, it tends to affect buying decisions for purchases across the board.

The viral advertising works two ways: first, you get all these wonderful reviews that remind you that Nvidia exists; the reviewers show you incredible numbers, then as an aside tell you that the "real deals" (i.e. 9600GT, 8800GT) can be found for much less. Then you get the second effect, where hardcore enthusiasts read these articles and then preach the gospel to the masses via forums/blogs.

I mean it when I say that Nvidia doesn't make any money on ultra high-end; the largest segment for their earnings comes from the $200-250 segment, which has been populated by the venerable 8800 GT for the last six months. The 8800GT alone literally stole %5 of the desktop graphics market from AMD last quarter, even up-against the competitively-priced 3870.

PC graphics cards are only expensive if you insist on top-end. Example: you can get more graphics power than RSX in the PS3 for a paltry $100 today, and by next year the same power will be available in an entry-level $50 card. The graphics core in the PS3 used to be sold as the 7800 GTX, and sold for $500 only three years ago; now you can get MORE power in the $100 8600 GTS.

Mine just arrived this morning (the 1TB Caviar model) and it is extremely quiet (I bought it for a Home Theatre PC). It brings home the point, though, that they may have made great strides in power savings and noise reduction, but the real hurdle with a 1TB drive is the time it takes to copy 1TB of data. I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours. That's just to half-fill the drive.

Anyway, the article the summary seems to be slashdotted, so here's the review at TechReport I read before I ordered it, with lots of graphs and comparisons.

I don't think that is really true of *current* console games. I don't have a PC game rig, but PS3 games look VERY nice on a 1080p projector.

[quote]As evidence that more accessible titles do better, Wardell points to not only the success of games like The Sims, but also of Sins of a Solar Empire--a low-budget, real-time strategy game published by Stardock that's reportedly sold 200,000 copies in its first month already. To put things in perspective, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare sold 383,000 units within its first couple of months of release. Unlike COD4, Sins of a Solar Empire didn't benefit from huge media coverage, and it doesn't even have copy protection--something Wardell says Stardock chose not to include because "the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it." He adds, "Our customers make the rules, not the pirates."[/quote] http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14383 I'd say this guy knows what he's talking about.

I recently spent some time at Newegg pricing out a new rig.

Motherboard ~ $150 (at least. Unless you want to get a motherboard that won't be upgradable because it's using a 1 generation old socket.)
CPU ~ $200 - 300 (core 2 duo's run around $200, quads around $300)
RAM ~ $250 (for 2 gigs of average quality RAM in the proper speed. A minimum for running VM's and gaming)
Graphics card ~ $300 (for any Nvidia 8x00 card, although this may have dropped a bit with the release mentioned in TFA)

If you're willing to use an AMD platform again, motherboards using the new AMD 780G chipset (socket AM2+ for Phenom, PCI Express 2.0, HyperTransport 3.0, RAID 0/1/10, integrated Radeon HD 2400 based graphics, HDMI) start at $80 ($70 after rebate) at Newegg.

For now, a $61 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (65nm with VT support) should be a very nice temporary upgrade from your Athlon 64 3500+. I'd wait for the post-TLB versions of Phenom to ship before going quad-core, but Phenom prices (currently around $200) should be significantly lower than Core 2 Quad since Intel still shows an absolute performance advantage for this generation.

I don't get how you got $250 for 2 gigs of "average quality RAM in the proper speed" because a pair of 1GB DDR2 800 sticks start at around $40 for the "value" stuff (including Patriot and Kingston) and around $75 for "enthusiast-grade" Corsair XMS. If DDR2 800 is not fast enough, does a low-end gaming/VT rig really need more than those sub-$90 DDR2 1066 kits?

I know integrated low-end Radeon HD graphics isn't for "gamers," but note that it is based on the current Radeon architecture (Radeon HD 2400), so it should be much better than your GeForce 5600LE for now. Also, I don't think you can get more upgradable than a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot.

Of course, don't buy a new rig unless you need it. You seem to have other things in your life that are more important. On the other hand, a new rig can help some busy gamers keep their sanity. ;-)

Think further back. A few years ago, the Opteron and the Athlon64 took a big bite out of Intel's market share. That happened because Intel was arrogantly chasing higher clocks (P4) and awkward architectures (Itanium). The tick-tock strategy was adopted in response to AMD's success. If AMD hadn't embarrassed Intel so badly, I doubt we'd be seeing such rapid product cycles today.

Though, 45nm processors are currently in short supply. They're usually sold out, and are marked up considerably.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14323

There are some other good looks at RS780 performance:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=527 - looks at Hybrid CrossFire with several games in real world testing as well as GPU overclocking; also features the new AMD X2 4850e processor
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/processors/780g-and-4850e/ - looks at both the chipset and CPU
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261 - good motherboard review
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/03/04/amd_780g_integrated_graphics_chipset/1 - tests HQV and HD audio systems

The issue with apple is that they only order a few lines of processors, all of which are at the top-end of the scale, which has the lowest yields in the manufacturing process. Notice how Intel gave Apple exclusive access to their quad-core 3ghz CPUs for the MacPro a few months before anybody else got them http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12176. If Apple is capable of saturating Intel's high-end production line for a single chip on a desktop machine, AMD wouldn't have a change to keep up with their high-end laptop demand.

There are a lot of HPC projects that were planning to use Barcelona, that were held back by the TLB bug.

An HPCWire article says Ranger uses the processors with the TLB bug, and reportedly it doesn't impact their application performance.

Developed by Sun Microsystems, Ranger was built from 3,936 Constellation blade servers, each containing four quad-core "Barcelona" Opterons running at 2.0 GHz. The 15,744 Barcelona processors in Ranger come from the batch that suffers from the highly publicized translation lookaside buffer (TLB) problem. TACC has used the recommended Linux kernel memory patch to work around that particular problem. Reportedly, the patch has little, if any, impact on performance.

Ranger was apparently one of the "specific customer deals" that continued to receive Barcelona chips after the erratum was discovered.

...spokesman Phil Hughes said AMD is shipping Barcelona Opterons now, but only for "specific customer deals." Industry sources have suggested to TR that those deals are high-volume situations involving supercomputing clusters. Such customers may run workloads less likely to be affected by any workarounds for the erratum that reduce L3 cache performance, and those customers could potentially consume hundreds of thousands of CPUs.

(Since the workaround BIOS patch slows some cache misses, maybe this means (a) HPC codes with large datasets are long running programs that can be and have been optimized to avoid idling CPU cycles while waiting for memory in cache misses by using techniques like cache prefetching hints or hyperthreading, and (b) the rest have small datasets so that with so many processors the dataset fits in all their caches?)

There are a lot of HPC projects that were planning to use Barcelona, that were held back by the TLB bug.

An HPCWire article says Ranger uses the processors with the TLB bug, and reportedly it doesn't impact their application performance.

Developed by Sun Microsystems, Ranger was built from 3,936 Constellation blade servers, each containing four quad-core "Barcelona" Opterons running at 2.0 GHz. The 15,744 Barcelona processors in Ranger come from the batch that suffers from the highly publicized translation lookaside buffer (TLB) problem. TACC has used the recommended Linux kernel memory patch to work around that particular problem. Reportedly, the patch has little, if any, impact on performance.

Ranger was apparently one of the "specific customer deals" that continued to receive Barcelona chips after the erratum was discovered.

...spokesman Phil Hughes said AMD is shipping Barcelona Opterons now, but only for "specific customer deals." Industry sources have suggested to TR that those deals are high-volume situations involving supercomputing clusters. Such customers may run workloads less likely to be affected by any workarounds for the erratum that reduce L3 cache performance, and those customers could potentially consume hundreds of thousands of CPUs.

(Since the workaround BIOS patch slows some cache misses, maybe this means (a) HPC codes with large datasets are long running programs that can be and have been optimized to avoid idling CPU cycles while waiting for memory in cache misses by using techniques like cache prefetching hints or hyperthreading, and (b) the rest have small datasets so that with so many processors the dataset fits in all their caches?)

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?

For the informative TechReport Article on Intel's 'Skulltrail': http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14052
Personally, I'd prefer a Seaburg chipset server board as photographed by TR's user "Leor": http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=55937

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?

For the informative TechReport Article on Intel's 'Skulltrail': http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14052
Personally, I'd prefer a Seaburg chipset server board as photographed by TR's user "Leor": http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=55937

The only hardware site that remains in my daily bookmarks is the Tech Report. One of the few honest sites on the web.

How to build a PC

Christmas 2007 system guide

Note that most hardware sites are geared toward gaming. As you're a graphic designer, your requirements are probably

0) color accuracy (don't know anything about this, really)
1) gobs of memory
2) gobs of storage
3) fast CPU

Then there's software limitations, which are out of the purview of most hardware sites. 32-bit Windows is limited to about 3 GB of usable RAM. Kickass hardware is useless without software that supports its features.

The only hardware site that remains in my daily bookmarks is the Tech Report. One of the few honest sites on the web.

How to build a PC

Christmas 2007 system guide

Note that most hardware sites are geared toward gaming. As you're a graphic designer, your requirements are probably

0) color accuracy (don't know anything about this, really)
1) gobs of memory
2) gobs of storage
3) fast CPU

Then there's software limitations, which are out of the purview of most hardware sites. 32-bit Windows is limited to about 3 GB of usable RAM. Kickass hardware is useless without software that supports its features.

The only hardware site that remains in my daily bookmarks is the Tech Report. One of the few honest sites on the web.

How to build a PC

Christmas 2007 system guide

Note that most hardware sites are geared toward gaming. As you're a graphic designer, your requirements are probably

0) color accuracy (don't know anything about this, really)
1) gobs of memory
2) gobs of storage
3) fast CPU

Then there's software limitations, which are out of the purview of most hardware sites. 32-bit Windows is limited to about 3 GB of usable RAM. Kickass hardware is useless without software that supports its features.

Tech Report seems to think it was the WSJ that said it:

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14047

whereas Ars doesn't name a source;

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080201-microsoft-adds-yahoo-to-shopping-cart.html

The article linked to from the slashdot article was missing some info, such as what linux distro it will have preinstalled. This one says it will be Ubuntu. All I could find on shuttle's own site was this press release.