PC General Discussion Thread

[Romanc]

8800 GTS 320 is a good choice performance/price. 8800 GTX 768 is excellent performance, but expensive.

[Darth Alec]

I have to keep it under 10k, so GTS.

But it doesn't matter all that much. Any DX10 compatible is more then I currently need.

[Power666]

Originally Posted by Darth Alec

A PC that's 500 degrees F?

Sets your house on fire.

Ovens are an everyday device that produces those temperatures. So not only would computers be faster, but they'll also bake your cookies.

[Romanc]

Originally Posted by Power666

Ovens are an everyday device that produces those temperatures. So not only would computers be faster, but they'll also bake your cookies.

I felt a slight urge towards buying one of those. Disturbing, indeed.

[underzr0]

lol, i saw a computer today that had vista on it and the rating of the computer was 4.4

[chedabob]

Originally Posted by underzr0

lol, i saw a computer today that had vista on it and the rating of the computer was 4.4

What's wrong with that? My old machine could barely scrape a 1

[Darth Alec]

Epic.

I want a cake thing.

[underzr0]

Originally Posted by chedabob

What's wrong with that? My old machine could barely scrape a 1

nothin, i was just pointing it out.

[Power666]

Bunch of random stuff.

On Monday the Geforce 8800GT was released and its performance generally surpasses the Geforce 8800GTS. Considering that its cheaper, faster and has more memory, it is a win. AMD's competition, the Radeon HD 3870 is arriving in about two weeks and it is supposed to be even faster for the same price.

nVidia plans to enable triple SLI support for the Geforce 8800GTX cards soon. Leaks have already appeared online. The results of triple SLI only see tangible gain at 2560 x 1600 on 30" LCD displays with 2.5x to 2.8x the performance of a single Geforce 8800GTX. At lower resolutions the extra GPU power is hidden behind a CPU bottleneck.

Also on Monday, Intel showed off its new Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme chips based off of the Penryn core. They big benefit is the 6 MB of L2 cache per die (12 MB total for the quads) and the 45 nm manufacturing process. It is kinda nice as all the Core 2 Extreme reviews I've seen have been able to surpass 4 Ghz when overclocking. The results are rather impressive at 4 Ghz but at the 3 Ghz stock speed, there isn't much of a performance gain compared to Intel's other 3 Ghz Core 2 based systems.

OS X 10.5 was released over the week end selling over 2 million copies and I've personally been enjoying it. It has been hacked to run on PC's supporting SSE3 capabilities. In other Apple news, they're now the 3rd largest tech company behind MS and Google. They're also the 3rd largest PC maker as well.

[E6600]

Which would you rather have?

8 cores each clocked at 500 MHz or 4 cores each clocked at 1 GHz? Given that both of them will cost the exact same price and will have the same amount of cache.

I recall an argument in one of my COE courses about it.

Here is my take on it:
Say you run programs that doesn't need much computing power, but you want to run multiple of them without lag, here I believe the 1st option is best. OTOH if you only run very few programs at the same time, but they need loads of power (3D rendering for example) your better off with the 2nd option.

Now the argument is, which direction should the industry follow. The numbers I put are just an example, you can assume 4 cores each clocked at 4GHz vs 80 cores each clocked at 200 MHz.