GamersBeyond Community Blog

This week in Hardware Monday, a plethora of hardware news geared right for your gaming underbelly. Intel and Nvidia ruled the news streets this week, Intel’s Nehalem turns heads, while Nvidia’s new looker turns some more. Comcast promises higher speeds, for a price; while many hope to replace it with Cern’s internal protocol that runs a tid-bit (10,000 times) faster. So here it is in all of its Monday glory, the news as I have found it all across the net; neatly packaged and ready for mass consumption. Don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself!

Nvidia has had one heck of a week, first the 9800 is released and does well with the first round of reviews. it seems to score a bit below ATI’s 3870×2 dual CPU card, and tosses blows with the 8800 ULTRA from last generation, which at $330 is where this card is supposed to be. In comparison the cheapest 8800 ULTRA card I can find on Google’s product search is over $600 so I’d gladly pay the $330 for comparable performance.

Also from Nvidia was the speculation that the 9900 series cards will be coming this summer, sporting a nice new GT200 core and of course improved performance. some are pessimistic saying that it is too soon, or that the 9800s aren’t as amazing as they had hoped, so they are scrapping it. But I see this news as a usual step in performance with a different name to cover the new chip, and to avoid confusion.

Next we have Intel and their new baby, the Nehalem (en-hay-lem) processor. Apparently it was on display earlier this week in china and the some of the specs floated home. The processor will be a dual core built with 45nm technology. It will have an integrated DDR3 memory controller on die with 8MB of L3 Cache and will be the next generations high performance chips, that the elitists will be clamming over with their dual chip Motherboards and custom cooling. Personally, I am anticipating the power, but then I realize that there is no way I need that much, not when I can upgrade to a comparable Crysis killer for less than $1000.

Also notable is the apperent shortage of Yorkfield core chips, the 45nm chip that is due to replace the current Core2 chips, built with the 65nm spec. These chips report faster speeds, cooler temps, and similar price point for those people that just wants to upgrade. Expect them to be lining the store shelves any day now.

This is more of a rant but whatever, it still has some news. Intel, this week, had said that in the future, gaming riggs will rely on the CPU as the primary graphics controller, effectively causing every system to use integrated graphics. They are saying that with the power of the chips coming out and the fact that they have too many cores to be used effectively then it is a reasonable choice to have those extra cores doing all of the video work. they also bring up audio cards as an example of where this has happened in the past, and that the audio that comes on-board no is perfectly fine for most users. I say, have those extra cores help my dedicated graphics card to perform even better! Dedicated graphics aren’t going anywhere. The faster and more awesome integrated graphics are, the better and more fantastic the dedicated cards will be.

Some more news, Comcast notes that speeds are being increased to 50Mbit/5Mbit for the hefty tag of $150 a month. the service is only in the twin Cities area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, but within the next year and a half will cover 100% of Comcast’s service area. the price seems hefty but when compared to current price/mbit it is still a discount. I’m just hoping for Verizon’s FiOS to be available in my city by then with similar speeds at a greatly reduced price point. We will see.

In other net related news; Cern, the proposed father of the net as we know it has been preparing for the big day they turn on their particle accelerator by creating a new protocol called “The Grid” which can apperently transmit and receive data at 10,000 the current rate of most internet connections. though this is only speculation, and there is no reason to think that all of the standards that we have come to love will be replaced tomorrow, it is nice to dream isn’t it?

I’m unsure of where else to put this, and since it has to do more with your hardware than your games I will put it here. It seems that Microsoft is bending under the OEM pressure and leaving XP on the market until the release of “Windows 7″ now slated for a 2009-10 release. Apperently windows vista had such an ill reception that they cannot ignore the fact they need something new to compete with the competition. My question is, if it took them upwards of 4 years to essentially make a skin and slap it on XP, how good will this completely new and redesigned windows be with just over a year in development?

Remember to check out the further reading section below for references and other news or hardware that I found interesting.

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Thanks for hanging out, see you Wednesday with all the game news you can shake your pinky at!

-shegs