Agreed, many Amiga fans were very religious about their advocacy, and it often got quite scary. But we must never forget that there is still one tribe in the history of computing which trumped even the Amiga fans in the brutality and savagery of their lynchmob mentality.
The 'duh, it's free' or 'you don't need to have a serial' card might seem perfectly obvious, but is in fact largely redundant. In most of the world, FOSS is not competing with free. People don't understand the difference between free beer and free speech and it doesn't matter anyway. Pretty much all software is considered free in all possible ways.
Granted, this may not be completely true for transitional countries like the United States, where the ecosystem still supports packs of hungry lawyers prowling the inner cities, and roving bands of thugs led by software robber barons might beat down your door at any time, sometimes even backed up by what passes for law enforcement agencies over there.
However for the rest of the world 'free' is not good enough. So even though the chances of getting prosecuted for copyright violation are slimmer than being struck by an asteroid, point out to people that they're doing the right thing by using software that is legal to use. This is not quite as easy a sell, and it will take some explaining. But at least it is just a little more relevant than 'free'.
Why, after all these years Linux has existed, do we have to seek help from Microsoft with its fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at? We don't. These days, we can just use Red Hat's Liberation font family instead.
With a 17" screen, what are you going to do with graphics that the GMA950 can't handle?
Well, maybe run World of Warcraft.
Sure, there may be only few games available for Mac, but WOW players typically don't get around to playing anything else anyway. Yet it is also very accessible for casual gamers.
Any old ATI 9600, X600, or Nvidia 7600 would be a massive leap forward compared to the GMA950, even at low clock speeds with passive cooling.
The Mini doesn't need to run off a battery. Use that benefit.
Ah well, I spose it's not for everyone. Perhaps they should've brought in some Friends cast members and have them apply their hilarious 'here comes a punchline' mimicry to these clips. Maybe follow with some canned laughter to cue merriment for those who still didn't get it.
The IBM one was tame. I completely loved the Microsoft one.
The method that the Firingsquad article describes is for Windows only, because it relies on the RivaTuner utility.
RivaTuner is nice because it provides a convenient GUI for playing around with different configurations easily, and I would definitely recommend going that route first of all, to find out which pipelines and/or vertex shaders can be enabled on your particular card.
After any configuration change one should test it thoroughly with a bunch of shader intensive 3D apps (like HalfLife 2, Doom 3, 3DMark03/05 and the rthdribl demo). If you don't get any artifacts or stutters then you can use the info you got from the RivaTuner method for another one which works in Linux too.
See instead of using RivaTuner, you can also unmask pipelines and vertex shaders directly in the BIOS of your 6800(LE/NU/GT/Ultra) card. The advantage is that they will be enabled as soon as your card powers up. As such they'll work in any OS you boot, and they'll keep working if you move the card to another PC.
Unfortunately I don't really know about any nice walkthroughs for the BIOS method but have a look at this page (click on the link for 'iron cobra') for some pointers. If you're confident enough to feel that you should be trying this then that should be all you need. It works fine for me.. and in Linux too.
.. or at least that it's now sufficiently obsolete for the PowerMac target audience. It seems that Apple still considers the modem important enough in the consumer space to put that one in every iMac and even every Mac Mini that leaves the factory, as well as in all the portables of course. With the limited space in such machines requiring more careful consideration of any features that might be dropped that's probably more telling.
No, I'm just stating that "isn't all that much slower" matters to someone who wants 1GB of video RAM on their card. They want as fast as possible.
Yes, so this card and this performance bracket simply isn't for him. He's calling for 512/1GB cards, which aren't even out yet in the consumer market, and the first ones to come out will cost 6-8 times what these TC cards go for.
Words like 'a little' and 'a lot' are very subjective...we're talking nanoseconds here, which are still pretty damn small regardless. What seems a lot to me could seem to be a little to someone else.
We're mainly talking about compromises for low cost. And TC looks like a rather intelligent compromise if you go by these HalfLife 2 benches at Hexus, where they pitch the 6200TC against the regular 6200 with 128MB of onboard RAM - which costs 30$ more.
Not necessarily, because this card is largely meant to compete with integrated video chipsets from the likes of Intel, SiS, ATI and yes Nvidia themselves, which typically also use system RAM, but which are nowhere near competitive with this thing when it comes to feature support and performance.
the card sucks, and ANY video card that uses system memory is crap. where are the 512 meg and 1 gig video cards? or "GASP" cards with a right angle DDR2 slot on them so I can upgrade it it myself with STANDARD ram?
The 512 and up cards will be in the power gamer segment. This is something completely different.
Why would you want a separate DIMM slot on your card when you could just add more RAM to the system itself, which you could use for other things when you're not running 3D apps, and which isn't all that much slower due to the Turbocache architecture.
i'm tired of these low end use system ram cards that are not much better than the bargin bin cards from 3 years ago but cost 3X the price.
Read again - for less than 100$ you get 30-36 fps with 8x af in Doom 3, 42 fps in Half Life 2 and 43 in UT2004, and that's at 1024x768. And you can at least look at any modern game right up to any that use Shader Model 3 with full eyecandy. You'll probably turn off antialiasing to actually play, but that's still miles better than any bargain bin card from 3 years ago.
Some of these make a little more sense because they benchmark the 6200TC against some of its direct competitors in the low end instead of against a mid range card.
I think Gamers Depot's conclusion is a bit off too. What's notable isn't that it is slower than enthusiast cards. Of course it is. What's surprising is how well it still runs the very newest games, despite the drawbacks associated with that pricing range.
and most importantly, what happens on a relatively calm day? Just a few non-trivial questions.....
Well the plan might involve using the wind (or other renewable energy source) to produce hydrogen, which you can then store and use on those relatively calm days.
Yeah yeah forking is always sweet and this sure sounds like a lot of fun already, but what I'm really waiting for is for someone to put together a BSD-from-scratch distribution! I mean, I know I could just build one with Linux.. BUT only having a single kernel to choose means my grimy little subculture won't be as obscure as it could be. Just think how exclusive I'd be if I could pick one of the NetBSD, OpenBSD, either of the active branches of FreeBSD, and PicoBSD, Dragonfly BSD or Darwin kernels..
Kind of like the mess they came up with for Starship Trooper. Sheech that was horrible!
In its own right I think that was a rather entertaining and at times superbly funny flick. I suppose that it wasn't quite what fans of the book were expecting but what Verhoeven came up with worked quite well as a movie.
Actually, I'm less concerned about Will Smith than about the fact that they cast some hot chick straight out of the Coyote Ugly Bar to pose as Susan Calvin. But let's keep an open mind.
Plus a blade actually gets you a smooth shave.. unlike any electric razor. Ok, those models using the Braun system are sort of okay. The Philips rotating head ('Philishave') on the other hand is quite a disaster. Never understood how someone could call that a proper shave.
Don't let the fact that they proclaim the Athlon 64 to be the 'clear looser' in the SPECViewperf discipline because of the poor results in the DX-08 and DRV-09 tests fool you.
Those scores are probably not representative of the true performance of the AMD processor but rather of the early stages of optimization of the Linux support for the Nvidia NForce 3-150 chipset. The very same weakness was observed in the past in other reviews that used Specviewperf on Windows platforms, such as this one from THG. Subsequent versions of the Nvidia drivers have since brought noticeable improvements.
The AMD scores would likely have been much more competitive if a motherboard based on another Athlon 64 chipset like the VIA K8T800 would've been used for this review.
I doubt that such is the case here. My guess is that the chips on the 5900 didn't pass QA at 5950 speeds.
Not necessarily true, as the 5900 had been out for a good many months before the 5950 was even announced. The high end 5900 Ultra chips were likely never even tested at 5950 speed.
However, the core has some headroom and is likely not going to be your biggest problem with this BIOS flash/overclock. The memory is. 5900 Ultra memory is typically specced 2.2 ns or up to 900 Mhz. Which is more than the 850 Mhz it tends to run at, but less than the 950 Mhz the 5950 requires. Which is why 5950 boards come with 2.0 ns memory. Regular 5900 and particularly low end XT models have slower memory still.
That said, my XFX 5900 Ultra is now merrily running at a higher core/mem clock with a Leadtek 5950 BIOS, and everything works perfectly.
While it's certainly true that Tom's website has been overtaken by other more in-depth websites when it comes to authoritative reporting, your claim that Tom deliberately engineered the test to make the Athlon look bad is in fact completely baseless.
There was a very valid point to that test and that is that the AMD Athlon XP and MP CPUs rely on the motherboard to step in and prevent CPU damage in case of overheat, whereas modern Intel chips protect themselves. It just so happens that at the time of the test there was exactly one motherboard actually available for purchase that had the AMD thermal protection circuitry installed, and that was the exact Siemens board used in Tom's test. I know, because at the time I was *waiting* to be able to buy a board with said support. And what this test showed is that A) thermal protection didn't actually work reliably at the time and B) *all* other boards available would've burned up the MP as well. Just like the Thunderbird did in any case.
As for the Van Smith incident, I'm not sure what happened there, but I could understand why THG would want to distance themselves after discovering what a complete and utter nutcase they had on board.
'upgrades' is nicely put. It's all about semantics. I always enjoy the unabashed way the MS propaganda department calls competing solutions 'legacy applications'. I think we should try to consistently refer to installing OpenOffice and Mozilla as upgrading and precede words like MS-Office and IE with the sentence 'legacy apps such as'
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, many Amiga fans were very religious about their advocacy, and it often got quite scary. But we must never forget that there is still one tribe in the history of computing which trumped even the Amiga fans in the brutality and savagery of their lynchmob mentality.
I am, of course, referring to Team OS/2.
The 'duh, it's free' or 'you don't need to have a serial' card might seem perfectly obvious, but is in fact largely redundant. In most of the world, FOSS is not competing with free. People don't understand the difference between free beer and free speech and it doesn't matter anyway. Pretty much all software is considered free in all possible ways.
Granted, this may not be completely true for transitional countries like the United States, where the ecosystem still supports packs of hungry lawyers prowling the inner cities, and roving bands of thugs led by software robber barons might beat down your door at any time, sometimes even backed up by what passes for law enforcement agencies over there.
However for the rest of the world 'free' is not good enough. So even though the chances of getting prosecuted for copyright violation are slimmer than being struck by an asteroid, point out to people that they're doing the right thing by using software that is legal to use. This is not quite as easy a sell, and it will take some explaining. But at least it is just a little more relevant than 'free'.
In related news, Steve Balmer was spotted replacing his previous 'ZUNE4ME' vanity plates with a fresh set which sports the slogan 'JAVAL0L'..
Seriously though, I don't think Java is a particularly big reason for people to like Sun, and tying your company's future to it seems ill-advised.
The Atari 800 was the most advanced machine of the 8-bit generation.
.. Jet Set Willy, Skool Daze, Tornado Low Level, Underwurlde, Sabre Wulf..
It sure made a better doorstop.
when I say.. thank god
With a 17" screen, what are you going to do with graphics that the GMA950 can't handle?
Well, maybe run World of Warcraft.
Sure, there may be only few games available for Mac, but WOW players typically don't get around to playing anything else anyway. Yet it is also very accessible for casual gamers.
Any old ATI 9600, X600, or Nvidia 7600 would be a massive leap forward compared to the GMA950, even at low clock speeds with passive cooling.
The Mini doesn't need to run off a battery. Use that benefit.
Ah well, I spose it's not for everyone. Perhaps they should've brought in some Friends cast members and have them apply their hilarious 'here comes a punchline' mimicry to these clips. Maybe follow with some canned laughter to cue merriment for those who still didn't get it.
The IBM one was tame. I completely loved the Microsoft one.
Well actually the Euro started at $1.181. But don't let facts get in the way of your argument.
The method that the Firingsquad article describes is for Windows only, because it relies on the RivaTuner utility.
RivaTuner is nice because it provides a convenient GUI for playing around with different configurations easily, and I would definitely recommend going that route first of all, to find out which pipelines and/or vertex shaders can be enabled on your particular card.
After any configuration change one should test it thoroughly with a bunch of shader intensive 3D apps (like HalfLife 2, Doom 3, 3DMark03/05 and the rthdribl demo). If you don't get any artifacts or stutters then you can use the info you got from the RivaTuner method for another one which works in Linux too.
See instead of using RivaTuner, you can also unmask pipelines and vertex shaders directly in the BIOS of your 6800(LE/NU/GT/Ultra) card. The advantage is that they will be enabled as soon as your card powers up. As such they'll work in any OS you boot, and they'll keep working if you move the card to another PC.
Unfortunately I don't really know about any nice walkthroughs for the BIOS method but have a look at this page (click on the link for 'iron cobra') for some pointers. If you're confident enough to feel that you should be trying this then that should be all you need. It works fine for me.. and in Linux too.
.. or at least that it's now sufficiently obsolete for the PowerMac target audience. It seems that Apple still considers the modem important enough in the consumer space to put that one in every iMac and even every Mac Mini that leaves the factory, as well as in all the portables of course. With the limited space in such machines requiring more careful consideration of any features that might be dropped that's probably more telling.
No, I'm just stating that "isn't all that much slower" matters to someone who wants 1GB of video RAM on their card. They want as fast as possible.
Yes, so this card and this performance bracket simply isn't for him. He's calling for 512/1GB cards, which aren't even out yet in the consumer market, and the first ones to come out will cost 6-8 times what these TC cards go for.
Words like 'a little' and 'a lot' are very subjective...we're talking nanoseconds here, which are still pretty damn small regardless. What seems a lot to me could seem to be a little to someone else.
We're mainly talking about compromises for low cost. And TC looks like a rather intelligent compromise if you go by these HalfLife 2 benches at Hexus, where they pitch the 6200TC against the regular 6200 with 128MB of onboard RAM - which costs 30$ more.
Not necessarily, because this card is largely meant to compete with integrated video chipsets from the likes of Intel, SiS, ATI and yes Nvidia themselves, which typically also use system RAM, but which are nowhere near competitive with this thing when it comes to feature support and performance.
the card sucks, and ANY video card that uses system memory is crap. where are the 512 meg and 1 gig video cards? or "GASP" cards with a right angle DDR2 slot on them so I can upgrade it it myself with STANDARD ram?
The 512 and up cards will be in the power gamer segment. This is something completely different.
Why would you want a separate DIMM slot on your card when you could just add more RAM to the system itself, which you could use for other things when you're not running 3D apps, and which isn't all that much slower due to the Turbocache architecture.
i'm tired of these low end use system ram cards that are not much better than the bargin bin cards from 3 years ago but cost 3X the price.
Read again - for less than 100$ you get 30-36 fps with 8x af in Doom 3, 42 fps in Half Life 2 and 43 in UT2004, and that's at 1024x768. And you can at least look at any modern game right up to any that use Shader Model 3 with full eyecandy. You'll probably turn off antialiasing to actually play, but that's still miles better than any bargain bin card from 3 years ago.
Here are some other reviews:
TechReport
AnandTech
HotHardware
Some of these make a little more sense because they benchmark the 6200TC against some of its direct competitors in the low end instead of against a mid range card.
I think Gamers Depot's conclusion is a bit off too. What's notable isn't that it is slower than enthusiast cards. Of course it is. What's surprising is how well it still runs the very newest games, despite the drawbacks associated with that pricing range.
and most importantly, what happens on a relatively calm day? Just a few non-trivial questions.....
Well the plan might involve using the wind (or other renewable energy source) to produce hydrogen, which you can then store and use on those relatively calm days.
Yeah yeah forking is always sweet and this sure sounds like a lot of fun already, but what I'm really waiting for is for someone to put together a BSD-from-scratch distribution! I mean, I know I could just build one with Linux.. BUT only having a single kernel to choose means my grimy little subculture won't be as obscure as it could be. Just think how exclusive I'd be if I could pick one of the NetBSD, OpenBSD, either of the active branches of FreeBSD, and PicoBSD, Dragonfly BSD or Darwin kernels..
Kind of like the mess they came up with for Starship Trooper. Sheech that was horrible!
In its own right I think that was a rather entertaining and at times superbly funny flick. I suppose that it wasn't quite what fans of the book were expecting but what Verhoeven came up with worked quite well as a movie.
Actually, I'm less concerned about Will Smith than about the fact that they cast some hot chick straight out of the Coyote Ugly Bar to pose as Susan Calvin. But let's keep an open mind.
Plus a blade actually gets you a smooth shave.. unlike any electric razor. Ok, those models using the Braun system are sort of okay. The Philips rotating head ('Philishave') on the other hand is quite a disaster. Never understood how someone could call that a proper shave.
Don't let the fact that they proclaim the Athlon 64 to be the 'clear looser' in the SPECViewperf discipline because of the poor results in the DX-08 and DRV-09 tests fool you.
Those scores are probably not representative of the true performance of the AMD processor but rather of the early stages of optimization of the Linux support for the Nvidia NForce 3-150 chipset. The very same weakness was observed in the past in other reviews that used Specviewperf on Windows platforms, such as this one from THG. Subsequent versions of the Nvidia drivers have since brought noticeable improvements.
The AMD scores would likely have been much more competitive if a motherboard based on another Athlon 64 chipset like the VIA K8T800 would've been used for this review.
I doubt that such is the case here. My guess is that the chips on the 5900 didn't pass QA at 5950 speeds.
Not necessarily true, as the 5900 had been out for a good many months before the 5950 was even announced. The high end 5900 Ultra chips were likely never even tested at 5950 speed.
However, the core has some headroom and is likely not going to be your biggest problem with this BIOS flash/overclock. The memory is. 5900 Ultra memory is typically specced 2.2 ns or up to 900 Mhz. Which is more than the 850 Mhz it tends to run at, but less than the 950 Mhz the 5950 requires. Which is why 5950 boards come with 2.0 ns memory. Regular 5900 and particularly low end XT models have slower memory still.
That said, my XFX 5900 Ultra is now merrily running at a higher core/mem clock with a Leadtek 5950 BIOS, and everything works perfectly.
While it's certainly true that Tom's website has been overtaken by other more in-depth websites when it comes to authoritative reporting, your claim that Tom deliberately engineered the test to make the Athlon look bad is in fact completely baseless.
There was a very valid point to that test and that is that the AMD Athlon XP and MP CPUs rely on the motherboard to step in and prevent CPU damage in case of overheat, whereas modern Intel chips protect themselves. It just so happens that at the time of the test there was exactly one motherboard actually available for purchase that had the AMD thermal protection circuitry installed, and that was the exact Siemens board used in Tom's test. I know, because at the time I was *waiting* to be able to buy a board with said support. And what this test showed is that A) thermal protection didn't actually work reliably at the time and B) *all* other boards available would've burned up the MP as well. Just like the Thunderbird did in any case.
As for the Van Smith incident, I'm not sure what happened there, but I could understand why THG would want to distance themselves after discovering what a complete and utter nutcase they had on board.
'upgrades' is nicely put. It's all about semantics. I always enjoy the unabashed way the MS propaganda department calls competing solutions 'legacy applications'. I think we should try to consistently refer to installing OpenOffice and Mozilla as upgrading and precede words like MS-Office and IE with the sentence 'legacy apps such as'