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Reviews - Christmas came early :-(
If there's one downside to working on a mag, it's the Christmas issue. You see, I really love Christmas - I tend to become quite childish, bouncing around and grinning while playing 'Fairytale of New York'. However, Christmas comes early when you work on a magazine; in order to give you enough time to order all the great stuff we review, we started work on this issue in mid-October, while advanced planning started in the summer. Our annual mince pie test (see p69) saw us scoffing 11 mince pies on 2 November - so unseasonal that it made a few of us a little ill. Or was that the dodgy stollen?
Apart from dreams of snow, evenings spent with friends and family, and eating loads of chocolate while watching all the great telly, Christmas is the time when all the good kit is released. Nvidia makes a good claim for your cash with its new GeForce 8800 GT graphics card (see p42) - a £175 card that can comfortably play all our test games at 1,920 x 1,200 is fantastic. Or there's the new Intel CPU architecture to drool over - Penryn is here, it's on page 39, and it's awesome.
However, Intel and Nvidia have had it far too good for far too long, so the news of AMD's return is very welcome. I went to the briefing about its new products with Ben, who covers the new releases in Download this month (see p10). We'll also have another interesting AMD announcement on the website on 19 November.
Unfortunately, AMD couldn't supply us with samples in time for a full review, but you can expect to find reviews of new graphics cards, motherboards and processors in Issue 53, which will be on sale on 20 December (subscribers should receive their copies a week earlier), so you'll need to get out there quick, as you won't have much shopping time.
Chuck some Christmas songs on your MP3 player, suck in some of that cold, fresh, winter air, and hopefully, you won't care too much about the seething crowds of people. Merry Christmas everyone!
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