I’ve written boatloads of articles over the years about PC tech, building PCs, hardware specs, benchmarks and other topics that PC enthusiasts (read: PC geeks) care about. Geeks obsess over details. How many shader cores? What’s the latency? Bandwidth between interconnects. And so it goes.
I’m also a fairly serious amateur photographer. I obsess over which lenses would be ideal, how fast they should be, ISO settings, which noise reduction app works best. I suppose you could call me a digital photo geek, but I’m a pale shade of some of the real pros out there.
Then there’s bicycles.
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I don’t know if this is a sign that I have to turn in my PC geek badge or not, but I now own a Macbook. True, it’s the latest entry level Macbook. And I did take a screwdriver to it first thing. And it is running Windows 7 Professional x64 in addition to MacOS.
It pains me to think that I’ve contributed to Apple’s stellar quarter not once, not twice, but three times. I picked up an iPad (just a Wi-Fi version, but 64GB), bought the Macbook and recently upgraded to an iPhone 4.
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Once a year or so, I get the crazy idea that I want to build a small form factor PC.
It’s not the actual small form factor system that’s crazy. It’s what I want it to do. What I typically want is to build a high performance gaming system using a micro ATX motherboard, building it into a micro ATX chassis. I’m typically lured in by some cool looking micro ATX case. That happened to me with a couple of Silverstone SUGO models (SG01 and SG03). Most recently, it was the NZXT Vulcan, which I reviewed for Maximum PC. The Vulcan is actually a good looking case with an attractive feature set that makes it sound like a badass, high end case.
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I’ve been heads down on a number of freelance writing projects, many of which are finally reaching fruition.
I had fun writing an article on new graphics technology as it affects games. That ran in the August issue of Maximum PC, and is online now at MaximumPC.com. The real bummer is that I had lots of cool screen shots, most of which the magazine ran. But the need to reduce size for both print and online makes them less effective. Still, I think DirectX 11 will have the biggest impact on PC gaming since DX8.
Also up on Maximum PC is a review of Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 network interface card for gamers. It’s an interesting product, in that it works as advertised, reducing lag and ping times… but most people won’t notice any benefit. I’d class it as a luxury product, maybe useful to the 0.5% of gamers who compete online, care about winning and have the insanely fast reflexes to notice the small differences.
More stuff after the jump.
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Not long ago, I wrote about upgrading a laptop to an SSD. I’ve been using the OCZ SSD in that Acer Ferrari for several months now, and it’s all been working well.
But SSDs make me nervous.
I’ve been reading some of the articles on SSDs at Anandtech recently, and what I’ve read hasn’t exactly filled me with confidence. Anand’s experience with Crucial’s C300 is a pretty good example of what makes me nervous: firmware updates that brick drives.
Then there’s OCZ, who has a deservedly good reputation for reliability. Yet buggy drives can still slip through their QA process.
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Yeah, I’ve been slacking on this blog.
Actually, I’ve been busy with other writing projects, consumed with Mass Effect / Mass Effect 2 and brought low by a bronchial infection. The good news is that I’m coming out of my Bioware addiction and at the tail end of this combination of cold and sinus infection.
This is just a quick post to point towards a few articles. I recently wrapped up several big projects for Maximum PC, including extensive benchmarking of Nvidia’s new 480 GTX, a review of Sapphire’s take on AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition and a roundup of Raw photo editors. Writing the article on editing raw images was great fun, but I’m not happy with the way it turned out. I waxed a little too enthusiastic, and got carried away writing it, so the fault was entirely mine — not the editors at MaxPC. That happens every now and then, if you write a lot. Not every article can be perfect, even when you have great editors. All you can do is learn from them and move on.
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I’ve got my second day CES coverage up at Tom’s Hardware.
One of the funnier bits I ran across was the dueling AMD / Nvidia booths in the North Hall foyer. I’m not sure if this was intentional, or an accident, but they’re almost right next to each other.
The potentially coolest thing I saw was Nvidia’s FG100 DX11 graphics card actually running in a PC. No word on final specs, pricing or power consumption, though. Now it’s off to CES Thursday and more meetings.
So Intel and AMD settle their antitrust litigation for a cool $1.25 Billion. With a “B.”
The timing is certainly interesting, coming so soon on the heels of New York State’s recent filing against Intel on that same topic. Toss in the European Union judgment, and you get a picture of a beleaguered Intel, fighting a battle on multiple fronts.
What does the settlement really mean for consumers and OEMs? How will it affect AMD going forward?
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I’ve been running the full release of Windows 7 since the RTM went up in August on TechNet, but today is the day that most users who are so inclined will pick up a copy of Windows 7 and attempt to install it.
Most of them will be successful. Windows 7 setup is remarkable forgiving, but some users will still have issues. Even I had a problem with one older laptop based on the original Core 2 Duo, in which Windows 7 installed fine, but the HD audio device refuses to work even though the driver reports itself as working normally.
Of course, there will be people who have issues, sometimes serious ones. That’s the nature of the PC.
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When I was editor at ExtremeTech, I wrote several articles on building very tiny PCs. These didn’t offer great performance, but they were very compact, and useful as “kitchen” PCs, or maybe car PCs. They all suffered from some caveats. Some, like the original (Fit-PC Slim were very small, but the performance was just too anemic for general use, though they were useful in certain dedicated applications.
I also built one Intel Atom-based system, using a Travla C156 case. While compact, I could have used any mini-ITX motherboard with that, and the north bridge on the particular motherboard I used had a pretty noisy fan. So when Intel dropped off yet another Atom motherboard kit with me, I wasn’t initially very interested.
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