How Things Are Around Here

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: June 26, 2008 - 10:10 AM PST People say that one image is worth more than one thousand words. I think it is the case with this picture of what is below my main bench. click to enlarge Plus what is inside my closet.  Yep, I have around 30 hardware parts for reviewing here... This means it would take 1 month reviewing one part per day and asking the manufacturers to stop sending me stuff. Who said running a reviewing website was an easy job? Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

The new GeForce 9800 GTX+ and PhysX

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: June 19, 2008 - 10:25 AM PST I really don’t know about you, but sometimes I get the impression that nVidia likes to launch one new video card per week. Even for us sometimes it is hard to keep track of all new releases. The new GTX 200 was launched only three days ago and today nVidia launched a “new” card, GeForce 9800 GTX+ (an overclocked 9800 GTX), lowering the price of GeForce 9800 GTX to make it a competitor to the new Radeon HD 4850. Fortunately nVidia provided a handy table comparing which products from AMD competes to which products from nVidia after this price drop and the addition of GTX+, see below. click to enlarge But today nVidia also made an important announcement, which is finally the support of PhysX in the GPU. PhysX is a physics engine, which allows games to be more realistic by calculating how objects interact. For example, if you shot an object, what will happen to the object? Will the object move? Will the bullet make a hole on the object? Will the bullet bounce back? Will the object be destroyed? These calculations are traditionally done by the system CPU. The new 177.39 driver allows GeForce 9800 GTX, GTX 280  and GTX 260 to move these calculations to the GPU, thus improving performance. nVidia is promising for July a new driver that will allow PhysX for the entire nVidia product line. There are several games supporting PhysX on the market, Unreal Tournment 3 is one of them. 3DMark Vantage also supports PhysX, but it isn’t a real game. Forthcoming games supporting PhysX includes Mstar, Mirrors Edge, Empire: Total War, Backbreaker and Pwnage. The only problem for me with this amount of new releases in such a short period of time is trying to put together reviews, especially when nVidia launches a new driver version a day, forcing us to retest all video cards everytime a new major driver is released. For instance, with this new driver supporting PhysX released, all our data we had already collected for 9800 GTX and GTX 200 is worthless and even our GTX 280 review published only 3 days ago may be considered "flawed" by criterious readers because of a new driver released today supporting PhysX. This really sucks. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Our New Methodology for High-End VGA Reviews

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: June 10, 2008 - 1:16 PM PST Deciding what methodology to use when reviewing hardware parts like video cards, processors and motherboards is always hard. No matter what methodology we decide to use there will always be users complaining that we should used this or that hardware part, that we should have included this or that program or game, and so on. There are several technical reasons involved on how we pick the components and programs to do our benchmarking; this selection is not random and also isn’t based on “we used these components because these are the components we have here at our lab”. In fact every time we decide to update our testing procedures we spend a lot of money buying new parts and programs. Since we are going to start reviewing high-end video cards again – finally! – we decided to explain all the reasons behind the components we picked. The main goal with a VGA benchmarking is to test the maximum performance it can deliver. If we install a high-end video card on a low-end or mainstream system, the system may limit the maximum performance the video card can deliver because the CPU, the memories and/or the hard disk drive may be limiting the performance (this happens because if the video card is faster than the other components it will have to wait for data that is coming from outside, thus reducing its performance; we want a system where data is available as soon as the video card requires them). Also since high-end video cards are expensive, we believe a user that buys a high-end card will install it on a high-end PC. Even though there are probably users that install high-end video cards on low-end PCs, it doesn’t make sense to review a high-end video card on a low-end system because the system would be limiting the video card performance, as explained. So we tried to build the most high-end system we could, i.e. the fastest CPU, the fastest memories and the fastest hard disk drive we could buy. We know that our system isn’t a typical PC, but at least we know for sure that no part from our system is limiting the maximum performance the video card can deliver. Below we are listing all components from the hardware setup we will use for reviewing high-end video cards, with a brief explanation on why we picked each component and how much each one costs. CPU: Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (3.2 GHz, 1,600 MHz FSB, 12 MB L2 memory cache). As explained we wanted the fastest CPU around to make sure that the CPU wouldn’t be limiting the video card’s performance. This baby costs USD 1,470. Memories: Crucial Ballistix PC3-16000 2 GB kit (BL2KIT12864BE2009). We wanted the fastest memories around and these DDR3 memories from Crucial run at 2,000 MHz with 9-9-9-28 timings are are compatible with nVidia’s EPP standard. The biggest problem is the price, USD 500, which prevented us from having a system with 4 GB instead of “only” 2 GB. Motherboard: EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI. We picked this motherboard because it is compatible with our CPU, it is based on PCI Express 2.0 and it can make our memories to run at 2,000 MHz with no fancy configuration. It costs USD 350. Hard disk drive: Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS (300 GB, SATA-300, 10,000 rpm, 16 MB cache). We wanted a high performance drive and a 10,000 rpm seemed the way to go. It costs USD 300. Video monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 305T (LCD, 30”, 2560x1600). We wanted a video monitor that could reach a resolution of 2560x1600 and this was our best choice. We could have bought a cheaper CRT solution, but we wanted a monitor that wouldn’t take a lot of space on your bench. It costs USD 1,230. Notice that we didn’t buy this monitor because of its screen size (30”) but because of its maximum resolution. Notice that there are bigger monitors around that are cheaper, but they have a lower resolution. Power supply: OCZ EliteXStream 1,000 W. We know that 1,000 W is overkill, but we wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t have any kind of power shortage. It costs USD 250. So we are talking about a USD 4,100 system. We are glad that except for the video monitor and for the hard disk drive all other parts we got from the manufacturers that are proudly sponsoring Hardware Secrets. Even with these donations we still had to invest USD 1,530 (plus shipping) for you to get the best possible high-end VGA reviews. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top