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.

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Regular readers of the mag will be well aware of our Cooler Master-sponsored photo competition: the aim is simple, just take your copy of Custom PC with you on your travels, snap a pic and send it to us (letters [at] custompc [dot] co [dot] uk) and you can win a Cooler Master PSU. We’re always surprised by just how cool the entries are that we get for this competition - we’ve had photos taken by divers underwater, shots from the Antarctic, pictures of tanks from Iraq and Afghanistan, and countries from Burma to Chile. All the shots are on our Flickr account. I particularly like this one, taken by Berkant Aydin in the Maldives.

Makes me want a holiday

Here we are again on the cusp of another NDA lift (see here for past dramas) - check the Custom PC site tomorrow from 2pm and we’ll have news and reviews for you. More I can’t say of course (did I mention the NDA?), but I don’t think a sneak peek is out of the question…

UPDATE: The cat has leapt from the bag. Well done if you guessed GeForce 9800 GX2. The review is online now.

One of Custom PC’s games reviewers, Dan Emery, also works for the BBC, producing news stories for BBC Radio 5 Live. This means that as well as arriving in the labs full of salacious, off-the-record gossip, he’s also prone to calling up and asking other members of the team to go on the radio and comment about news stories that involve computers. This is often last minute, and often quite… let’s say, tangential, to the concerns of Custom PC. It’s not often that national radio talks about modding and overclocking.

However, Dan’s colleague Adam recently gave me a call and said Radio 5 were putting together a piece on PC and console gaming, as part of a segment for the Up All Night Show - Up All Night is, as the name suggests, a show for nighthawks that goes out from 1 till 5am. Now PC and console gaming happens to be right up our street, so last Thursday evening I found myself heading to White City to the BBC.

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* 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…

A frequently asked question, to which the answers can be found in this helpful forum thread, which I regularly update. Subscribers get their issues the Saturday or Monday before the Thursday newsstand release. Yet another reason to subscribe

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!

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.

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