I had it all planned out, my last blog would go live before the weekend and then on Monday morning you'd be hit with a barrage of CrossFire benchmarks. But I guess this is one of the problems of dealing with pre-release hardware, it rarely works perfectly on the first (second, third or fourth) try, and it always gives you a tough time when you need it to cooperate most. Derek and Wes spent a lot of time debugging the issues with the platform, finally after a few days of despair they managed to get the system working and producing reliable results. So check out Derek's preview here.
As I alluded to in my last post, CrossFire is great and all, but with no R520 it's pretty much yesterday's news at this point. ATI isn't the only company to have botched up the execution of a product; if you'll remember back to NVIDIA's nForce launch, the chipset shipped several months after their initial Computex launch, but they haven't repeated the catastrophe in such magnitude since. If ATI is to be taken seriously as a chipset maker, this can't be the way they launch products like CrossFire. There's more to talk about on the chipset/motherboard side of CrossFire, but I'll let Wes address that next week.
I've been playing with Gigabyte's i-RAM all week and I've had the review done, except for a handful of questions that needed answering from GB's engineering. I just got those answers at around 3AM so I'm going to work on putting the final touches on this piece over the weekend, to go live Monday morning. It's an interesting little card but I don't want to spoil it for you all so I'm going to do that new paragraph thing right about...
This weekend there's a retirement party for my aunt (she's actually a new aunt, picked her up during the whole marrying into a new family deal) so sometime today Vinney and I are going to head down to NJ to kick off the weekend. It should be a lot of fun, especially since the last time (and the first time really) I saw most of these folks was at/around our wedding last August.
Now it's time to do the whole cooking for sustenance thing, have a great weekend folks :)
As I alluded to in my last post, CrossFire is great and all, but with no R520 it's pretty much yesterday's news at this point. ATI isn't the only company to have botched up the execution of a product; if you'll remember back to NVIDIA's nForce launch, the chipset shipped several months after their initial Computex launch, but they haven't repeated the catastrophe in such magnitude since. If ATI is to be taken seriously as a chipset maker, this can't be the way they launch products like CrossFire. There's more to talk about on the chipset/motherboard side of CrossFire, but I'll let Wes address that next week.
I've been playing with Gigabyte's i-RAM all week and I've had the review done, except for a handful of questions that needed answering from GB's engineering. I just got those answers at around 3AM so I'm going to work on putting the final touches on this piece over the weekend, to go live Monday morning. It's an interesting little card but I don't want to spoil it for you all so I'm going to do that new paragraph thing right about...
This weekend there's a retirement party for my aunt (she's actually a new aunt, picked her up during the whole marrying into a new family deal) so sometime today Vinney and I are going to head down to NJ to kick off the weekend. It should be a lot of fun, especially since the last time (and the first time really) I saw most of these folks was at/around our wedding last August.
Now it's time to do the whole cooking for sustenance thing, have a great weekend folks :)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
15 Comments
View All Comments
andrew - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
the i-ram has a battery on it so that even when you turn off your computer, it can store the data, albeit only for something like 12 or 24 hoursfor many people this wont be a problem since they leave their computers on all the time
of course in the event of a power outage that might last a while or if your only computer dies, it would suck to lose the information
it would need some fail-safe where if all of the above goes wrong, it can somehow dump its contents to a hard drive but without power, this would be tough :x
SV - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
The best advice I (or anyone) can offer you wrt NJ: Don't leave the car.A thought on i-Ram: why not just spend all that money on system memory and get a huge disk cache PLUS the ability to run crazy, crazy things? I don't see how an ultrafast temporary hard disk is that different from disk cache (except for the fact that it uses a PCI slot). Or is it an ease of use thing?
Carlos - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
You really know how to leave ppl drooling... I'm very curious about that GB i-Ram.Having 2Gb Ram, 4 HDs in raid 0 + other set of 2 HD in Raid 0 for "temp" stuff, disabled virtual memory, and I still complain about all those "mysterious" HD accesses XP does every so often while idling...
1 or 2 Gb on i Ram for all temporary internet files, and temp extraction of zips/rars, should prove more than enough and do a good job at it.
But I'll wait for your review... post it quickly plz! ;)
Killaz - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Be sure to hit a Jersey diner sometime this weekend, and try not to get stuck in traffic ;-)Heron - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Cool enough, Anand. Say, could you give us a little hint on AMD's newest entry level dual core? I am really interested in that. Overclocking potential, plus a R520 Crossfire will be very nice. I hope...