GTX 470 & 480 - another paper launch from nVidia ;-)

Yes, we're excited to finally see a new top-drawer and next-to-top-drawer card from nVidia. The benchmarks are looking good, and clearly nVidia is still on top of their game. Unfortunately, they just can't seem to stop launching new products without the actual products. Like Gandalf said - "Expect me when you see me!" Our best guess is April 10th for real-world availability, but we'll update as we hear more...

USB 3.0 and SATA 3 arrive!

Although we tend to favor EVGA when it comes to choosing motherboards, Gigabyte and ASUS occasionally offer new tech a bit before EVGA, and this is the case with the new USB and SATA bus speeds. The Ion build page now includes an option for the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD6 on the Ion, and the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 on the Fury. Hopefully EVGA will follow suit soon.

Are the new bus speeds worthwhile?

USB 3 + SATA 3 does indeed produce significant transfer speed increases - moving data from a USB 3 external drive to an internal SATA 3 drive is about three times as fast as using a USB 2 port.

Bear in mind that Windows 7 does not yet seem to have support for booting off of some or all of the SATA3 controllers currently available, so don't get too excited about a SATA3 RAID 0 boot volume just yet...

ATI (well, AMD) steps up!

New video cards aren't always something to get excited about (remember the 9800 GTX+?) but ATI's 5000 series is looking very, very interesting.

The company needed some wins, having lived in Intel's CPU shadow for so long. ATI's 5000 series brings DirectX 11 to the table - something that nVidia has yet to do. As with the move to DX10, it's anybody's guess as to when, or even if, there will be real-world benefits to DX11 capability. DX10 took a long time to be adopted by the game developers, and when it did, the extra eye candy made a lot of PCs run more slowly. Still, DX11 has a lot more potential to speed things up instead of slowing them down, and our advice is to go with ATI for now, at least until nVidia catches up.

The 5000 series also offers Eyefinity - the ability for one card to drive three monitors at the same time. There is even emerging support for Eyefinity in Crossfire mode (currently only in the 5970). It's not something most of our customers are clamoring for, but it's another ATI first, and adds to the value of the 5000 line. Weigh that against nVidia's PhysX if you're looking for brand-specific options.

There are five ATI cards in our lineup now. The first two are recommended for gaming at 1680x1050 or lower resolution (typically that means 22" monitors or smaller):

"Juniper" architecture
HD 5750 - 700MHz, 1GB of VRAM
HD 5770 - 850MHz, 1GB of VRAM

Both cards offer good performance. The 5770 offers about 15% more performance for about 15% more money, so choosing between them is really more about your own personality than anything concrete.

The remaining three cards are based on ATI's "Cypress" architecture (Juniper's big brother). Our minimum recommended card for gaming at 1920x1200 (usually 24" monitors) is the 5850:

HD 5850 - 725MHz, 1GB of VRAM

That leaves two super-expensive cards at the top. The 5870 and 5970 feature the same type of GPU, but the 5970 has two of them, essentially offering a Crossfire setup on a single circuit board (we were expecting it to be named the 5870x2, to keep up previous naming convention.) The 5870 is probably overkill in most 1920x1200 situations (the 5970 definitely is) but you'll want at least one of these if you're gaming at 2560x1600 (usually a 30" monitor).

HD 5870 - 875MHz (overclocked from 850MHz), 1GB of VRAM
HD 5970 - 725MHz (to reduce heat from the 2 GPUs) , 2GB of VRAM

As always, we like to point out that the industry likes to bill dual-GPU cards as having twice as much VRAM as they effectively have access to. Yes the 5970 has 2GB of VRAM, but as it is split evenly between two GPUs in Crossfire mode, you're actually working with 1BG of effective space, just like the 5870. This means that when playing games that perform poorly under Crossfire (and thankfully such situations are becoming more rare) the 5870 will outperform the 5970. If you're planning to play many different games in the future, the 5970 would give you a bigger overall benefit, but if you're buying a PC with one or two particular titles in mind, check out those interwebs to make sure Crossfire works well with them.

P55 vs. X58 (or Ion vs. Fury (or what is Intel's problem?!))

OK,

So Intel came up with a brilliant marketing strategy - let's supplement our i7 line of CPUs with some more i7's, but those new i7's will use a brand new motherboard and CPU socket. Oh and let's introduce the i5 too, but lump it in with those new i7's, which by the way will use faster memory, but drop to dual-channel instead of triple-channel. The new i5/i7's will have a similar price/performance ratio to the old ones, and the fastest of the old ones will still be faster than any of the new ones.

HUH?!

Part of our job here is to chew through all of the particulars for you so we can offer you nice clear choices, and apparently that really wrankles Intel's heinie, 'cause they're making it a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Here's a simple chart that we hope will help clear up this PR fiasco. We're going to show you just the cost of the CPUs paired with a comparable motherboard, so you can see how the price/performance of these two families shakes out. To clarify, the CPUs listed on the left (which we offer in our Ion model), require a P55 motherboard, whereas the CPUs on the right (which we offer in our Fury) require an X58 motherboard.

To illustrate, $320 gets you an i5 750 and an entry-level P55 motherboard, whereas $1,400 will buy the top-drawer i7 975 plus a high-end X58 motherboard.



BTW, don't forget that the i5 does not have hyperthreading (HT lets a quad-core CPU act like an 8-core CPU.) All the others do. Net effect on gaming = nil (for now).

Since Uberclok went online a couple years ago, our models were separated by CPU type. Now the most logical method is to separate by motherboard type, since that's how the i5/i7 family is split. The prices listed above show the combined total of CPU and motherboard (in each case, we paired the level of CPU with the same level of motherboard.) The trouble here is that you can't always choose a model based solely on budget at the moment. The i5 is clearly the choice for the budget-minded, and the i7 975 is the only choice for top-performance. Things get muddy in the middle though. The i7 860 only offers a .14GHz speed increase over the i7 950, and there's very little difference between the 870 and the 950. There are some great architectural improvements with the P55 chipset, and you can read about them at arstechnica, AnandTech, and Techreport, but from a gaming perspective, they aren't going to make a noticeable difference in framerates. Consequently, take a look at the footnotes we put in that chart, and let them influence your decision.

And as always, feel free to email us at info@uberclok.com or call us at (877) 211-4235 with any questions.

New Intel Processors!!!

As you may have read, Intel released a new set of CPUs this week. We'll be updating our site tomorrow to offer the new chips, but I wanted to take the opportunity to chat about what's new:

The old i7 chips were known as Bloomfield, and fit into socket 1366 motherboards, which ran on the Intel X58 chipset. The new CPUs "Lynnfield" are split into two options - the single "i5" 750, and two "i7" options, the 860 & the 870. The primary differences between the i5 and i7 chips (aside from the fact that the i5 is slightly slower than the slowest i7) is that the i5 does not support hyperthreading. (Hyperthreading makes a quad core CPU act as if it has 8 cores.) These new chips fit into socket 1156 motherboards, which use Intel's new P55 chipset. Bear in mind that P55 motherboards are generally less expensive than X58 boards, so going with Lynnfield chips reduces the cost of the PC a bit. So here is the entire Intel lineup as of today:

i5-750 2.66GHz $210 P55/1156
i7-920 2.66GHz $220 X58/1366

i7-860 2.80GHz $300 P55/1156

i7-950 3.06GHz $570 X58/1366
i7-870 2.93GHz $580 P55/1156

i7-975 3.33GHz $999 X58/1366

The memory controller on the new CPUs is a little bit faster than the old ones. While it's true that the new chips only support dual-channel memory (vs. triple-channel on the 1366 chips) that won't affect gaming performance until we start seeing games that stress three cores or more simultaneously - and that's still years away.

That means the new Lynnfield/P55 CPUs will give you more bang for your gaming dollar right now. It also means that you're opting out of a simple chip swap to go 6-core when those chips come out next year - P55-based machines will be limited to quad core. Personally, I don't see that as an issue, since by the time games can really use more than four cores, you'll be buying a new PC anyway, but if you want to be able upgrade to a 6-core chip next year, go for an X58-based PC.

In addition, if you're going for a high-end SLI or Crossfire rig, you'll want to stick with the X58 chipset, as that's one rare case where the X58's faster PCI bus will make a difference. I'm talking about a pair of GTX 285's, GTX 295's, or ATI 4870's 4890's, or 4870X2's. (Triple-GPUs of any kind would qualify too.)

Here's a reality check since the majority of our customers are gamers - none of the CPU options you pick are going to have anywhere near as great of an effect on your gaming performance as your video card choices. The only way to get CPU-bound on today's games is to throw $400 or more worth of video cards at a 19" or smaller monitor, at which point you should call us so we can point your money in a better direction.

So our advice: Go for the new P55/1156 chips unless:
A. You want to be able to drop in a six-core next year, or
B. You want to do a high-end SLI/Crossfire rig, or
C. You want the fastest PC possible (which is still the i7-975)

Happy hunting!

Strange Website Problem Resolved...

Some of you may have been unable to view our site or email us for a week or so - there was some sort of routing issue with the servers that host our site. Our hosting company has fixed the issue, and assures us it won't happen again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

HOORAY! (Or make that....hooray.) New i7 CPUs!

In a move that is sure to amaze and astound almost no-one, Intel has essentially bumped the speed of its mid-range and 'extreme' edition i7 chips by a mind-leaving-alone 4%!

To be fair, any speed gain for no extra cost is a good thing, but as CPU generational releases go, this one's a yawner. The i7 950 has a base speed of 3.06 GHz, compared to the 2.93 GHz i7 940 it replaces. At the top of the line, the i7 975 starts at 3.33 GHz, compared to the now defunct 3.2 GHz i7 965.

The really good news isn't that the new chips have a marginally better base speed though - it's that all current i7 chips (including the still highly-recommended 920) are now being produced with Intel's latest stepping: D0. (That's 'dee-zero'.)

The D0 chips are particularly good at overclocking, so we should start seeing our average OC go well above 4.0 GHz on the 950 & 975, and it should become very unusual for us to not hit 4.0GHz on the 920's. So the new chips really are worth getting excited about after all!

New Cases!

Allrighty - it's a bit overdue I think, but we've refreshed our case offerings. As usual, we've chosen with three main precepts in mind: cooling, functionality, and appearance. (Well, and quality too, but we figured that goes without saying.)

Here is our new lineup, available for the Ion and the Fury:

Mid-size towers:
Antec 300
Cooler Master HAF 922
Lian-Li PC-7FW
Antec 902
Cooler Master Scout

Full-size towers:
Cooler Master HAF 932
Antec 1200
Cooler Master ATCS 840
Silverstone Raven RV01
Silverstone TJ09-BW

It is with a heavy heart that we retire the venerable Antec 900 with which we launched our company. With the success of the 902 revision, there's not really any justification for keeping it in production. For the time being, I will have to console myself with the daily interaction I get with my 900-clad primary gaming PC on my desk. Rest in peace, friend...

PS - in order to facilitate case options and to be able to tell you more about the cases themselves, we're breaking them off into their own category on the store. If you want a different case than our default Antec 300, you'll need to add the Fury or Ion to your shopping cart, then click on 'Choose a Case' and add it too. Take a look - we're now able to give you a ton of more information on them...

Price drop!

Greetings! I know I've been quiet on this page for May - blame the economy and the effect it's having on the gaming PC industry. And by 'effect' I mean the Coming of the Apocalypse.

OK, maybe it's not that bad (none of us have actually been consumed by Hellfire) but as luxury goods were one of the first things to get hit hard, most of us in this industry are taking bold steps to stay in the game.

On the plus side, prices have been steadily dropping for months, and now that they are universally as low as they're going to get, now is literally the best time possible to buy a gaming PC. Which brings us to today's topic - new Fury pricing! We're introducing a price drop for the Fury that makes it the best i7 deal in the U.S. today. You can technically find a cheaper i7, but not at the speeds we ship. You can now have a 4GHz i7 for less than $1,600 - and believe me, I never thought I'd be saying that! Happy shopping!

New ATI Cards - HD4890!

ATI launched their latest high-end card, the HD 4890. For $265 you get 1GB of GDDR5 video memory, and a single GPU running at 900MHz (overclocked from 850MHz). That's much faster than the previous ATI record holder, the HD 4870X2 (overclocked from 750MHz to 800MHz). Of course, the 4870X2 still costs quite a bit more ($450-ish) since you get two GPUs on the same card, but since the benefits of the 4870X2 rely on games having been optimized for Crossfire support (and not all of them have been) you might want to seriously consider the HD 4890 if you're interested in the very highest performance you can get.

You can also compare the new card to the $200 HD 4870 with 1GB of memory, which runs at a significantly slower 780MHz, which we would recommend for gaming at resolutions of 1680x1050 or lower.

On a side note, nVidia announced its latest video card today too (the GTX 275) but as it won't be available until the middle of April, we'll save that for later. The HD 4890 is available as an option on our Ion and Fury models immediately.