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Tom's hardware's preview of dual 7800GT cards recorded 377 Watts power consumption. The cards each had their own external power brick! Dell will almost certainly have integrated power. Finally, an application for those 1000W PSUs..

Ask and ye shall recieve. (Quick answer, 70% increase)

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/

This was done by Gigabyte some time ago.
Quad SLI board, voila: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10/04/one_gigabyt e_motherboard/

However, it did not perform better in various benchmarks. Mayby that's what will change now?

-JaL

Tomshardware tested this kind of setup few weeks ago. Link to story and some benchmarks. http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/

That's part of the magic behind Apple's product line. "Back in the day," computers were ugly, huge, clunky, off-white boxes that people generally kept out of sight of guests, perhaps in a spare room somewhere along with their model rockets and comic books--as per a good friend of mine at the time. And this was fine; computers were not mainstream in the individual citizens' world. As computers became more and more integrated in our lives, form became just as important as functionality.

Revisionist bullshit. Computers were not all ugly off-white boxes "back in the day", and Apple has made some damn ugly hardware over the years.

To the first point, computers have always been an assorted bag of good looking equipment and ugly beige boxes. The IBM PC was infamous for being an ugly beige box but it was the exception rather than the rule. Most companies competed for attention by producing eye-catching hardware. Commodore was famous for their attractive designs - chunky styling and rounded edges with colours that were fashionable (in the 70s). I still find the C64 to be one of the most stylish personal computers ever made.

Here's another gorgeous design from "back in the day", the Sinclair ZX81. The slim case meant it slipped easily into the television cabinet and the jet-black casing was revolutionary for the time. Remember that back when this computer was released most TVs still had wooden (actually veneer) cabinets and hi-fi stereos were rarely connected to the television. This computer was positively space-aged looking by comparison. It was exceptionally attractive and many houses had this proudly seated under the TV.

Outside the PC world, mainframe companies used impressive designs to showcase their hardware. Cray had achieved legendary status for the bench seat inspired Cray-1. That particular design is still recognized today as one of the most distinctive mainframes ever built. However Cray was never content to stay still and they outdid themselves with the Cray-2 which had waterfall cooling towers. There's still nothing in the PC world that can even begin to compete with Cray for distinctive and attractive form.

Apple's decision to make their products just as appealing outside as inside is a major part of why I am one of their many fans.

Apple has produced some awfully ugly crap over the years as well. Take a look at the horrendous beige box that was the Mac II. It was by far the ugliest PC on the market at the time; even the IBM PC at that time wasn't as cringe worthy as the Mac II. How about the uninspiring Performa 575 which was also an unreliable piece of crap. Or take a look at the ugliest computer that Apple ever made... the PowerPC 4400 (argh, my eyes, the goggles do nothing).

Recently Apple has started making their computers attractive - the trend seems to have started with the iMac - but so what, the rest of the industry is doing the same thing. Everybody is making attractive cases these days; the only difference is that in the x86 world it's a choice and if you don't want to pay the premium for style then you don't have to.

So to your original points - it is not true that "back in the day" all computers were ugly off-white boxes, and it's not true that Apple has some sort of "magic" in their product line. Apple is like the rest of the companies; they've made ugly hardware to cut costs, and now like most PC manufacturers they're producing more attractive hardware to

DVD Writer RoundUp this becomes even more fun when you read the conclusion:
"Of all the units we tested for this article, two models had the best overall performance: the NEC ND-3540A and the Toshiba SDR-5472."

"3. No seek time (I think, not sure about this)."

You can be certain. This page:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/08/10/two_fast_an d_functional_usb_flash_drives/page9.html shows that seeks times can come in at less than milisecond.

I have seen another test that shows I/O operations per second, the type where SCSI drives usually trounce IDE drives. Flash blew away all types of hard disks in this type of tests purely because of the huge seek speed advantage that flash has.

I can't find the English version of http://www.de.tomshardware.com/motherboard/2000022 5/agp-analyse-08.html which compares AGP to 2x and 4x. It's old, but it was interesting.

Here are a couple of actual "reviews" comparing a broad sweep of video cards:

Digit-Life's 3Digest

Tom's Hardware's VGA Charts

Anyone know of any others? One of the big problems in the hardware review site industry is that they all review the same stuff and duplicate one another's work 100 times over (for various reasons which I won't go into), while you'd be hard pressed to find a single review of many low-mid range cards. Even if the purpose of such reviews would simply be to inform people about how poorly they perform, it's a major oversight. There is still a heavy bias toward high-end stuff in the above linked reviews, but at least there are a few low-end and mid-range cards chucked in.

P.S. Another pity is slashdot's poor editorial standards, accepting the description of the linked article as a "review" being the latest example. I guess I could just stop visiting, but then I'd miss out on all the insightful comments from visitors who actually do produce some worthwhile content. So I just block the ads, so as not to reward the editors' laziness.

Well, its native resolution is 1920x1200 - which is incidentally the limit on the single link DVI-D spec. You'll probably want to run at 32 bits per pixel (8 bits for red, green, blue, and alpha transparency), so you'll need a card with at least 10 MB of RAM... most cards have much more than this (32MB +), the extra which can be used for offscreen buffers and stuff. So pretty much any decent card with DVI-I outputs will do for 2D. Probably best to stick to the ATis and NVidias, though, since I'm certain they will support that monitor's physical screen rotation feature.

Uh, you'll probably have to go pretty high end if you want decent 3D framerates at 1920x1200 with anti aliasing and stuff. But if you're looking for that, you pretty much have to set your price point ($100? $200? $300?) and go see what http://anandtech.com/ or http://tomshardware.com/ has to recommend.

Don't wanna boosts Tom's too much but are there any better reviews on the net then this?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts_ viii/index.html

Can somone give the useless and ad-ridden articles at rojakpot their own section, so I can filter them all out automatically? If I wanted a graphics card review that actually gave useful information, I'd visit a site with real content in that area, like Tom's hardware.

I'm not sure if mega-texels shows true performance. I have a ATI 9700 Pro and Geforce 7800 GT, both can run games at high resolutions at the same speed, but the 7800 can run with AA/AF enabled without a performance hit.

It is nice to see where GFX cards rate in games, and Toms hardware has the best link per game. Thats why I picked a GT over a GTX for 200 dollars less.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts_ viii/page18.html
and
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/05/vga_charts_ vii/page4.html

I'm not sure if mega-texels shows true performance. I have a ATI 9700 Pro and Geforce 7800 GT, both can run games at high resolutions at the same speed, but the 7800 can run with AA/AF enabled without a performance hit.

It is nice to see where GFX cards rate in games, and Toms hardware has the best link per game. Thats why I picked a GT over a GTX for 200 dollars less.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts_ viii/page18.html
and
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/05/vga_charts_ vii/page4.html

Well the C3s performance is kind of all over the map. If you look at these benchmarks you can see that a Celeron 667 is faster is most cases.
I guess the biggest advantage the Xbox has in terms of performance is no operating system overhead.
But yeah there really isn't any other option in the super small, cool and quiet space.

Will it have BLUE LEDS inside the clear cover.

Joking, but strangely it's not impossible

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10/14/western_dig ital_goes_flashy_with_lighted_hard_drive/index.htm l

\\if you strobed the blue leds, you could make the platter look stationary.

Enter Asus with its brand new Extreme GeForce 7800 GT Dual. This monster of a graphics chip sports two 7800 GT chips running in parallel.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/

Not true. The Intel 975X chipset supports ATI's Crossfire.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/14/intel_goes_ dual_graphics_with_975x_chipset/index.html

Turn the LCD panel, plus an overhead projector, into a projection TV.

(I did it; it actually works quite well. I'm using it as my TV.)

et everyone will yammer endlessly about how important it is that AMD processors are faster than Intel (which I'm still not convinced is true; I've never seen an AMD noticably faster than any Intel processor, yet HDTV is very noticably better than SD, and likewise SACD sounds very much better than CD which is very much better than MP3)

AMD runs 30% faster than the equivilent Intel on single threaded applications while Intel comes out ahead when it comes to multi-threaded applications. AMD cores also consume significantly less power and have better dual core communication that Intel's. See the live stress test rundown for more.

It terms of actual computational performance etc, etc, we have measurable metrics, so we can say which chip is "better" at certain tasks.

For things like Sound and video quality, there really aren't the same kind of hard metrics for how "good" something looks or sounds, so there's a lot of debate. I'm a tone deaf individual with bad eyesight, so HDTV and SACD really doesn't resonate a whole lot with me.

VooDoo 2 was a great chipset for its time. Held up with newer games well past its prime.

Actually, it didn't hold up well at all. It was severely hampered by the PCI bus and the "AGP" Voodoo cards were not being used in AGP mode, rather some PCI compatibility mode.

The fact is, that GPU focused games of the time were being made to at least run well on the older Voodoo2 cards, because there were so many out there. The game houses were targetting thier market and thus slowing development due to the Voodoo2. 3Dfx accelerated 3D game technologies and then severely slowed it down by choosing to stick with PCI.

Here, take a look at a Matrox G200 (!) kicking the shit out of a Voodoo2 SLI setup! This situation, where a MUCH slower 3D card is killing the "awesome" Voodoo2 SLI because the Voodoo2's are: 1/ PCI and 2/ storing the SAME texture data in each of the cards memory because 12MB+12MB does not give you 24MB in an SLI setup (the data MUST be mirrored, except for the frame buffer).

"S3's own `mon2.dm2' demo, using their own `newS3' map is using a whole lot of really large textures, making the scenery look very detailed and pretty. It would have been a shame if Savage3D would not score well in it, but this would almost have happened. In the latest driver I received, the `AA" setting needs to be enabled to run mon2.dm2 at a decent speed. Anyway, in mon2.dm2 the Savage3D scores higher and higher the more test runs you do. I decided to put down the result of the second run. Matrox' G200 looks very good at mon2.dm2 as well, obviously due to its AGP 2x interface. It reaches about 66% of the Savage3D scores and this without texture compression. The coolest thing are the TNT results however. TNT scores better than Savage3D although TNT does not use texture compression!!! Only with a Celeron 266 TNT looks a little slower than Savage3D, which is another proof for the CPU dependency of TNT in Quake 2. 3Dfx products have yet to learn what AGP means, so the mon2.dm2 is a serious threat to them. 22 fps scored by a $500 Voodoo2 SLI combo looks a bit sad, doesn't it? Banshee looks even worse, its `AGP-interface' only consists of the mechanical connector for the AGP slot."

I find it completely shocking that 3Dfx had the talent to design such a great video card and then completely fail to see the value of AGP over PCI. That failure ultimately killed them. It gave their competitors a window of oportunity to make lots of money to put into more R&D while 3Dfx played catch-up. 3Dfx couldn't, it was too late, they died.

Games never looked that great in 16 bit colour anyway.

'This article was inspired by offers on eBay for home projector construction manuals for around $20 that, on closer inspection, proved to be thoroughly useless.'

Thats what i thought it said as it HAS been released here...
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051203/index.htm l

P4s have held the content-creation benchmark record in Windows over AMD's parts for a long time

Em, no, at least, not now.

I've been following the laptop hard disks for a little while looking for an upgrade.
For those interested another review is at Tom's hardware.

At any rate, as well as missing the Toshiba drives, I noticed they were using the Samsung Spinpoint M40 80GB for review. I'd discounted that previously because of it's lacklustre performance (also highlighted in the Tom's Hardware review).

But (you knew there would be one!) there's the newer M60 series that was released recently. The HM100JC looks interesting. Better transfer rate as well as lower power consumption, which is always handy for the laptop users.

Anyways, if anyone has one of these baby's pls post your impressions.

This seems similar to the original XBox Media Center software. A friend of mine was running it on a heavily modded box and it was kind of nifty.

But Intel has a special feature: The die of the 600 series Prescott processors takes up 135 square mm^2 making it the first 4-dimensional chip around.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051121/the_mothe r_of_all_cpu_charts-39.html

is about the only page worth looking at, the rest is all adverts and barely any text or conclusions.

Five hundred and twenty pages later

Liar. It's only 50 pages long. What kind of person could grow tired of uber exciting CPU charts after just 50 pages?

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051121/the_mothe r_of_all_cpu_charts-50.html

I would agree. Have a look at this page. Scroll down, and notice that there is a group of about 14 AMD processors essentially got the same score. These processors range from a Sempron 2500+ all the way an Athlon 64 3700+. Go up a bit an there is a simular group of about 18 Intel processors that get essentially the same score, where the processors range from the P4 2.4Ghz to a P4 EE 3.4Ghz. What gives?

That's because Tom's Hardware is a bunch of AMD fanboys. Check out this article that started it: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/200008281/index.ht ml I haven't read an unbiased review from them in a long time. Every piece seems opinionated and biased, it's really puzzling...

even Tom's, which some geeks claim leans towards Intel, brought a smile to my face in their description of AMD and how well they deal with heat...

November 2004 saw AMD move into the 90 nm age, nine months after Intel did. AMD unveiled a new and very impressive CPU, codenamed Winchester (D0), which was only available in the low-cost market segment. As such, the core made its way into the Athlon 64 3000+, 3200+ and 3500+ models. The technology it was based on was anything but low-cost, though: we would have loved to see the looks on the faces of Intel's engineers when they measured the power consumption of AMD's 90nm CPUs and realized that even under full load, this unimposing CPU draws a mere 31.4 W. This means AMD was able to reduce the power consumption by about 44% clock for clock. Further measurements taken on a specially-modified motherboard in our Munich lab showed an idle power consumption of only 11.1 W.

But the best was yet to come. When the Cool & Quiet feature was activated and the frequency dropped to 800 MHz, the CPU contented itself with incredible 3.2 W. The Winchester was followed by the Venice stepping, which added SSE3 support to the Athlon 64 and lowered the power consumption even further.

source "tom's 'the mother of all cpu charts' part 2" nov 2005

they also made me happy when i saw they benchmarked video encoding with XviD :)

1. 17MB/sec. http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/review.php?item= oczrally&file=1
2. 60 MB/sec. http://www.usb-2-0.com/what-is-usb-2-0.html#2.%20H ow%20fast%20is%20USB%202.0
3. 60 MB/sec. http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200511/HDS72 5050KLA360_2.html
4. 11 MB/sec. http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050520/usb_f lash_drives-09.html
5. 35 MB/sec. http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2515

It's 1.5 times as fast as your average flash, and only half as slow as your typical USB hard drive.

The results seem to disagree with the review of the Transcend Jetflash here http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050520/index .html

"At 27 MB/sec maximum read transfer rate, Transcend has set the bar pretty high for its competition."

C'mon, the Memina Pocket Rocket, using faster SLC memory, can beat these write times and keeps up pretty well in read speeds too. I bought several for our office and they're great performers, noticeable difference compared to other drives we've had, and the price is almost exactly the same as any other flash drive. http://www20.tomshardware.com/storage/20050322/ind ex.html

Isn't that what http://tomshardware.com/ is [supposed to be]?

From what I can tell this is just some retail company that decided to throw in one of those free Ubuntu discs with a microdrive, rather than anything officially supported by Ubuntu / Cannoical. Still interesting, but a little bit less newsworthy when you discover that a) the "pre-installed" OS is not pre-installed, and b) it takes 4 minutes to boot.

When you look at the graph, you see that you're getting less than 10MB/sec. Two questions: what are the numbers on the bottom referring to, and why does the graph look like it does? Is there some caching mechanism going on?

WTF are you talking about? Gaming PCs are cheaper than they've ever been. $1000 isn't exactly extravagant (that's probably about the average new PC price these days), but even that's more than you need. You can easily build a very capable gaming box for $500 or so.

Performance per watt? Intel?
Not likely...

The pentium D is putting out as much as 233 watts.. (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=145&type=exp ert&pid=17)
Compared to 89 watts on the athlon X2. (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/200508011/athlon_ 64_x2_3800-03.html)

Maybe they should label them according to number of bogomips or mflops instead?

Kind of liked last months toms hardware article better: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051025/index.htm l

Intel sells the most video cards.

Not according to these.

But hey, pulling things out of your ass is good fun, right?

You're talking about the infamous THG video. No, Athlon 64 doesn't suffer from that. (downloading videos from THG may need registration) See also this.

You're talking about the infamous THG video. No, Athlon 64 doesn't suffer from that. (downloading videos from THG may need registration) See also this.

You're talking about the infamous THG video. No, Athlon 64 doesn't suffer from that. (downloading videos from THG may need registration) See also this.

They did and they have, and they sell shedloads of them. It's called the Pentium M, dual-core 65 nm versions of which will be available next quarter. The currently-available single-core Dothan version performs pretty awesomely, matching FX-55 and P4 EE even at gaming, and all at less than a third the CPU power consumption of the Pentium 4.

Not only that, but they overclocked it to 2.5 GHz as you suggest, and this was back in May.

Might want to check out this review:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20051028/ index.html

"LumiLED has a lofty goal: solving all the problems inherent in static displays on LCD monitors. In other words, the goal is not to improve responsiveness, but to work on color rendering and the richness of hues."

Yes, Tom's Hardware reviewed this very model back in June:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20050602/ viewsonic-05.html

$500 will get you CPU+MB+RAM+HD+CD/DVD+VGA+P.S.

Does anybody read the article anymore before posting, or FP is more important?

Link to the conclusion, if you don't have the attention span to read a 400 word article.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20051014/the_500 _gaming_machine-08.html

Which, if you read a lot of reviews for this monitor will tell you means absolutely nothing. Viewsonic uses a system referred to as overdrive in order to achieve these response times. What they do is when the pixel is say going from black to 50%, they just put 100% power into it for about the first milisecond (thus getting the pixel to respond much quicker, as higher voltages improve response times for the LCD) and then try to narrow it to the correct brightness. This however often causes the pixel to actually overshoot and become brighter than it's supposed to until it stabilizes. The numbers quoted there are how long it takes the pixel to first get to the correct state, but not stabilize there. Don't believe me? http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20050526/ viewsonic-07.html