GamersBeyond Community Blog

Another Monday is among us and the hardware news is ripe for the picking, some stories were looked over from last week while plenty of good eats are recent and awesomely ready for consumption. Wow, I must be hungry or something… on to the news!

From AMD’s financial downturn to new SLI equipped laptops from Toshiba and some water cooled ddr2 from OCZ, read on to find out where your gaming technology will take you in the near future.

Microsoft had an XNA article about the technical advantages of programming in 64bit to coincide with the increase in 64bit systems being used. This article goes into some depth about how processors are undergoing 2 transformations at the same time, the movement to 64 bit and the use of multiple cores. up until recently there were very few games that even took advantage of the ability to run under the 64 bit variations of windows, let alone the use of multiple cores that many new games nor apps have any ability to use. The combined ability for a game to use both multiple cores and 64 bit could be revolutionary and finally push PC gaming out of the stone age.

Not gaming related, but 64 bit related and will hopefully push this very same technology forward; Adobe Photoshop cs4 will be 64bit and for Windows PCs only.

64 bit has been a technology that is in much need to be more widely incorporated into gaming and PC usability in general, so I am looking forward to the possibilities and will watch closely where these technologies go.

AMD’s financial forecast for 2008 Q1 reduced to $1.5 billion a 15% reduction from Q4 2007. Regardless of price cuts they have been unable to make up the profit, and will have to resort to letting go of 10% of their workforce. There is good news though, with the release of the tri-core and new quad-core phenom processors that are fairing well with reviewers along with the new 3000 series cards yet to be released; in contrast the Nvidia 9800 cards are under fire for lackluster performance increase over the previous generation.

I have been an AMD fanboy before and may some day be again. AMD has its current place as a budget line high performance chip scoring high for many reviewers in their Value VS. Budget arguments. This has happened before from AMD and I am sure once ATI starts ramping up and AMD gets their act together intel will drop the ball and amd will return to fame. A good way to succeed at this in a more timely maner would be to provide unlocked processors across all price ranges, this will push gamers and enthusiasts to AMD over Intel in no time.

With AMD’s acquisition of ATI, and Intel’s lack of desire for a similar partnership with Nvidia, Nvidia’s future could look bleak. Add that to a lackluster release of the 9800 series cards and Nvidia will have to really pick up pace to keep ahead of ATI.

Nvidia’s plan is in a merger with VIA, who produce their own processors but have little or no market penetration and could really use the marketing push that Nvidia could provide.

Coupled with the impressive numbers that Nvidia released for the Q1 2008 showing a 36% increase over the previous quarter, Nvidia doesn’t seem to be going anywhere yet. Though the last chip that I knew was a VIA was one of my 486s so assuming they have expanded their technology since then this may be a good idea for Nvidia, especially if they could get some real talent designing processors to put VIA back on the map.

Nvidia is also pushing an initiative that directly attacks Intel and their chips by stating that processors have gotten fast enough and that all the recent performance boosts have come from graphics cards.

This news isn’t too shocking, knowing what I had already posted above about 64 bit and multi-core gaming. I feel that until those technological hurdles are bound we wont see much of a performance increase coming from the CPU when related to gaming.

OCZ finally announced their flex line to the 4GB DDR2 kit, this kit uses water cooling and rates at PC2-9200 with a latency of 5-5-5-18. Each kit includes the tubing and couplers for optionally integrating them into your own water cooling cycles.

This is the kit I plan to max my system with, and when I do it you can bet I post a video of me installing them and integrating them into my own water cooling cycle.

Lian-Li is poised to release no less than 10 cases before June’s Computex show in Taiwan. the models cover all markets and look pretty damn good, my favorite is the PC-A20 toward the bottom of the page, with allot of well designed cooling and airflow choices, though I am unsure if they have room for a good radiator internally. Now if they can introduce some nice cases at sub-$300 price point I would line up to buy one one of these.

I had mentioned a few weeks ago that ASUS had a Triple core ATI graphics adapter under the works utilizing the CrossfireX technology and 3 R670 with 1.5GB of memory. the unveiling happened last week as they officially announced its production. don’t run to Frys yet though because it wont be out for a while, as ASUS hasn’t announced any desire to sell them.

the cards will feature 4 DVI ports and be water cooled, the pics show that it comes with it’s own water loop for easy integration into your case even if you don’t have water cooling already.

I am becoming torn in whether I should promote this card or Nvidia cards, I guess we will have to see when the benchmarks and reviews come out.

Thank you for your continued reading and I hope you found this news noteworthy and important to your gaming experience.

please leave comments below and let me know how well this site is shaping up.

Also I would like to get a few more authors to post about topics related to PC gaming, I unfortunately have nothing to post about until I get back from Korea. So of you are someone who would like to help a growing outlet by submitting a semi regular article, commentary, preview, or review, just email me at blogadmin@gamersbeyond.com.

Thank you.

-Shegs