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Matrox isn't really in the market anymore. Their latest (as far as I can tell) card was constantly at the bottom of the performance heap on TomsHardware's last year's VGA Charts, and this year it didn't have a card on there at all.

Matrox isn't really in the market anymore. Their latest (as far as I can tell) card was constantly at the bottom of the performance heap on TomsHardware's last year's VGA Charts, and this year it didn't have a card on there at all.

I stopped reading Tom's Hardware because of the constant anti-Intel bias. Read some of the conclusions of their Intel vs AMD shootouts. They generally have something negative to say about AMD.

I stopped going to Tom's Site when I read this:

"Summary: The P4 3.2 EE Wins 32 Times, The Athlon 64 FX-51 15 Times - An Uncertain 64-bit Future For AMD"

Uncertain Future for AMD? I'd like to look at benchmarks and draw my own conclusions, thank you very much. I don't need Tom's Hardware predicting the future of AMD's demise!

If it weren't for the biased conclusions and ad laden articles broken into several pages, Tom's Hardware would be great.

Here's that link clickable and without the space:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041019/index.htm l

Tom's hardware article: AMD's Athlon64 4000 and FX-55: Nails in the P4 EE's Coffin?. The article makes the point that, if you want to know which AMD part is the lower-powered 90nm part, you will have to read reviews.

NBC many not be biased; they may just be rational:

Government data compares Democrat and Republican economics.

Links to reviews of 3 movies and 35 books that say George W. Bush is the worst president ever: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

For $150(xbox), $35(modchip), $60(hdd) and some setup time you can have a system that rips cds automatically and provides a nice gui on the TV instead of having to provide a monitor. For an additional $20 you can buy the DVD adaptor and control XBMC with it. You can read about it at http://www4.tomshardware.com/consumer/20040511/ind ex.html

Presumably, web browsing, word processing, DVD playing, etc. According to the website it has a 9700 non-Pro with only 64 megs... Apparently, that's faster than a 9600xt, so it ought to be okay for gaming. Not sure how well it'd run Doom 3, though... (It's also pricey.)

I'm an editor for Tom's Hardware Guide (tomshardware.com), and I'd like to also point Slashdot readers over to a review we did back on September 29th featuring this Seagate Savvio (ST973401LC).

The URL to our article is http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20040929/.

Our bottom line was as follows:

"Viewed in the long term, Seagate has not only entered a new market, but also heralded the end at some later date of 3.5", 10,000 rpm enterprise drives. The "big guys" get warmer, need more energy, make more noise and can rarely display their remaining speed advantages in the server environment. From a number of aspects, 2.5" models on the other hand are the more sensible option. We can only advise the competition to follow suit - and fast."

Doesn't the iRiver already do this?

From the article:

The new iPod...will pack Toshiba's new 60GB 1.8-inch hard drive, a 2-inch color liquid crystal display

form factor will be identical to the existing 4G iPods...will be two millimeters thicker than the current 40GB iPod

The H320 also downloads directly from digital cameras without a PC.

Yet I bet Mac-addicts are already swooning over Apple's "innovation" on this one.

iRiver has been including FM tuners in their stuff for awhile. I wish they'd put an AM tuner in tho.

If the iPod played MP3 natively and supported Linux, I'd have 1 today. The iRiver 20GB version looks fantastic, but it is over $300! I got in on a http://slickdeals.net/ deal from Dell on their 15GB Jukebox for $129. If it play halfway decent - WOW! The usability isn't as good as the iRiver and iPod, but for less than half the price, I'll live with it. Here's the Tom's Hardware Review of the iRiver device
http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041005/index. html
impressive.

I'm amazed at the number of people here who don't consider the need for a radio important to a portable device. If you just survived a hurricane, wouldn't it be nice to hear local news on a radio? With the long playing time of FM on the iRivers, this could last a week easily of real use when there is no power at your house.

BTW, the iRiver H320/H340 (review) does all that the new iPod is supposed to, and it even includes a USB host function - you connect a USB storage device (like most cameras, or even a USB hard drive), and simply transfer files between the two devices.

Ha ;) no way I'll mistake this for the real thing. No offense, but a mobility 9700 is in no way ever close to a mobility 9800 except for the successive character in their model numbers. ATI is just too errrm let's say hesitating to call this thing by its real name. The mobility 9700 was a version of the desktop 9600xt, the mobility 9600 was something older, but the new mobility 9800 is a slightly toned down X800(!).
60 percent more graphics power while only using slightly more energy. No way I ever buy my new gaming notebook without one, except when nVidia surprisingly unveils a blistering fast chip really soon now because I'd trust their drivers more than ATI's. Until then I prepare for the current mobile GPU flagship, trust me. But not from Dell, but that's a personal matter for me... ;)

To be fair, Quake 3 is basically the only platform-independant game that isn't disadvantaged on Linux in some way (pure OpenGL, not a Direct3D port/afterthought), and he was claiming something that is contradicting what benchmarking sites like Tomshardware have shown, that games can run faster in Linux than in Windows. For example, Tom has a benchmark page here that shows Linux outperforming Win2K on Q3. The difference is probably not noticable to a casual gamer, but benchmark junkies who tweak their machine to milk an extra 5fps out of their rig will.

So basically, it isn't sad that the guy had to put a disclaimer in there, because what he said does in fact contradict popular belief, as well as somewhat recent published benchmarks.

(Disclaimer: I'm not one of these dillusional people who claim Linux can run Windows games faster than Windows itself under Wine. The only game I recognize as running equal or better in Linux is Quake3.)

This is applicable if you are building a beowulf cluster or a render farm. In that situation your SMP Intel system times x # of nodes, at 100watts more per hour adds both to the cost of electricity as well as the A/C to remove that heat. A lot of concentrated systems in one room at 100% utilization 80+% of each day. The costs will become noticable over a year. Home systems, the difference probably won't be noticable for each individual, but if you could generate a statistical average for x # of systems out there, over say the whole USA, you could probably manufacture a nice stat to correlate to saving money and reducing our dependence on foreign oil :) Where I work we use exclusively Intel CPUs, at home I have a P4 and an AMD, my perception is that my P4 runs much hotter than my slightly lesser spec'd AMD system which pulls 24x7 duty.

But you're right, there are several not so well accounted for variables, and all this back of the napkin figures people are throwing around need a large grain of salt. That aside everything I've seen suggests that Intel's new Prescotts as raw CPUs take a lot of juice, IIRC the 550+ use 115w, while the 3.2Ghz and below use 84w. These #s are take from Tom's Hardware

There is a commercial reason: Intel now wants to sell the Itanium for "workstation" use, so it cut down the number of FPUs in Pentium 4, relying only on SSE for multimedia performance. From "Athlon XP Meets P4":
The picture is similar in 3D rendering (OpenGL) - the AMD Athlon XP's three FPU units helped it to outstrip the Pentium 4, with 2 FPU units. Ideally, you can employ the following equation:
Performance = Clock Speed x Operations/Cycle
This equation helps explain the theory behind why the AMD Athlon XP, although clocked at a lower speed, is able to reach the same performance than a faster-clocked Intel Pentium 4...

If you're seeing ghosting, that's just the way LCD monitors are. http://www.tomshardware.com/ Check out this site for benchmarks on new LCD monitors, they're pretty extensive. I have a Philips 170S, and there's some ghosting, but it's so minor, I don't even really notice it. But if the lag is as you describe it, check out your drivers on your system, could be something messed up.

I found another link, Here

Pentium III 550MHz, pushing 1600x1200, Quake III, 21.2 FPS, Voodoo 3 3500.

I also rememeber everyone talking about Windows running the same game faster/better than under Linux.

1600x1200, 50fps on a K6-2 400MHz? With a 16MB Voodoo3?

I call bullshit.

Link

Here's a K6-400 running Quake 2 @ 1024x768, Voodoo3, ~40fps

bah i dorked the EFF link

broadcastflag not flat

also toms hardware review of ATI HDTV wonder might be of interest...

e.

Thank god for PCI Express.

Ok, try this picture of yohan.

One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

Here are the reviews from Tom's site:

Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip [tomshardware.com]
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview [tomshardware.com]
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D [tomshardware.com]
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT [tomshardware.com]

I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:

"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."

Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited? jt

One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

Here are the reviews from Tom's site:

Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip [tomshardware.com]
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview [tomshardware.com]
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D [tomshardware.com]
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT [tomshardware.com]

I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:

"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."

Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited? jt

One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

Here are the reviews from Tom's site:

Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip [tomshardware.com]
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview [tomshardware.com]
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D [tomshardware.com]
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT [tomshardware.com]

I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:

"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."

Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited? jt

One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

Here are the reviews from Tom's site:

Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip [tomshardware.com]
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview [tomshardware.com]
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D [tomshardware.com]
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT [tomshardware.com]

I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:

"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."

Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited? jt

Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives [slashdot.org], as/. regulars are well [slashdot.org] aware of [slashdot.org], are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually [techreport.com]. Too bad for a large number of customers [techreport.com], it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke [techreport.com] on these drives, some [techreport.com] tech sites [storagereview.com] came out [viahardware.com] with the news, and others [tomshardware.com] kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current/. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports [consumerreports.org] buys everything [consumerreports.org] they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why? emx

Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives [slashdot.org], as/. regulars are well [slashdot.org] aware of [slashdot.org], are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually [techreport.com]. Too bad for a large number of customers [techreport.com], it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke [techreport.com] on these drives, some [techreport.com] tech sites [storagereview.com] came out [viahardware.com] with the news, and others [tomshardware.com] kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current/. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports [consumerreports.org] buys everything [consumerreports.org] they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why? emx

Tom's Hardware they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why? edq

i just read on thg their review of the idf held recently, and those intel fan boys didn't even say anything about why the chip wasn't physically displayed ... there is even a funny picture of a staffer hauling the case out of the presentation right away ( here )

When I'm at home, it's the air conditioner running, when I'm at work it's the PC's in my office

and we wonder why global warming is occurring! :)

I think most people turn lights off during the night - personally, I can't sleep with one on (but I'm strange, and I don't need air con running all the time)

BTW. power requirements of RAM are about 10W per 512Mb just to refresh. Add the gfx card RAM and idling CPU power requirements, and the power required to run your fans and motherboard, even if you have your HDD and monitor turned off with power saving, I think you'll use a fair bit more power than a 60W light bulb. (and way more than if you have one of those 10W energy saving ones)

I don't think people realise how much power their PCs actually use. Have a look at Gfx Card Power consumption or the rough power consumption of pc components

A colleage used to work for a large firm and was asked for ideas on how to save some money.. he said 'turn all the monitors off overnight'. After several reports it turns out the firm would save £75k per year by doing this... power saving nowadays will do most of that, but quite a few monitors have poor standby consumption (check out standby consumption

Thanks for the tip - I am thinking as soon as I reformat, I am going to make the change. Where do I find drivers for my devices? Just need to make sure my sound card, etc will work fine. Toms Hardware ran a good feature on this a while back.

*(i wouldn't personally count office benchmarks like word but i know intel has a weird history of doing well in those)

*(i wouldn't personally count office benchmarks like word but i know intel has a weird history of doing well in those)

Those retail prices for SATA disks are pulled from Pricewatch. Yes, you can find special sales, sales with rebates, etc, that drop the price, but people putting together RAID systems generally don't want to wait over a period of 5 months to get all the drives they need for their RAID systems.

Check out this quick review where premium U-320 4 drive array spanks SATA in every test, and this was merely for RAID 0. That's no extra processing overhead. Tom's Hardware has a more thorough article, but is heavily slanted in SATA's favor. I especially love this quote:

As incredible as this may sound, SATA has performance advantages over Ultra320 - provided it's used correctly and in conjunction with a sufficiently fast interface with the system. That is because each SATA hard drive communicates with the controller via its own fast (150 MB/s) point-to-point connection while the SCSI bus is used jointly by all devices.

Yes, it sounds incredible to anyone that knows anything about how to setup SCSI RAID. First, there's not a drive made that comes anywhere near 150 MB/s continuous transfer speed, only the data in the buffer could theoretically be transferred at that speed, so that red herring is pretty smelly already.

Second, the configuration issue is definitely something to be considered with SCSI. Proper setup will actually have SCSI hitting near its theoretical peaks data transfer more consistently than not. There are also ways of utilizing multiple channels on a single controller to gain significant speed advantages. To hit the 66MHz 64 bit limit of 512MB/s data transfer would take roughly 9 striped drives for a single call. For a SCSI U-320 bus, it takes about 5-6 drives to fill up a single channel. (Note, this is for a single read/write operation, multiple concurrent read/writes add additional complexity to the tests)

Lasltly, this article utilizes the most expensive SCSI 320 products in a test that much lower hardware could have smoked with ease. Any 4 10K or 15K SCSI drives could have gained the same performance advantages over SATA as the uber SCSI drives, and at a fraction of the cost. What you gain with U-320 is not speed in the sense that the drives are faster, but the max number of drives on a single channel before reaching saturation along with slightly faster messaging speeds.

So, basically, SATA appears to be fine for most single-user desktops, but for real servers, use SCSI. One of these days, I'll actually do a real benchmark test of my own, maybe.... Except I don't have SATA RAID hardware to compare against.

Direct X is an underlying graphics standard that is owned and controlled by Microsoft. Games are displayed using one of two technologies (generally), Direct X and Open GL. This lets the programmers do things like tell the game to display a polygon with XYZ corners and N bitmap stretched to M size with a global light of F, without actually having to program that stuff themselves.

As for 3rd party graphics cards... Games are developed on Nvidia and ATI cards. I've worked on a few games, both PC and console, and we've never tested on anything other than ATI or Nvidia. I've seen publishers that test on-board graphics cards, but unless the required tweak is minor most on-board graphics cards are (rightfully) assumed to be junk. Most on-board graphics cards claim DirectX 9.x or Open GL 1.x compatibility, but most are several orders of magnitude slower than real cards.

This isn't a slander against non ATI, non Nvidia cards. Check out Tom's Hardware guide to XGI graphics cards. They're as fast as the other companies, but their output is terrible. I think we'd all be happy if another company came up to unseat ATI and Nvidia, the way that Nvidia unseated Voodoo. But that really hasn't happened yet... and with the specialized knowledge required for good image processing, that won't happen easily.

Unless your new PC was specifically a "gaming PC," it probably didn't come with a real graphics card. If you plan on playing any games, new or old, I'd plunk down the 80 bucks for an ATI 9600. It's well worth the investment.

Yeah I'm aware of the "MHz myth," but look at the benchmarks please. At 3.4GHz, the "Extreme" edition bests the 3.4GHz 1MB cache version by a whopping 1.4%. Meanwhile the Non-Extreme 3.4 beats the Extreme 3.2 by over double that amount! Both are marginal differences if you ask me, but price difference is truly "extreme."

Once you see what his ex-girlfriend did to his monitor when he told her it's over you'll understand why he needed to know well in advance if she was heading to his place for yet another constructively destructive discussion about why he does not want to marry her.

Just so you know, that used to be a 22" Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2060u before they broke up.

Toms Hardware review

e.

I forget exactly which ones. I base my assertion on a Tom's Hardware article on LCDs I read about a year ago. I believe there was a manufacturer that had a one-pixel (!) policy, but I can't be certain. I was reading a whole bunch while researching a possible LCD purchase of my own. In the end I decided to wait until the replacement policies of the manufacturers were better, since this would imply that they technology had matured to the point where pixel failure was uncommon.

Ah! Found the article.

Jeepers! Upon reading the article (it had been a while) it looks like Apple's pretty damn bad!

So that may answer my question, unless Apple's changed their tune and has a policy posted somewhere?

I forget exactly which ones. I base my assertion on a Tom's Hardware article on LCDs I read about a year ago. I believe there was a manufacturer that had a one-pixel (!) policy, but I can't be certain. I was reading a whole bunch while researching a possible LCD purchase of my own. In the end I decided to wait until the replacement policies of the manufacturers were better, since this would imply that they technology had matured to the point where pixel failure was uncommon.

Ah! Found the article.

Jeepers! Upon reading the article (it had been a while) it looks like Apple's pretty damn bad!

So that may answer my question, unless Apple's changed their tune and has a policy posted somewhere?

umm, why do they put a piece of garbage in there? The FX 5200 is what, the low end card a gen and a half ago?

Geez, how about a 5900SE/XT even if you have to clock it a little slow for heat dissipation and sound.. Or a mobile ATI 9800 chipset that DOESN'T SUCK...

At least make a nicer vidcard an option for phuxake.. Read the tomshardware comparo and weep...

Maybe I'm taking a shot in the dark, but could this really all be dependent on hardware?

I recall for example, the x64 extensions really help in database work in a very big way. The select queries especially. Perhaps they're just waiting for really good DB performance.

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20040830_0920 16.html

It says:

"According to Hunter, the Efficeon architecture allows Orion to reach a performance of one flop per Watt - more than would be possible with any competing processor."

I'm familiar with megaflops and gigaflops and teraflops and petaflops, but what is so magical about "one floating point operation per watt"? Is this just a misquote, or does it mean something?

Ok, so let me get this straight:

1. If I ever have a power failure in my house or the battery dies in the computer the encryption key will explode. So I sue Intel over this in a class action suit and they have to fix everyone's cpu chip. Massive recalls, etc.... I can't see Intel doing that.

1a. Besides which - you can buy CPU chips by themselves and they don't have any power being applied to them. You think Intel would develop something that you can only plug in once? Not likely. Man! Would Tom's Hardware have a fit!

2. If I install a watchdog on my computer, install a program which has this technology on it and it shows me how to access the information on the chip my CPU will somehow know and blow itself up. I don't think so. You give too much credit to the PR guys. Either the information can be accessed or it can't. If it can't - then no one else can either. Which makes this technology moot. Use common sense and logic. It is either:

A. You can access this information (albeit in a specific manner).

B. Or you can not access this information.

A program which watches what another program does (Anti-Virus Software anyone?) interrupts whatever the other program is doing to check it. A watchdog program is just doing the same thing. It intercepts whatever the other program is going to do BEFORE it does it, checks it out, and can send that information to a file or the screen. Thus, BEFORE any request goes to the CPU for whatever reason, those commands are intercepted and stored so someone could hack (fairly easily) the command used to access the key information. Once you can do that - the key becomes meaningless because you can then forge the key (captured on output from the CPU by the same program) and make a new disk with this.

Further, what a lot of hackers used to do (and probably still do) is just to find the JSR to the function which does the check and negate it by either putting in their own routine at the end of the program and JSR'ing to it so it can return the key or just NOP'ing it so it is never called. If the function is supposed to return TRUE or FALSE depending upon whether or not the key passed verification, then you just JSR to a function which pushes a TRUE value onto the stack and return.

JSR myFunction
.
.
.
myFunction:
lda a1,1;
push;
return;

What's so hard about that? Then you just load the program in, disassemble it, and do a global replace on that JSR CheckKey function.

After all, why try to disable something when you can just go around it? This is a lot like those dongle things. The people who sold the dongles would also include a set of functions which would check the dongle and the dongle would send back the "special" id. (Sound familiar?) The problem is the same with this Trusted Computing PR BS. Remember that rule #1 says:

"You have to start somewhere."

It is no different with them. Somewhere, somehow, you have to be able to access the key. You find that and the rest is as easy as eating a donut.

If you check out Toms Hardware you can see a small chunk of cube pc's which already feature this.

Not a bad option if you are like me and looking for a portable everything box with an alternate plan of being a PVR in its spare time.

However, after looking over the prices I decided I would rather have a mini-itx solution.

A nice C3 board with tv out and a PCI slot for capture ended up being my pick. Thankfully, I alraady have most of the components to slap into this little beast. The final product should measure about 7 x 2 x 10 (w x h x l).

Yeah, it won't have instant on dvd support, but I'm not going to nit pick when my savings was in the 300+ range.

I find the trend of inserting ads into article text annoying and distracting. I, for one, would never buy anything off of such a link, but obviously people are, or else this practice would die down. See this is practice with any of the articles at:
http://www.tomshardware.com/

What about 4x the war flying ?

And they handle heat so very well.

I have been interested in a silent system for awhile, although I don't really have the money. Zalman made the TNN 500A which is the same concept as this case, giant heat sinks with heat pipes. However the Zalman has plenty of room, supports ATX P4 3GHz or more, top ATI/Nvidia graphics chips, Tomshardware has a review. Other than weight I see no advantage with the Hush system. Price? Hush $3,069.45 USD Zalman $1199.99 USD. My no money is with Zalman.

Tom's Hardware Review