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October 25, 2004 Server Downtime and Other News - Josh In case you may have noticed, the server was rather flaky all weekend long due to a router problem at the hosting site. If you had sent me an email, and I had not responded, please try sending it again. I was unable to upload or do anything for the site this weekend, which was more than a little bit frustrating. The good news is that we will be implementing a totally new webdesign over the next few weeks. The first thing up will be a new forum system, followed by a new database driven page service. There will of course be quite a learning curve for us here, as we currently use a pure HTML system (if you hadn't noticed). This will lead to better content updates, as well as an easier way to implement new advertisers to the site. Expect to see some changes this week, and we will start rolling out new things throughout the next month. Hopefully by the end of November, this site will be up to date and packed with new features! The folks at Crytek have finally released the 1.3 patch for Far Cry, which officially adds SM 3.0 support, as well as better compression methods and High Dynamic Range lighting. A must get for anyone with a solid DX9 card and who has enjoyed playing Far Cry. It is nice to see Crytek continue to support this product, as well as add new features which will keep players coming back again and again (I personally enjoyed Far Cry much more than I did Doom 3, now I am anxiously awaiting HL2). You can get the patch at the usual places (File Shack, File Planet, etc.) AMDBoard added a bunch of nForce 4 based motherboards to its list, some very interesting products coming down the line to be sure! Tyan appears to have a couple nF4 based products, as well as a SLI version with dual Opterons. Bout time they got back into the desktop AMD market! These are solid looking boards that have the E-ATX/ATX 12V rev. 2.0 connectors. TechConnect Magazine is hosting the latest beta Forceware from NVIDIA. These are the 70.41's which include quite a few new features and supposedly better performance. Try at your own risk. The fellas at Hot Hardware take a look at EPoX's eX5-320S small form factor PC. This is based on the i865 chipset, and currently only support Socket 478 Pentium 4's. Looks to be a solid product, but doesn't add much over the competing Shuttle product. Hi-Tech Reviews has the latest Mushkin DDR-2 DIMMS hard at work, and while the timings are right at JEDEC standards, they were able to run them quite nicely at 667 MHz. Mushkin makes high quality parts, and these look to be very solid. With the latest influx of LGA-775 chips, The Tech Report takes a look at the Albatron PX915P-AGPe motherboard. This board features both PCI-E and AGP Extenstion graphics slots. This is a good idea for those not wanting to get rid of their high end AGP card, but want to invest in the future with PCI-E. The only problem here is that the AGPe slot is not fully AGP, but rather more PCI than anything else. Will this affect gaming? Read on! October 19, 2004 NVIDIA nForce 4 and AMD Athlon 64 4000+/FX-55 Preview - Josh Today both AMD and NVIDIA have released their latest products, and they couldn't go any better together than if it had been planned (cough). The nForce 4 is NVIDIA's latest chipset offering, and it brings PCI-E and SATA-2 to the Athlon 64 market. It has a host of new features that sets it apart from the competition, with a pricetag that is also very palatable for motherboard manufacturers! AMD also upped the ante in the processors speed wars, and so far Intel has failed to respond. While the 4000+ is not all that exciting, the FX-55 brings some very interesting features to light. Here is a direct quote:
You can find the entire preview here. Here are a handful of other previews of the nForce 4 and reviews of the Athlon 64 4000+/FX-55: October 13, 2004 Steelpad S&S Mousing Surface Review - Josh I thought a change of pace would be a good idea, so I finished my review of the Steelpad S&S mousepad. Steelpad products have always been interesting to me, but this was the first chance I had to actually use one of them. I was not disappointed in the least. I now have a new mousepad that I use for myself, and I couldn't be happier! Here is a quote from the review:
You can read the entire review here. October 11, 2004 NVIDIA GeForce 6200 Day! - Josh When NVIDIA claimed that they were in an all out war with ATI, they weren't kidding! What started with the NV40 launch (GeForce 6800 series) in April of this year evolved into the NV43 (GeForce 6600 series) last month, and has now made it down into the lower mainstream with the GeForce 6200 cards (apparently still based on the NV43 chip, but with one pixel quad disabled). NVIDIA is doing its best to cover all bases with the NV4x technology, and they have finally been able to bring it down to the $129 price point. There will be two versions of this card, one with the full 128 bit memory bus, and one with the 64 bit memory bus. All of the reviews on this part use the 128 bit version running at 300 MHz core and 250 MHz memory (500 MHz DDR). Manufacturers have the freedom to play around with these speeds, but the minimum we will supposedly see are the 300/250 numbers. Overclocking on this product proved to be interesting. The HardOCP folks were able to take their sample up to a whooping 550 MHz core and 320 MHz memory, and though they didn't show the results of that overclock, it must have had a massive impact on performance. I am sure the folks at Rivatuner are working on a way to enable the disabled quad, which would essentially turn a 6200 into a 6600. Though the memory speed will be a limiting factor, these cards could very well provide a LOT of bang for the buck. NVIDIA will not release a AGP version of this card, as they feel it doesn't offer enough features and performance over the current GeForce FX 5200 that exists at price points under $129. At the Ultra Low end, the GeForce 4 MX still rules the roost. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as those looking at this price point typically don't game. The FX 5200 was not a terrible product in my opinion, though the 5200 Ultra was a bit out of reach (as its performance was not that great over the standard version). NVIDIA will probably keep pushing the 5200 down and put the 5700 LE in its place (which is a much more capable product). I doubt the GF4MX will die anytime soon, as it is a very inexpensive chip to produce, and it still sells well at the low end. The GeForce 6200 features 4 pixel pipelines and 3 vertex shaders, though due to the fragment crossbar architecture of the NV43, these numbers may be a bit suspect in ways. How it performs though definitely backs up that macro-overview. The color and z compression features are also disabled in this product, but with only the 4 pixel pipelines, it is not nearly as important as in the GeForce 6600. It also features the video decoder/encoder unit that was partially defective in the NV40 (GeForce 6800). NVIDIA apparently fixed all of the problems with this design in the NV43, and hence the 6200 features the full functionality of this unit. There will be more functionality exposed in the coming month, so keep tuned! For the video enthusiast, this could be a rather remarkable product for a HTPC. The 6200 competes very well with the X300 and X600 products from ATI, but it of course is well below what the X700 and GF 6600 can do. It utilizes TSMC's 110 nm process, and so far I have been very impressed with the performance of products off of that line. My previous editorial about the NV48 and R480 could be a bit suspect if those big chips can perform at the level that these smaller ones are at. If this is in fact the case, then we will see new high end cards from both NVIDIA and ATI this calendar year. The GeForce 6200 will be PCI-E only (again, NV doesn't see the need to port this over to AGP as the FX 5200 fills that niche), and it is fully PCI-E compliant and certified. NVIDIA expects this product to hit the market in force by the end of November, which will be in time for the Christmas rush. While its gaming performance is not the hottest out there, it is more than adequate for the majority of games currently out. This should perform better than older GeForce 4 Ti series of cards, as well as many in the GeForce FX range. Once the user decides to overclock this product, then we should see some nice results (especially if the other quad can be activated). This could be a true project card for those not wanting to spend anymore money than they have to. Pushing SM 3.0 to this price point is also a very good move by NVIDIA, as developers will now be more comfortable in placing SM 3.0 code into their products. Pushing this technology down into this price range will increase the value of the entire lineup of products. We have seen that well coded SM 3.0 applications can show a significant increase in overall performance. While SM 3.0 is not the panacea that NVIDIA would want us to believe it is, it is the future and ATI will be releasing SM 3.0 parts this next Spring. To get the jump on ATI with this specification with products from the $129 to $600 level is a significant development for NVIDIA. With all these wonderful new products hitting us already, it looks to be a great buying season this winter! Here are a few previews: October 8, 2004 D-Link High Speed Home Network - Josh D-Link was kind enough to send me a group of products that constitute the majority of what a "high speed home network" should be. This comprehensive series of products will enable the average user to network their home both with Gigabit-Ethernet as well as 108 mbps wireless networking. Now that home networking is becoming more and more common, D-Link is hoping to open the eyes of many users to the infinite possibilities that a strong and flexible home network can provide. X-box Live!, HTPC's, MP3 Jukeboxes, and hundreds of other applications can benefit from a robust and fast home network. In this article I try to show the advantages of such a setup, as well as the overall speed that it can provide. Here is a quote:
You can find the entire review here. October 4, 2004 R480 and NV48 News - Josh I admit, I was wrong. I fully did not expect either ATI nor NVIDIA to produce a new, high end card this year. I was fully expecting both to keep pumping out their X800 XT's and GeForce 6800 GT/Ultra's as the top end cards for some time yet (at least until Spring of 2005). This appears to be partially wrong though! ATI recently taped out the R480, which is the PCI-E follow-up to the Radeon X800 XT/PE products. We can expect a few tweaks here and there with this design over the current products, but there are also a couple of wrenches thrown into the mix... First off these products appear to be based on the 110 nm process at TSMC. This means that clockspeed will probably not match the X800 XT PE (530 MHz), but there could be a greater IPC due to changes with the design. Since ATI can get more transistors packed into the same area as the older chip, then we can probably expect a small performance increase due to the use of more transistors for rendering functions. We can also expect a few more features thrown into the mix, but what these are remains to be seen. Since this tapeout occurred about two weeks ago, we can expect at least 120 days from initial tapeout to shipping product. So, this leads to some interesting questions about what ATI will want to do... Since this product will not be available until late December at the earliest, would it behoove ATI to launch it right before the Holiday Season? I wouldn't expect so, since it would cannibalize sales of many of their current high end products (such as the X800 Pro and X800 XT/PE series). While Comdex was a time where many products were launched, we no longer have Comdex in mid-November! So will we see the R480 this year? I seriously do not think so. One area that is probably holding ATI back is that their current R420/R423 chips are made on TSMC's 130 nm Low-K process. ATI has invested a lot of time and money into getting these products to market, and the clock speeds that the Low-K enables allow ATI's products to run very fast against NVIDIA's latest and greatest. While ATI would save some money going to TSMC's 110 nm process with these chips, they will lose their clockspeed advantage, as well as quite a bit of money transferring the R420/423 design to this process. NVIDIA is in a slightly different situation as of this moment. As you know, the NV40 and NV45 products are produced by IBM on their 130 nm FSG process. These chips are large, and they do not show the clockspeed advantages that the X800 parts do from ATI. Now, I have not heard whether NVIDIA has actually taped out the NV48, but I would suspect that they may have done so quite a while ago. Hints of NV48 have already been put in the latest leaked Forceware drivers, so this hints strongly that a part may actually be in initial testing at NVIDIA, or that actual product will soon be available for testing. This gives NVIDIA a bit of a leg up in quite a few different areas. First off NVIDIA has shown that they can design a NV4x part on TSMC's 110 nm process, and these can run fast. The NV43 (GeForce 6600 series) can run at 500 MHz with ease, and with only standard cooling. While this is a 120 + million transistor part, we can safely assume that a significantly larger part can be produced at clockspeeds from 350 MHz up to 450 MHz. It has been no secret that NVIDIA has not been terribly impressed with IBM's performance in the fabrication department, and the paucity of high speed NV40 parts on the market at this time reflects this. GeForce 6800 Ultra parts are in high demand (though their supply is admittedly greater to the end user than the Radeon X800 XT PE parts), and look to continue that way. The NV48 could help eliminate that particular problem, and NVIDIA might do that soon. By going to a NV48 part, NVIDIA hits a couple of birds with one stone. The first is the massive die size that the current NV40 has. By going to the 110 nm process, this die size can be decreased by a significant amount, so there will be more die per wafer. Also, TSMC looks to have very impressive yields for this process, as evidenced by the NV43 and RV410 parts that will soon hit the market. Also, TSMC could very well have better speed bins than IBM. This points to NVIDIA wanting to release the NV48 as soon as possible for these following reasons: more product due to better yields/dice per wafer, potentially faster clockspeeds, and trumping ATI before the holiday season. I would seriously expect NVIDIA to release the NV48 in early November (though less likely, a late October date to get a jump on the season). The NV48 will probably have a few tweaks, but nothing significant. The largest "tweaks" would be native PCI-E support, slightly faster clock speeds, and some architectural changes (such as a working video encoder/decoder). A more possible and extreme change would be a redesign of the shader pipeline that would allow 2 shader ops PLUS a texture op per clock. As you may remember, the current NV40 can either do 2 shader ops OR a shader op and texture op per clock. ATI on the other hand can do 2 shader ops and a texture up per clock. If NVIDIA can design this in without exploding the transistor budget, then the NV48 could have a significant boost in performance in shader and texture heavy applications. If NVIDIA can get out significant quantities of both the GeForce 6600 as well as the NV48, then they may have a heavy advantage going into the Holiday Season over its rival, ATI. We have already seen GeForce 6600 GT parts in the wild (albeit not many), but in the next few weeks we can expect to see more products from more providers. By the beginning of November, we should see good availability of the 6600 series in both retail and OEM, and only limited availability of ATI's X700 series. By the end of November I would expect X700's to be very well represented in the market. As for the high end, it seems that NVIDIA will have a refresh before Christmas, while ATI will have to do their refresh after Christmas. I am very unsure how ATI will spin this one, as I doubt that this refresh will be as fast as the current X800 XT PE. The refresh will be cheaper to produce though, and we will probably see greater availability of products based on this chip. While many have berated NVIDIA for not using TSMC's 130 nm Low-K process, it now appears that NVIDIA's approach may in fact be a bit more logical in terms of their reasoning. By going with a less expensive 130 nm FSG process over a more expensive Low-K, the transition to 110 nm FSG will improve both yields and performance (by allowing more transistors), and allow a "higher end" part to be produced over the previous generation. With ATI using Low-K for their current high end, and then transitioning their high end to 110 nm FSG, then they will give up clockspeed. Initial appearances will show NVIDIA as moving forward, while ATI will just be taking a side step (though a more profitable step, as well as increasing availability of high end parts). This will be a very curious fall... News of Interest - Josh The Tech-Report takes a 90 nm Athlon 64 3500+ and connects the entire system to a watt meter to see what the actual power usages are for a system of this nature. They compare it to a 130 nm Athlon 64 3500+ and a Intel Prescott 3.6 GHz. The results are actually quite interesting, and it is worth a read! Essentially the 90 nm Athlon 64 is consuming far less power than the Intel product, and surprisingly enough it is considerably lower in consumption than its 130 nm forebear. From initial indications, AMD's 90 nm process is coming along quite well. They have the power consumption under control (seemingly), now they are probably trying to work on speed increases. If you are familiar with process technology, you should know that there are different "mixes" that a company can use (eg. low power consumption vs. high clock speed). With Intel spinning its wheels now with their latest Prescott processor, AMD has had the chance to really work on their 90 nm process and get it running very solidly before trying to push the clockspeed envelope. Of course this is definitely an "apples and oranges" situation mainly due to the overall designs behind the Athlon 64 and Prescott products. Because AMD has not designed a product that stresses high clock speed, it does not have the transistor leakage that Intel faces. I would bet that Intel's 90 nm process is far more mature, and a lot higher performance than AMD's, but the Prescott design is just so power hungry that it has many negative features when it comes to power consumption and heat production. Anyway, mosey on over to the Tech Report and take a look at Scott's article. Speaking of Athlon 64s, Anand and the gang have taken a very in depth look at memory performance on these processors. High end memory such as Geil, OCZ, Crucial, G-Skill, and PQI. This is somewhat of an eye opener, and a very good read to boot. If you are looking to buy into an Athlon 64 system, this is an invaluable resource to figure out what kind of memory you should be getting! Hexus has a review of the Asus AX800XT/2DT PCI-E video card. This of course is based on the ATI Radeon X800 XT. These cards should be in better supply as compared to the X800 XT PE, which are essentially non-existent in the retail world. Now that AMD PCI-E motherboards are on the horizon, we should start to see a lot more PCI-E products hit retail. Intel is also doing a nice job ramping up their PCI-E products, so by Q4 of this year, for new computers, PCI-E should take a good portion of the market. Hardware Pacers takes a good gander at a headphone amplifier from HeadRoom Corporation. This portable little number should increase the overall quality and power of the sound from a portable device (such as an iPod and its ilk). This is also a great idea for those wanting to use higher end products like the Grado cans instead of the included ear buds that many portable players feature. Going on about iPods, The Tech Zone reviews the 4th generation Apple iPod. Apple has certainly saved their financial bacon with the iPod and iMusic, and they are seemingly trying to keep up with the competition for once by releasing updated products. That is all the time I have now for review links, check back later for some more news!
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