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And for the people too lazy to cut and paste:
Motherboard Compatibility
Memory Timings

Don't flame me.

Last year Mercedes declined to add bluetooth to any of their 2003 and 2004 models - so they should be safe, I guess. Fiat cars thus seem to be a bit more unsafe.. ;)

What??? I clicked your link and saw this and this. In most of these benchmarks, FX5200 beats the R9600SE by 40-200% framerate levels! That's the opposite of your point!

Now there is a big difference between a Radeon 9600 and a 9600SE. Are you sure you're not thinking of the regular 9600?

What??? I clicked your link and saw this and this. In most of these benchmarks, FX5200 beats the R9600SE by 40-200% framerate levels! That's the opposite of your point!

Now there is a big difference between a Radeon 9600 and a 9600SE. Are you sure you're not thinking of the regular 9600?

My friend's Radeon 9600SE smokes my FX5200 in Far Cry. I took a hard look at the performance vs. cost of the various cards and just ordered a Radeon 9700 Pro (OEM) for $153 from targetpcinc.com. Had to use the pricewatch.com "Buy Now" button to get that price. Their website check-out was a little quirky, but I got my order placed eventually (I think). My decision was based mostly on this video card round-up at Tom's Harware: Link Here
Keep in mind prices have dropped quite a bit since they posted that review.

Apparently, he knows more than you

Actually, yes.

Going to "Setings->Legal" on my iPod clearly shows the PortalPlayer logo, as well as legal jargon about PortalPlayer technology being used, and PortalPlayer's involvement in the iPod's guts is well documented.

Why not read first?

Actually, Nvidia and Alienware are both working on solutions that accomplish this goal. Nvidia's solution is their own (called SLI, probably because they gobbled up 3d Labs -- remember the Voodoo2 boards you could link up?), while Alienware's is (video card) manufacturer independent and based on technology from Metabyte a/k/a Wicked3D. The performance is promising (with gains from 70-90% on various benchmarks).

You can read about Nvidia's solution here, and Alienware's here. The problem is that two x16 PCIe slots are required (PCI-Express, not to be confused with PCI-X which is a different beast altogether). Right now, the only manufacturer shipping PCIe enabled boards is Intel, and even they didn't last too long (see The Grantsdale Recall), but none as of yet have two x16 PCIe slots, other than the "x2" motherboards which are custom OEM to Alienware. I'm sure that in the near future the major tier one motherboard manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte will provide these solutions as well, but it remains to be seen what kind of price premium can be expected (other than the cost of a second video card!).

When we can find a 1.6GHz Duron for just over half the price of a 2.6GHz Celeron and get better performance consistently in almost every test we ran, the choice is clear.

Alienware took a very different tack with their solution because it requires a 3rd PCI slot AND it's analog (3rd & 4th pics). I guess its a series of tradeoffs: Space vs flexibility, with Nvidia winning the battle for space but losing on flexibility.

That aside, its rediculous that nvidia is expecting their OEM cooling solutions to do any kind of justice to the heat from those cards. Alienware already expects water cooling to be part of the solution and has cases designed accordingly... couldn't NVIDIA have done it any other way? Do they absolutely have to have a hardware link between their cards?

"A power draw of 250 Watts for the 6800 Ultra SLI solution is very realistic."
Then explain how this will work.

here.

Certainly the slashdot crowd will have noticed that this has nothing to do with SLI, but i don't think it's been mentionned here that the technology is actually PGC. Even though i remember it clearly, it didn't seem to get much press at the time. I found a story about it but dear Tom seemed to be a non believer.
Ok, we haven't seen it yet, but with Alienware and nVidia backing it, i'd be surprise if it didn't show up, one way or another.

According to the Tom's Hardware link above.

...the instructions are here.

A little more info here:Intel Grantsdale Recall

It may come as a surprise to some, but there's quite a lot of interest in very small and very quiet PCs. Just check out this site as a for instance. And there's also this review on Tom's Hardware site.

Do AMD chips still roast themselves in seconds if the cooling fails?

More than just overclockers, there are those of us who are called upon by family and friends for recommendations for hardware. I (and a lot of us) go with whatever offers the best performance for the price. That's generally AMD (lately, however, they've been trying to match prices with the equivalently-measured Intel chips).

There you go! As long as Intel doesn't make an "unoverridable" chipset we'll have crazy geekz trying to figure out how to get around it and making a webpage about it.

Am I the only one here who's goign to ignore everything Intel releases until they start releasing dual-core Dothan-based P4s? Here's Tom's Hardware's take on the new LGA 775 architecture, along with copious comparitive CPU/platform benchmarks. Anandtech has their own entry here. In both cases, the combination of new architectures, cpus, features, etc don't add up to much of an advancement in performance. What you get are a lot of features of questionable value and/or features that have been touted by platforms such as nForce/nForce2 for some time now. Please wake me when the Dothan P4s start coming out.

here's a couple of pictures.

For a more comprehensive overview of the whole BTX, DDR2, Socket 775 and PCI Express malarkey, I'd recommend having a look here. Interesting stuff.

RAID 5 is only really appropriate if you are building a large array. The money you will spend on the controller will make the cost/megabyte higher than RAID 1 unless you are looking for a very big array (more than you can get with a mirrored pair.) I have a RAID 5 array I built about 2 years ago with 4 160GB drives on a 3ware 6000 series RAID controller. It has worked great and I'm planning on using RAID 5 again for my next array. I've only had one drive failure so far but it recovered from it beautifully.

If you are willing to fork out about $1100 for storage you can create a really nice array. I'd recommend a 3Ware 4 port 9000 series controller like the 9500S4LP (around $330) or a RaidCore card reviewed recently over at tomshardware. Add in 4 $180 250GB SATA drives and you have a nice 750 GB array for around $1100. The Promise FastTrack SX6000 is quite economical and supports more drives if you don't mind it's bad performance and crappy Linux support. 8 port cards are also pretty economical but it's hard to put that many drives in most cases. You have to design a system carefully in order to create arrays much bigger than 4 drives.

Once you have your array, it's a good to use Linux or something with a reliable journaling filesystem on top of it. Once you have a RAID array your filesystem becomes a much more important point of failure. Using a reliable one will do a lot towards reducing your likelihood of data loss.

I also use a separate drive with a separate filesystem for backup. I have a script that manages it for me (ignoring certain directories) which runs every night. A RAID array is pretty reliable and a big step up from single drives so it's a good half way point but I wasn't comfortable with it so I went further. How far you go us up to you.

Literally. Was reading Tom's Hardware yesterday and their setup mentioned 13 hours.

First, you must decide which RAID level meets your needs/wants. To do this, you must educate yourself on the various RAID levels and the pros and cons associated with each so you can make an informed decision. I recommend reading "The Skinny on RAID" if you want to learn the various RAID levels available.

After reading that article, you should learn about hot spares and what they can and cannot do for you. A recent article has been written about setting realistic expectations on what hot spares can do for you. "The Mythical Hot-Spare - Tape/Disk/Optical Storage" will be informative on this subject matter.

Lastly, you should read "Kill SCSI II: NetCell's RAID 0 Performance + RAID 5 Security Equals SyncRAID" to look into a innovative IDE RAID card that can give you kick ass performance and reliability. Be sure to read the benchmarks on the review so you can make an informed decision.

RAID 1 (mirroring) cards are cheap (and sometimes built into the motherboard), but for every gigabyte you want for storage, you need to be two gigabytes worth of hard drives.

RAID 5 cards cost more money (sometimes a thousand dollars or more), but if you set up a 5 drive system, only one of the drives is "wasted" storing redundancy data (of course, you need to buy five hard drives). RAID 5 on three drives is possible, bu the "wasted space" ratio goes from 20% to 33%, as a whole drive's worth of capacity is used to store parity info.

There are other RAID setups that use combinations of striping, mirroring, etc in an attempt to overcome performance bottlenecks.

Another interesting setup is NetCell's SyncRaid/Raid XL - Tom's Hardware had an article on it a while ago, but actually getting it is tough.

If you are planning on building a new system, Anandtech had an interesting article on RAID on the motherboard.

After a few years of experience with Promise RAID 0+1, Promise RAID 5, 3Ware RAID 5 and SCSI RAID 5, and recently 3Ware SATA RAID 5, I would say that the cheaper solutions often provide a false sense of security, especially if using IDE drives. We have a machine that has a Promise RAID-5 IDE setup that on reboot, seems to require a few restarts to get up and running, and when we lost a drive recently, it took quite a while for the array to rebuild (though this might not be an issue at home, where it's faster to rebuild an array than rebuild your whole computer on a fresh drive). I had a Promise RAID 0+1 card in a computer a few years ago that would corrupt any large file that I moved between hard drives on the computer.

If your data is important, get a good card from a trusted manufacturer (3ware is pretty good, and they have open source Linux drivers), and go SATA.

Indeed not even a pc connected to a TV can compare because the xbox has a HDTV compatible tv out and there are no affortable HDTV out pc gfx cards yet. ( none which aren't more expensive then the entire xbox anyways ).

As a added boon the xbox runs the best games which are released nowadays ( sadly ).

Indeed not even a pc connected to a TV can compare because the xbox has a HDTV compatible tv out and there are no affortable HDTV out pc gfx cards yet. ( none which aren't more expensive then the entire xbox anyways ).

As a added boon the xbox runs the best games which are released nowadays ( sadly ).

Actually it would seem that RAID is the only disk advantage. Hitachi is one of the SATA manufacturers that use the Marvel bridge to convert parallel ATA signals to serial, and the bridge can only communicate as fast as the controller allows, so it's probably back to ATA-133. If you look at Intel's info, it's more likely Ultra ATA 100 (PDF). (ATA Bridge) Native SATA throughout, controller and drives, is almost as expensive as SCSI; smart buying with this in mind are likely to benefit you if you discover you need that throughput to burn these monsters.

In all fairness, it's not, in may cases. It is (sometimes) if you're running 1600x1200 with AA turned way up, but at lower resolutions the difference isn't usually at all significant, the ATI 9800 and the NVidia can even beat it at 1200x1024 resolutions. The Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra even significantly beats the X800XT in some benchmarks and does it using 32 bit math while the X800XT is using only 24 bit math and older technology in other areas (Shader model 2 vs. Shader model 3, for example).

There's also the question of there being any real gain in having say 130 frams per second for a game as opposed to, say, 85 or 90. Particularly when you monitor isn't likely to be displaying those extra frames (or you eyes seeing them). It would seem to make a lot more sense to just compute and display to to 90 frames a second, and use any remaining CPU power to be sure other parts of the game are as responsive as posiable (and yes, the game does eat a lot of CPU to computer 130 frames a second, even though a lot of the graphics are done right on the video card).

But I'm not really wanting to argue the merits of one card against another, I was just pointing out how the gamers think nothing of dropping $500 here and another $500 in a couple of months when the next "hot" card is available. At this rate they almost certainly will have bought something at least as expensive to replace their new X800XT's before they even have Half Life 2 and Domm 3 in hand, and will be pitching those new cards when they need PCI Expresse video cards for the new motherboards that come out in the fall.

To me it would seem to not make a lot of sense to buy two or three different "high end" AGP cards this year when AGP is about to be replaced by PCI Express in the high end systems this year. But clearly the gamer community is still willing to shell out the cash for anything hot.

I wish they had addressed the issue of reliability. I wouldn't have read the review if I had known that they skipped that. Frankly, we need a review of these flash drives that focuses -entirely- on reliability. What's the point of having a data storage device if when you need the data on it, you find the device broken beyond repair?

The original article was shot down in an AMDZone article that was covered by Slashdot.

...this guy start selling them.

Do you Remember him?

Here are some more review links for those who are interested:
Tom's Hardware
Bit-Tech
Driver Heaven
AMD Zone
Hard Tecs 4U
PC Perspective
Ace's Hardware
Sudhian

I remember when consoles were all the rage (Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision). When PC's became more affordable, consoles died out.

That's why Nintendo was a bit of a mystery to me (and the ensuing Sega, Playstation, etc). But the reason was simple; if you wanted to play games, they were cheap, and did the job well.

I think the better combo would be console/media TV device, like the XBox Media PC. It's cheap, and does the job well.

I think the smoke would be a good indicator.

If by "raped" you mean "performs comparably", then sure.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030210/barton-1 5.html

It's only meant for the console, but maybe there's some way to get it for a HTPC.

Here is a better link to the article. The one in the original post bypassws the RR-mirror selection and goes directly to www6...

XBox Media Center's page (googe cache)

There's my karma whoring for the month.

History repeating: Who can (or can't) remember

Easy! Get a card with a vacuum cleaner on it! (not to mods: I'm a nVidia fanboy just having fun).

The results of the battery life benchmarks show the benefits of 90-nm process technology. The two test systems were identical, except for the CPUs, and gave nearly the same results."

From here.

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040504/ati-x 800-04.html

It's gonna make everything look that much sweeter...

Remember, if you buy one now, it might even arrive in time for Longhorn to get its first Service Pack. Look here for all the details you need on Michaels Computers, the fastest computers nobody's ever seen: http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/20040317/

AMD Athlon XP does appear to be consistently faster than Pentium 4 at various math-intensive tasks like Photoshop filters but slower than Pentium 4 on OpenGL and Direct3D (most games). It is deceptive when looking to buy a new system and you see a choice "Athlon 2200Mhz" or "Pentium 2800Mhz" for around $100 more and one assumes the extra $100 will get you a faster system... depends on if you're playing games or doing video editing.

Here is a chart that shows what you are looking for. It doesn't cover cards made after December 2003, but it is still useful.

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-c harts-16.html

ft

Gigabit gives you 3 to 4 times the performance in the same way that a 3Ghz processor gives you double the performance of a 1.5GHz...
Assuming you could get even 50% utilization of a Gigabit network connection, that's 64MB/s. What do you think the throughput is on the IDE hard drive in this thing? I'll point you toward this benchmark of one of Seagate's most recent top of the line drives, and you'll notice that the read speed in the BEST case tops out near 60MB/s, and that's an artificial non-real world example that couldn't even be maintained. That's also on an Ultra ATA/100 controller, which I'm sure the SNAP box is lacking.
The network connection isn't really an issue here; even if it were a gigabit connection, the drives would be too slow to really take advantage of it. Plus, as I've said in numerous other posts, their target market doesn't give a damn about gigabit support. If you do, don't buy their product or better yet try to sell your own improved NAS device.
Besides, a SAN administrator would laugh at your puny gigabit ethernet connection while he points at his Fibre Channel setup.
This Snap Server isn't designed to serve everyone's needs, it fills a niche market that was sorely in need of a solution like this and if you find it lacking YOU'RE NOT IN ITS TARGET MARKET! Don't try to sell a semi truck to someone who just needs a pickup!

stolen from Anandtech

HardOCP
Ascully
DriverHeaven
TrustedReviews
K-Hardware
Hardware Analysis
Hexus
The Tech Report
Beyond3D
Neoseeker
ExtremeTech
Gamers Depot
Lost Circuits
Firing Squad
Tom's Hardware
Bjorn3D
Hot Hardware

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While it's true that both ATi's and Nvidia's new cards scream, it has to be noted that ATi decided not to compete with Nvidia on quality. The new 3.0 versions of the Vertex and Fragment shaders, as implemented in the NV40, are a stunning advance over the 2.0 shaders in the newest ATi cards.

That means that ATI has decided not to compete with NVidia on compatibility. On shader quality, the screen shots at Toms Hardware suggest that it is NVidia that has chosen not to compete. Why would you care about a 3.0 shader language from a card that still doesn't give you correct output of 2.0 shaders?

I read a few of these reviews, including the Tom's Hardware Review and this card looks very good.

I'll be in the market for a new card by the end of the summer, I'm currently a couple of generations out of date with a GeForce 4 (which still manages to do the job, but is showing it's age against games like Far Cry).

I'll be watching how the cards do over the summer (once they can actually be bought) and make up my mind then. If I had to make the call right now... I think I would go for ATI. One less power connector inside, smaller, less fan noise, and less heat in general.

The nVidia card does have an OpenGL advantage (at least for Windows Gaming), but the ATI card can just do a bit more in terms of having AF / FSAA turned on (which is killer for my GF 4).

Bottom line... both this card, and nVidia's previously announced cards, are great for gamers if you've got the coin for them.

I can't believe they forgot Tom's Hardware in the list of reviews.