E8400s shipping again!

As you can see here, Tiger Direct now has the E8400 in stock. They're not our usual source, but they'll do. We just took the ETA off that CPU on our web store, and we can now ship PCs with them. What the heck happened? We still don't see them in stock elsewhere. Intel. rrrrr.

IE doing odd things with Uberclok.com...

I remember the old days, when men were real men, women we real women, and furry things from Apha Centauri were...

Nevermind. The point is, my memory of the Internet (like many of you) reaches far back into the furthest reaches of time where Netscape was brand new, and all web pages had a grey background and used divider lines everywhere. It might not have been pretty, but at least it was actually CROSS PLATFORM! Nowadays you can't shake a stick without hitting a website that will only display properly on the Windows version of Internet Explorer (sometimes it even has to be the latest version.)

I'm sure Microsoft is salivating as they read this (for it's well known that the Uberblog is very high on the priority lists of M$ execs for monitoring) and they're probably wringing their hands at the progress they've made at making the entire Internet proprietary.

Which is why I find it ironic that the recent updates we did to the Uberclok website were not displaying properly in Internet Explorer, even though they looked fine in all other browsers. For the past 24 hours or so, all of our pages were showing a split splash graphic because of this change to our template code:

< src = " pic.jpg ">
< / t d >
< / t r >

instead of

< src = " pic.jpg "> < / t d >
< / t r >

Don't ask my why, but IE needs the /td tag on the same line as the image. Those of you who don't know HTML are probably starting to regret reading this post, but trust me when I tell you that this is a very stupid way for Internet Explorer to behave. Which probably shouldn't surprise me. In fact, I've just revealed to the world that we did some pretty crappy testing before releasing our website update.

Arg.

The point is, our site should look better now to you IE users. Please wear your tinfoil hats so we know who you are.

Yet more info on the 9800 GX2...

There's an excellent review on Tom's that compares the GX2 to both the 8800 Ultra and AMD's dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2. It's pretty much as expected - at 1920x1200, the GX2 is on average about 30% faster than the other cards, but at 2560x1600 it ends up being only slightly faster than an Ultra because of the greater amount of video memory.

Oh, that reminds me - helpful tip time! We often make a point of explaining to our customers that two 512MB cards in SLI mode does not give you 1GB of video RAM - an SLI setup's total amount of usable memory is the same as the total amount of one of the cards (so 512MB in that example.) The same applies to the 9800 GX2! This is important to remember because the cards are advertised as having 1GB of memory, but effectively it's 512MB. That means the 8800 GTX, the Ultra, and the 1GB versions of the 8800 GT/GTS all have more video memory than the GX2. That won't matter as much at resolutions lower than 1920x1200, but you shouldn't buy a GX2 for those resolutions anyway. Much depends on what game you're playing, what resolution you're playing at, and what settings you're willing to live with when considering this card for purchase. Also, next week we'll see if the new drivers which allow Quad-SLI will make a compelling argument for a pair of GX2s.

At the moment, all I can say for certain is that the GX2 is a better choice than the Radeon HD 3870 X2, and that I'd wait another week or two before buying one to see both the new drivers and the 9800 GTX...

9800 GTX on the way!

The 9800 GX2 mentioned below is a noteworthy product, but I'm more excited about the upcoming release of the 9800 GTX cards, which is happening SOON, and with real-time availability, much like the GX2 launch. (Kudos to nVidia for that.) If a pair of 8800GTs will outperform the 9800GX2, what will a pair of 9800 GTXs do? Stay tuned...

More on the 9800 GX2...

Let's be honest - the nVidia G80 (8800 GTX & Ultra) cards have been the top dogs for an unusually long time. Their supremacy is mostly due to a lack of competition from AMD/ATI (when will they settle on one name for that company?) Thankfully, nVidia has finally delivered some next-gen replacements for these venerable beasts.

The 9800 GX2 is a return to nVidia's dabblings with dual-GPU cards, which began with the somewhat-successful 7950 GX2. Initial reports on the 9800 GX2 is that a pair of 8800 GT 512's will beat it out at a lower price. The main selling point then is the possibility of running two GX2's in SLI mode for quad-GPU gaming. Only time and benchmarking will tell which games will respond well to this, but since TRI-SLI (which has been possible with the G80 cards since the 780i motherboards came out a little while ago) isn't a compelling deal yet, I'm skeptical about the near-term usefulness of dual-GX2s. Things will be much clearer as the cards get benchmarked.

At last - a possible replacement for the G80 cards!

Today marked the arrival of the long-awaited 9800 GX2 from nVidia, and guess what? It was a real launch with immediate availability. (The 8800 GT launch left a sour taste in our mouths, since demand far outstripped supply for weeks.) Our first batch of GX2s should arrive in a couple of days, at which point we'll start pounding on them and see what they can do.
It looks like the pre-overclocked versions will take a little longer to get to market, so we'll be overclocking them ourselves for the time being. That means we won't have a good target speed identified for a few weeks, so if you order a PC with one, we'll be setting the overclocked speed on a case-by-case basis for now. The 8800 Ultra is officially dead now, by the way, and is no longer on our site.

Which reminds me - those Cosmos S cases are finally here, and can be chosen on the configurator for the Reactor. We'll get some photos up soon...

SLI still useless for Flight Simulator X

There's a very dedicated subset of gamers out there who stick to sims pretty exclusively (that's "sims" not "The Sims", although the latter qualifies.) Within that group lurks the die-hard flight simulator fans. As near as I can tell, these guys are pretty similar to HAM radio operators, in that their knowledge of their hobby runs deep, and is very specialized. I'd be curious to discover what percentage of them are licensed pilots.

We've gotten several queries about how well Microsoft Flight Simulator runs on our PCs, so I bought a copy and tried it out. It actually pushes hardware more than Crysis, if you turn all the settings up. Speaking of which, it has more settings than anything I've ever played before - it's kind of a mini-game itself, just choosing which options to set where. I benchmarked several configurations on one of our Reactors - dual 8800 GTX with an E6850 (now replaced by the E8400) and 2 GB of memory, single 500GB hard drive, and a 680i motherboard. What I discovered was:

1. SLI does not make a difference.
2. It performed equally well in XP and Vista.
3. I would be quickly arrested if I ever tried to fly an actual plane.

After much trial and error, (and in my opinion) here are the settings required to enjoy the simulation on an 8800 GTX:

Graphics
Global Texture - Medium
Lens Flare - off
Light Bloom - off
Advanced Animations - on
Flitering - Anisotropic
Aniti-aliasing - on
Resolution - 1920x1200x16
Scenery
Lvl of det radius - Large
Complexity - Very Dense
Autogen denisty - Very dense

Below is the spreadsheet of the various framerates and settings: (click to zoom in)