Jonathan's Hardware Thread 5.0 (Q4 2004)

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Jonathan
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Jonathan's Hardware Thread 5.0 (Q4 2004)

Post 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.
Last edited by Jonathan on Thu Oct 14, 2004 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Peijen
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Post 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?

Jonathan
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Post 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.

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Post 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.

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Post 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?

Peijen
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Jonathan
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quantus
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Post by quantus »

I just have to add a preemptive "No comment"
Have you clicked today? Check status, then: People, Jobs or Roads

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