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Jonathan's Hardware Thread 5.0 (Q4 2004)

Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 9:54 pm
by Jonathan
You can buy mainstream DX9 video cards now. nVidia's cards are still the only cards worth buying for Linux gaming.

AMD launched their 90 nm revision. You can now buy a Socket 939 Athlon 64 for less than $200. They have not launched a new top bin yet.

Intel removed the 4.0 GHz Prescott from their roadmap, which had been delayed from Q4 2004 to Q1 2005. Taking its place will be a variety of dual-core and 2 MB cache Prescotts. This quarter, you will need to content yourself with a 3.8 GHz Prescott.

Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 10:48 pm
by Peijen
damn, that's pretty sweet. I just checked out newegg. ATI and nVidia needs to hurry up with their motherboard chipsets.

here is a question. for home use, let's say you have 3 disks and you split your fs setup to system and data. do you raid backup for data or raid backup for system?

Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 10:51 pm
by Jonathan
Personally, I don't worry about system backup because I have all my install media and configuration doesn't present a significant problem. If either of those are not true for you maybe system backup matters to you.

Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2004 6:03 am
by Jonathan
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2278

Shoot out of video cards in Half Life 2.

The short answer is all 4th generation cards from nVidia or ATI give good performance. If you enable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, ATI's cards do better. If you want a 3rd generation card, you should buy ATI. The X700XT and 6600GT seem like good performance for the money and can run the game OK at 1600x1200. Those are the cards I would look at, if I were buying a card right now.

Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2004 10:59 pm
by Jonathan
Intel also launched their BTX form factor recently. BTX represents standards for quiet SFF computers, which I see as an expansion of the SFF market from more than just Shuttle. Also, BTX enables computers in consumer electronics form factors, which I am personally very interested in. Now, I wouldn't recommend the HP Entertainment PC I just linked to because it costs $1399, but with the standard defined it won't be long before DIY or open source equivalent products are available.

When I can build an entertainment PC for about the price of a Tivo plus a lifetime subscription, the entertainment PC starts to look very attractive.

Naturally, these types of systems are much more interesting with large high resolution displays, like plasma or LCD. A guy can dream, can't he?

Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 11:11 pm
by Peijen

Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 1:45 am
by Jonathan

Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 7:36 pm
by quantus
I just have to add a preemptive "No comment"