Posted 09/04/2009 at 06:41:56pm

I'm curious as to why Maximum PC has yet to include a Core i7 test bed.

Core i7 thermals are much higher than C2Q's and it would be nice to see how well these coolers perform on i7 platforms. Granted the old Q6700 isn't the coolest of processors, but an i7 950 would be a better thermal test of these heat sinks because often these things work great with C2Q's but can't quite handle the high end thermals of an i7.

Posted 08/26/2009 at 11:29:30pm

It is completely dependant on where you live and the density of population in the area. To put it into perspective, in the Bay Area, Comcast is trying to push the Niagra Falls through the Panama Canal, the network just isn't voluminous enough to handle the capacity of users accessing it.

That and they pick absolute shit times to work on the network and I lose connection at random hours of the day.

You have no idea how many times Comcast has been to every single house up and down my street to "fix" problems.

I'm paying for a 10 mb/s line and I rarely hit 1 mb/s downloads. I'll hit 1.8 mb/s if I'm lucky at 1 in the morning but then I get throttled down to about 750 kb/s and lower. It really is very bad.

Posted 08/26/2009 at 05:49:05pm

One of the biggest problems with high speed for me in California is reliablity. Comcast is an absolute dog. Throttling of your internet speed aside, their reliablity is pitiful and their customer service stinks. What is really bad is they have absolutely no competition where I live. The only alternative is AT&T DSL and they are essentially half as fast for five dollars less. But then again, considering Comcast is so bad, I'd almost rather go to AT&T. The bad deal is a friend of mine does have AT&T and he has trouble with them all the time to so it's a no-win.

Posted 08/20/2009 at 03:13:31pm

I walked into a local Frys about a week ago to pick up some RAM for an i7 build I was doing and I was surprised to see a Core i5 listed for sale in the actual store where they have all the processors advertised.

I talked to them and yes, they were in stock and if I wanted to, I could have walked out with an i5 that day...except for the fact that I didn't want or need one. Needless to say, I don't blame stores like Fry's getting tired of waiting for Intel's go-ahead when sales of the older C2Q's are slowing down in anticipation of the i5's and i7's.

Posted 08/17/2009 at 05:51:27pm

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14828/65/

nVidia market share down 1.9%, ATi market share up 1.3%

nVidia shipments rising slowly at 23.6%, ATi shipments rising rapidly at 41.5%

Want to continue calling me a fanboy and a lier? I just quoted the numbers for you. Go sit and spin on them.

And for the record, you didn't quote a single number and half the stuff you said you're just talking out of your ass about. Don't know what your problem is but whatever, have fun with yourself I'm not wasting my time on you anymore.

Posted 08/16/2009 at 10:05:09pm

Interesting that you automatically label me a fanboy for saying facts about a situation that shines a negitive light against nVidia.

I sort of read over what you said and have no real idea why you brought up some of the things you said and a lot of it made no sense what-so-ever. I will say this, both ATi and nVidia stock have dropped, ATi's is more because they are coupled with AMD but nVidia's has dropped due to their warranty fiasco costing them millions.

There's honestly no real point to arguing with you because I kinda have better things to do than write a novel on here and break down the numbers for you. I will say though that the money doesn't lie. If you are building graphics cards at a loss and selling them for a loss, you still aren't making any monrey (nVidia). But if you are building graphics cards cheap, and selling them at a profit, you are making money (ATi). nVidia's year-to-year earnings have dropped substantially. I am unaware of ATi's year-to-year earnings so I won't make an assumption although I would assume it isn't plummiting at the same rate as nVidia's.

That's really all I was saying.

And BTW: I've owned eight nVidia powered systems in the past and one ATi powered system with all of them using Intel processors. Numbers say I'm biased against ATi/AMD but really, I don't care. I buy what card I feel is the best overall purchase and right now, I'm quite pleased with the quality of my ATi graphics card although I have always been pleased with my previous nVidia cards (all except for the FX series. Should have gotten a Radeon 9800). It just so happens this generation I felt like giving ATi a try and I have been pleasantly surprised by their price and performance.

PAX

-Pratt

Posted 08/16/2009 at 06:21:44pm

Fiscally, ATi has been drastically more profitable than nVidia cards this generation and it has nothing to do with performance or outselling nVidia cards. It all has to do with the price of their components. ATi HD 4000 cards are drastically cheaper to make compared to nVidia GTX 200 cards. I honestly don't think nVidia is even making any sort of substantial profit off of the GTX series. This is one of the reasons why you see nVidia exclusive partners jumping ship and crossing over into ATi (XFX for example) because nVidia is squeezing their pennies together pretty tough and making it very hard for their board partners to make any sort of profit.

Yes, nVidia has the faster card, but ATi made the more profitible card. And before you trounce GDDR5 as a gimmick, look at the numbers and you'll see that nVidia and ATi achieved almost identical bandwidth numbers using two different strategies. It just so happens that nVidia's cost them a bundle more money to implement. The reason ATi used a 256-bit frame buffer over a 512 is because of cost and saving space on the PCB. If they went with a 512-bit frame buffer, it's obvious that bandwidth would have gone much much higher but my educated guess as to why they didn't is because their GPU couldn't take advantage of the added bandwidth and it would have been wasted money.

And besides, next generation, you're going to see nVidia try to use GDDR5 so I don't know why you're trying to downplay it's effectiveness as a technology.

Fiscally, ATi didn't screw a single thing up. They sold a ton of cards and were extremely competitive with nVidia and forced nVidia to create several cards they otherwise wouldn't have like the GTX 260 216 core and the GTX 275. Also for aproximately 6 months ATi had the fastest single card solution in the HD 4870 X2 until nVidia came out with the GTX295 so you can hardly say that wasn't successful to deny your competition of the high end for half a year.

In the end nVidia's strategy forced them to lose money on each card through manufacturing costs and poor yields whereas ATi's strategy made decent amounts of money on each card thanks to low manufacturing cost and high yields.

Performance is nice for the consumer, but as far as investment and financials are concerned, who makes the better, cheaper card wins which just so happend to be ATi.

Posted 08/15/2009 at 10:14:39pm

Very interesting idea having the game pull music out of your hard drive and playing it in game...although I'm not sure how easy it would be to get that to work plus there are licencing issues that will never be resolved. Other than that, it would be pretty cool especially if the game knew to pick appropriate songs for appropriate moments.

I have to say that game sound completely slipped my mind and is definitely something that can be improved upon. Having truly interactive background music that subtly changes depending on what is going on in the game would help with game aesthetics. Most of the time it's done very crudely (like in Knights of the Old Republic) or isn't done at all (Fallout 3). It would be nice to see that done in a different and interesting way. Unfortunately I have no idea what that could entail.

Posted 08/15/2009 at 10:06:57pm

I agree, Mass Effect was a fantastic game as is all the games that come out from Bioware but that game falls into the category of the "few good games" much like Fallout 3, Oblivion, Supreme Commander, and Company of Heros are on the list of good games that came out in the last 3-4 years.

Posted 08/15/2009 at 08:45:14pm

Honestly, there wouldn't be a "PC Gaming Decline" if video game developers would sit down and make at least a half-decent PC game. Of the so called "good" PC games that have been released in recent years, only an absolute handful have been worthy of being called "good" and even fewer are great.

It's not just PC games that are filled with tripe, console games suck pretty bad as well. Grab a dozen random games off the shelf and you'll be lucky if two or three are actually worth playing once let alone a second time.

Poor game development aside, the biggest knife in PC's back is the fact that no one, save Blizzard, has the guts to release a PC-only title. Star Craft 2 and Diablo 3 are going to be block buster sellers and for a slight second, everyone will be cheering in the streets declaring to the world: "PC gaming is back! Take that consoles!" And then the months will roll on, nothing good will come out, and that will be it.

The biggest issue with PC gaming is most companies are too focused on making a game that looks good (Crysis) but doesn't focus on actually writing half-decent code that will make it actually run at respectible rates. The reason Crysis ran so poorly on even hardcore PC's wasn't that the hardware couldn't handle it, it's because the coding was horrible. Case in point: Crysis Warhead actually optimised the game slightly and you saw drastic improvements in performance.

Four things need to happen for PC gaming to come back:

#1. Improve your code! Sloppy coding makes your game run like a midget through molasses, pretty bloody slow. It's not like Intel and nVidia aren't heeping out loads of money to AAA titles to make sure their benchmark numbers are on top so spend the money to get the right guys in there to write some decent code and optimize it for the hardware available. Also make sure your multiplayer content is really really good. I still don't know how CoD:WaW is so bad at multiplayer when compared to CoD4. Somewhere along the line Treyarch desided to ruin Infinity Ward's code and turn the game in to an absolute dog to play.

#2. Make games fun again! Farcry 2 looked fantastic and ran pretty well too. However a good looking game a good game does not make. Focus on making gameplay truly intuitive and fun. Give is a storyline that makes us care about the characters and what happens. That's one of the reasons why CoD4 was so good was the storyline. Nothing shocked me more than looking through the eyes of the American soldier as he crawls from the crashed helecopter, looks to the sky and sees the giant mushroom cloud, then promply dies of a combination of his injuries and massive radiation. Shocking, sad, keeps you up at night...but it was powerful and elevated CoD4 into one of the best first person shooters of all time.

#3. Be unique with your graphics! It gets tiring after a while when every single FPS game looks almost exactly the same as the last: Brown and Dull. Spice things up. I don't mean go loony toons but obviously the TF2 graphics style worked. Try to be unique with your approach instead of playing things safe. Throwing a splash of color here and there won't hurt. People moaned about Diablo 3 being "too colorful" but they'll be proven wrong when they play it and they see all the rich and unique environments that don't blend together and don't all look cookie cuttered together. What I'm trying to say is realistic graphics can't be real unless theres some color, imagination, and exaggeration to them. As strange as it seems, in order to make someone believe something they are seeing that isn't real is real all hinges on how well the exaggeration is. It's the same principal as in animation.

 #4. DLC! Downloadable content is the "in thing" right now. Fallout 3 has been the forerunner in the DLC craze as well as CoD:WaW (the WaW Zombie levels are the only redeeming factor to the game). Instead of providing half-baked expansion packs, give us a small, focused mini-level that is downloadable for a reasonable price and keep on making more little well made DLC's. The convenience of booting up your computer, getting on your web browser, and downloading a new level to a game is fantastic. No one really wants to trek all the way out to a store just to buy an expansion pack, so why not go online and get it right now?