Review Corrected

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: November 16, 2006 - 8:03 AM PST While we wrote our tutorial on how to use Battlefield 2142 to benchmark a PC we noticed that our Battlefield 2142 procedure on our Core 2 Extreme QX6700 review was wrong (we forgot to unlock the game’s internal FPS lock). Today we benchmarked all CPUs again with Battlefield 2142 and updated the review. The results and conclusions didn’t change, however it is always good to have the correct values published in case you want to run your own benchmarks and compare them to ours. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Our New Methodology for Reviewing VGAs

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: November 13, 2006 - 4:42 AM PST We decided to restructure our lab, updating our benches, in order to have a hardware that allows more realistic performance measurements on the hardware being reviewed. From now on our VGA reviews will follow the methodology described below. As you can see, there is always a motive behind the selection of every item; we don’t pick things at random as many people may think. The main change will be the use of resolutions beyond 1600x1200 with high-end video cards, especially because of forthcoming VGAs where differences in performance will be measurable only at 2048x1536. We had to buy a new 21-inch video monitor, naturally (we picked a Samsung SyncMaster 1100MB). We will review entry-level and mid-range VGAs only at 1024x768 and at 1600x1200. For each resolution we will run two tests, one with image quality settings disabled and another with image quality settings maxed out. We didn’t change only the video monitor, but also all the other parts of our hardware platform. We picked Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU from Intel. We know that is a processor that only a few users have and several users ask us why we don’t use a mainstream CPU. The whole question is that mainstream CPUs limit the maximum performance that the VGA can achieve. As in our reviews we want to see exactly the maximum performance the VGA can achieve, we used a high-end CPU so the CPU won’t be a bottleneck for the system 3D performance. We installed 2 GB of DDR2-1066/PC2-8500 RAM from Corsair on our system. As for motherboard, we selected ASUS P5B, which is based on Intel P965 chipset. You may think that we should use an Intel 975X-based motherboard. However, Intel 975X chipset officially does not support DDR2-800 memories. Besides that, ASUS P5B is one of the few motherboards available today where you can configure your memory to run at 1,066 MHz. So we set our memories to run at 1,066 MHz and not at 800 MHz. Regarding the hard disk drive, we chose a Samsung HD080HJ, which is SATA-300, has na 8 MB buffer and spins at 7,200 rpm. We didn’t need more than 80 GB.   Now talking about the programs, we decided to use only two benchmarking programs, 3DMark03 and 3DMark06. 3DMark03 simulates DirectX 9.0 (Shader 2.0) games, which are games from the previous generation, while 3DMark06 simulates DirectX 9.0c (Shader 3.0) games, which are games from the current generation. We removed 3DMark05 from our methodology because 3DMark06 completely replaces it. Following the suggestions from our readers, we added more games to our methodology: Quake 4, F.E.A.R. and Battlefield 2142, besides Far Cry, which will keep using. Talking about Battlefield 2142, it was very hard to find out how to use it to measure performance. Even though it is based on the same engine as Battlefield 2, so far there is no utility for this task. We found out that its internal benchmarking module doesn’t work correctly. Also, as this game was just released, so far there is no standard demo for measuring performance, so we had to create our own. As we wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to use this game for benchmarking VGAs, we published a full tutorial on this subject. On this tutorial we also made available the demo we will be using on our reviews, so you can use our BF2142 demo on your own benchmarks. We didn’t add more games because we think that the selected games represent the current gaming technologies available on the market; adding more games would be redundant. Also testing each video card takes a lot of time and since we will have to re-test all video cards we have already reviewed all over again, we would waste more than one month just collecting data if we added even more games. We think of updating this methodology only when DirectX 10 games are released – games like Crysis and Hellgate London. We ask you patience. We should delay at least more 15 days collecting data from video cards we have already reviewed. We want new reviews online more than you do. By the way: let us clean up the mess that is right now here at our lab that we will take some photos from our lab and post here on our blog. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

New Search Engine

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: November 13, 2006 - 4:03 AM PST Some of you may have already noticed that we recently changed our internal search engine. Before we used an internal engine, which wasn’t very efficient and also didn’t index the contents of our forums. Now we are using Google in our search engine. Now our search engine is not only faster, providing more precise results (and at the same time saving server load, which is always good) and accepting advanced commands (like if you were using Google itself), but this new engine searches at the same time both our website and forums using the entered keywords. In turn we need to publish advertisings on the results, which isn’t so bad. First, these ads would appear if you went directly to Google anyway and, secondly, we make some change whenever someone clicks on one Google advertisements – which is always welcome for us to keep upgrading our lab. We haven’t done this before because until a while ago it was not possible to present results from Google inside our own website – i.e. you entered the keywords inside our website but the results were shown on a new page inside Google website, making you to leave our website, lowering the number of pageviews of our website – since the results page wasn’t located inside our server. So this was a suicide for a website like ours that depends on advertisement to survive. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Two Nerds in The Silicon Valley

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: October 9, 2006 - 3:41 PM PST Me and my friend Cássio Lima, Junior Editor from Clube do Hardware, made a nerd trip to two museums in Silicon Valley. If you like hardware like us will like both museums for sure, and we will recommend you to visit them whenever you go to the Bay Area. The first one is Intel Museum at Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, CA (2200 Mission Blvd). It is great to learn not only about Intel history, but also the PC history itself. There is a lot to see there. There is no entrance fee and there is a big parking lot in front, which is great. click to enlarge Figure 1: Cássio at the entrance of Intel Museum. click to enlarge Figure 2: Altair 8800, grandfather of the modern PC. The second museum is The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA (201 South Market St). It has several interactive stuff there, target mainly to kids. However since Intel is one of the main donors, you will find chip manufacturing equipments there, including a real clean room. You can also explore some chips with a microscope, which is really neat. This section of the museum will give hardcore nerds wet dreams. click to enlarge Figure 3: Cássio at the entrance of The Tech Museum of Innovation (“The Tech”). One of the interactive expositions they have is a 3D scanner that scans your head and then you can see and play with it on the Internet, using a VRML tool. Figure 4: 3D scan of Cássio’s head. Figure 5: 3D scan of my head (yes, I DO have a big nose). Attached to The Tech there is an IMAX theater and the admission fee (USD 8) includes a ticket to IMAX – which is movie theater with a huge 8-story high screen. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Little Laptop Museum at IDF Fall 2006

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: September 25, 2006 - 9:12 PM PST Even though IDF Fall 2006 only starts tomorrow, we had the chance to walk around at the Moscone Convention Center, where we could see a small laptop museum set by Intel, presenting, among others, an Osborne computer, the famous Compaq Portable and world’s first true laptop, Toshiba T1000. Released on 1981, Osborne was based on a Z80 CPU with 64 KB RAM, had a small 5” CRT monochrome monitor and weighted 24.5 pounds (11 Kg). Its initial price was of USD 1,795. click to enlarge Figure 1: Osborne Computer. The Compaq Portable was the first IBM PC clone released on the market, in 1983. It used a 9” CRT monochrome monitor and weighted 28 pounds (13 Kg). click to enlarge Figure 2: Compaq Portable. The first true laptop was released in 1987. Toshiba T1000 was the first one to feature a LCD screen, what made it to weight only 6.4 pounds (3 Kg). It was basically an IBM PC XT clone, as it was based on an 8088 CPU running at 4.7 MHz. click to enlarge Figure 3: Toshiba T1000. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Turning Dreams Into Reality

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: September 24, 2006 - 12:53 AM PST I have many dreams, dreams that I haven't fulfilled yet. Many people think that to transform dreams into reality it takes a lot the money. It doesn't. Sometimes they are just "silly" things that you could simply go ahead and do, so costing us nothing or very little – as it is more a matter of energy than money –, but we keep postponing forever or worse, we simply don't think about them anymore. I really think we should have some personal goals in life, and transforming these goals into reality is what makes us feel alive, is what drives us ahead. I have a full list of dreams I want to fulfill and I try to transform them into reality as much as I can. And new dreams arise every day. I am writing all this just to say that today I fulfilled one of such dreams. I am really emotional and I have no words to describe what I am feeling right now. All I can say is that it took me 22 years to finally make this happen (especially because she has never been to my home country). The pictures are below. I have no more to say. I really wanted to share this with you. click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge Click here to download and watch a small clip that I made. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (1) top

Corsair HX620W Thermal Sensor Issue

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: September 5, 2006 - 10:19 AM PST I owe big time apologies to Corsair. On our "First Look" article posted yesterday night on their new HX620W power supply I said it didn’t have any thermal sensor at all. But I was wrong. The thing is that it doesn’t have a traditional thermal sensor. It uses a very small SMD thermistor that we couldn’t locate. Labeled as TR900, Corsair had to send us the picture below to show us this component location (click to enlarge an look for the red circle). I am correcting this article right now. click to enlarge Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

ATI: Recycling Old Cards With New Names

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: August 24, 2006 - 6:56 AM PST Yesterday ATI launched three new chips. I don’t know if you paid close attention to their specs, but Radeon X1300 XT and Radeon X1650 Pro are actually a Radeon X1600 Pro and a Radeon X1600 XT with new names. While all other members of Radeon X1300 family have 4 pixel shader engines, Radeon X1300 XT has 12, just like Radeon X1600 Pro. Radeon X1300 XT and Radeon X1600 Pro run at the same clock rate (500 MHz) and access memory at the same bit rate (128-bit). The only difference between them is the memory clock rate, which is 800 MHz on Radeon X1300 XT and 780 MHz on Radeon X1600 Pro – a 2.5% increase, which is completely negligible and probably won’t even be measurable on reviews. Almost the same thing happens between Radeon X1600 XT and Radeon X1650 Pro. Both have 12 pixel shader engines and access memory at the same bit rate (128-bit). Radeon X1650 Pro runs at 600 MHz while Radeon X1600 XT runs at 590 MHz – a ridiculous 1.7% clock increase –, while the new model accesses memory at 1.4 GHz against 1.38 GHz on Radeon X1600 XT – 1.45% increase. We bet that Radeon X1650 Pro will achieve the same performance as Radeon X1600 XT on reviews. So, what is the point of releasing these “new” cards? Just to say “hey, we want to make you believe that we have something new”? Simply ridiculous. Radeon X1950 XTX, however, is definitely a new product. While it has the same specs of Radeon X1900 XTX, it accesses memory at 2 GHz using the new GDDR4 technology (Radeon X1900 XTX accesses its memory at 1.55 GHz). Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (4) top

How To Disable Windows XP WGA Notifications

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: August 7, 2006 - 5:58 AM PST Since last month Windows XP users that use a copy with an invalid serial number are facing an annoying message on their system telling them that their Windows is using an invalid serial number and that they should buy an original copy: “This copy of Windows is not genuine. You may be a victim of software counterfeit”. Microsoft has post a step-by-step tutorial on their website on how to remove this  “feature”, called Windows Genuine Advantage or WGA for short. It seems, however, that newer versions of the WGA component cannot be removed using Microsoft’s own tutorial. We have found a small program (only 13 KB) that removes these messages: RemoveWGA. It works like a charm. It doesn’t, however, transform your invalid serial number into a valid one; it only disables that annoying message. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

My DVD Collection

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: July 24, 2006 - 12:00 PM PST All my friends already know that I am crazy about teen comedies from the 80’s, especially the high school ones by John Hughes (Ferris Buller’s Day Off is, in my opinion, the best movie ever). I have a huge collection of this kind of movie, and I frequently call my friends over to watch them with me. Our “popcorn sessions” are really funny. Even people that are not in the same age as myself (I am 32 now) – thus did not watch them when they were released – laugh a lot watching these movies with us. On my birthday party people asked to watch Bachelor Party and ask me "Hey Gabe, where is the donkey? Where is the donkey?". And of course those movies bring us a lot of memories from our teen years, especially because some of these friends studied with me back then. This weekend I bought Private Resort - which was finally released on DVD - and I remembered to update this list. It was really funny to watch Johnny Depp so young. Below is a full list of my DVD 80’s teen comedies. Do you have any suggestion on what I should buy that I don’t already have? Ferris Bueller Day Off (the best movie ever) Revenge of The Nerds (my friends had good laughs watching Anthony Edwards - Dr. Mark Greene from E.R.- with hair in this one) Sixteen Candles (both John Cusack and his sister Joan Cusack have a plot on this one) The Breakfast Club (watch Emilio Estevez in his best role, in my opinion) Pretty in Pink (James Spader is in this one) Can’t Buy Me Love Private Resort (Johnny Depp's first movie) Some Kind of Wonderful Weird Science (and the awesome sound track by Oingo Boingo, another icon from the 80’s) Real Genius (Val Kilmer very young) Last American Virgin Porky’s (awesome how a movie can be funny and naïve at the same time) Better Off Dead (John Cusack) One Crazy Summer (and John Cusack) The Sure Thing (and again John Cusack) Say Anything (Guess who?) Three O’Clock High Back to School (the funniest Rodney Dangerfield movie ever) Summer School Valley Girl (how funny to see Nicholas Cage so young) Secret Admirer (Thanks Rafael Coelho for this recommendation!) License to Drive (featuring “The Coreys”!) Risky Business (Tom Cruise very young dancing on his underwear) Bachelor Party (the best Tom Hanks movie ever) The Money Pit (Tom Hanks again) The Secret of My Success (Michael J. Fox, another icon from the 80’s) Police Academy (me and all my friends watch it only to guess when someone will enter The Blue Oyster Bar) Footloose (Kevin Bacon very young; one of my best friends loves to watch this one with me, his password to watch it is “Let’s have bacon and eggs”) Meatballs (ok, this one is from 1979, but is great anyway) National Lampoon’s Animal House (this is also from the 70’s but is really funny – this is the mother of all high school/college comedies) She’s All That (this is from the 90’s but is so full of clichés that deserves a place in my best movies list – so cliché that got a parody, Not Another Teen Movie - a great movie for teen comedies, by the way) Can’t Hardly Wait Mischief Encino Man (yes, I know. It isn't from the 80's but it is great anyway) Just One of the Girls (really funny movie with Core Haim, amazingly enough it isn't sold at Amazon.com) Road Trip (isn't from the 80's but keeps the same spirit) The New Guy (the same thing, DJ Qualls rocks) PS: I don’t have Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Sean Penn very young) because I don’t like it. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top