Overclocked PC Gaming

Reactor now features GTX 260 & GTX 280

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:32:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:41:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:13:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:53:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:18:00 +0000

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.

Velociraptor hard drives are here!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:01:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Sun, 25 May 2008 23:27:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:45:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:03:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:51:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:41:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:59:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:21:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:57:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:04:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:51:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:44:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:20:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:23:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:00:00 +0000

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)

Looking for a new standard case...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:21:00 +0000

The Antec 900, which is our standard case you see in all of our photos on this site, has served us well, but we're shopping around for another case to suppliment it with. One case we really liked that made an appearance at CES in Las Vegas last month was the Cooler Master Cosmos S. We've built custom orders for customers based on the popular Cosmos case, but we always felt the appearance could be better (black instead of silver?), and we prefer to not have a swinging door on the front of a PC, so the drive bays can be easily accessed, and bay devices can be seen. Lo and behold, Cooler Master thought the same thing: Not bad. This might very well be the next standard Uberclok case. We have to get our hands on one (in late March) to see how it handles cooling and noise.

On the subject of standard components, we're transitioning the Reactor's motherboard from the 680i to the 780i chipset. There isn't a whole lot of difference, except that the upcoming Wolfdale-based quad core chips won't work in the 680i. The 780i also offers support for PCI 2.0 cards (not very important yet, but possibly later in '08) as well as slightly more robust Tri-SLI support (another technology that hasn't yet fully matured.) We'll continue to offer both boards in the Reactor for now, until we see more details on the upcoming 790i chipset.

Welcome, and some processor news...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Glen) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:34:00 +0000

Well, here it is - the Uberclok blog. In addition to offering superior performance at lower prices, our other main mission is to make it easier for you, the customer, to understand what choices you face. AMD or Intel? ATI or nVidia? 32 bit or 64? There's a LOT of information out there, and we're here to break it all down for you in brief, comprehensive bite-sized chunks so you can get on with the important stuff (GAMING of course.) Now that we have a blog, we can bring you up-to-date on a daily basis. Like now!

As expected, Intel announced a new CPU line-up at CES in January, and we're in the process of migrating to them. These are the "Penryn"-based "Wolfdale" chips that are built on a 45nm process, as opposed to the older 65nm. As you may know, we offer three different CPUs in our gaming PCs:

1. Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 (Ion only)
2. Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (Ion or Reactor)
3. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Ion or Reactor)

The E4500 has a clear successor in the newly-announced E4700, but the entry-level CPU in the new E8xxx line, the E8200, is only about $30 more, and would allow us to bring three times as much L2 cache (6MB), a native FSB of 1333 instead of 800, and a 45nm chip to our default Ion configuration. We'll have to wait for both real-life test results and real-life pricing to emerge, but we might finally bid adios to the E4xxx line.

The E6xxx line has been completely replaced by the E8xxx, and we have already replaced the E6850 with the E8400. When the E8500 is available, we might shift to that instead if it makes sense (based on performance testing.) For about the same price we now have a faster chip with a bigger L2 cache, which offers a modest increase in gaming performance.

A similar fate awaits the Q6600, which will have had a spectacular run. Either the Q9300 or the Q9450 will take its place as our Quad CPU of choice. The 9450 is a bit above our desired price point, but the 12MB L2 cache might make it worthwhile. Again, real-life pricing and performance testing will decide.

The E8500 should become available this month, with the other changes happening in March.

- Thomas Glen