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?
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.
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.
So I dropped the Radeon HD 5870 into my primary production PC. While I was pretty intrigued by its potential 3D performance in games, I was more intrigued by its ability to support three displays.
I know a number of power users (who are not financial analysts or programmers) who use three displays. But using more than two monitors had several requirements I considered problematic. You either had to have two graphics cards, a special workstation card (that wasn’t always a good 3D card) or some type of DVI or VGA switcher, like Matrox’s TripleHead boxes.
All those introduced complexities I didn’t like. I just wanted one card with good 3D gaming performance that supported more than two monitors – and wasn’t a dual GPU card. Now I’ve got it.
I thought it was just me, but apparently, it’s not.
We’ve gone through three HP inkjet all-in-one printers in the past four years. One, the Officejet 7410, refused to connect to a wireless network, so that was returned and replaced with a Photosmart C7180. The Photosmart 7180 eventually died with a paper jam that could only be cleared by removing the *ahem* non-removable paper tray. (Why, exactly, is the paper tray non-removable?)
So we recently acquired an HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One aka the C309a. As a printer, it works fine — even double-sided printing works as advertised. However, the printer will occasionally fire up for no good reason. The print heads will move, the printer shakes and makes a tremendous racket, then the printer will quiet down again. I suppose it’s priming the inkjet heads, but it’s way too noisy and distracting when it does this.
As technology marches on, what was once the bleeding edge becomes the midrange, and what was once considered midrange becomes entry level. I recently built a pair of midrange systems. By any measure, their performance would have been bleeding edge just three years ago. Time and engineering march on.
These systems were the last pair of systems built to upgrade my Friday Night Follies LAN party systems. Will I be good to go for a few years, or will I be writing a version of this article in a couple of years? That depends, I suppose, on the health of PC gaming a couple of years from now.
But for the present, let’s see what the midrange looks like.
I’ve got a couple of system builds in the works, but I ran into an interesting problem that I thought I’d share. This is a lesson about paying attention to the POST messages, or maybe looking at that BIOS setup screen a little more closely. Those messages actually do show useful information on occasion.
IDF 2009 has drawn to a close, and Loyd and I are trying to sort through the well-orchestrated message delivery to understand what really is going on at Intel. Intel did an excellent job, though many of us miss Pat Gelsinger and wish Intel had gone a little deeper into the technical topics.
The man in the picture to the right is Justin Rattner, the chief technology officer for Intel, and he seems like a fellow who really enjoys his job. Intel puts Justin’s presentation of Intel research projects on the last day, since it is always popular and entertaining. This time, Justin had a huge 3D screen rolled out on stage and had us reach under our seats to discover 3D glasses. After a live 3D interview with a vendor, the screen was used to immerse the audience into a U2 concert. Bono appeared to walk out into the auditorium, and the effect was incredibly cool. Consumer 3D television should start to show up next year.
Shall we build a system?
Recently, I decided it was time to replace one of the gaming rigs in my office LAN. On most Fridays, my LAN party group gets together for what we affectionately call “Friday Night Follies.” I usually build systems out of older parts for the LAN party systems, which are generally good enough for the games we play.
This time around, though, I wanted to build something a little more current. So I decided to build a compact system based around Gigabyte’s P55-UD4 micro ATX motherboard and a Core i5 750. Part of my rationale was to test long term stability. You can run all the benchmarks in the world, but there’s nothing quite like hammering on a system in a current generation multiplayer game to really test system stability.
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