Welcome to our first ever Hardware Monday.This week I will discuss the hardware news and reviews from the previous week. there is no exact layout of the article in mind yet so be patient as I find my direction. and as always you are more than welcomed to leave comments or suggestions in the comments below.
This has been an interesting week in hardware. From Nvidia to Intel to AMD and ASUS there have been some interesting announcements and reviews. Nvidia is in the midst of launching their new lineup of cards, the 9000 series, and the overall acceptance from the media has been pretty low. Intel announces a processor fit for mobile phones that is amazingly inexpensive yet powerful enough to change the way we think about mobile computing. AMD releases their new three core Phenom chip. and ASUS is in development of a 3 GPU videocard to the taste of the ATI 3850 cards.
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I just updated to wordpress 2.5.
leave me a message if anything looks, feels or reacts awkward.
-shegs
No way!! Can i really do this… Yes yes I can.
Note to shegs, maybe you should fix this 
.
Written in blood by,
The #1 Shegs blog fan
edit by shegs:
Fixed, author role is now by request only.
I have been trying to think of an acceptable plan of action for this site. as this is my first site I have been looking elsewhere for inspiration and I am unhappy with my current direction. I have some new ideas that will hopefully make this easier for me and, what is really important, more useful for you.
No more posting about everything I think is useful in a bunch of mini entries. instead I will personally aggregate and read the news that I do anyways and weekly give you updates.
So 3 days a week or so I am planning on posting the HW news, the Gaming News, and random Reviews that I have been collecting the week before. As I start to get a hang of this schedule I will try to keep it as consistent as possible.
Thanks for being patient as I learn the ropes to this whole blogging thing.
-Shegs
“The cheapest GeForce 9800 GTX found listed today is made by Palit, under the XpertVision brand and it costs just under
273 euros.”
Full Story:
http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?id=18885&catid=2
In more hardware related news, we have word of the cheapest of the 9800GTXs being sold in the EU is bade by Palit. I think a reasonable price will be around the $350 - $400 and would much rather buy a BFG tech, Asus, or XFX. I dont know enough about palit yet to have them be a a part of my video card commitment.
What about you guys? Is it big name security for you? Or run and gun budget adapter?
“Being that we are Bethesda, everything gets a bit big. So as of last week, we’re over 200 endings. That is not an exaggeration, but it deserves some descriptions”
Full Story:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/03/26/fallout_3_to_have_over_200_endings/1
In a meeting on the
Official Xbox Magazine podcast, Todd Howard goes into some details on the 200+ unique endings in fallout 3, and how they came up with that number from the initial 12 they had a little over a year ago.
It seems that every detail about how you play the game will shape your ending. It seems great in concept but I have to wonder in the amount of variance in the endings? Are there 200 endings worth of story line? I am excited because I love Bethesda, I have been a fan since Morrowind, and I love fallout, but I am thinking that toting this 200 number is more of a PR stunt that something that tangibly or emotionally worthwhile. I know that I would never play through 200+ endings, hell I probably wouldn’t sit through a you tube marathon of all the endings.
What do you guys think, Was this an odd PR stunt? Or was it something more?
“Windows Vista users who apply the just-released Service Pack 1 patch should receive a general increase in gaming performance, according to several benchmarking websites.”
Full Story:
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51915
It seems that Vista isn’t as bad as has been toted when it comes to game performance. Service pack one solves a lot of the performance problems with vista and brings the frame-rate to near XP speeds.
As a vista user I admit that sometimes I have some performance lag, it doesn’t affect me much as when my performance isn’t lagging I still get a good 4-60 fps in most newer games. I have been looking forward to upgrading to SP1, mainly because I like to keep my systems up to date. Unfortunately though I am in Korea and henceforth unable to update. I’ll have to wait until I get back home in June. Have you vista users seen any increase with speeds or is
“We’re almost done. The Medic is still planned as the first update, but we’ll be pushing into the other classes pretty quickly.”
Full Story:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/861/861991p1.html?RSSwhen2008-03-25_154800&RSSid=861991
I’m looking forward to some much anticipated updates to TF2. In this first update it seems that the medic will get some un-lockable weapons. And that each weapon that will be un-lockable will have tradeoffs so that it is in fact not the weapon that is better but maybe the weapon fits your style of play better than what was available.
I personally don’t play medic all that much but some people in my guild do so I am glad they get a good change of pace. We’ll see how awesome things get when every class has their own un-lockables.
Until then, what do you guys think about un-lockables? Will it improve the playing experience or will it only push the advance up faster?
“NVIDIA’s high-end GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card has been pretty well received on its own, but it looks to be decidedly more of a mixed bag when it comes to a Quad SLI configuration,”
Full Story:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/25/nvidias-9800-gx2-based-quad-sli-solution-gets-mixed-reviews
In obvious news today; it seems that using a new technology, with new drivers, on games that aren’t exactly designed to use it, isn’t meeting the exact expectations we had expected. It seems that Crysis is one of only a handful of games the experience any boost in performance by using 4 of the latest and greatest GPUs from Nvidia. This is to be expected as Crysis is the only game that comes to mind right now that actually has untapped potential.
I am sure that given a few months time for Nvidia to iron out the drivers, by the time games start showing up that can use this technology, it will prove to set new standards in how graphics are approached.
Now if Nvidia could only fix the price of these suckers, it might be totally worth it to get a pair in anticipation of when it worked.
“ASUS really took AMD’s
CrossFireX multi-GPU capabilities and ran with them, stuffing a ludicrous trio of GPUs onto a single “concept” card.”
Full Story: http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/25/asus-eah3850-trinity-crams-three-radeon-gpus-onto-one-card/ Some things just seem ridiculous, and some things just get worse. I am seriously seeing a day where our graphics cards are described like our CPUs, where people are quoting the number of cores without actually knowing anything about the cores themselves; And where the newest innovation is just to add more cores without actually improving on the underlying systems. To each his own, I will admit that I am curious as to how well it performs; I will keep you guys posted.
