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November 16, 2004 Half Life 2 and GeForce 6600 GT AGP Day - Josh Half Life 2 is upon us. Expect to see many people absent from posting anything on the web, showing up for their jobs, not going to the bank to make deposits, etc. I stayed up til 1am MST to see what the fus was about, and after a quick unlocking of the HL2 content, I quickly delved into the game. I am very, very impressed. The attention to detail in the levels I have played are phenomenal, and I can see why Valve took as long as they did with this. I am not unhappy with Gabe about the whole September 30, 2003 comment, as the game would not have run as nicely as it does now with the latest hardware. The ability to immerse the player fully into the game is also very impressive, and I can see how some people are still probably up trying to finish the game even though it was only released last night. I have only played it for about an hour, so my experiences may be limited. I do know what I like though, and so far I really like HL2. NVIDIA officially released the GeForce 6600 GT AGP today. If you didn't already know, the original 6600 GT was a PCI-Express native chip, so to get it to work with AGP NVIDIA had to implement its HSI (High Speed Interconnect) chip. The HSI is a very solid piece of engineering, and with the battery of tests thrown at HSI enabled products, it has been shown that it essentially matches a pure PCI-E native solution. So getting a card with a HSI chip on it is not a bad thing at all! The initial specification calls for the same 500 MHz core clock, but the memory clock has been reduced to 450 MHz. Many speculate that this memory is slightly cheaper than the GDDR-3 that the PCI-E version has, so it offsets the extra cost of the HSI chip. The GeForce 6600 GT (NV43) seems to be a very well engineered chip, and in most benchmarks it beats up on the ATI X700 XT (even though the X700 has double the vertex shaders as the 6600 GT). The 6600 GT does clock about 30 MHz higher than the X700, but that small amount of speed shouldn't have a huge overall effect on performance. I have heard rumors that ATI has had some very large problems with getting enough X800 and X700 parts to market, but apparently in the case of the X700 ATI has done a respin on the chip, and we can expect better quantities (and higher overclocked speeds) out of that line. I was initially thinking that I would actually get one of these cards to test, but due to a copy/paste error in an email, I was sorely mistaken. Here are a couple of previews that will whet your whistle: Again, the 6600 GT AGP looks to be a great card for $200. If a user has an older GeForce FX or Radeon 9600 and below video card, this should deserve more than a second look! Intel i925XE Redux - MUST READ!!! - Josh Well, we thought we saw it all when the initial i925XE reviews were let out of the bag, but it seems that there are a few more surprises for those who dig a little deeper. MS from Lost Circuits takes a VERY in depth look at this product, as well as try a couple of tricks that other reviewers failed to implement into their evaluations. Definitely a great read for those wanting to find out as much as they can about the LGA-775 products from Intel. You can find the entire review here. BFG Trade-in Deal - BARGAIN - Josh I forgot to mention this a couple of days ago, but if you go and buy a BFG GeForce 6800 OC from Chumbo.com then you can send your old (or any old) working video card back to BFG for a $40 rebate. If you send in a BFG branded working video card, then you can get a whooping $60 back direct from BFG. Not a bad deal, especially considering a user will get the nice cooling unit of the BFG products, not to mention the full version of Far Cry. So, for $239 (if you have a old BFG card to send in), you can get a very solid card for not a whole lot of scratch. Also, I must mention that BFG officially launched its 6600 GT series of products today, so we can expect to see both AGP and PCI-E GeForce 6600 products on the shelves very soon now! Of course the PCI-E version is SLI Ready. November 10, 2004 NVIDIA SLI Certification- Josh I was approached by NVIDIA some time ago about writing an article on their new SLI certification program. I initially thought "what a dry subject to write about". I decided to at least take a look at the material behind it, and I slowly became intrigued about the possible ramifications that such a program would entail. SLI is not a simple technology to implement, and if it is done in a careless manner the user backlash from parts that only "kinda" work in SLI would be massive. To make sure that shoddy craftsmanship in both individual products and in fully built systems would not rear its ugly head, NVIDIA implemented a new certification process that will protect the customer from getting products that do not work as advertised. When I spoke with NVIDIA about this, some other very interesting aspects of SLI came up, as well as where the certification process needs to go. Here is a quote:
If you are the least bit curious about SLI, or if you are planning on getting SLI as soon as it is available, you really should read this quick article! November 5, 2004 Week in Review - Josh What an interesting week this has been! Lets go over some of the majors first... The State of 3D article was well received, and I think I made very few factual errors. This of course has generated some discussion, and I have learned quite a few new and interesting things. First off it appears as if the R420 and R423 chips from ATI are hardly being produced anymore. Apparently yields were pretty bad, and there were very few fully working cores that would achieve stability with all four quads at 525 MHz. So, it looks as if ATI is shutting down production on those cores, and moving onto some redesigned cores that will run on both the 130 nm Low-K and 110 nm lines at TSMC. The 130 Low-K's will of course be the high end X800 XT's and PE's (which received a major respin to achieve better yields and speed bins), while the 110 nm chips will exist between the X800 Pro level and the X800 XT. No official card has been introduced of course, but we should start hearing about these in December. Until then, X800's of any flavor may be very scarce (not even major OEM's are receiving many of them). It also appears as though the Xenon chip from ATI (which will power the X-Box 2) has been taped out on TSMC's 90 nm process. No word on if test chips are back from the fab, but essentially all work is complete on it. Late Spring of 05 looks to be the time when ATI will release the R520 (SM 3.0 next gen part from ATI). Few things are known about that one as of yet, but it also looks to be produced on TSMC's 90 nm process. The X700's are starting to hit the market in force, and they will be the PCI-E midrange product of choice for ATI for a long time to come. This isn't a bad thing as the X700 is a very high performing product, and well worth the money. NVIDIA's future looks a wee bit different... and the naming scheme is somewhat confusing. It seems that the Spring 05 high end part will be the NV47, which will feature more than 4 quads of pixel pipelines (some are thinking upwards of 24 pixel pipelines and an unknown number of vertex shaders). There is also some confusion if it will run on TSMC's 110 nm process or the 90 nm process that should be available by that time. The NV50 looks to be a Fall 2005 product, and that will definitely be produced on the 90 nm process. There is also some confusion if NVIDIA will continue to work with IBM, as its 90 nm process has been running since December 2003. The NV48 on the other hand is a NV40 PCI-E native redesign that looks to be produced on TSMC's 110 nm process. This will also probably feature a "fixed" video decoding/encoding engine (something that wasn't quite up to par on the NV40 chip). This should be available shortly after the Holiday Season (yes, it is confusing that the NV48 will hit the market before the NV47). The GeForce 6600 GT AGP version should be out this month, and there should be good availability by the end of November. This would be a very good upgrade part for those of us with AGP slots and not a whole lot of scratch in the pocket. Availability of GeForce 6800 GT and Ultra products have been steadily improving, and by the end of November quite a few products based on these parts will be sitting on shelves for easy purchase. Intel released its i925XE chipset featuring the 1066 FSB. Unfortunately, there will only be two CPU's that look to run on this platform in the next year. The first one is the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46 GHz processor based on the Gallatin core (Northwood + 2 MB L3 cache), and the next will be a 3.66 GHz P4 EE that will be released sometime next Spring (though that core will probably be based on the high cache Prescott design). Overall the results are a mixed bag (which explains why Intel released the NDA on a Sunday afternoon). Most reviewers found about a 3% gain in performance over the regular i925X with a 3.6 GHz Prescott. Not exactly earthshaking. Intel looks to also release a 3.8 GHz processor in the middle of this month, but again not much is being said about it. AMD is certainly keeping Intel jumping, and Intel has been forced into a bad situation by their roadmap (which they have had to change radically in response to the Athlon 64 and Opteron). Still, Intel should never be discounted as a 2nd rate processor manufacturer. They have always helped to push the industry, and their competition with AMD has been fierce. While the Athlon 64 parts are giving Intel fits, the Opteron is their biggest worry. The ability to scale the Opteron to 8 processors, and have massive increases in performance due to the Opteron's unique architecture, is making Intel sweat very badly in its Xeon division. While Opteron doesn't compete with the Itanium, it is certainly becoming the premier processor for the 2P, 4P, and 8P x86 market. Add to that the ability to run a 64 bit OS natively, and address many, many gigabytes of physical memory, you can see why Intel is pretty nervous about AMD grabbing marketshare in this lucrative area. Next week should be a busy week here, as we have articles coming in from all sides. Scott has promised something that will "blow your socks off", but take that one with a grain of salt! Keith has a set of Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers that he is nearly finished reviewing, so we will see that soon as well. I have about 4 projects that I am wrapping up, and all of those are coming up within the next 3 weeks. In the meantime, here are some reviews of interest: MS at Lost Circuits takes a look at the X800 XT PCI-E card from Sapphire. This little number of course performs quite well, but with the lack of available X800 XT parts hitting the market, these cards are very expensive and in high demand. Still, and interesting read with MS's always unique take on all things technical. 3DXtreme takes a gander at Soltek's LS-K8TPro-939, which is based on VIA's K8T800 Pro chipset. It has all the bells and whistles that are expected on an enthusiast level board, and it apparently performs as well as the current leaders in the market, not to mention a very solid overclocking ability. The purple and black motif is particularly striking! Madshrimps is having a PC3200 Low Latency 1 GB giveaway, featuring the Patriot 1 GB DIMMS. These look to be pretty solid, and plus... they would be free if you were lucky enough to win! Hardavenue reviews the Asus WL-HDD 2.5 wireless access point. This is a very, very small access point that is no larger than a standard hard drive. For those looking for a solid part with a very low profile, the Asus product certainly deserves a good look. The Tech-Report, the bastion of liberal thinking (basing this off of their Bush/Kerry poll) in the tech universe, has taken the Pentium 4 520 (2.8 GHz Prescott) and overclocks it for every penny it has (700+ MHz worth). This inexpensive processor certainly gives its older sibblings a run for their money, especially considering that this overclock was accomplished with air cooling. Designtechnica was given the Compaq GX5000Z system for review, and this is a major step for Compaq in the gaming world. Not only does Compaq deliver a very solid gaming platform, but it is also based on a lot of off the shelf enthusiast parts, so nothing in this case is proprietary to Compaq (unlike the Dell enthusiast machines...). A very nifty read, and a good branching out for Compaq! October 28, 2004 The State of 3D- October 2004 - Josh Well, it is that time again to introduce the latest State of 3D article for your reading pleasure. At times in the past the fallout from such articles was not pleasant to behold, but I believe that I really nailed it this time! Some good information here, as well as some explanations why the industry is acting as it is. Some very interesting things lay on the horizon, both in terms of actual products and technical hurdles to overcome. While one cannot summarize an entire, complex industry in one article, I hope to shed a little bit of light on some of the issues we are facing, as well as the current situation we are sitting in. Here is a quick quote:
You can read the entire article here. October 26, 2004 SoundStorm, AMD's 90 nm Strained Silicon, and Other News - Josh When the nForce 4 was announced recently, many in the enthusiast community were shocked to not see the fabled SoundStorm 2 technology integrated into it. SoundStorm was first seen in the original nForce chipset, but it reached fame with the release of the nForce 2. Here was an audio technology that rivaled what Creative had with the Audigy, and the very fact that it was a high quality solution already integrated into the motherboard made it a very popular feature with enthusiasts. NVIDIA supported SoundStorm very well in terms of software, and they continue to make improvements to the interface and application support. Rumors of SoundStorm 2 surfaced early this year, and many were expecting it to be integrated into the nForce 3 products. Of course the nForce 3 was released without SoundStorm, but then users started to hear rumors of the nForce 4, and they though that it would of course have SoundStorm 2 integrated into it. Disappointment yet again reared its ugly head. The public outcry was very intense at the lack of SoundStorm technology for the Athlon 64 architecture, and The Inquirer posted dozens of emails from incensed users who bemoaned the lack of SoundStorm in the latest nForce product. This outcry elicited a response from NVIDIA's Drew Henry that ignited a new firestorm of speculation and hope for those enamored with the SoundStorm technology. You can read Drew's response to The Inquirer here. The Cliff's Notes version of this basically runs this way- do not abandon hope, for SoundStorm will see the light of day in a future product. This is entirely contra positive from what I was told while writing up the nForce 4 Preview. "SoundStorm is dead," said Bryan Del Rizzo. When pushed further Bryan simply stated that the entire concept of SoundStorm was incredibly unattractive to motherboard manufacturers, and since their non-SoundStorm based nForce products where never criticized in reviews for the lack of that functionality, they thought that it was a superfluous feature that only added cost to a design. Nevermind that the Asus A7N8X Deluxe or the Abit NF7-S were great sellers, or that the enthusiast backing of SoundStorm was bordering on rabid, the manufacturers did not find it a compelling feature as compared to the less expensive VIA chipsets that did not contain such functionality. In light of this, I find that I do not believe Drew and his comments about "SoundStorm will be integrated into a future product". My personal belief, and this is not based on any other information that I have, is that the SoundStorm engineers have been moved to other projects and we will not see another SoundStorm product based on the technology we currently see in the nForce 2 chipset. This does not mean that future NVIDIA chipsets will not feature more advanced audio functionality than what is currently available, as I am certain Azalia will eventually come to the Athlon 64 market. What I am saying is that SoundStorm as we know it is essentially gone and will never be seen again. This means no more circuitry will be used to give hardware acceleration to 2D and 3D streams, Dolby Digital Encoding will be the domain of the nForce 2, and future implementations will increasingly rely on the CPU's extra cycles to achieve advanced sound routines. 24 bit sound will eventually come to the platform, as that is already a feature of Azalia, as well as the Dolby Pro Logic functionality. NVIDIA may in fact label this technology as "SoundStorm", but it will have very little in common with its predecessor. Again, this is only my opinion based on what has been told to me. I could be entirely off base here, and NVIDIA is in fact working on a true SoundStorm 2 product that will go into a next generation chipset, as well as a standalone product that will be one of the first soundcards to run on the PCI-E bus (which is the only thing with enough bandwidth to feed the SoundStorm hardware and Dolby Digital Encoder). I wouldn't hold my breath though... AMD's 90 nm Strained Products AMD let leak some months ago that they were going to use some strained silicon features in upcoming products. The first announced product that does feature this technology is the Athlon FX-55, which is their recently released 2.6 GHz Athlon 64 processor made on the 130 nm SOI process. There are several ways to strain silicon, and it appears that AMD is currently only using the "stretched" feature. Compression is not yet used (something that Intel has had very good success with), but it is something that AMD will eventually integrate into their design. What many were wondering is if strained features were integrated into AMD's latest 90 nm cores? While the 130 nm line was the first to receive the strained treatment, I have just received word that pretty much all Athlon 64 starts now feature strained silicon. This includes both the 130 nm and 90 nm lines. While the initial 90 nm Athlon 64's did not have strained silicon, it wouldn't make much sense for AMD to integrate strained in only certain wafer starts and not in others. The fab business just doesn't like to work that way. It can be assumed that all Athlon 64 processors by Q4 will have strained features, and these include both 130 nm and 90 nm product lines. Eventually more strained features will be added to the design mix, as both stretching and compressing silicon leads to better performing and lower power parts. AMD takes advancements like these one step at a time. Unlike Intel, which utilized a series of strained design features in the Prescott processor on the 90 nm node, AMD has integrated a single strained feature in its current lineup. Now that AMD apparently has this wrinkle down, we can expect to see more strained features to be integrated in the future. Most likely the 2.6 GHz and 2.8 GHz 90 nm parts expected in January will only feature stretched silicon, but products after that point will probably utilize more strained features. From all indications, AMD's 90 nm SOI process is holding up very well, and the overall design of the Athlon 64 has contributed to the success of their 90 nm process (AMD didn't have to push transistor speed to such a degree as Intel did with the Prescott to achieve good performance). AMD definitely has a smoother road ahead of them as compared to Intel. With the Prescott Intel threw a whole slew of technologies into the design and manufacturing of that product, and they essentially ran out of tricks to get it to go faster and consume less power. Intel has obviously seen this dead end, and have cancelled the 4 GHz Pentium 4. It is also very uncertain if Intel will release a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4. The new strategy for Intel apparently relies on other architectural enhancements such as 2 MB of L2 cache, higher FSB speeds, and eventual dual core processors. AMD has been able to match Intel's parts until this point with 130 nm products, and only now have they started to release 90 nm parts that reach 2.4 GHz. AMD is still ramping up performance on their 90 nm line, and they have yet to integrate many of the performance features that Intel's 90 nm process currently possesses. Compressed strained silicon is the next step, and there are many features left to integrate. The first 90 nm products off of AMD's line were focused on good yields and low power consumption. This allowed AMD to have good initial yields and to sell these products for revenue (as compared to trying to achieve high speed at the expense of poor yields). This gave AMD engineers a chance to work the kinks out of their 90 nm process without the added worry of squeezing every ounce of performance from the new process. We can perhaps get a good feeling where AMD is heading in terms of clock speeds for the Athlon 64 on 90 nm. If we look at the current range of 130 nm products, we see the initial speed of 2.0 GHz with the 3200+ released one year ago. The current speed champ for the 130 nm process runs at 2.6 GHz (the FX-55). We can safely assume that AMD will eventually reach 3 GHz with 90 nm products, and by that time we will also see the introduction of the desktop dual core processor. With their current roadmap, AMD is not relying on brute clockspeed to achieve their performance goals. While manufacturing is always a primary concern in processor design, AMD has done its best to limit the negative effects that a poorly performing process might entail. Luckily for AMD their 90 nm process appears robust, and they can continue to tweak Intel's nose with faster and more competent products. AMD is in an envious situation at the moment. Not only do they have one of the fastest desktop processors in the world, but they are steadily increasing their 90 nm output. This gives AMD the ability to produce more chips than they have previously, and also allows them to address a larger percentage of the market. With the original 130 nm Athlon 64 design, AMD could only theoretically supply around 20% of the market with all of their manufacturing lines maxed out. With 90 nm and the latest designs, AMD is in a position where they could theoretically address up to 28% of the market. If AMD continues to keep one step ahead of Intel, then by Q2 of 2005 they could acquire around 23% of the market (I believe their current marketshare is around 18%). From the roadmaps I have seen of Intel and AMD, AMD should continue to stay one small step ahead of Intel. From a desktop application and gaming perspective, AMD certainly holds the performance crown. Intel still holds the performance lead in many audio and video encoding applications. Now that AMD will have PCI-E based motherboards on the market shortly, the feature race will tighten even more. As AMD scales the Athlon 64 in clockspeed, then the encoding advantage that Intel holds will start to diminish. Once both companies have their dual core products on the market, then things will probably get mixed up again and we will see a huge shift in relative performance between the two. Links of the Day John Malley from BFG let me know that they have a smoking deal on the BFG 6800 bundled with Far Cry at Best Buy. From today through Saturday, Best Buy is offering a $50 rebate on the BFG 6800 at the register. So if you were looking to get a 6800 anytime soon, this is a great deal! Regular price is $299, which turns into $249 at the register. Add to that the bundled Far Cry game, it it becomes a very tempting proposition! This is also the OC version, with the fancy heatsink! Hexus takes a good, long look at ATI's X700 XT and X700 Pro. While the X700 XT is not available yet, I have seen the X700 Pro for sale with a distributor of mine. These are incredibly competent products which brings excellent performance to the $200 price point (not to mention PCI-E support). Speaking of the X700 products, Dave from Beyond 3D has written a VERY thorough review on both the XT and Pro parts. This massive (30+ pages) review takes a good look at nearly all the performance characteristics of these parts, as well as a good breakdown of the technology behind it. If you have a spare 20 minutes, this is well worth the time to read. The Tech Zone takes a good look at one of the fastest SATA drives out there, the Western Digital WD360. This little number spins at 10,000 RPM and has 8 MB of cache onboard. I know of many people with two of these drives paired in a RAID 0 configuration, and it simply smokes. [H]ard|OCP (do you know how annoying it is to type it that way?) takes $1500 and shows you how to spend it when building a system from scratch. Take a quick trip with the [H] to Newegg and build the system of your dreams, all on a fair budget. A good read for those of you who might have questions on what to buy and why to buy it. OCModShop tells us of their PCI-Express article, which covers what is currently known, as well as what the future may bring for this industry standard. Goodbye NGIO, hello PCI-E! While this is slightly older news, Abit has finally offered a new NVIDIA based motherboard with their nForce 3 250Gb powered NF8. This little number is a bit late to market, but it marks the first Athlon 64 motherboard from Abit that features a NVIDIA chipset. Due to some negative fallout after the NV30 release, Abit decided to take a step away from NVIDIA and go with ATI and VIA products. It seems that all bridges are mended now and Abit will once again feature products from NVIDIA. It is as of yet unknown if Abit will again re-introduce NVIDIA based video cards, but they at least will support motherboard chipsets. Expect to see a nForce 4 based product from Abit soon!
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