Velociraptor hard drives are here!

Western Digital has been the king of the fast gaming PC hard drives for quite a while with their "Raptor" 10,000rpm drives. (Most desktop drives spin at 7,200rpm). This past six months saw the performance gap close significantly as the improved technology and larger write cache on newer 7,200rpm drives made it harder to justify choosing a 150GB Raptor over a 500GB Seagate Barracuda.

Well it's a moot point now - WD is now shipping a 300GB "Velociraptor" product which re-takes the speed crown for gaming PC drives. It still costs more ($300 for 300GB vs. $100 for 500GB) but if you're after speed, there's no longer much of a contest. The drives are available on our web store as options for the Reactor.

Samsung 245BW on sale at Overstock.com.

Behold:

The Samsung 245BW is our favorite 24" monitor, and it wasn't too long ago we were paying $550 for the privilege of owning one. Now you can get them (for the moment at least) for $326 at overstock.com by looking here. More to come...

Q9450 really is available! (For now)

OK, this time for sure. We've confirmed availability for the Q9450, but if history has taught us anything, it's that awesome new CPUs sell out off and on for the first few weeks. We'll be on top of it, so if our web store lists the Q9450 as an option, then we have them in stock, and right now we do! If you've been waiting for this chip to buy, now would be the time.

Q9450 not available after all.

Well, that was awfully exciting for about 10 hours. Apparently Tiger Direct is a big fat liar, and doesn't actually have any Q9450s to sell, like the website currently says. (EDIT: they took the part down just now) Our bad, we should confirm it really is Jesus walking on water and not one of those fast lizards before declaring the second coming. So we're back to square one - no ETA. More to come...

Q9450 is out!

Well slap me silly and call me Susan. The Q9450 actually showed up. We'll be obtaining them from Tiger Direct for the time being - hopefully we'll find a less expensive supplier before too long, but for now the chip will add $150 to the base Reactor price. It's worth it, in my humble opinion. (Hey, I must be the first blogger in years to actually spell that phrase out.)

To remind those of you who forgot, this is the chip that will finally prove a worthy successor to the Q6600 - something the Q9300 really wasn't. Here's a brief comparison of Humanity's quad-core options:



As you can see, the Q6700 is so cheap now, it blows the brand-new Q9300 away, and even the Q6600 is arguably a better choice, with a comparable speed and a higher cache. But the 65nm chips (Q6600 & Q6700) are looking a bit long in the tooth, and we'd much rather be selling PCs with current-generation hardware.

The QX9650 fits that bill (and many of them will do 4GHz, which is incredible for a quad at this point) but they are so very expensive. That makes the Q9450 our sweet spot quad, and the one we've been waiting for more than any other 45nm chip. The Q9550 will eventually outperform it, but by a small margin for about 57% more, so this is, in our opinion, the most exciting chip to come out of the new 45nm line.

And we're happy to finally be able to change our stance on quad-core gaming PCs - the time to buy is NOW!

Q9450 coming soon!

As I mentioned below, the Q9300 isn't very compelling as a replacement for our current leading "affordable" quad-core option, the 65nm-based Q6600. We're really excited to hear our distributor tell us that we should be able to add the Q9450 to our lineup in less than a week! Of course, we won't count those chickens just yet, but I think it's likely to be true. The Q9450 has a massive 12MB cache, which may or may not turn out to equate to improved framerates, but we'll be benchmarking ASAP. The real appeal is the 8x multiplier and the 2.7GHz starting point, which should finally give us a sub-$400 quad core that can reliably run above 3.5GHz. Stay tuned...