Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...In the video studio
Alex Watson
Clive, Phil and Orestis have spent most of this afternoon in Dennis’ new video studio. The company spent the first few months of the year building it (at a cost of about £50,000 when you factor in the cameras and lights), and this was the first time we’ve had the chance to use it - previous videos such as our GeForce 9800 GX2 teardown were shot in glamorous conference rooms elsewhere in the building. The studio looks great - it has an ‘infinity wall’, so the join between floor and back wall is curved so that it appears invisible, a green screen curtain, and because it has a white floor, you have to wear special bootees over your shoes (shots of these later in the post). As well as a nice room we’ve also got some professional camera men and editors, too. And what, you might ask, were we filming? As you can see from the shot above, size comparisons of graphics cards…. Since I’m under NDA until Monday the 16th, I can’t tell you what the one in the middle is, but you can expect benchmarks aplenty as well as us taking it to pieces.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
Loading ...Another NDA: 2pm once again
Alex Watson
Nope, it’s not an April fool. A company really is launching a new product today… Check back later for the full story 
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
Loading ...Introducing the GeForce 9-series - but why now?
Alex Watson
And the review mentioned in my last teaser post is now up - presenting our review of Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT. Hard to judge, this one - in and of itself, it offers decent performance in newer games, but does the world really need another sub £200 Nvidia graphics card? This is the question that myself, and a lot of other hardware journalists are struggling with. Over at Bit-Tech, Tim comes to much the same conclusion as we did: it all depends on the price. The 256MB and 512MB GeForce 8800 GT are, at £125 and £150 or so respectively, extremely good choices. The 9600 GT, currently priced in between them, and performing in between them too, is also a good choice, but it’s not really answering a question consumers have asked. It does make me wonder why Nvidia has unleashed the 9-series brand now. Tim and I chatted on MSN about this last night, and it wasn’t a question either of us could easily answer. Possible reasons we came up with:
* Perhaps the yields on the 8800 GTs aren’t good. Maybe it’s costing more to produce than Nvidia initially planned, and so they’d rather sell 9600 GTs.
* Maybe the sales of the 8800 GTs aren’t as good as Nvidia expected - since the performance of the GTs is excellent, we could perhaps attribute slack sales (if that’s the case) to the 8-series branding being a little old and tired. A new number would be a good way to kickstart sales.
* Fear of competition from AMD/ATi? Seems unlikely, I know, but given that the Radoen 3850 is available for under £100, perhaps Nvidia wanted to get its new mid-range GPU out there. Of course, the GT version of the 9600 is priced well over £100, but that will drop, and we should see plainer, lower speed 9600s soon enough.
* Something else I haven’t thought of… Any ideas, let me know. This one really has left me wondering…
Rated: 75% (4 votes)
Loading ...Motherboard quiz and issue 52 preview
Alex Watson
Issue 52 is back from the printers now, and should be with subscribers this week, and it’ll be at the newsagents on Thursday. The main cover feature is a big motherboards labs test, and that’s partnered by a feature I wrote which traces the way mobos and their BIOSes are developed. It’s a topic I’ve wanted to investigate for ages - while we run a lot of coverage of how boards are laid out, how they perform and how they overclock, we’ve never really gone behind the scenes and looked at the process and people which produce them. One of the interesting facts I uncovered while researching the feature and talking to the engineers in Taiwan was the cumulative length of all the circuit traces on a modern motherboard, and I thought this would make a good quiz question. Up for grabs to the lucky entrant who gets the answer right and is picked from the virtual hat my inbox is a World in Conflict hoody and CPC t-shirt…
So, what’s the combined length of all the circuit traces on the average modern motherboard (full size ATX)?
A) Just over 200 yards, the length of two football fields.
B) Just under a mile
C) Just over 50 metres, the length of an Olympic swimming pool
Drop me an e-mail with your answer - alex [–at–] custompc [dot] co [dot] uk. Good luck!
Rated: 93.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...On the product launch bandwagon
Alex Watson
Whenever I tell anyone I’m a journalist, the image that usually comes to their mind is of invesitgative types like Bernstein and Woodward bringing shady government conspiracies to justice - assuming, of course, that I’ve made a decent first impression, and that they don’t think of me as some kind of Fake Sheik. When I mention it’s IT journalism, the usual reaction is to instantly replace the glamour and grit of Watergate with its polar opposite: dull work in a darkened room, lit only by TFT screens. It’s not always like that, I say. No. Sometimes I get to go to other countries… and… sit in darkened rooms lit only by TFT screens.
There’s a fair bit of travel involved in being an IT journalist; having just got back from Nvidia’s Editor’s Day 2007, I thought I’d share a bit of behind the scenes info about how a big product launch and briefing works, and what it involves.
Rated: 100% (6 votes)
Loading ...On the possibility of 3-way SLI
Alex Watson
Transcript of an MSN Messenger conversation with a friend, also a PC hardware and gaming enthusiast, when I told him that I’m off to an Nvidia press event next week at which Nvidia may, or may not, introduce 3-way SLI.
Alex CPC: 3 way SLI?
The Unstoppable Ninja Of Doom: Can you do me a favour when you’re out there? Can you find who is responsible for 3-way SLI and hit them?
The Unstoppable Ninja Of Doom: Physically strike the man in the face.
The Unstoppable Ninja Of Doom: They deserve it. Take a picture of a motherboard inside a case, mine for instance, then ask him how he expects to fit three dual slot cards on that board, while leaving room for sound and other components. Then hit him again. Then ask him why SLI is still complete toss and ask why he felt he needed to add a third card and not fix the existing system.
Alex CPC: Sounds like quite a beating you’re asking me to dish out.
The Unstoppable Ninja Of Doom: Then point out that their single cards aren’t actually perfect either and slap him. You might want to take Vinnie Jones with you. In fact screw the reporting, don’t bother going, just pay Vinnie Jones to go instead and have him kick the crap out of the bloke behind triple SLI and menace the rest.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...One of those days
Alex Watson
Yesterday was one of those days. Just after lunch time, my hard disk began to make loud clicking noises and the kind of gurning normally associated with Russell Brand. Its time on this mortal coil was clearly coming to an end. Fortunately, it didn’t die outright, so I was able to make a complete back-up of it. Cloning the disk using freeware apps didn’t work - possibly, Gareth thinks, due to Vista’s anti-piracy techniques - but I was able to use Vista’s own Backup and Restore centre to save the complete contents of the drive to a new one, and restore my system from that. Very cool indeed, although the sheer volume of data involved meant it took a good few hours to finish.
The only slight complication with the ‘Back up computer’ option is that the disk you backup to can only be used for the purposes of retrieving the backup data - you can’t use it as your new system disk, so you actually need two spare drives to get your system running again. Apparently, this whole PC backup feature is only in Vista Ultimate, too. Needing two spare drives and Vista Ultimate isn’t a problem when you work on Custom PC, but I can’t see the wisdom in making such a killer feature so hard and pricey to use.
I wasn’t the only one suffering hardware problems yesterday, either - just before I went home, I went down to the lab, and saw this:
One of those days.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...If you’re going to San Francisco, speculate wildly before they make you sign an NDA
Alex Watson
The autumn is getting interesting - Intel has had its say at IDF, and now its Nvidia’s turn. At the end of the month I’m off to GeForce/nForce HQ in Santa Clara (near San Francisco, in Silicon Valley) to hear them talk about…. well, they won’t say. And before they do, I’ll have to sign an NDA. So before I do, how about a few guesses? Pictures of a new GeForce card with a single-slot cooler have been doing the rounds, but California is a long way to go for just a new mid-range card. It’s not cheap to ship journalists around the world (even though we do fly cattle class), so I’d expect more than just one new product. A successor to the 8-series (or at least a 7800 to 7900 style revision) seems a decent guess, and of course, compared to Intel, things have been quiet on the chipset front for Nvidia, so a successor to nForce 650/680i could be on the cards . Of course, it might be something far crazier than that but while AMD is capable of some real surprises, my feeling is that Nvidia is a far more focussed company…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...AMD news
Alex Watson
The info in the AMD conference call I referred to earlier will go live on the site when the NDA expires at 1AM UK time*. All I can say is that it confirms a rumour that’s currently doing the rounds.
* provided all the buttons I’ve pressed work.
Not yet rated
Loading ...Intel Developer Forum
Alex Watson
Coming back from a wedding yesterday, I happened to find myself driving past Stonehenge and since I’d never been before, decided to stop and take a look. The audio tour around the prehistoric stones was a pretty frustrating affair, full of ‘we don’t know how’ and ‘we don’t know why’ statements (which I can forgive given that what we can currently see on Salisbury Plain was constructed 4,500 years ago); that said, I did learn how neatly - perfectly, in fact - some aspects of Stonehenge’s design fit into marking/observing the passing of the seasons.
It’s funny to think, as I type into a device which would be as incomprehensible to the Stonehengers as the stones are to us 21st century types, how sensitive we still are to the seasons. It’s been a bit of a slow summer, but now that it’s Autumn, things are going to get a lot busier.
Kicking off the season is Intel, as it’s staging its Autumn Developer Forum in San Francisco this week. Ben is out in California to cover IDF for us this year so there’ll be plenty of stories on the site from him. Intel has already announced it’s buying Havok, so as well as the expected stuff about Penryn/45nm, there might be some surprises in store from the show. Meanwhile, back in Blighty, like the other half of a bitterly divorced couple, AMD can’t bear to see all this attention being focussed on its rival, so I’ve got a phone briefing this morning about — ah, already signed an NDA about it, but you can probably guess. Interesting times - but then Autumn always is.