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No BS Podcast #91: The All Rant Edition

The Maximum PC Staff — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:00:00 -0600

We checked our Maximum PC zodiac chart, and realized that 2008 was the Year of the Rant. Gordon's capacity for rage never ceases to amaze, so this week, we present to you 3 hours and 40 minutes of non-stop ranting. Culled from this past year's podcasts, this all-rant episode includes anger toward interoffice spam emails, indignant hippies shopping for organic food, and shirts sticking out of sweaters. A certain Cuppertino-based tech company doesn't get off easy, either.

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by.

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In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Cross-Examines CrossFire

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:35:28 -0500

AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X in quad mode scales well for having four GPUs.

I’ve been skeptical of multi multi-GPU support since the days of Nvidia’s original Quad SLI. Back then, bad drivers, a lack of game support, and 30-inch panels that cost a month’s pay made the prospect unpalatable.

So when AMD sent us an Alienware ALX system decked out with four GPUs, I didn’t expect much. But the dual Radeon HD 3870 X2s in this rig performed pretty damn well. In a system sporting a 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850 overclocked to 4GHz, an Asus X38 board, DDR3/1800 RAM, and Windows Vista, the double double-barreled 3870 X2s’ performance at ultra-high resolutions shocked the hell out of me. In 3DMark06, Call of Duty 4, and Unreal 3, I saw a roughly 40 percent increase in frame rates going from one Radeon HD 3870 X2 to two.

At lower resolutions, closer to reality, the four Radeon GPUs didn’t up the ante quite as much at 1900x1200, but there was still a healthy 20 percent boost in COD4 and UT3. That’s probably not worth filling that second slot, but at least the setup offers decent scaling. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 ain’t perfect, though. Driver problems initially plagued our preview of the cards, so our assessment is that this quad-GPU solution isn’t quite ready for prime time.

It’s not much of a secret that Nvidia has its own second-gen Quad SLI coming out. It will use two new dual-GPU cards dubbed GeForce 9800 X2. It’s obviously too early to say which will be faster, but the quad Radeon HD 3870 X2 at least presents a respectable dual-card solution for folks who want to build a high-res gaming box using an Intel X38 or even X48 chipset.

CrossfireX Performance
	CrossFireX	Single Card	% Difference
3DMarkOverall 2560x1600, DX9	21,050.0	12,889.0	38.8%
3DMark06 HDR1 Canyon Flight 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	52.7	30.0	43.1%
3DMark06 HDR2 Deep Freeze 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	51.3	26.0	49.3%
Call of Duty 4 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	93.0	73.0	21.5%
Unreal 3 CTF-OmicronDawn_Bot 2560x1600, DX10 (fps)	118.0	65.6	44.4%
Unreal 3 CTF-OmicronDawn_Bot 2560x1600, DX9 (fps)	120.3	68.5	43.1%

Hands-On Review of AMD’s New X3 Tri Core

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:03:44 -0500

There are two ways to look at AMD’s new tri-core. The first: Why would I buy a tri core when I can get a quad core? The second (the one that AMD would prefer you use): Why buy a dual when I can get a tri?

That’s the fine line AMD is trying to walk with its tri-core 2.4GHz Phenom X3 8750 proc. It can’t fight Intel’s quads head on, but it’s hoping that people who are considering dual-core procs will see the value in having one more core.

Of course, that was all before Intel slashed prices on its quad-core procs. On April 20, Intel cut the prices of two of its elderly quad cores. The 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700’s price dropped from $530 to $266 when purchased in bulk. The real trouble for AMD, however, is the 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600, which took a 16 percent price cut to $224. Just two months ago, the chip was priced at $299. With prices for the Q6600 already dropping to $224, this budget quad core will likely be available for $200 in a few weeks.

With that in mind, we fired up AMD’s X3 on an Asus M3A32-MVP with 2GB of Dominator RAM at 1,066MHz data rates, a 150GB WD Raptor, Windows XP SP2, and a GeForce 9800GX2 GPU. For comparison, we populated a new 45nm Penryn Core 2 Quad Q9300 and a Core 2 Quad Q6600 in an EVGA nForce 790i Ultra motherboard with the same GeForce GX2, WD 150GB Raptor, and Windows XP. The nForce 790i Ultra board features DDR3. Some will argue that the inability to run DDR3 is not Intel’s fault—it’s AMD’s. There is simply no way to run DDR3 on AMD chips right now. And while we could have tested the Intel chips using DDR2, we felt that it wouldn’t be fair to the Intel chips. Instead, we represent the chips on the best platforms available. DDR3, while exotic at the intoxicating high speeds of 1,800MHz and 2,000MHz, is almost affordable at 1,333MHz.

The chip itself should be familiar to AMD fans. It’s a 2.4GHz CPU with the same cache sizes as AMD’s top gun, the 2.5GHz Phenom X4 9850. Each core in the Phenom line features its own 512KB of L2, and all three cores share 2MB of L3 cache. As a 50-series chip, it’s free of the TLB errata that the original Phenoms had. All retail versions of the X3 series will be free of the TLB bug that hurts performance. AMD, however, is selling OEM-only tri-cores that still have the bug.

So how does the tri core stack up? Basically, it’s a quad core with one core turned off. From a practical standpoint, that means it’ll perform right between quads and dual cores. In most games, which generally aren’t optimized for quad cores, it’ll run with the quads. In most encoding applications, including video editing and other quad-optimized applications, it’ll attain roughly 75 percent of the performance of a quad-core Phenom and will definitely be slower than any of Intel’s quads. In other words, it’s not a bad performer in the context of where it’s being wedged.

Price, rather than performance, will probably be the deciding factor for anyone considering an X3. And that’s where AMD has a problem. With Intel putting incredible pricing pressure on AMD these days, the prices for AMD’s processors are incredibly compressed, so it probably doesn’t make sense to buy a tri core. At least not the top-end CPU. AMD’s fastest CPU, the 2.5GHz Phenom X4 9850 costs $235. The new 2.4GHz X3 8705 costs $195. Even more confusing, the 2.2GHz Phenom X4 9550 quad core also costs $195.

Of course, the big question is: What will Intel do in the coming weeks? With its preemptive price cut on the 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600, the price of that chip at retail outlets drops literally every day we’ve checked this week. If the Q6600 pushes into the $190 range, the X3 doesn’t become competitive until you hit the 2.3GHz Phenom X3 8650 at $165.

This doesn’t factor in overclocking results, as everyone’s mileage will vary with overclocking. We can at least say that AMD’s 50 series B3 cores overclock fairly well. We pushed a 2.5GHz X4 9750 to 3GHz on air cooling, similar results should be expected from the X3s.

There’s also the issue of software compatibility. Fortunately, it’s likely a miniscule problem. However, it’s enough of an issue that AMD decided to inform benchtesters that certain test applications that don’t work correctly with tri cores. Some simply don’t work, while others don’t perform as expected because of sloppy coding that allows them to run on only one, two or four cores.

What should you buy? Ultimately, that’s up to you. If performance is king, you should avoid tri core and go straight to a quad. If you’re on the fence between a dual and a tri, we would take a tri-core Phenom over a dual-core Athlon 64 any day of the week, but up against an Intel Core 2 Duo, it gets a little trickier. We’ll visit that subject in a future story.

Speeds and Feeds
	Core 2 Q9300	Core 2 Q6600	Phenom X4 9850	Phenom X3 8750
Clock	2.5GHz	2.4GHz	2.5GHz	2.4GHz
L2	6MB	8MB	512KB	512KB
L3	N/A	N/A	2MB	2MB
FSB	1333	1066	N/A	N/A

3DMark06 Overall	13,990	13,565	13,594	12,420
3DMark06 CPU	4,103	3,856	3,807	2,944
Valve Particle Test	87	76	72	51
Valve Map Build (min:sec)	2:42	2:48	2:57	3:57
CineBench R10	9,622	8,763	8,065	5,893
ScienceMark 2.0 Overall	1,572.21	1,393.57	1,606.46	1,530.95

PCMark05 Overall	9,080	8,948	8,547	7,950
PCMark05 CPU	8,064	7,746	7,396	6,444
PCMark05 RAM	6,012	5,434	4,761	4,485
PCMark05 GPU	15,643	15,806	13,972	13,841
PCMark05 HDD	7,633	7,647	7,766	7,767

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 (min:sec)	15:45	17:33	18:01	24:39:00
Photoshop CS3 (min:sec)	2:20	2:28	3:35	3:08

FEAR (fps)	199	209	200	202
Quake 4 (fps)	169.7	166.6	165.7	158.9
Unreal Tournament 3 (fps)	119	105	87	71
AutoGK DIVX 6.8 (min:sec)	9:36	10:07	11:44	13:40
AutoGK XVID (min:sec)	11:08	11:38	12:42	15:07
Volume Price	$299	$224	$235	$195
Street Price Retail	$279	$224	$236	Unknown
Street Price OEM	$279	$234	None found	None found

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Re-Examines RealTek Audo

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:32:24 -0500

In December 2006, I took RealTek to the woodshed for its cheating drivers, which made many EAX-enabled games sound simply awful.

For months, we’ve been rattling motherboard makers, including Nvidia (which uses RealTek parts on many of its reference motherboards), about the issue, but RealTek seemed not to get the message, as nothing changed—until recently, that is. Indeed, I was pretty surprised when testing XFX’s nForce 780i-based motherboard to find that RealTek had finally fixed the problem with EAX support.

The problem was that RealTek HD Audio drivers would tell games that EAX support was enabled, which would cause games to pass off the audio mixing to the soundcard drivers. In RealTek’s case, that often (though not always) produced terrible sound. A tank that was supposed to sound as though it was 200 meters away sounded like it was 10 meters away. And instead of a grenade sounding muffled by the presence of a wall, it sounded like it was next to you.

With older RealTek drivers, a simple position test would show that EAX filtering wasn’t working correctly.

Why would RealTek do this? Falsely claiming to have EAX support is akin to a videocard driver claiming to run16x AA filtering when, in reality, no filtering is occurring.

But RealTek’s R 1.86 drivers dated February 1, 2008 seem to finally enable EAX. Using RightMark’s 3D Sound positioning utility, I found that the occlusion effect finally worked as it does on all other EAX-enabled cards. The obstruction effect almost works but is a bit heavy-handed, blocking all sound when you should still hear some audio.

In real-world gaming tests, however, EAX support seemed sporadic. Battlefield 2 audio was as poor as it was previously when EAX was enabled and the game let the RealTek part do the mixing. But when we fired up the EAX-enabled BioShock and ran the new drivers through their paces, with EAX and reverb enabled, the experience wasn’t bad. Compared to an X-Fi XtremeGamer soundcard, the onboard RealTek component’s audio was still clearly inferior but at least not intolerable, as it was with Battlefield 2.

I’ll continue to follow this issue, but at least it appears that RealTek is finally addressing the problem.

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Wants to Kill ATX

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:44:01 -0600

Would you use a ball mouse? A VL-Bus graphics card? A Socket 7 board? Then why the hell are enthusiasts still embracing the 13-year-old ATX formfactor? It’s time we started thinking about moving beyond ATX.

Today, we’re running quad-core boxes with two or more GPUs in a formfactor created when people used serial and parallel ports and the Pentium was the hot chip in town. In the near future, USB 3 will appear on motherboards in the south-bridge chips. To route the ports, motherboard vendors must run traces all the way from the south bridge to the rear I/O shield. You might be able to do this with USB 3 data rates on a four-layer board, but can it be done with USB 5? If it requires more layers, it’ll add to the cost of the board.

The failed BTX formfactor included many forward-thinking features.

Of course, Intel tried to fix these problems with its BTX formfactor, which cratered because of resistance from case-makers, a new emphasis on cooler CPUs, and complete resistance from AMD. But if I were hardware dictator for a day, I’d propose a new formfactor called GTX (Gordon TX) that mandates:

A minimum motherboard stand-off height, so wires can be routed safely and easily under the motherboard
RAM and expansion slots that are parallel to air flow in the case
A larger board area and I/O section to accommodate the dizzy- ing array of connectors a modern power user needs
Standardized front-panel connectors for reset, power, and LEDs
Two more expansion slots. The seven in ATX aren't enough with the multi-GPU machines we’re building
Less distance between the south-bridge and north-bridge chips
A CPU cooling scheme that accounts for liquid cooling or venting from an area other than the front of the machine. While we’re at it, let’s build in more cooling for the GPU.

This probably sounds crazy because the push is for smaller, rather than larger, PCs, but I say it’s time. Average people are moving toward smaller machines or notebook PCs. Full-tower ATX boxes are increasingly focused on the workstation market; we really shouldn’t be handcuffed by formfactors designed to appeal to the masses.

Dell Drop Kicks Proprietary Parts

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:25:52 -0600

Dell, long dinged for using proprietary hardware in its gaming PCs, has seen the light. The company said such annoying traits such as proprietary motherboards and power supplies is now a thing of the past.

The first XPS to shed the proprietary hardware will be the new budget XPS630 gaming machine. Based on the nForce 650 ichipset, Dell claims you can swap the board, PSU out for any other ATX-spec hardware.

The change is a long overdue. In the past, Dell has used designs that looked ATX-like but were actually not. If you tried to swap the power supply in your Pentium III Dimension XPS B 733R years ago, you would have been greeted by charred motherboard as the company actually wired its PSU’s differently than the industry but did not key them differently. For years, PC Power and Cooling has made small side business selling Dell upgrade PSUs. More recently, the company has been called out over BTX support and even using a proprietary power plug in its more recent XPS gaming rigs.

Why the use of proprietary designs? Cynical observers have said the company was just trying to lock customers into buying parts exclusively from Dell. The company has long defended the practice by saying that the variations from spec were because its engineers found the specs to be lacking. But the heat from critics and machines such as Hewlett-Packard’s Blackbird 002 going all ATX apparently have forced Dell to see the light. Company officials said the mantra in Dell engineering is that varying from the spec’s must be avoided at all costs.

The change from proprietary parts won’t be the only new trick for the XPS630 though. Dell has taken a page from Hewlett-Packard and claims the XPS 630 will support either Nvidia’s dual-card SLI or AMD’s dual-card CrossFire cards. How can Dell do this? Maximum PC spoke to AMD graphics officials who said the capability is being offered only to select OEMs who take the responsibility for making sure the drivers fully work with the BIOSes on the motherboards.

So why not just release such a driver to the public to let any nForce-user run CrossFire? The company said it is worried that a certain company could affect the performance of its cards when CrossFire is run on an SLI board so public support just isn’t going to happen. In the case of Dell and HP, AMD feels both have enough influence to keep performance problems from cropping up on their systems. For now, the CrossFire support is only through drivers obtained directly from Dell.
Dell says the XPS 630 will also be the first tier one OEM system to support Nvidia’s Enthusiast System Architecture. In the XPS 630’s case, ESA will let the user control the lights in the system. ESA support for the PSU or other components will not be initially supported.

The $1,300 version of the XPS 630 will ship with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600, GeForce 8800GT and a 750 watt power supply. Dell said the BIOS on the XPS 630 will support overclocking and is upgradeable to both dual and quad-core Intel Penryn CPUs.

XFX nForce 780i SLI

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:35:25 -0600

We knew something was up when Nvidia officials were light on details concerning its 780i chipset during a recent press briefing. Normally quite happy to toot its hardware horn, Nvidia practically skipped the PowerPoint slide on the chipset.
Why? Like Intel’s x48, the 780i isn’t really that new. In fact, those familiar with the 680i are well acquainted with the 780i, which is pretty much a 680i with an extra chip (interestingly named the Nforce 200) thrown in to add PCI-E 2.0 support and a full x16 tri-SLI mode.

Despite this, the XFX Nforce780i SLI is still worth taking a gander at. In the hardware department, it has some nice enthusiast touches, such as a POST LED and surface-mounted reset and power switches, but it’s pretty bare-bones next to the Asus board. While we can see not including 802.11n or the wacky pre-boot stuff in the XFX 780i, where are the eSATA ports?

In the I/O arena, the XFX 780i board features three physical x16 slots. Two slots operate at full x16 PCI-E 2.0 data rates while the third runs at x16 PCI-E 1.0 rates. When running tri-SLI mode, the two PCI-E 2.0 slots are actually slaved to the nForce 200 chip, which plumbs directly into the north bridge, while the third x16 PCI-E is routed through the south bridge. There’s been some criticism of this design, which is a bit like going from your kitchen to the living room by crawling though the bathroom window and cutting across the yard. Can you truly synchronize three GPUs if one has to take such a circuitous route? Nvidia says it’s not an issue because the cards actually do most of their talking across the big SLI bridge that’s clipped to the top of the cards. The board includes bridges for tri- and dual-SLI configurations.

Also supported out of the box in the 780i is Nvidia’s Enthusiast System Architecture, which lets a PC talk to new ESA-enabled smart components such as power supplies, water coolers, and case enclosures. We’ve seen early ESA implementations, and we like it so far.

What is truly a differentiator between the 680i and the 780i is support for Intel’s 45nm Penryn CPUs. Although Nvidia officials initially indicated that they expected quad-core Penryns to work on 680i boards, to the chagrin of enthusiasts everywhere, they were wrong. Due to limitations with existing board designs, the current 680i inventories won’t work with Penryn quad cores, such as the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 or the upcoming budget quad Penryns. For those, you need a board like the XFX 780i.

You’re not completely CPU-safe though. While the 780i supports 1,333MHz Penryn CPUs, it isn’t clear if it will work with the upcoming 1,600MHz FSB Core 2 Extreme QX9770 CPU. Nvidia has been cagey concerning this issue, saying that it can’t comment on compatibility until Intel releases a shipping part. In our tests, however, it’s a no go. Using a 3.2GHz/1,600FSB Core 2 QX9770, the XFX 780i board wouldn’t work even with the CPU and FSB downclocked to a 1,333MHz FSB. Nvidia has a point that it’s still waiting for final silicon to finish validating it, but come on. Aren’t Nvidia and Intel even communicating here? We must note that the QX9770 worked fine with the Asus X48 board.

This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the XFX 780i board, and the entire chipset lineup. Add that to talk of a soon-to-be-released 790i chipset with DDR3 support and you have a chipset and board that have fairly limited appeal. Although performance was quite good and it erases the performance gap we saw in our January showdown between the x38 and 680i, we’re pretty damned worried that it’ll be obsolete faster than you can say 45 nanometer.

ASUS P5E3 Deluxe Wi-Fi-AP@n

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:18:12 -0600

We’ll be the first to admit that we were unimpressed by DDR3 when we first tested it last year, but there’s finally a glimmer of hope.

What changed our minds? Asus’s spanking-fast P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP@n mobo, which uses the enthusiast-oriented X38 chipset. The X38’s main highlights are apparently useful DDR3 support and PCI Express 2.0 support. We say “apparently” in reference to DDR3 because we didn’t have a DDR2 version of the board for a direct comparison, but from our tests, the X38 with DDR3 is a winning combination. Also good to have but not a proven performance boost yet is PCI-E 2.0, which doubles the bandwidth of PCI-E 1.0 from 8GB/s to 16GB/s. But does PCI-E 2.0 matter?

Maybe. The jury is still out, but one GPU vendor told us he has seen solid performance boosts from it. We couldn’t test this claim because we were unable to lock our PCI-E 2.0 card at PCI-E 1.0 data rates. Of course, you’ll also need a PCI-E 2.0 GPU, such as Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT or AMD’s Radeon HD 3870, to see any benefits. The P5E3 Deluxe doesn’t include SLI support, but the board can run two graphics cards in CrossFire mode.

This mobo also sports a no-nonsense Asus design: There are no blinged-out gamer LEDs or crazy wind tunnels. But that doesn’t mean cooling is an afterthought. A heat pipe keeps the ICH9R south bridge cool and also wraps around the north bridge and voltage-regulation modules.

Other notable features include 802.11n-compliant Wi-Fi support, and the superior Analog Devices audio parts over Realtek hardware.

To test the board and chipset, we set up the P5E3 and an EVGA 680i SLI board with identical hard drives, quad-core CPUs, GPUs, and drivers. However, the P5E3 packed 2GB of Corsair DDR3 clocked at 1,333MHz while the EVGA board used 2GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM clocked at 1,066MHz. With the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad overclocked to 3.3GHz and running on a 1,333MHz FSB on both platforms, we expected to see minor differences between the two boards, but the P5E3 easily outran the 680i board. The big wins came in gaming, where Quake 4 ran about 11.4 percent faster on the Asus board. FEAR and Valve’s Particle Test were also faster on the P5E3 by a comfortable 5 percent margin. In encoding tests, the P5E3 was faster by a shocking 13 percent.

Those are impressive numbers, especially in motherboard land, where clock-for-clock performance increases of 2 percent are viewed as a win. It’s also more impressive when you consider that the P35 chipset in DDR3 trim was slower than Nvidia’s 680i chipset. However, you’ll have to weigh the value of that speed boost against DDR3’s premium pricing.
The chipset does not officially support a 1,600MHz front-side bus, but we conducted much of our Core 2 QX9850 Penryn testing with the board’s FSB at 1,600MHz with no additional voltage. Intel, however, hasn’t certified the X38 as capable of officially supporting 1,600MHz FSB speeds. We won’t see 1,600MHz until the X48 ships, probably in January 2008.
The X48 launch will make the X38 one of the shortest-lived enthusiast chipsets in recent memory. Should that trouble you? The “unofficial” FSB doesn’t trouble us, but newer is better, and with the X48 launch imminent, the X38 is something of a head-scratcher.

And that’s really a shame, as the P5E3 Deluxe is a great board. It’s fast and solid and packs just about every feature you would want in an Intel system. Unless you’re hung up on getting SLI support, this is clearly one of the best boards available today for Intel.