Cheat the Cheaters, ATi Interview, X-Arcade Controller and More
Good morning everyone :) Well, it is holiday time up here in Canada; the so called "May Two-Four" weekend (you can guess what activities occur during this time). Though I was unable to go away camping as I have in the past, I think it worked out for the best. Last night we got pounded with a torrential thunderstorm that would diffidently have put a damper on spending the night outdoors ;) Nevertheless, I am home warm and dry, and I have a pile of news for you...
Cheating the Cheaters@ HardOCP
"It has been a while since we editorialized at length, particularly where it concerns the video card industry, but it is that time again. We changed our video card "review" format in the last year and we did this without much notice and with little explanation for doing so on the pages of HardOCP. Last week when we once again started seeing headlines, stories, and multi-page forum threads on the latest batch of video card "cheating", it got me thinking on just where HardOCP is on this issue and about our responsibility to our readers."
Tech Report interviews ATI's David Nalasco
"THE INTRODUCTION OF ATI's Radeon X800 series completed a one-two punch of killer developments for graphics chips, as ATI countered NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 with its own 16-pipe monster capable of astonishing performance. These new chips are very evenly matched in terms of performance, so we've interrogated ATI's David Nalasco about places where they differ: shader models, OpenGL performance, antialiasing methods, and the cards themselves. We've also discussed some of the questions raised by the controversial discovery of ATI's adaptive trilinear filtering algorithm. Read on for an in-depth discussion about the hottest graphics issues of the day. "
"X-Arcade has done a great job at delivering a high quality controller that performs well. It is not a controller that can play every game you have on your PC or gaming console, but it does a superb job at what X-Arcade has intended it to do. The arcade style joysticks and buttons make the experience that much more satisfying."
"It has been awhile since we last heard from Swiftech, but by the looks of it, they have been busy with the design and engineering that goes into their new waterblock, the MCW6000. ClubOC has always tried to deliver influential, and real world reviews of water cooling products, and if we haven't said it before we'll have to mention once again that its always a pleasure to review products from Swiftech. They are one of the best in the design and manufacturing of cooling products. Of course our opinion of Swiftech products hasn't been without competition from the likes of Danger Den, but by the looks of it, Swiftech beat them to the plate in being the first to offer a new waterblock, that so far in testing, has been one of the first in eliminating the wide temperature threshold of a CPU going from idle to load."
"Each time a new generation of video cards is released; the last generation that had the title gets a nice price drop and offers the normal users affordable upgrades. HTPCnews takes a look at two such cards from Celestica, the 9800xt and the 9600xt Gold Editions, and runs them through the ropes of HTPC use. Included are benchmarks based on gaming at HDTV resolutions (1080i and 720p) and much more. It just goes to show how powerful of a HTPC / Video Card you'll need for some ultra-high res HDTV gaming, but oh my does it look so good."
"Today at GamePC, we've taken a look at the first 3Ware Escalade series Serial ATA/150 RAID controller to be sold under their new AMCC branding. The new 9500S-4LP is a quad-channel hardware RAID controller which supports RAID-5/50, has 128MB of onboard cache memory, and is connected via 64-bit PCI. We compare the new controller to 3Ware's older 8500-series, and standard, everyday 32-bit RAID controllers on the market with a few Western Digital Raptor hard disks."
"Another big facet of GDDR3 is the addition of on-die termination. This helps the RAM to reach higher clock speeds as well as benefiting board manufacturers, as the fact that they no longer need to worry about termination resistor packs and other power supply circuitry relating to the RAM can save them reduce the component count and as a result both complexity of the board and cost."
That is it for the moment my friends, I will catch you back here in a little while - Cheers
