New Processors!

We've got good news! Intel's latest round of processors have proven worthy, and we are once again pleased to announce that the Ion and Reactor are now a little more powerful for no extra cost. The Ion's CPU options are now:

1. E7300 overclocked to about 3.2GHz
2. E8400 overclocked to about 3.7GHz
3. Q6600 overclocked to about 3.2GHz
4. Q9400 overclocked to about 3.4GHz

You might notice that the Q6600 is the last 65nm processor we still offer. It's still an amazing chip, and probably deserves an award from the overclocking community. If you recall, it won out over what should have been its successor, the fairly unimpressive Q9300. We expect it to maintain its position in the Ion options list until the price drops on the Q9400 in a month or so.

Meanwhile, the Reactor now offers the following line-up:

1. E8500 overclocked to about 3.8GHz
2. E8600 overclocked to about 4.0GHz
3. Q9550 overclocked to about 3.4GHz
4. Q9650 overclocked to about 3.6GHz
5. QX9650 overclocked to about 4.0GHz

That's a pretty nice spread - the price differences follow a fairly logical pattern, offering a little something for every budget.

Pricing error on the HD 4870 X2...

Big thanks go to David E. who pointed out that we used the total pricing of the HD 4870 X2 on our Reactor configuration page, when we should have been using the price difference between it and the default HD 4870 ($560 vs. $250.) The prices have been corrected, so it now costs a much more reasonable $250 extra to order a Reactor with a single HD 4870 X2, and $810 extra (total) for a pair of them. Sorry for the confusion!

Holy Price Drop! Q9550...

We always felt the Q9550 would have been our first choice for the Reactor's entry-level quad-core CPU, but it was introduced an unreasonably high price of $530. Well, we apparently weren't alone, since the price has now dropped to around $330, indicating pretty clearly that sales of this excellent chip haven't been bringing in too many bonus Hawaii trips for the Quad-Core product manager at Intel. That lodges the Q9550 at a mere $5 above the Q9450 we've been so happy with thus far. The 9550 only sports .1GHz more in CPU speed, but the real payoff is the 8.5x multiplier, vs. the 9450's 8x. That should allow us to offer a significantly higher overclock on the Reactor for the same price. We'll post some results after we've had a chance to run through a few of them...

HOLY CRAP! ATI takes the lead!

I gotta say, I was worried about AMD/ATI for a while. They still have some ground to cover (the new video cards run a bit hotter than we'd prefer) but they finally took the performance crown off nVidia's head. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 is THE card to use on a 30" monitor, and in most cases outperforms nVidia's high-end GTX 280 on smaller monitors too.

The Reactor's possible options became thus:

nVidia
1. GTX 260 $315
2. GTX 280 $450
3. 2 x GTX 260 $630
4. 2 x GTX 280 $900

ATI
1. HD 4870 $310
2. HD 4870 X2 $560
3. 2 x HD 4870 $620
4. 2 x HD 4870 X2 $1,120

(Prices are for overclocked versions where possible.)

The first tier is a draw, since the GTX 260 and HD 4870 oveclocked perform about the same. (The 260 is better at some games, the 4870 is better at others.) Then things go downhill. We knew for a while now that the GTX 280 didn't always beat out a pair of 4870's in Crossfire mode, but since the GTX 280 cost $70 less, that was to be expected. The arrival of the 4870 X2 changes everything. It consistently beats out the GTX 280, a pair of GTX 260's, and in many cases, even a pair of GTX 280's (for $340 less!) It is especially adept at handling antialiasing at 1680x1050, 1920x1200, and 2560x1600.

Consequently, the nVidia line no longer makes sense for the Reactor. As of today, you'll only see HD 4870 variations on the configuration page. You'll notice there isn't an option for a pair of 4870's in Crossfire mode. That's not because the Reactor can't do it - if you buy a single 4870 now, you have the option of adding another one in down the road (without having to change the power supply.) But as an immediate option, it makes more sense to go for a single 4870 X2 - it's less expensive and performs better across the board.

Why we don't use the ATI HD 4870...

ATI is definitely back in the game, and we're very pleased with the results we've gotten from offering the HD 4850 in the Ion. A few of you have asked us why we don't then offer the 4870? It's true that ATI's new high-end card offers decent bang-to-buckness, but the price point and capability clearly make it more appropriate for our Reactor (the Ion, being designed for 22-inch monitors and below just doesn't need that much power.)

As a possible Reactor card, it compares closely to the nVidia GTX 260, each outperforming the other under certain circumstances. That said, we only had to follow a few lines of logic to arrive at the conclusion that the HD 4870 just doesn't fit our needs:

1. We want to use a single motherboard for the Reactor to keep costs down and ensure superior support and quality assurance.
2. We want to offer multi-GPU options (nVidia's SLI or ATI's Crossfire) to our customers, even if they don't buy their PC with two video cards installed.
3. No motherboards can support both Crossfire and SLI (except Skulltrail, but don't even get me started about THAT.)
4. In order to span the Reactor's entire range of supported monitors, we pretty much have to include the GTX 280 as an option (nothing can touch it for 30-inch gaming.)

So we just can't turn to the HD 4870 for the Reactor, until something unseats or pulls even with the GTX 280. The good news is, we use the overclocked versions of the GTX 260, which does consistantly beat the 4870.

Reactor now features GTX 260 & GTX 280

After quite a bit of benchmarking, the dust has settled, leaving five distinct video card options for the Reactor:

1. A single GTX 260
2. Two GTX 260's in SLI
3. A single GTX 280
4. Two GTX 280's in SLI
5. Three GTX 280's in SLI

The 9800 GX2 just doesn't make sense any more: you get more performance for about the same money from either a single GTX 280 (compared to one 9800 GX2) or a pair of GTX 260's (compared to a pair of 9800 GX2's). This holds true across multiple resolutions, especially 1920x1200 and above, and especially with antialiasing turned on.

This is interesting news, since we can now say that the 8800 GTX was the longest-reigning performance champion in memory, while the 9800 series was the shortest lived.

It's also a little sad to say that Quad-SLI was somewhat stillborn. We're not too big on TRI-SLI either, unless you're after bragging rights. We have yet to find a situation where Three-way SLI makes much of a difference in gameplay feel

It will be interesting to see what happens with the GTX-200 series. I suspect they'll last through Q1 2009 as the top dog...

Changes to the Ion and the Reactor!

Those new video cards we talked about here previously turned out to be quite the interesting development. Without getting bogged down in details, the net effect is that ATI is indeed finally offering competitive products again, and the HD 4850 has single-handedly rendered obsolete the 8800 GT, 8800 GTS, and 9800 GTX. At a $200 price point, we're thrilled to offer it as the new standard Ion video card, with two HD 4850's in Crossfire mode (which is ATI's version of SLI) as the upgrade option. This means the Ion now offers significantly more power now than it did last week, at roughly the same price! In order to support Crossfire mode, we've chosen Intel P35/P45-based motherboards for the Ion, which are just as good, if not better, at overclocking than the 650i/680i boards they are replacing.

As for the Reactor, nVidia's new GTX-200 series cards are only offering a modest improvement in performance, but an improvement it is. We're currently still comparing the following combinations in gaming benchmarks:

1 x GTX 260
2 x GTX 260
3 x GTX 260
1 x 9800 GX2
2 x 9800 GX2
1 x GTX 280
2 x GTX 280
3 x GTX 280

Until we have more concrete data about how these combinations stack up against each other, we're offering all eight of them, plus an "entry level" single GTX 260 option which features a non-overclocked card with a non-SLI ready power supply. That latter option gives those with a moderate budget a respectable Reactor configuration which sacrifices upgradability for affordability.

Within the next few days, we'll identify what monitor sizes make sense for the various combinations, and drop out any redundant ones (for example, the first to go will probably be the triple-GTX 260 option. It costs the same as a pair of GTX 280's with no performance gain, but it uses much more power and two more expansion slots.) More to come...

Scads of hot new video cards!

We're finally recovering from the analysis of the new video cards from AMD/ATI and nVidia! What a mess, but in a fantastic way. We're very happy to announce that AMD/ATI has finally shipped a product we can get behind. The Radeon HD 4850 costs $200, which is the same price that the 9800 GTX was dropped to, and it outperforms the 9800 GTX in almost every benchmarked game we've seen (except Unreal Tournament 3). Sometimes it wins by just a few points, but it's usually 20%-40% faster, which is a very pleasant surprise.

While this means it no longer makes a lot of sense to go with the 9800 GTX, we chose not to slot the HD 4850 as a replacement stock card for the Reactor, since the price point is closer to what we designed the Ion to use. Consequently, the Ion now offers a lot more bang for your buck than it did yesterday, thanks to AMD! In order to support Crossfire (the AMD version of SLI) we had to switch to an Intel chipset-based motherboard for the Ion, which suits us fine, since we've had our eyes on the Intel P45 chipset for a while now anyway. (The default Ion motherboard is a more affordable P35 version.)

On the Reactor front, things are even more exciting. nVidia's GTX-200 series cards are turning out to be almost everything we hoped for (and we were hoping for a lot!) The GTX 260 is our new "stock" card, with upgrades availible to the 9800 GTX (mostly as a path to quad-core, which we still hope will see performance increases as time goes on) and the pricy but undisputed new performance king - the GTX 280. We offer three of those in Tri-Sli mode, just in case you were wondering what to do with that mortgage payment this month.



Following in the Ion's footsteps, we've introduced a lower-priced baseline motherboard in the Reactor - the 750i SLI - in order to help offset the effect of switching to a more-expensive baseline GPU. The 750i is almost identical to the 780i, with a few reduced features:

1. SLI is limited to two-way at 8x, as opposed to up to three-way at 16x
2. One ethernet port as opposed to two
3. Memory speed is limited to 800 MHz (possibly 900, but not 1066)
4. Only four SATA devices, as opposed to six
5. Eight USB ports instead of ten

Otherwise, the overclocking capability is the same, and the gaming performance is nearly identical. And now I finally get to pass out. 'night!

The new high-end cards from nVidia were "launched" today: the GTX 260 and the GTX 280. Here's a chart of the most important specs, compared to the 9800-series cards they're effectively replacing. We also included the 8800 GTX, which until now was a better choice than the 9800 cards for gamers with 24" or larger monitors:


The G92-based 9800 cards were a bit disappointing - the GPU was faster than the previous kings of video (the G80-based 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra) but the memory bandwith and video memory were smaller, resulting in older technology beating out the newer in many cases.

That isn't going to happen this time around. The new cards have higher bandwidth and more video memory than either the 9800 or 8800 cards, along with a beast of a GPU that doubles the number of transistors. At $400, the GTX 260 is a clear choice over the 8800 GTX (finally) and unless Quad-SLI suddenly picks up a huge burst of effectiveness out of the blue, there's no reason to buy a 9800 GX2 any more either. (Don't be fooled by the 256 stream processors on the GX2 - half is dedicated to each GPU, and the net effect is less than a single card with that many SPs.)

In fact, the $400 GTX 260 is probably going to outperform the 9800 GTX by a wide enough margin that saving $100 won't justify choosing the latter, but we'll post benchmarks along those lines as soon as we get one.

Which brings us to availability. The GTX 280 is up to bat first, supposedly shipping in the next few days. Time will tell if this card is simply overpriced, which is a definite possibility. The GTX 260 should follow sometime in the next two weeks. We'll post some more information shortly.

New high-end video cards coming soon!

nVidia is (thank god) going to release some new video cards later this month which will finally be an obvious choice over the aging but astoundingly long-lived 8800 GTX. The two cards being announced are what might have been called the 9900-series, but now go by the term GTX 200-series:

GTX 260 - 896MB of GDDR3 VRAM $450ish
GTX 280 - 1GB of GDDR3 VRAM $650ish

The larger amounts of memory and bandwidth in these cards are going to make them exactly what we'd hoped the 9800-series would be, but wasn't. Launch day is the 18th, but we don't know how quickly the cards will actually show up. If the 9800 launch was any indication, we won't have to wait long. Also, ATI's new RV770-based video cards will launch about the same time, and is aimed at the same market. It's too early to say if they will be worth considering yet, but June/July is getting interesting.

This news doesn't affect Ion sales, but if you're looking at our Reactors, you might want to wait a couple of weeks.