Posted 07/06/2008 at 07:42:05am

"What we have here is a failure to allocate."A core is a core is a core at this point. It’s not like my quad core has a GPU core a CPU core a Cell Processor and an Encryption accelerator. As awesome as that would be it just doesn’t exist.Back in the stoned age when new processors had new commands every generation programs relied on something to translate for them it was a little thing we called an Operating System. The initial function of an operating system was to allow communication between programs and hardware. Somewhere along the line OS’s Evolved into massive slow moving monsters that got in the way and people started programming around them.I think that the multi-core processor needs to get off its high horse and realize it’s just a piece of hardware. The OS should determine number of cores, track usage, and allocate threads to the least used core. Last I looked my windows not only recognizes how many cores the computer has but tracks usage as well. Several interfaces to manually assign affinity already exist. There’s not really any reason a piece of middleware or eventually the OS itself cant automate this process.

Programmers should have seen this one coming and realized when processor went to 2 and then 4 cores that manually coding for multi-cores was going to be an issue and they were going to have to adapt and find a way to identify number of cores and allocate accordingly. Much like any other advance… Lead, Follow or Get out of the way.           

if all else fails...

Posted 07/01/2008 at 09:11:56pm

PhysX is about as usefull as 6 cores

if your running the "special" versions of those games on that card yes it runs faster.

like the idea of CUDA though  why buy a beter cpu when i can slap in a better gpu and kill 2 birds with one stone. 

think ill wait a few months see if it files before i buy.

if all else fails...

Posted 07/01/2008 at 08:58:06pm

you sound like RAID is painfull

if u realy have a drive throughput issue get a rack slap in a RAID 50 fiber mesh (4GBper Line)NAS

oh wait theres no room for a fiber nic with all those video cards in the way.

 if all else fails...

Posted 07/01/2008 at 08:38:29pm

1.5 million hour life expectancy realy, could u put that in millions of writes?

that figures about as realistic as a MTBF is on a standard HDD.. when they start claming 3 or 4 million hours maybe it will last 3 years. oh and dont run anything that uses a swap file on them youll fry them quick. right now id say there great for backups and laptops. mainstream applications wait another 18 months the next cycle should have much better specs in terms of burn out.

if all else fails...

Posted 07/01/2008 at 08:28:59pm

It seems to me that it’s more of a personal preference than a performance issue @ this point.

As long as you’re smart enough to buy the video set (SLI or Crossfire) that runs with the motherboard you’re running everything should run nice and smooth.

My 3 HD2600 (512mb version)ATI’s  as run smooth on my Intel Board. As my friends 2 8800 GTS (640mb version) Nvida's run on his AMD board. His bench test a lot higher but performance varies by game. And we both paid about the same for either setup.  It appears the cards are only as slick as the person installing them and the platform there running on.

if all else fails...