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  1. F

    What's the best type of AA to use with the 4870?

    Yes, that's why I said "almost." Personally, I find the performance drop for 8x edge prohibitive except in older games, like you said. It seems to me that 4x or 8x box AA is a better "one size fits all" solution unless he wishes to make profiles for games that could benefit from edge AA settings...
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    What's the best type of AA to use with the 4870?

    There's almost no reason to use the shader-resolved modes with the 4800 series. This didn't make much of a difference with the R600 generation because box, too, had to be shader-resolved. The R700 generation parts have very good ROP-resolve, so going box will free up your shaders for more FPS...
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    4 x LCD monitors?

    Have you looked at those 3870 X2s with 4 DVI outputs? It would simplify matters quite a bit, since you would only need one video card and one driver set. Personally, I'm quite intrigued by the concept but I have no personal experience with these cards. Of course, Nvidia should be pushing out...
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    Radeon 4000-series in June?

    Well, mathematically speaking, you're going to have 50% more hardware (with twice as many TMU, which is good) and a 50% (ish) higher clock, so around 225% the performance of a single 3870. not bad for a simple mainstream part. Now, you put two of these together and you have crossfire on a stick...
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    K10 on September 10

    Always? we've only had them since late 2003. Before that memory performance for AMD chips always sucked, courtesy of VIA's/SIS's/Nvidia's crappy memory controllers.
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    AMD HD 2400/2600 Benchmarks

    Funny how Hexus' review has the 2400XT beating/matching the 8500GT. I doubt this would happen in more modern titles but if it turns out that the 2600 Pro is the card that is price-competitive with the 8500GT, AMD will rule the extreme low-end... Power consumption is kind of a disappointment, as...
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    AMD HD 2400/2600 Benchmarks

    People also used to say that, with driver improvements, the 2900XT would match the 8800GTX and I have yet to see a driver for it that improves performance significantly (in non-CF setups). I don't doubt that performance WILL improve as drivers mature but we won't know just how much of an...
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    AMD HD 2400/2600 Benchmarks

    The 2600 series looks decent enough assuming the XT is price-competitive with the 8600GT and the pro is competitive with the 8500GT. The one problem, as I see it, is that the 2600XT being tested is the GDDR4 version and price for this part may end up being a bit higher than predicted since it...
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    finished lapping my Q6600 (with pics and results)

    Real men lap the die/dies/dice, not the IHS :P Just kidding, good job on the lapping.
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    Question about the new AMD quad-core Cpu's coming soon

    Current K8s have HT 2.0, what the new chips will bring is HT 3.0. No, memory bandwidth is completely different from IO bandwidth (which is what HT deals with). Memory bandwidth is bottlenecked by the memory clock while IO bandwidth is limited by the speed of the IO components (Video cards...
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    4000+, too high of a voltage?

    I usually try to stick to +10% of stock voltage, in the case of X2s I usually dont go over 1.45v. Temperature is not the only thing that affects longevity. In fact, the vCore actually affects it much more. You could keep your CPU at subzero temperatures and still have damage due to voltage. If...
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    Fudz on K10 : 45W TDP, Budapest, Shanghai

    Not stock volts, though. I wonder what the power draw is at that clock... If the 2.3GHz part really gives the 2.66GHz kentsfield a run for its money then a 3GHz part may beat whatever Intel can get out of Penryn, TDP permitting. Of course, Penryn is probably a Late Q3/Early Q4 part, and only at...
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    Fudz on K10 : 45W TDP, Budapest, Shanghai

    Huh? The K10 HAS been demoed, just under extreme NDAs so very little info has gotten out. On the 45nm side, 45nm prototypes are not completely out of this realm, the problem is bringing them into full production (since this requires AMD to retrofit a fab, likely fab30, which requires massive...
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    Intel Penryn Performance Preview: The Fastest gets Faster

    Affordable? I doubt anything other than XE parts will be coming out before Q4 this year so maybe Q2 next year for an "affordable" Penryn?
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    sunfire t1000

    It's single-die. It also sucks pretty badly compared to Intel's quads (heck, even dual-cores can spank it).
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    Barcelona April launch rumor T/F?

    As far as I know, AMD will demo its K10 this month, I havent heard anything definitive about an actual launch, though.
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    Worth selling a Opteron 165 setup and going to AM2?

    I would sell it and hold the cash until the Intel price drop (two weeks) and then buy an Intel system. The 3GHz X2 performs pretty much in-line with the 2.4GHz Core 2 but has no overclocking headroom. Since you already overclocked your Opteron, overclocking a Core 2 shouldnt be much of a...
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    Could AMD improve socket AM2?

    There's nothing to improve in socket AM2 K8s. K8s are not bandwidth starved, they did quite well on DDR 400, doubling the bandwidth to 800 effective doesnt yield much of an improvement because there is no need for it. What AMD could do is to a) add more cores, or b) have more aggressive...
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    Should I buy a 8800 GTX now or wait until ati relases dx10 cards?

    Wow, someone's getting all philosophical, lol. You also can't live your life always looking for instant gratification. Long-term planning is extremely important because, more likely than not, you'll still be there when those plans come to fruition. If he can afford to wait then waiting a few...
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    Windows freezes while running Prime95

    Is that an AMD CPU? You may need to lower the HT multiplier, if so. Or it could be the RAM, too.
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    Today in history: First Pentium chips released

    Hate to break it to you but the 486 is not a Pentium :P Lovely video card, by the way, but the system was a bit lacking on the RAM side.
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    price drops from Intel+AMD

    More than that, looking at the price list it looks like soon all we'll be able to find in the low-end is 65nm parts, the low-end Winsors look like they'll be EOL.
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    hmmm.. RV630XT - DX10 & faster than a 1900XTX?

    The two parts with the "?" are parts that we're pretty much ceirtain will be there but don't know the names to yet. I don't see why everyone makes such a big deal about the memory widths. Having a thinner pipe at higher clock speeds IS better than having a wider pipe at lower clocks, and the...
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    getting 4gighz with xq6700

    If you aren't overclocking your video, it could also be that your power supply cannot feed two 4GHz Conroes and your video card at the same time. Remember that the TDP for 3GHz quad-cores is somewhere areound 130W, so you're quite a bit higher than that. Personally, I'd try scaling back on the...
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    Will CPU-Z show both cores on an Athlon64 X2?

    More importantly, does WINDOWS see the two cores? If not then you need to change your HAL to ACPI Multiprocessor (or whatever it's called)...
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    would I notice much of a difference between an x2 or opteron dual core vs one of the newer, c2d chips?

    Generally, I'd say no. It truly depends on how much you are going to spend. Getting an X2 3800 will set you back $120 bucks and you won't have to upgrade anything at all (with the possible exception of the BIOS). If you plan on spending over $500, though, going for a mid-range Core 2 with a new...
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    Intel E6600 vs athlon fx-72

    Considering that the FX-72 requires a $300 motherboard and dual-CPUs to be at its best, I'd suggest going for the E6600. The E6600 will have significantly-lower power consumption and will even be slightly faster. Do you already have DDR2 RAM? Both of these CPUs will require that.
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    Intel prices never dropped much in last 6 months!

    Intel usually drops its prices when it introduces new parts, the Dual-core lineup is pretty much unchanged since mid-2006 so there haven't been any new parts to take the top pricing slots. This will change as more Kentsfield parts reach the market, as these will take the top pricing slots.
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    HUGE article on Barcelona core

    Remember that these are quad-core. the 2.3GHz parts, anyway. 2.3GHz at 95W is pretty decent (45W per "pair"), especially if it outperforms the 130W part that Intel already has out there (possible in multi-socket systems but I'll believe that when I see it). We'll be seeing a few speed bumps in...
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    Barcelona debut in June, 2.1 - 2.3 GHz ?

    He's saying that Q3 starts a few weeks after the June launch for the 2.1-2.3GHz parts...
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    Barcelona debut in June, 2.1 - 2.3 GHz ?

    Remember that these are quad-core, so they only need to compete against the 2.66GHz Kentsfield. The TDPs are quite nice (95W) and the clock speed MAY be enough to match the Kentsfield but I doubt they'll outperform it to a significant degree (with the possible exception being FP performance)...
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    Chipset support for Barcelona?

    AM2+ and AM3 should be pin-compatible with AM2 (and thus, they should work on the same motherboards). As long as there is a BIOS update, you should have no problems running the K10/K8L (Barcelona is the server chip). You'll lose a few benefits from the new architecture, though--HT3 support...
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    Is intel underclocking it's CPUs so they can release higher clock models in the future without any difficulty?

    I think Intel is underclocking its CPUs to hit its own TDP targets. Many Core 2s will hit 3.2GHz without too much trouble but their "TDP" is closer to 100W than 65W at that speed. The same thing can be said about the quad-core parts. This is usually the case with Intel. TDPs are what held back...
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    Performance Delta Banias Vs. Core 2 Clock for Clock

    When people say K8 they usually refer to Desktop, dual-channel DDR parts. Lancaster IS slower than Dothan (slightly) but mostly because of its single-channel memory and its relatively low clocks (PC2700, for the most part). That said, I'd say that Core 2 really is 25%+ faster than Banias, clock...
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    x2 3600 vs x2 3800 - performance difference ?

    All K8s have the same amount of L1 PER CORE, that's 128KB (or 2x64KB or 64KB data, 64KB instruction, these are the different way of writing the same damn thing). I'd tend to give the nod to the 1.9GHz Brisbane over the 2GHz Windsor because the 2x256KB L2 cache sounds remarkably anemic to me...
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    Intel Demonstrates 80-Core, 3GHz, Air Cooled, Teraflop CPU

    I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I'm not really impressed. The TFlop is not all that impressive considering that pretty much any high-end video card can get half of that, and these are already out. The power draw is impressive but a video card is simply much more useful that some...
  37. F

    Intel / AMD for integer crunching powerhouse

    If you're going for the extreme edition why not just pick up the Quad-core part? It's 266MHz slower but has twice the cores...
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    X2-3600+ for $92 on the 12th.

    It's kind of sad that half that budget would be burned off in RAM, though...
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    R600 supports Quad setups

    So does SLI and look at just how much performance sucks when using it... I dont doubt that ATI's Quad-crossfire implementation will be better, only whether it will be good enough to warrant the insane cost increase compared to dual and single-card setups.
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    X2-3600+ for $92 on the 12th.

    Is that so? That X2 3600+ will look mighty-tempting at that price. Also, OEMs will ceirtainly love more price drops.