Can a sub $100 graphics card really hang with today’s $300-$600 cards?
According to Tech Report yes.
After a very exhaustive review of eight cards from Nvidia and ATI, the answer is definitely yes. Although the final recommendation is for the Radeon 4850 a $170 card with a $30 mail in rebate, the sub $100 cards, those being the Radeon 4670 and Nvidia’s 9600 GSO, still hang in there in most of yesterday’s games. The 4850 would also have to be my recommendation as well after seeing all the numbers. The 4850 was top card in all gaming test except Crysis: Warhead, although it draws more power that’s to be expected with a higher end card.

I was always a big Nvidia fan myself but since AMD acquired ATI I’ve been leaning the other way and this report pushes me just a little further. Although it will be awhile before I build a new rig, I’ll probably be using an ATI card.

Tags: ati, Gaming, nvidia, pc, video card

Many may be aware of the Folding@home project run by Stanford University, but thanks to Sony now they have a Guinness record. This record certifies the Folding@home project as the most powerful distributed computing system, reaching over 1 petaflop (thousand trillion floating point operations per second). In comparison the SETI@home project has only reached 256 teraflops (265 million floating point operations).

What does Sony have to do with the record. Well more than 600,000 PS3 owners have been donating their spare cpu cycles to the project and this along with others donating their PCs spare cycles have netted the project the World Record.

Source: News.com

Tags: folding@home, record, science, Sony

I couldn’t take it any longer I went out and preordered a copy of the limited edition Halo 3. 

Update: It seems Microsoft and Bungie goofed on the design of the limited edition case.  During shipping both discs might fall out and slide around and become scratched, mine were very lightly scratched.  If anyone experiences any problems with this Microsoft will replace the disc/s free until Feburary next year. 

Link to the replacement form.

Tags: game

I just started downloading the massive demo for Bioshock, all 1.8 gigs of it. I’ve heard alot of hype about this game and I wanted to see a little of it myself. I’ll let you know how the game looks after I have time to play this weekend. I might post a few screen shots if I think about it. I’m pretty sure my system can handle it at least at lower resolutions. I’ve got one EVGA 7900 Gt card right now, I was planning on getting another one soon for SLI.

Update: I went ahead and got Bioshock for the Xbox 360, I haven’t played it yet.

Tags: gaming_rig, misc