PC General Discussion Thread

Yeah the final reveal on that quad line was a little concerning, in order to really compete they'll need to ramp up to 3Ghz before intel's 45nm gets out the door.

On a another note you should really really read reviews on individual motherboards... especially getting into evga stuff, they have multiple revisions of the same boards... some are great, others are crap... and not all sellers list the revision numbers.

Also watch out for tiger direct.... bought a laptop from them awhile ago and it showed up broken, they refused to except it back despite it being in line with their return policy. So after doing a little research I find tiger direct has been screwing people over like this for 7 or 8 years. You can complain to the better business bureau of Florida but as soon as the company makes a statement saying "oh no we offered to take it back", the bureau drops the case.

[Power666]

Once AMD is capable of getting their quad core chips to 3Ghz, I don't think they'll have much to worry about Intel's 45 nm chips. Sure, Intel could easily release a 3.66 Ghz chipin the not so distant future, but the performance gains are a bit deceptive with just a pure clock speed increase like that. To get the best performance out of Intel chips you gotta increase the FSB speed as well which Intel isn't likely to do again for desktop since they just did about a month ago.

In other areas of discusion, Xbit Labs got to play around with two 1 GB Radeon HD 2900XT's in Crossfire mode. Performance was all over the place with more than double the performance of a single card (which really shouldn't be possible), some decreases in speed with select games and everything in between. The article highlights two things: multilpe video cards under Windows Vista still has its share of issues and moving to 1 GB of memory on a video card doesn't make a difference.

Originally Posted by Power666

Once AMD is capable of getting their quad core chips to 3Ghz, I don't think they'll have much to worry about Intel's 45 nm chips. Sure, Intel could easily release a 3.66 Ghz chipin the not so distant future, but the performance gains are a bit deceptive with just a pure clock speed increase like that. To get the best performance out of Intel chips you gotta increase the FSB speed as well which Intel isn't likely to do again for desktop since they just did about a month ago.

In other areas of discusion, Xbit Labs got to play around with two 1 GB Radeon HD 2900XT's in Crossfire mode. Performance was all over the place with more than double the performance of a single card (which really shouldn't be possible), some decreases in speed with select games and everything in between. The article highlights two things: multilpe video cards under Windows Vista still has its share of issues and moving to 1 GB of memory on a video card doesn't make a difference.

Just got to wait for better drivers and it should be fine. I can't imagine how expensive those cards are tho, especially when you need a rather large PSU to go along with it.

I for one cannot wait for Project: Offset to come out. The game looks amazing and I really want to get my hands on the developer tools. Godly I say. Just hope it doesn't turn into vapourware because no new news has been released about it for a long time.

Unless you find yourself suddenly wealthy and looking for the best performance available I would never recommend dual graphics cards. Aside from performance inconsistencies that will most likely always exist in one form or another it's just not worth the hassle. Better to spend more on a single card and just keep swapping it out for a new one.

@666
I don't know if these numbers have been revised but originally I heard penry is suppose to have a 40% performance increase clock for clock over their current core2s. If Intel has a launch speed of 3.66 Ghz on these new quads then I think AMD may be back at square one; even if they can ramp it up to 3 Ghz quickly.

[Power666]

There are three things different for Penryn chips: first is of course 45 nm production, second is 6 MB of L2 cache and third I believe is SSE4. Only one of those three is going to improve performance per clock with current software and its not going to be a 40% improvement.

The big performance boost of Penryn will be high clock speeds.

It'll be the chips after Penryn that really have some major architectural changes that'll effect performance per clock. Penryn's successor isn't due until late 2008/early 2009 though.

From what I understood the biggest performance boost was some how derived from the decrease in volt leakage.... not sure how that would help clock for clock but thats how it was advertised.

[Power666]

The metric was probably a 40% increase in performance per watt, which is possible with a new manufacturing process.

I really don't think that Intel will be able to radically move the figure of performance per watt for the entire system though. Intel's server hardware is tied to power hungry FB-DIMMs and Intel's desktop/server chipsets do consume a sizable chunk of power. Laptops are another story but this is one area where AMD's new design also makes significant strides.

[Power666]

Well it looks like AMD has announced some triple core CPU's. Effectively they're just a quad core part with one core disabled due to yeilds (pretty much like the SPE's in Cell).

[chedabob]

Originally Posted by Power666

Well it looks like AMD has announced some triple core CPU's. Effectively they're just a quad core part with one core disabled due to yeilds (pretty much like the SPE's in Cell).

So it's basically the Sempron for multi-cores?

[Power666]

Pretty much. AMD does plan to introduce dual core chips as well, so these triple core CPU's fit right in.