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Intel Introduces a Few New CPUs, Cuts Prices on Others

Chris Moody — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:31:08 -0500

Intel adds a few processors and drops a few prices this month in it’s CPU line up. There doesn’t appear to be any shakeups from Intel’s expected plans.

Intel's Core 2 Extreme Quad Core line remains unchanged, but in the standard line, the Q9650 joins the line up at the top, while the Q9550 drops 40% from $530 to the Q9450 previous level of $316. The Q9400 is also new, and enters at the same price as the Q9300 and Q6700 (a 65nm process CPU) at $266.

The only other prices changes were in the Xeon line, with the new X3370 coming out and the X3360 dropping 40% to $316.

All prices are in 1000 tray units.

We will certainly see more changes when Intel ships Bloomfield sometime in Q4.

CyberPower Gamer Ultimate SLI Quad

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:39:51 -0500

For all those readers who have added up the price of the parts in an OEM box and screamed into the night air: “Hell, I can build it cheaper than that!” CyberPower has a retort: Beat this one, sucker! While you might think you’re up to the challenge, we suspect the price-to-performance ratio of the CyberPower Gamer Ultimate SLI Quad is impossible to match—unless you’re using boosted parts. In fact, we’re not sure how CyberPower is making a profit off this stacked and packed rig.

Peep this: The Gamer Ultimate features no less than Intel’s 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770 along with a pair of EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2 cards. The CPU itself retails for $1,500, and the pair of GPUs runs about $1,100. Indeed, we added up the retail price of all the Gamer Ultimate’s parts and reached a total of $5,500. The machine sells for just $5,000.

CyberPower pushes the eminently overclockable Intel core up 800MHz to an even 4GHz using Cooler Master’s new ESA-enabled AquaGate Max. To this, CyberPower adds an Asus Striker II Extreme mobo. Based on the nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset, this board is wicked cool and feature rich—and DDR3 all the way. CyberPower includes 4GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3 DIMMs rated to operate at 1,600MHz data rates.

But not all of the Gamer Ultimate’s parts are top-notch: The main hard drive array hosting the OS isn’t composed of Western Digital’s spanking-new fourth-generation 300GB VelociRaptor drives. We can’t blame CyberPower for this oversight, as the drives are just now trickling out. We can, however, blame the company for a funky hard-drive config. A pair of 150GB Raptors hosts the OS, and CyberPower includes a second pair of 500GB Hitachi 7,200rpm drives in RAID 0 as well. Huh? We put a premium on safety when storing our precious photos and videos—and RAID 0 ain’t safe. The chance of both arrays going bunk is low, but if the board goes south, you’d have to hunt for another Striker II to get your data back. Also controversial is the OS choice: Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit. For times when driver and app support fail, however, CyberPower also includes Home Premium 32 bit.

The Gamer Ultimate sets new performance records in just about all of our benchmarks and makes the Kentsfield Q6700-based zero-point system we built in December seem antiquated.

Still, there were some issues: The machine occasionally failed to boot. We’re not sure what caused the problem, but it may be related to the soft start button in the Cosmos S case. Only after cycling the power on the PSU would the machine restart. The top USB ports were also nonfunctional. CyberPower said it decided to use the ports for the media reader, which does include USB, so it’s not too horrible a trade-off.

The Gamer Ultimate is a stellar performer, but the real story is its price. You could almost buy this rig and sell off its individual components for a tidy profit.

AMD’s new X4 quad core

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:02:28 -0500

It’s been a pretty lousy six months in AMD fan boy land. Even the most vocal of fan boys have found themselves ducking for cover as AMD was hit with delays, production problems and errata bugs.

With the release of the Phenom X4 9850, AMD hopes to finally put some of those problems behind it. Dubbed “B3” chips, the new CPU no longer features the infamous TLB bug that hobbled performance of the original Phenom chips. If it isn’t already obvious to you, AMD is also reverting back to the X4 nomenclature that it had toyed around with before Phenom launched. New Phenom’s will now carry the X4 designation for quad cores and X3 for tri-cores (of if you want to be snide, quad cores with one bad core).

We tested the new 2.5GHz Phenom X4 9850 using an Asus M3A32-MVP board with 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM at 1066MHz data rates, a 150GB WD Raptor, Windows XP SP2, and the new Nvidia GeForce 9800GX2 GPU. For a comparison, we populated a new 45nm Penryn Core 2 Quad Q9300 and a Core 2 Quad Q6600 in an EVGA nForce 790i Ultra motherboard. For those who don’t know, the Q9300 doesn’t have the same relationship that the Q6600 has to the top-end procs. Intel has cut the cache in half from the 12MB in a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 to 6MB in the Q9300. This makes it sort of a “Penryn-lite” chip. Why? There’s probably two explanations: Intel has either decided to do something with its Penryn CPUs with some bad cache (ala AMD) or it has decided to hobble the chip intentionally to give its top quad cores more of an edge. We set the pair of 1GB Crucial DDR3 modules at 1333 and installed Windows XP SP2 on a WD Raptor 150GB drive. Finally, the same reference GeForce 9800GX2 card was used in the same machine and the same public drivers were used for both tests. Is it fair to pit a DDR3 platform against a DDR2 platform? We think so. Afterall, we would have tested Phenom on DDR3 but there’s just no support for it yet. Even though the DIMMs in our Core 2 platform cost more than the CPUs, we think it would be unfair to not put the Core 2’s best foot forward. If anything, Intel is probably grumbling that the test should be conducted on X48 which, we’re sure, the company thinks is a better and faster platform.

For the most part, the Q9300 owned the night. It generally outpaced the old Q6600 quad core and the new Phenom quad core in most of our tests. In a clock-for-clock test between the Phenom and Penryn, we would declare the Q9300.

AMD fans shouldn’t hand their heads in shame though. The Phenom numbers weren’t so far behind as to be dead in the water. Certainly, it doesn’t go quite head-to-head with the Penryn-lite but it is still fastest AM2 chip available today for most apps. That makes it a pretty good upgrade for those with AM2 boards that are capable of supporting Phenom. If you had to start afresh though and you weren’t opposed to Intel for anything other than religious reasons, Core 2 is still the champ in the cheap quad core category.

AMD’s big problem is expectations. When Phenom first launched late last year, the company had built up wild expectations that Phenom would level the playing field with Intel’s quad core. In truth, all it could do was barely compete with Intel’s lowest of the low quad cores – a chip that was a year old. AMD still has no response to Intel’s 3GHz Core 2 Quad QX9650 and the soon to be released 3.2 Core 2 Quad QX9770 chip and it doesn’t look like the company will for several more months. Meanwhile, Intel is already demonstrating fully functional Nehalem CPUs and says they’re on track to launch later this year.

Benchmarks
	Core 2 Q9300	Core 2 Q6600	Phenom X4 9850
Clock	2.5GHz	2.4GHz	2.5GHz
L2	6MB	8MB	2MB
L3	N/A	N/A	2MB
Rated TDP	95 watts	95 watts	125 watts
FSB	1,333	1,066	N/A
Bulk Pricing	$266	$266	$235

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

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

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

FEAR (fps)	199	209	200
Quake 4 (fps)	169.7	166.6	165.7
Unreal Tournament 3 (fps)	119	105	87
AutoGK DIVX 6.8 (min/sec)	9:36	10:07	11:44
AutoGK XVID	11:08	11:38	12:42

Intel’s details Nehalem, Larrabee and hexa-core CPU plans

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:57:53 -0500

If there’s one message Intel wants the world to take away from its Monday morning sit down with the enthusiaist media, it’s that all pistons are firing full bore.

The company demonstrated working silicon from its upcoming Nehalem CPU, talked up details about its return to the world of discrete graphics, and even said it had a hexa-core CPU ready to go. That's six dies in one package, for everyone who flunked tenth-grade Greek.

The biggest news announcement wasn't Nehalem, but Intel's reentry into the discrete graphics market. Although light on concrete details, Intel said Larrabee, the first discrete part, would not be ass-bad integrated graphics. Instead, it would be full-on performance GPU. Larrabee would feature “many” cores and performance would scale to the teraflop range. The new graphic part will also include a new vector instruction set and leverage Intel’s strong tool set to ease the pain of developing massively-parallel, general-purpose apps on GPUs. Intel believes that its tools will set it apart from ATI’s GPGPU and Nvidia’s CUDA frameworks, which offer similar functionality. Both initiatives are slowly gaining traction in the scientific and animation industries, but the tools to utilize GPUs for general purpose computing are still rough. Of course, this doesn't apply to consumers, who simply want to play the latest games on their PC, but Larrabee will cater to PC developers as well. The part will ship with full support for DirectX and OpenGL.

Intel didn’t detail which flavor of DirectX would be supported, but it would be current. Intel expects the first Larrabee parts to see the light of day sometime in late 2009 or early 2010. The company also cleared up some misconception about Larrabee. Many thought Larrabee cores would be the basis of its integrated graphics platform but on Monday, Intel denied that saying that it would continue to develop an integrated graphics core for normal computing. Integrated designs, however, will likely move from the chipset into the CPU package itself.

Besides Larrabee, Intel also released more on its upcoming Nehalem chip. Based on a 45nm process, Nehalem will utilize a modular design that will let Intel build CPUs featuring different numbers of cores and different cache configs, as well as integrated graphics and memory controllers. The initial consumer enthusiast version is codenamed Tylersburg. It will be a native quad-core design, and each core will feature a Hyperthreading-like capability to execute two threads simultaneously. Tylersburg will feature L3 cache and an integrated tri-channel DDR3 controller. That should offer boatloads of bandwidth but it’ll also mean more complicated memory configurations.

The demonstration Tylersburg machine featured six DIMM slots. To operate in tri-mode, three DIMMs have to be populated. However, the demonstration machine ran fine with just two DIMM slots occupied.

The desktop version of Nehalem is already up and running.

As expected, Nehalem does away with the front-side bus. The chip will communicate with the chipset and other CPUs via a high-speed interconnect Intel has dubbed Quick Path Interconnect. Tylersburg is expected near the end of this year. Intel also demonstrated its hexa-core CPU. Codenamed Dunnington, the chip is essentially a six-core Penryn.

Should upgraders expect such a beast to fill their existing Socket 775 boards? No, Intel said. Dunnington will only find a home in Xeon boards. Intel said that while there’s been some discussion about Dunnington on desktop, the resources to make it work in a desktop configuration don’t make fiscal sense. And since Dunnington will hit just after Nehalem, the company expects most performance desktop users to adopt Nehalem. Dunnington’s best fit is for workstation and servers where it should work as a drop-in replacement for current quad-core Xeons.

On tap beyond Nehalem, Intel said to expect Westmere, a 32nm shrink of Nehalem with some microarchitecture enhancements to keep performance up. A more significant upgrade is expected with the Sandy Bridge CPU core in 2009 or 2010.

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 Premium

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:34:47 -0600

Motherboard naming conventions have never been easy to follow, but Asus threw us for a loop with its P5E3 Premium board. Is it an even better version of the stellar P5E3 Deluxe that we reviewed in January? Nope. The board actually features Intel’s newest enthusiast x48 chipset, which is, umm, 10 more than the x38 used in the P5E Deluxe board.

Besides the chipsets, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two boards if they were laid side by side. Like the Deluxe, the Premium has integrated 802.11n wireless capable of running in access-point mode. Both feature a beefy heat pipe, PCI Express 2.0, an Analog Devices audio component, eSATA ports, and spiffy I/O shields. And like the Deluxe, the Premium also sports three physical x16 PCI-E slots, two of which run at x16 PCI-E 2.0 data rates while the third runs at x4 PCI-E data rates. For hardcore gamers, SLI still isn’t supported since Nvidia is limiting its multi-GPUs to its own chipsets. You can run CrossFire mode, but AMD graphics aren’t anybody’s first pick for gaming right now.

Also aboard is the Express Gate feature. It lets you boot into a mini OS that sits in a bit of flash RAM on the motherboard. From this pre-boot environment, you can browse the Internet or access Skype without having to start your OS. It’s an interesting concept, but you can’t save files from the browser. Such capability would make the Express Gate a great emergency tool should your OS get trashed and you need to access the Internet to search for a fix or download a driver or utility.

If the only change is the addition of the x48 chipset, should you upgrade from a P35 or x38? Not necessarily. The key change from the x38 to the x48 is official support for Intel’s upcoming 1,600MHz front-side bus CPUs; the x48 also adds improved Xtreme Memory Profile support, so boards can auto-overclock. Other internal tweaks give it better memory-ratio settings and better voltage control over DDR3 RAM. We must point out, however, that the x38 is perfectly stable on a 1,600MHz front-side bus and many other chipsets are as well. Like a Vulcan, though, Intel must do everything by the book. If it’s going to have 1,600MHz CPUs, it’s damn well going to have a chipset fully validated for it too.

Coming off the high of the x38-based P5E3 Deluxe board, we thought the x48-based P5E3 Premium would be just as impressive. But this board was just plain finicky out of the box, and we had to go through several BIOS requests from Asus to get one that would let us make basic BIOS setting changes. While the Deluxe version excelled against a competing 680i board in January, the Premium couldn’t outrun our XFX Nforce 780i SLI board here. The only numbers worth mentioning are surprisingly subpar disk I/O numbers and a performance edge in FEAR.

The Premium’s one serious advantage over Nvidia’s 780i is still pretty valuable though: validated 1,600MHz front-side bus support, which makes it a far safer bet for anyone who places CPU performance above running two GeForce cards in SLI. But who knows, maybe AMD will do Intel a favor one day by introducing GPUs that people will use.

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Introduces New System Benchmarks

Gordon Mah Ung — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:07:57 -0600

It’s been a long time since the zero-point system and benchmarks we use to test PCs and other components have been updated, and it shows. The enthusiast world has switched from AMD to Intel and a new OS is upon us.

To select our new hardware and benchmarks, a committee of editors sat around a box of doughnuts and debated the direction of performance computing. We discussed the typical tasks power users perform and how we could make our benchmarks pertain to those needs. Then, we discussed what PC configuration to use to test all new hardware in the coming year. Our zero-point rigs represent the basic level of hardware we expect a power user to have six months from now. These machines serve not only as a reference point for readers of our system reviews but also as test beds for almost all the hardware and software we review.

Generally, we update our zero-point config and all our benchmarks every 12 to 18 months, but this time, we’re breaking from convention. We’re sticking with old gaming benchmarks for the time being. Why? With high-profile titles like Crysis on the cusp of release, we decided to continue running Quake 4 and FEAR benchmarks until newer, more graphically intensive DirectX 10 titles are available. At that time we’ll fold those tests into our benchmark suite.

The Hardware

Although considered high end by most, our zero-point system really stacks up as a midrange machine

CPU

When we spec’d our new test machines, we decided quad core was a must-have feature. We would have considered both AMD and Intel, but as you know, AMD is a no-show in the consumer quad-core game. We normally reach for the top-tier CPU, but this year, we selected a CPU that most enthusiasts on a budget would buy, not what we all want. Intel’s fast, new QX9650 was out of our price range, so the company’s Core 2 Quad Q6700 got the job. At $500, it’s pricey but not a wallet breaker. For our zero-point, we’ll run it at its stock 2.66GHz clock even though we know it’ll run at 2.93GHz all day without breaking a sweat.

Motherboard

EVGA’s nForce 680i SLI board marks the fourth Nvidia-based chipset that we’ve adopted for our zero-point systems.

EVGA’s 680i SLI will soon be supplanted by Nvidia’s follow-up to the chipset, but we’ve chosen it for its affordability and proven ability as a workhorse. Plus, BIOS updates from Nvidia have been timely and the chipset supports SLI. Maximum PC historians will note that the 680i SLI is the fourth generation of nForce chipsets we’ve adopted since we stopped being an Intel-only chipset shop.

Videocards

A pair of EVGA 8800 GTX boards gives our machine potent gaming capability at all resolutions.

The best-performing card right now is EVGA’s GeForce 8800 Ultra, which sells for more than $700, making SLI cost prohibitive. That’s why our machine uses a pair of EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX warhorses. The duo gives us smooth performance at just about any resolution you’d play games at.

Memory

8GB? 4GB? Nah. Within the limitations of a 32-bit OS, the sweet spot for system RAM is sadly still 2GB. To meet our zero-point system’s needs, we reached for 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 Dominator 8500C5D modules. The modules are rated to run at 1,066MHz, which will be useful when an individual machine has to be overclocked to test cooling gear.

Hard Drives

Because we constantly wipe our test beds with a clean hard disk image, we’re eschewing a RAID setup (disk imagers work inconsistently with RAID). We didn’t want to totally give up on performance, though, so our main boot drive is a single 10,000rpm 150GB Western Digital Raptor drive. A supplemental 7,200rpm 500GB WD Caviar pulls bulk-storage duties for holding drivers, benchmarks, and image files.

Optical Drives

Burning Blu-ray and HD DVD discs isn’t critical for every editor, but viewing high-resolution movies is an important part of testing many products. With that in mind, we reached for LG’s GGC-H20L drive, which reads both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs and gives us DVD and CD burning capability. The drive has a SATA interface and will likely mark the end of PATA in our Lab.

Soundcard

As good as the EVGA 680i SLI boards are, they still use Realtek’s onboard audio, with its fake-ass EAX support. To fill the void, Creative Labs’s X-Fi XtremeGamer gives us hardware audio support in XP (and the Vista drivers almost work too!).

Power Supply

We’ve long used PC Power and Cooling’s PSUs in our zero-point machines. In almost 10 years of testing, we’ve had only one supply ever fail, and that was due to impact damage that no editor ever owned up to (Josh!). In a shocking move, we’re stepping back from our previous test bed’s insanely high wattage in favor of a quieter Silencer 750 quad supply.

Next: The Benchmarks!

The Benchmarks

Our benchmarks continue to be 100 percent synthetic-free tests. If a machine gets faster scores in our benchmarks, it’s because it’s faster, not because of an esoteric driver hack.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3

We use the same HDV content we previously used, but now we’re outputting it to a Blu-ray-friendly MPEG-2 format instead of WMV.

We decided to reuse much of our project from the previous Premiere Pro 2.0 benchmark suite, but we’ve upgraded to Premiere Pro CS3. Additionally, we’ve tweaked our output options. Instead of outputting the file to WMV9, we take our HDV-res video and spit it out to a 1080i Blu-ray-compatible file in MPEG-2 format. The project continues to use multiple effects, both CPU and GPU, and multiple video overlays. The benchmark really highlights the improved multithreading support in CS3. The test favors fast CPUs and scales well with clock speeds, but not as much when you move beyond four cores.

Adobe Photoshop CS3

The only major change to our Photoshop test is the jump from CS2 to CS3. For this benchmark, we take a RAW file (shot with a 12MP Canon EOS 5D) and apply a ton of filters to it with multiple reverts along the way. Our Photoshop script tends to be CPU intensive, but disk I/O and the amount of system RAM also influence the result. Multicore support in Photoshop is better than in previous versions, but for the most part, this benchmark prefers clock speed over the number of cores.

Photodex ProShow Producer

ProShow is one of the top choices for professionals who want to make video slideshows from their still images.

New to our benchmark retinue is Photodex’s popular ProShow Producer application. The application is a popular slideshow program among professionals and advanced amateurs. We like it because it not only represents real-world workloads but is also extremely multithreaded and will even load up a dual quad-core machine. In our benchmark, we build a slideshow using 130 12MP images shot with an EOS 5D at 3200 ISO. We apply a random selection of transitions and effects to the images and two MP3 files are used for background music. The entire show is then rendered as a 1080p MPEG-2 file. The benchmark likes clock speed and gets a good bump from quad-core CPUs, but our tests show that Intel’s eight-way Xeon platform doesn’t scale as well as we’d expect.

MainConcept Reference

MainConcept is a popular multithreaded codec maker that’s embedded in many consumer and commercial applications.

Also new to our benchmark suite is MainConcept’s Reference. You might not be familiar with the MainConcept name, but you probably use one of its products. Corel, Adobe, and AverMedia all use MainConcept’s codecs. We use MainConcept’s freely available Reference demo to transcode the 1080p MPEG-2 file created in our ProShow Producer benchmark to the AVC/H.264 codec at 1920x1080 resolution. The Reference demo uses the same codec as the fully licensed version but includes a watermark in a corner. The benchmark gets a healthy bump from quad cores and scales well with clock speed. Interestingly, this is one of the few benchmarks that run significantly faster under Windows Vista than XP.

FEAR

FEAR: First Encounter Assault Recon was a punishing game and benchmark when it shipped two years ago, but it’s no match for today’s hardware. It is still very much a GPU benchmark at higher resolutions, but at 1600x1200, a combination of GPU and CPU influence the score. As a compromise, we run FEAR’s demo with soft shadows enabled and 16x anisotropic filtering. Hardware audio support, if available, is enabled for the benchmark runs as well. We’ll be replacing FEAR with a more current game within the next three issues.

Quake 4

This venerable Doom 3–engine game is OpenGL-based and generally exposes poor OpenGL drivers. We run our custom timedemo at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and 4x anisotropic filtering. The game is one of the first to support dual cores and it scales well with CPU support. We’ll also be replacing this benchmark within the next three issues.

Next: How it Stacks Up

How the New Zero-Point Stacks Up

Windows XP isn’t going away, so our new benchmark suite supports both OSes, but the speed differences are surprising.

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows Vista Ultimate machine using a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU.

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP Professional machine using a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU.

We selected all of our benchmarks because they run on both Windows Vista and Windows XP Professional. As performance hounds, we lean toward Windows XP Professional, so we considered running our benchmarks in XP and simply comparing Vista-only machines that we receive on the same scale. After lengthy debate, we decided that would be unfair, so our zero-point is a dual-boot system with Windows XP Professional SP2 and Windows Vista. We ran the benchmarks on each OS independently.

Wonder why enthusiasts are skipping Vista? Look at our benchmark chart. Vista performance generally dragged behind XP except in two tests: FEAR and MainConcept. We were particularly surprised by FEAR. Vista drivers have been horrible since launch, but apparently Nvidia has finally turned a performance corner.

There’s no such speed increase elsewhere, though. ProShow Producer showed a 14 percent performance decrease in Vista, and Photoshop was about 8 percent slower. OpenGL performance was atrocious in Vista, as well, with Quake 4 scores about 18 percent slower than XP’s. Ouch.

How does the new zero-point stack up against a high-end machine? You can read December’s system review for details, but a faster CPU, RAID 0, and faster graphics cards amounted to as much as a 50 percent increase in performance.

Our zero-point machine is not intended to best the machines we review but to provide a frame of reference for readers who wonder just how fast a 4GHz Penryn is compared to what’s in their own rigs.

Watchdog: December 2007

The Maximum PC Staff — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 13:51:06 -0600

Hank, watchdog of the month

Quad-Core Pentium 4?

In January, I purchased $3,000 worth of PC parts from Zipzoomfly.com, including a boxed retail Intel QX6700 Quad Core processor. I had numerous instability issues with my new rig spanning several months. After replacing literally everything else, I finally contacted Intel for warranty replacement of my boxed retail proc only to be told that the markings on my CPU were not that of a quad core! To make a long story short, Intel told me that my warranty was void because the proc is an “illegal re-mark” and that I should pursue a replacement with the vendor.

I have contacted Zipzoomfly.com more than a dozen times and the company has tried everything under the sun to dodge responsibility, including saying that I was beyond the 30-day return policy, and finally saying it has no way to recoup its money. So, in a nutshell, Zipzoomfly.com won’t replace my CPU because someone is going to get shafted and the company prefers that it be me.

—Roger Westbrook

Your problem is a disturbing one, Roger, as CPU re-marking has long been a bane of the industry. For those who don’t know about it, CPU chip pirates take slower CPUs which are capable of overclocking and “re-mark” the surface to say it’s a faster CPU. The profits come from selling the cheaper chip as a more expensive one. Re-marking isn’t the problem it was five years ago—and we would hate for this to be a sign of its resurgence.

The Dog pinged Zipzoomfly.com to hear its side of the story. The company said the situation is unfortunate but it doesn’t assume responsibility since Roger waited several months beyond the return policy period before contacting its support center. The spokesman said CPU orders are checked to see if the tamper seals are intact before they go out the door. The company also said they learned through their conversations with Roger that the machine did identify itself as a quad core during boot. The spokesman said that at one point, Roger told Zipzoomfly.com’s support center that he had taken his machine to a local shop where a tech examined the machine out of Roger’s view. So, although the company has sympathy for Roger, it has no plans to take the processor back because it believes the CPU was swapped after it was shipped to him.

The Dog went back to Roger who told the Dog that, yes, he had taken the machine to be checked, but he denied ever telling Zipzoomfly.com that the machine was out of his view. “I was talking with the tech the entire time and watching what he was doing,” Roger told the Dog, “and as I’ve said, the symptoms continued after I got the rig back home, until it died completely, that is.” Roger also said that he did not examine the tamper seals when it arrived but later noticed that one of the seals had been cut on the opposite side of the box he originally opened.

Oy, what a mess. A picture Roger sent the Dog clearly shows that the heat spreader says “Pentium 4,” but Roger says it boots as a Core 2 quad core. Roger said he believes the heat spreader said P4 from the very beginning but admits that he did not look at the chip’s markings until he spoke to Intel months later.

So is it a P4 or Core 2 quad core? The Dog spoke to David Brown, a senior engineer in Intel’s security department and was told that there are no known hacks to make a Pentium 4 identify itself as a Core 2 chip. Brown said Roger’s case doesn’t sound like a classic re-marking problem but rather a “swapping” issue. Somewhere in the chain of custody, the CPU in the box was swapped out.

Intel’s security department has seen re-marking problems drop off to almost nothing in recent years because newer CPUs are identified at the die level and are thus beyond remarking electronically, Brown told the Dog. You could, say, re-mark a cheap Core 2 Duo to physically say it’s an expensive Core 2 Extreme, but it’s impossible to make the OS or BIOS recognize it as a Core 2 Extreme, unless they were themselves hacked.

But what if the holographic seals were intact on the box, surely that would protect you? Nope. Brown said that counterfeiters’ skills are so incredibly sophisticated that even the holographic seals can be reproduced. The most foolproof method for protecting yourself is to download the CPU identification tool from Intel and check the proc yourself.

Although it looked like Roger was going to end up with a dead P4 instead of a shiny quad core, Intel reversed its decision and swapped Roger’s chip for another Core 2 Extreme QX6700. The Dog must add that Intel’s warranty department did this independently of the Dog’s questions to the company about Roger’s case, so hats off to the company.

The Dog doesn’t necessarily hold Zipzoomfly.com to blame, as there is simply no way of knowing when the CPU was swapped. Roger certainly didn’t help matters by reporting the problem months after the return period ended.

So what are the lessons to be learned? Number one, make sure you got what you paid for as soon as possible. If you’re buying a part at a store, check the packaging. Many new packages actually put the CPU or videocard in a clear window so you can even check it without opening the box. If you buy an open box or returned item, check it in the store, or if that’s not allowed, when you’re paying for it. The cashier can be your witness and you can avoid claims by the store that you swapped the part yourself.

Running Intel’s Processor Identification Utility on a new CPU is one way to make sure the Core 2 Duo you bought isn’t an old Pentium 4.

If you purchased an Intel CPU, download Intel’s Processor Identification Utility at www.tinyurl.com/23z6mh. The utility will check any current Intel CPU and tell you if it’s actually the chip you bought. AMD has a similar tool available at www.tinyurl.com/o0n. While it’s possible to fool Windows XP, Windows Vista will identify the CPU string from the chip, so that’s another option for verification. Third-party tools such as CPU-Z (www.cpuid.com) and GPU-Z (www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/) are also available to query your hardware. The key take-away is to check your hardware before the return deadline comes up. Woof.

No Bunny Hopping with this Keyboard

I purchased a WolfKing CS Warrior keyboard. It worked fine for about a month and then quit. None of the keys would do anything, I even switched USB ports, but to no avail. I emailed WolfKing about my problem but didn’t hear back after two weeks. I then called the support “hotline” numerous times only to get a recording that says, “We’ll get back to you at our convenience.” Which, as it turns out, is never. I sent six emails and still no response. The keyboard is under warranty but that doesn’t help if I can’t reach anyone. Has the company been skinned?

— Sgt. Bass 64

The Dog pinged WolfKing USA and heard from Bob Costlow, the company’s director of sales and marketing. Costlow told the Dog, “I’m a bit puzzled at this complaint. I’m usually copied on any defect issue (of which there have been very few). I have not received any reports of a CS Warrior... as a defect or a phone message indicating an issue. I’ll certainly look into it... [and to abide by the warranty period], I’d be happy to provide this user with a replacement unit ASAP.”
Woof.

Fix Alert!

Canon has issued a service alert for some of its new 12.1MP PowerShot A650 IS digital cameras, which may exhibit a light leak. The problem can occur when a person is shooting with the LCD display open and sunlight shining directly on the back of the camera causes a small overexposed rectangle to appear in the image.


Canon’s PowerShot A650 IS cameras could leak light when the LCD is exposed to sunlight.

Canon did not say how many of the cameras have the problem, but it did say the problem affects PowerShot A650 IS cameras that have a 0 as the fifth digit of the serial number. For example, a camera with a 4816002105 would be eligible for the fix. Canon will repair any camera with the problem free of charge. The company also said the problem can be avoided in the short term by keeping the LCD closed during exposures. For more information, contact Canon at 800-828-4040 between 8 a.m. and midnight, Monday through Friday, or 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday. Consumers may also contact Canon at carecenter@cits.canon.com.