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...

Quad Cores & Dual Cores

As you may be aware, we recently added the Q9300 to our lineup, and we've overclocked enough of them to identify 3.2GHz as our target speed for them. That's slightly disappointing, but not too surprising given the low multiplier (7.5 vs 9 on the Q6600.) I'd currently recommend the Q6600 over the Q9300, since the cost is similar, the speeds are the same, and there's 6MB of L2 cache on the Q9300, whereas you get 8MB with the Q6600. What we really need is for intel to finally ship the Q9450...

On a similar note, we're shipping PCs with the E8500, which is $100 more than the E8400 for about .3GHz more speed. It's a more subjective issue, choosing between those two dual-cores, but when we have a solid target speed for them in a week or two, it should be a clearer choice. (The E8500 has .5 more on its multiplier, so we should be able to get a higher percentage of OC on it than with the E8400.

We get a lot of "dual vs quad" questions these days, and it's understandable. If you're not sure what that means, or why it's an issue, the basic concept is that quad-core CPUs can handle twice as many simultaneous operations as a dual-core CPU, but the dual-cores are able to run faster at the same price. (If price isn't really a problem, then just go for the QX9650 and have the best of both worlds.)

We're in a transitional period where sometimes one makes more sense than the other. Presumably we're moving towards a time when dual-cores just don't make sense anymore, but it's not absolutely certain yet, and we certainly don't have a timetable to look at. From a gamer's perspective, either choice is justifiable. There are very few games which take advantage of dual cores, and almost none that leverage four or more right now. We know that will change, so it's tempting to go quad now in preparation for multicore bliss next year. Or the year after that.

Since we don't know when it will happen, though, we run the risk of cheating ourselves out of enjoying a higher CPU speed for (potentially) years, only to realize that when multicore gaming is in full swing it's already time to upgrade the CPU anyway.

To further confuse issues, it's important to remember that a game doesn't necessarily have to be multicore-capable to benefit from the presence of mutliple cores - specifically if you're the sort of user that has other things going on in the background while you're gaming. This is more evident in the case of a non-multicore game on a dual-core PC, as opposed to a dual-core capable game on a quad-core PC, but in either case there's a tangible benefit to the extra cores.

Personally, I would choose a dual core if gaming performance was my primary concern, and if and when multicore games become commonplace, then I'd upgrade to a quad. This industry changes too fast to invest in technology which you have to wait to benefit from. I'd probably only go quad when I knew beyond doubt that one or more games/applications that I personally use a lot were multicore-capable. And there aren't many out there yet.

MAN is Tom's Hardware Popular!

At least it is with many of our past and future customers. We opened a small tech office in downtown Chicago two weeks ago, and between the fallout from that and the tremendous response we got from the latest Uberclok Reactor review in Tom's HW, there's been very little time left for the blog.

Anyway, here's what's new. The 9800 GX2s dump a lot of heat into the PC case, so we're having fun with our dual-GX2 orders. The heat doesn't seem to be an issue with our standard overclock settings, which is very good news, but we're going to test a dual GX2 Reactor in a hot room, just to be on the safe side. Triple-9800 GTXs still outperform dual GX2s for now, but I still expect that to change as the drivers improve.

Many of our recent custom orders have been for 790i-based motherboards, so I think we'll be offering them as a standard item soon. I didn't think peeps would warm up to DDR3 that quickly, as in my opinion it's still too expensive with little benefit over 780i/DDR2, but there is something to be said for future-proofing.

The Q9450 continues to be an elusive beast, with no hard ETA. I'm beginning to think Intel is orchestrating these delays and shortages according to a complex financial model, much like DeBeers (no not DaBears). The Q9300 is, I'll say again, available...

Cricket...cricket....

Yeah, I'd wait too. We haven't sold a single Q9300 yet. That 6MB cache and 7.5x multiplier look pretty weak next to the Q9450's 12MB & 8x for a mere $50 more, to say nothing of an extra .2GHz out of the box. On the higher end, I'm a little surprised at how many of you have been ordering PCs with the QX9650. We added it as a standard item, which is something I never though we'd do with a $1,000 CPU, but there is a LOT of allure in a quad core that OC's stably to 4.0GHz.

Also on the CPU front are sporadic sightings of the E8500 dual-core, which we should be able to get to 4.2GHz or so. Only Tiger Direct has them as of this writing, and they'll dry up soon. (We currently only offer them as on custom PCs, so shoot us an email or call if you're interested.)

On another note, we're currently favoring GSkill's memory for our DDR2-1066 needs in 2GB increments.

The Dominator chips of that type are no longer Micron-brand integrated circuit boards, and can't be overclocked reliably (at least, not the way we like). We'll still use Dominator chips where appropriate, but for now GSkill's memory is a better performer in that category.

Q9300 & 9800 GTX shipping! (and a mini rant)

The 9800 GTX launch gets pushed back with no explanation to April Fool's Day? I'm half-expecting our orders to be cancelled tomorrow ;-)

Well, I must say that I'm not disappointed with these two products, but they haven't knocked my socks off.

With respect to the Q9300 finally showing up, we're evaluating it as a replacement for the Q6600. As a 45nm chip, we expect to be able to overclock it further than the Q6600, and I'm sure that will prove true, but it has a smaller L2 cache than its predecessor (6MB instead of 8MB.) I think the 12MB cache-equipped Q9450 is going to be our true replacement, but we're still waiting for that to show up. We're offering the chip in the Reactor as of today, and simply promising a significant overclock - a firm target speed will follow once we've worked with enough of them to establish some baselines.

As for the 9800 GTX - the bottom line is, it's very similar to the 8800 GTS 512MB card from an engineering standpoint. That it can perform close to the 8800 Ultra at half the price is impressive. Having said that, it has a smaller memory bandwidth than the 8800 GTX/Ultra (256-bit instead of 384) and comes equipped with 512MB of VRAM - a shocking suprise considering the 8800 GTX had 768MB. That means some games with lots of textures to load will play better on the 8800 GTX than the 9800 GTX. From a marketing perspective, that should never happen. Ever.

It confuses things, and leads to weird situations like the one we have right now on the Reactor's build page. Namely, that it's more expensive to buy a Reactor with an 8800 GTX than the 9800 GTX. Normally we'd quietly remove the 8800 GTX and move on, but the truth is, there are some of you out there who would probably enjoy your gaming experience with the 8800 GTX more, and would benefit from paying a bit more for an older card. I don't remember this ever happening before. In any case, we'll be working very hard to lay out some guidelines in choosing between these cards. For the time being, there are some good articles on Anandtech and Tom's Hardware.

One last thing: we'll also be giving you some advice when considering one or two 9800 GX2s, but I want to point out again because the hype is so omnipresent out there - THIS IS NOT A 1GB CARD! There are 1GB versions of the 8800 GT and 8800 GTS which are true 1GB cards - if you SLI two of them, you get 1GB to work with. The 9800 GX2 is essentially a pair of 8800 GTSs in SLI mode, each with 512MB to work with. Since they are SLI'ed by default, you get 512MB to work with. If you then SLI a pair of GX2s, you get...512MB to work with. It's really incensing me that so many vendors are billing this as a 1GB VRAM solution.

/Soapbox off

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...