An open letter to Steve Jobs
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 2nd 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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Why I can’t l leave my computer at home. Dear Mr. Jobs, I love my iPad, really, thank you very much. I am a proud member of the current generation of Apple zombies spawned by the iPhoneOS. I have been doing my best to fall in line and help bring in the new age of computing but I could use a little help here. The iPad is working out to be pretty much everything I need for entertainment. I read Kindle books and I can switch to reading them on the iPhone when I’m standing in line for 2 hours at…
Olympus DM-420 Digital Recorder Review
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 2nd 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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Eyes-free recording—testing the Olympus DM-420 digital recorder I was asked why I wanted to test a digital recorder device when I could record using my mobile phone? My first response was, “well, I am a gadget hound, and I like toys.” I was then challenged by the prospect of carrying around multiple devices when I could do everything I needed with one—the ubiquitous iPhone or some other smartphone. However, just as the iPhone has a passable camera—it’s not a great camera, and therefore, I carry a higher megapixel, higher quality pocket camera that has a flash unit, as well as an…
Cyblink Power2go 7 Review
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 2nd 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Software Review
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New and improved, better than ever—Cyberlink Power2go 7 You thought 6 was good—you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet How often has this happened to you? You’ve got a bunch of photos on your computer and you want to see them—but you can’t—they’re in ISO format—sucks to be you. Well bunky, your days of frustration and wait are over—let me hear you say hallelujah. With Power2Go’s new ISO image browser, you don’t have to burn a disc to see what is in the image, or to get the contents. Just drag and drop from the image to your hard drive. Much faster ……
Review: Nvidia’s F104 - GTX 460 mini-fur-me
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 19th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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A $200 board that packs a lot of wallop One of the fastest airplanes ever made was the Lockheed F104 clocking in at 1.7 mach with a 48k ft/min climb rate it was called a missile with a pilot in it. We’ve been testing another F104 - the new F104-based Nvidia AIBs, the 1GB GTX 460 and the 768MB GTX 460 both units configured with GDDR5 memory. These are consumer derivative versions of the famous Fermi chip, minus the super computer parts like EC memory management, smaller caches, and a larger number of texture units per FP unit. The new GPU…
Nvidia’s three-screen 3D Vision system
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Hardware Review
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nvidia
graphics
gaming
To do more you gotta see more—it’s the law As you all know (and if you don’t we’re going to send you to your room and make you write it a hundred times), Peddie’s 2nd law is—The more you can see the more you can do. And as you may know we’re pretty big fans of stereo games (S3D.) And, some of you may have seen at CES, or GDC, or PAX, or Computex, Nvidia’s three-screen S3D system. You could see it, but you couldn’t touch it—it wasn’t really a shipping product yet. Last week Nvidia officially released their GeForce Beta…
“Singularity”—first impressions - game review
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Software Review
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review
games
fps
We got a copy of Activisions’s “Singularity” (developed by Raven) and started playing with it. It’s a FPS set on a island where the Russians built a research facility in the 1950s to test a newly discovered element E99. Things didn’t turn out quite the way the scientist had hoped and the Russians (Soviet Union at the time) shut down the research center and abandoned the island. Rediscovered by a satellite scan in 2010 a U.S. special ops force is sent in to investigate, find the E99 and well, I’m not sure what they are supposed to do with it yet.…
Seeing more, doing more; a guide to putting multiple monitors to work, or play
Posted by Jon Peddie on April 16th 2010 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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amd
gaming
production
multiscreen
We have been proponents of multi-screen displays forever, and have run almost every combination there is for over two decades now. Possibly the largest monitor in a cluster we ever had was a Sony 24-inch CRT Trinitron that weighed over 300 pounds. We’ve cabled notebooks to external monitors and built really powerful workspaces of three and four displays with effective resolutions of 4800 x 1200. We’ve tried the various Matrox Dual and TripleHead2Go combinations, and for the money we were pretty impressed, but the burden of driver tweaks limited the range of applications. The TripleHead2Go maps the GPU’s external display frame…
Benchmarking Nvidia’s GTX 480 Fermi AIB
Posted by Jon Peddie on March 30th 2010 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Last week in Boston at the PAX conference Nvidia officially announced the GTX 480 and 470 AIBs based on the GF100 Fermi GPU. We’ve written it up in this issue of TechWatch (see page 1.) The board is unremarkable in its appearance, and we could not find any wood screws. As you might have heard, some who saw early versions of Fermi AIBs claimed to have spotted wood screws holding the thing together – evidence that the boards were mock-ups. We tested the Nvidia GTX 480 in an Intel Core i7 x980 3.33GHz 6 cores (12 logical processors), DX58SO X58, 3GB DDR3…
Lenovo’s new light-weight notebook—a road warrior’s delight
Posted by Jon Peddie on March 19th 2010 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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ces
hp
usb
lenovo
Lenovo made the mistake of letting us play with their new X201s. It was a mistake because they’re going to have to pry my cold dead fingers off it to get it back. The specs: Core i7-620LM 2GHz; 4GB DDR3; 160GB hard drive; Bluetooth spacer, Intel HD graphics; Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit; 802.11n; 1yr warranty, stated battery life 12 hours with (optional) 9-cell battery. Price: $1,349 The specs I care about: The screen is 12.1-inch with resolution of 1440 x 900 (WSXGA) LED backlit. It weighs a mere 2.7 pounds—1.22 kg. When on the road weight and screen size mean…
ATI’s Radeon HD5970 Hemlock - DirectX 11, lots-o-cores, multiple displays, over-clockable
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 24th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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gpu
ati
amd
opencl
directx
graphics
pmark
benchmark
overclock
Number five in its series of new AIBs, ATI as promised delivered the dual chip HD5970 Radeon board. It’s killer fast, easy on the power supply and pocketbook, and has bonuses like multi-display output and over clocking tools. The board comes with 2GB of DDR5, one each for each GPU. The GPUs get to the PCIe lanes via a gen2 PLX PCIe bridge chip. We ran a series of tests on the board in Windows 7 and the results were very impressive—without over-clocking. ATI has a lot of headroom in the RV870 Evergreen GPU, and the two of them on the…
Kill a watt
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 19th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Every month the electric bill comes in and every month it’s higher than you think it should be and every month you say we have to find out what is using all that power, it can't be just the PC I sit in front of all day, someone is leaving lights on or something. And then you go back to reading your email and tapping out tweets. At quitting time, you get up and some folks turn off their PC, others have a sleep mode set and want to have instant on when they come back so they leave the machine…
Your very own switchboard
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 19th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Here at Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs we run several computers with AMD or Intel processors of various sizes. We have a variety of monitors, keyboards, and mice, and the one we want is never attached to the machine we’re going to run tests on. Not only that, when we do unravel the rat’s nests of wires, one of them in inevitably is either too short or too knotted up to reach and so a few frustrating minutes are lost sorting that out. We’ve tried to get a KVM switch that would help us manage it and couldn’t find one that handled…
Wikipedia in your pocket
Posted by Jon Peddie on October 28th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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wikireader
Openmoko has announced the availability of WikiReader, a palm-sized electronic encyclopedia containing the more than three million English language articles of Wikipedia that can be accessed immediately anytime, anywhere without requiring an Internet connection. WikiReader is available for $99 at http://thewikireader.com and Amazon.com starting today. We got to play with one briefly Saturday night and, in addition to being a real attention getter, it suddenly became the main guest—all of a sudden everyone had a question they wanted answered. WikiReader turns on instantly and we are told will run for months before its two AAA batteries need to be replaced. The…
How high can you go? - Village Tronic says 1920
Posted by Jon Peddie on October 28th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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television
usb
ebook
vibook
Village Tronic is one of the pioneers of multi-display solutions and the company just launched a new member to its ViBook family of display extenders. These little modules provide computer users with a simple way to run several displays from a Windows or Mac desktop computer or laptop. The ViBook Plus is one of the first devices to use DisplayLink’s new DL195 chip, enabling it to support higher resolution screens of up to 1920x1200 and up to 28 inches with faster graphics and improved video playback that includes HD video streams. Up to six displays can be driven by one Windows-based…
PS3 getting better and better—We take a tour of Unchartered 2: Among Thieves
Posted by Jon Peddie on October 28th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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gaming
games
ps3
In addition to all the cost moves (mostly due to disk price manipulations, and a smaller box) Sony is increasing the number of titles for the PS3. That’s helped them move almost a half million units in September And from a pixel point of view, the quality of some of the new games is really getting impressive. Take Unchartered 2: Among Thieves from Naughty Dog Studios. This is a 3rd person game, classified as “adventure.” It’s action packed, some fighting, lots of shooting, some running and jumping. It has a pretty interesting story, and it’s a lot like a movie. The…
ATI Radeon HD 5770: It’s going to be tough to knock down Juniper
Posted by Jon Peddie on October 13th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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gpu
ati
amd
aib
radeon
gpgpu
pmark
hd5770
3dmark
When ATI took us aboard an aircraft carrier in Alameda California a couple of weeks ago to introduce their new Radeon HD5870 code named Cypress, they also showed us their plan for releasing a scaled down version of the new chip code named Juniper. Phase two of their “Sweet spot” program, and on schedule, ATI delivered (literally) their Midrange AIBs the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750. Code named Juniper, the 5770 is an incredible value delivering DirectX 11 performance, with a GB of GDDR5 memory and doing it for a few dollars and a few watts. The new midrange AIBs also…
Testing the ATI Radeon HD 5870
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 30th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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gpu
ati
amd
3d
graphics
radeon
gpgpu
2d
teraflops
By now you’ve probably read our review of the RV870 and a half dozen others so you should already know it’s suppose to be a 2.7 TFLOPS chip with 1,600 processors and ultra fast 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The board is totally enclosed, with air vents at the back, and oddly the chip’s connector and heat-sink retention bracket is exposed, which adds a strangely aesthetic appeal. It could be we got an early test unit and the production version will have a cover plate over the chip. You can see the two six-pin power connectors at the top of the rear…
How low can you go?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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mobile
vista
disk
storage
ibm
verbatim
drive
flashdrive
kodak
2.13 billion bits per buck, that’s how low. For one U.S. penny you get 21 million bits of memory in a package not much bigger than a U.S. penny. Verbatim has introduced an 8GB USB memory for $30. Verbatim, one of the pioneer companies of the industry, having started in 1969 with a license from IBM to build floppy discs, has gone through the usual ups and downs, management changes, and refinancing gyrations any 50-year-old company…
Darkest of Days: What if you could travel in time?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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nvidia
gpu
cpu
games
wwii
physics
realistic
physx
You can, and enjoy physics and cinematic visions whilst doing it: the first serious implementation of GPU-based physics. During wars and natural catastrophes people go missing, MIA in the case of wars, simply missing persons in disasters. They could be alive, they could be dead, the ambiguity of their status is the basis for the time travel in the multi-era, Darkest of Days FSP from 8Monkey Labs. In order to avoid conflicts with the time-continuum and prevent you from killing your own grandmother, you have to be in never-never land, or so the game’s story premise goes. I buy it, it…
CyberLink MediaShow—they love GPUs
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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apple
facebook
media
flickr
microsoft
faces
photo
cyberlink
recognition
CyberLink has been at the forefront of GPU exploitation for photos, and their latest effort is MediaShow. YAPP—yet another photo program, but this time it’s got more. If you’re like me, you have several photo programs, some you wanted, some that were forced on you. I currently have: Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photo Gallery, Picasa 3, Roxio 2010 PhotoSuite 12, and now CyberLink MediaShow; there may…
Go fast, go long—Intel releases the Lynnfield platform
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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nvidia
intel
cpu
ram
nehalem
processor
core
Lynnfield is Intel’s first mainstream Nehalem, and is being marketed as Core i5. It’s built in 45nm, has 4 cores, and Hyper Threading, 8MB of shared L3 memory, and Turbo Boost Technology for dynamic frequency scaling. The Core i5, again like the i7, has an integrated 1333 MHz DDR3 memory controller, but the Lynnfield’s is dual channel instead of triple channel. Unlike Core i7, Lynnfield communicates directly with PCI-e 2.0 graphics, though at a maximum of x16 lanes, which requires splitting them x8/x8 in multiple AIB setups. Since the CPU can interface directly to memory and graphics, no northbridge is needed…
Wolfenstein - Great game little use of GPU
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 4th 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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gpu
3d
games
fps
activision
Activision has recently released a remake of the classic FPS Wolfenstein, and all I can say is thank you Activision. However, the GPU folks may not be quite as thankful. When I heard it was coming out I expected it to be in stereovision and have killer physics, after all this is 2009. The physics are good, damn good, but not accelerated by the GPU, and alas there’s no stereo. No doubt Nvidia will do a driver tweak and correct that but a natively developed game in stereo is just so much better. There are three elements I look for in…
Augmented Reality hits the mainstream - A darling of technorati Marvel is bringing it home
Posted by Jon Peddie on August 6th 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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3d
marvell
boeing
avatar
startrek
augmented reality
mattel
Immersive Technologies’ AR demo.If you’ve ever seen a yellow scrimmage line appear in the field of a football game, you’ve experienced AR (Augmented Reality), which is a term credited to Thomas Caudell in 1990 when he was with Boeing. Lots of companies and universities have experimented with it, and there are games being played on mobile phones in Japan right now (you point your camera phone at a place and on your screen is superimposed a graphics image of a treasure or a monster). At San Diego Comic-Con 2009 last week, Mattel showed a new line of action figures based on…
eVGA’s Interview
Posted by Jon Peddie on June 12th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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eVGA’s Interview being tested in MTTL’s lab. The camera is in the center post. See more do more, see more together. Anyone who has read Tech Watch has heard about Peddie’s second law—The more you can see the more you can do. And you’ve no doubt heard me extol the benefits of multiple displays, seen pictures of my workspace, and suffered through my lectures on the productivity gains one gets as they add screen space. Two are better than one It’s an easy concept to grasp. If you try to replicate a desktop. A real physical desk top that is maybe…
Nvidia GTX 275
Posted by Jon Peddie on May 15th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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nvidia
gpu
ati
Figure 8: Pmark for Nvidia GTX 275 and ATI AIBs Figure 9: Performance comparison of Nvidia GTX 275 to ATI AIBs Figure 10: Performance per power consumption of Nvidia GTX 275 and ATI AIBs Figure 11: Performance per price of Nvidia GTX 275 and ATI AIBs The Nvidia GTX 275 is a gap filler for Nvidia designed to offer a SKU at every price point. It’s basically a scaled down 285 with 240 processors and a lower clock speed of 633 MHz (down from 648 MHz) less memory 896 MB (down from 1 GB), the memory clock is dropped to 1134…
A word about Game Booster
Posted by Jon Peddie on May 14th 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
Tags:
games
software
boosters
Game Booster is a free program that can be downloaded from various sites (e.g. http://majorgeeks.com/Game_Booster_d6148.html). It’s advertised as being designed to help optimize your PC for smoother, more responsive game. It works by temporarily shutting down background processes, cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance so you can keep all the features of Vista or XP out of the way as well as all those little applets to make opening a program faster. And you can turn them back on when you are ready to get back to work. We thought we’d try it. It’s got a convenient UI for turning things…
HP DV6Z Laptop
Posted by Jon Peddie on May 14th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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hp
laptop
thumbsup
My big bad HP Pavilion DV9700 notebook died. Actually it didn’t completely die, it just went blind, or maybe I did because I couldn’t see the screen anymore. It was kinda exciting to watch as it turned itself off, the screen flashed brilliant lines, rippled up down like a snake shivering, then got black bars with color highlights and then—flat line, except there wasn’t even a line. My first thought was, no problem, just connect an external monitor—that’s like flying to the sun at night so you don’t burn up—HUH? Obviously if the Nvidia GPU has fried itself there’s no external…
Lenovo Elite ThinkPad W700ds
Posted by Jon Peddie on March 3rd 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Thinkpad Elite W700ds second screen with menu.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) OCR seems to be able to read anything.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Time to calibrate.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Color calibration sensor.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) FIGURE 1: Performance characteristics of some powerful computers.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Probably one of the most impressive machines we’ve played with in a while, the Lenovo dual-screen ThinkPad W700ds comes with a 2.53 GHz Intel Core2Duo processor with 4GB of DDR3, a 17-inch 1920 x 1200 main screen, a 10.4 inch 1366 768 second screen driven by a Nvidia FX 3700M, a 1.3 Mpixel camera, and a Ultanav…
Testing the new Nvidia monsters
Posted by Jon Peddie on February 4th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Figure 1: Comparison of five leading graphics AIBs at 1920 x 1200. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) Figure 2: Comparison of five leading graphics AIBs at 2560 x 1600. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) Figure 3: Call of Duty at War played on two AIBs. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) When ATI’s half-sized half-price HD Radeon 4870 opened up a can of whoopass on Nvidia’s GTX 280, a lot of folks in the industry where all too willing write Nvidia’s epitaph. Fools. I’ve said it publicly and I’ll say it here: I’d never underestimate Jen Hsun Huang, he’ll always manage to pull a rabbit…
Nvidia breaks the 20,000 mark
Posted by Jon Peddie on January 19th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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Nvidia GTX295 and GTX 280. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) “In computer graphics too much is not enough”—Jon Peddie 1980 The new GTX 295 dual-GPU AIB from Nvidia is a beast—period. The $499 (MSRP) AIB has a pair of die-shrunk 55nm GTX 280 chips and the GPUs run at 576MHz while the memory is clocked at 999MHz. Compared to the GTX 280, the differences are shown in Table 1. GTX280 GTX295 Difference Processors 240 480 100% Pixel Fill rate (Gpix/sec) 19.3 39.6 105% GPU clock MHz 602 576 -4% Memory Clock MHz 2214 1998 -10% Memory size MB 1024 1792 75% Price…
Double your refresh, double your fun
Posted by Jon Peddie on January 9th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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The stereopsis experience To get a flicker-free stereoscopic image, you have to have 120 Hz refresh with a single screen, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a single LCD, plasma, DLP, ventricular display, or a CRT. Anything less is a compromise that will cause eye fatigue and send you away, probably not to return. So, as CRTs faded from the desktop of gamers, and too few had a high-speed DLP projector, the concept of stereovision for games languished, with the notable exception of IZ3D’s dual-plane LCD design. In addition to IZ3D, Zalman has offered a custom display which offers a passive…
VillageTronics ViBook
Posted by Jon Peddie on January 9th 2009 | Permalink
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Hardware Review
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These past couple of weeks, we have had the opportunity to catch up on some of the testing that we put off. And yet, we still ran out of time—Parkinson’s law in action. But what we did get time with was very satisfying. Today’s products are getting better and better. But drivers are still the weak link. What we have tested, and continue to test, is the Nehalem, with a variety of AIBs, and are currently watching the door for the UPS guy who is bringing us a GTX 295. VillageTronics ViBook. (Source: VillageTronics) We’ve tested almost every product VillageTronics has…
ATI’s latest AIBs get a workout on Vantage
Posted by Jon Peddie on December 22nd 2008 | Permalink
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ATI’s HD4870 and HD4850 X2 AIBs.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Working end of the ATI AIBs.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Figure 1: Comparison of ATI and Nvidia AIBs running Vantage.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Figure 2: Price/performance comparison of AIBs running Vantage.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) This week, we received some more ATI AIBs, specifically a pair of Sapphire Radeon AIBs, and a pair of 1 GB HD 4870 AIBs. We also got a new Catalyst driver, so we decided to run the batch of them, including the 512 MB 4870s, for comparison. We stuck with Vantage for these tests since it is the only…
Benchmarking the new Core i7 Nehalem processor
Posted by Jon Peddie on December 1st 2008 | Permalink
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This ain’t as easy as we make it look... The Vantage 3DMark tests were astounding—astoundingly confusing and disappointing. We expected the Intel processors to beat the AMD Barcelona. But we also expected the Nehalem to own the Core 2 Extreme, leave it in the dust, smoke it. It didn’t. The goal was simple enough, test a new Intel Core i7 3.2GHz (965 Extreme) X58-based machine against previous machines with a couple of different graphics boards. X58 is Intel’s new I/O hub that accomodates the Quickpath interface. However, we found out the early production version of the Nehalem Core i7 Intel sent…
Does Google Chrome shine?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Permalink
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So I did it, not on day one but by day three I downloaded Chrome and tried it. I still use it occasionally to see if there are any changes or upgrades, but basically it’s not impressive. It’s a little faster, hardly noticeable, than Firefox, and anything is faster than IE7, but who cares because no power user uses it anyway. The choice of name is amusing. “Chrome” was the ill-fated name Microsoft gave to a new software initiative in 1998, which was code-named GDI2. It was supposed to offer 3D acceleration in the UI for web-based multimedia, and, are you…
HP 2133 Mini Note struts its stuff
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Permalink
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HP’s Mini Note 2133(Source: Jon Peddie Research) We first saw a Mini Note in early 2007 when our friends from VIA came to visit and brought some demos with them. It was an interesting device and, as usual, VIA was way ahead of the pack. In fact, VIA has almost always been ahead of the pack but they fail to win the prize when the pack catches up with them. This time it’s different and the Mini Note from HP is a design win triumph for VIA and a product win for HP. Intel has been late to the game, as…
Roxio Creator 2009
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Permalink
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Opening screen of Roxio Creator 2009.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) There are five companies that are offering multimedia suites: Adobe, Avid/Pinnacle, Corel/Ulead, CyberLink, and NTI. I suspect Microsoft will soon be an entry into this category, and there are some other brands that have bits and pieces. Roxio has been in the business longer than most, and may actually be the pioneer. Their technology came from the Canadian company MGI, which was definitely a brave pioneer and suffered the usual fate of pioneers. They paved the way for everyone else. Roxio continued a trend that started at MGI of buying adjacent companies…
Just how fast is SSD?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Permalink
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Samsung has been annoying us with PR emails about their solid-state drives for almost a year now. Finally, we had enough and said put up or shut up. They put up and sent us a 15.4-inch Lenovo T60p ThinkPad laptop ($2,438.) What the hell are we going to do with this, Robert asked? Kathleen also was puzzled. The cats got on to test for warmth and softness and abandoned it. How do you test for disk or flash drive speed? Surely, there must be some special benchmarks or test programs we could get. We did find some software from PassMark and…
YABM – yet another benchmark
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Permalink
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We bought a nifty performance test program from PassMark. (See the mention of it in this in the review of the Lenovo ThinkPad.) It’s a full suite of tests, and totally affordable ($24.) Included in the suite is a 2D and a 3D test set. They run on DirectX 9. FIGURE 1:PassMark 2D and 3D test results(Source: Jon Peddie Research) FIGURE 2:3DMark06 multi-res benchmarks.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Since we had a couple of laptops on the bench for some other testing, we decided to run the graphics benchmarks on them too. Why not? The results were amazing. So much so we…
HP TouchSmart
Posted by Jon Peddie on August 18th 2008 | Permalink
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By Jon Peddie with Alex Gorvoi, Robert Dow The Touchsmart in a kitchen.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) This is the most impressive entertainment PC I have ever seen, and I think I may have invented the term EPC back in 1999 when I said we would have this kind of capability by 2003—oops. It’s not perfect, but it is so much closer to the ideal consumer device we all want that its imperfections can be hopefully overlooked, if not, dealt with. This may not be a machine for your grandma or your technophobic neighbor, but for most techno savvy adults, this machine…
There’s no VGA connector. How do you hook this thing up?
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 30th 2007 | Permalink
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Tags:
LG just brought out a 20-inch LCD monitor they’re calling the FlatronWide L206WU. The unique thing about this monitor is that it uses DisplayLink’s DL-160 chip, enabling high-res graphics over a USB 2.0 link. The display offers wide-screen resolution (1680x1050) on a 20.1-inch (51.13 cm) active matrix TFT LCD panel with a non-glare screen. With 2ms response time and 3000:1 contrast ratio, the monitor is well suited for playing fast FPS games, and with the high contrast ratio it’s well suited for PCTV, as well as photo and video editing and professional graphics (i.e., DCC and CAD.). The 20-inch L206WU has…
Is that Vista in your Browser?
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 16th 2007 | Permalink
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3D software developers have long held the dream of applying the third dimension to the Internet, which is the most comprehensive communications network that humanity has invented to date. This is the vision of a literal “Web3D” rather than simply 3D on the web—a vision which has now become reality according to SpaceTime. From now on, users can search and browse the Internet using SpaceTime’s new paradigm where information need not only be recovered, but discovered. SpaceTime claims it will save time in searching because multiple search results are displayed in their patent pending 3D Visual Stacks. All search results are…
AMD’s Radeon HD2400 and HD2600XT
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 2nd 2007 | Permalink
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Tags:
Last we told you about AMD shipping the new midrange and entry-level AIBs based on the R600 architecture, and built in 65-nm technology. This week we got a basket full of them and ran some tests. Product Web price AMD price Sapphire HD2600 Pro 512-MByte DDR3 $185.00 Sapphire Radeon HD2600 Pro 512-MByte DDR2 $185.63 Sapphire Radeon HD2600 Pro 512-MByte DDR2 $196.88 Radeon HD2600 Pro 256-MByte DDR2 $99 Sapphire Radeon HD2600 XT 256-MByte GDDR3 $210.00 $129.00 ATI Radeon HD2600 XT 256 MBGDDR4 $149.00 Sapphire Radeon HD2600 XT256-MByte DDR3 $215.00 Sapphire Radeon HD2600 XT 256-MByte GDDR3…
Revisiting some previous results
Posted by Jon Peddie on June 18th 2007 | Permalink
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We have two follow-up tests to share with you this week: the Toshiba docking station and the R600-Radeon HD2900XT. Toshiba Dynadock—it’s totally powered If you read our evaluation of the Dynadock (see TechWatch, June 4), you may recall we had, or thought we had, a problem with the rear panel USB connectors not having power, and were forced to use the front USB slots for items that required powered USB. Well, that’s just not the case and we want to set the record straight. We have verified that the Toshiba Dynadock does have powered USB ports in the back and front…
Want to do more, then you need to see more – AMD’s R690
Posted by Jon Peddie on April 9th 2007 | Permalink
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It’s taken a while, but like “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.,” the R690 has been worth the wait. What’s that? That, son, is the wait for our evaluation of the AMD R690 Asus motherboard. And the reason it took this long, when the web guys had their reviews out almost the same day AMD announced it, was due to two things: (a) the chief geek was involved in an all-consuming trial and couldn’t get to it full time, and (b) we hit some roadblocks and discovered some stuff that’s interesting, plus our test was targeted at a different POV than the yadda-yadda benchmarks. We were…
First impressions of “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl”
Posted by Jon Peddie on April 9th 2007 | Permalink
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As usual we had more stuff to test than we could get to, so we picked the things that are most fun for us: games and displays. As so often happens, we discovered unusual and certainly undeclared artifacts, which we hope you’ll find interesting, amusing, and informative. The long-awaited game based on the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 and the subsequent movie of the same name are finally here. Created by the Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, and first unveiled back in 2001, “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” is a first-person shooter (FPS) set in the near-future in the ruined Chernobyl…
Getting back to the future
Posted by Jon Peddie on February 26th 2007 | Permalink
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As your official old-fart, been there-done-that curmudgeon, I’m happy to report that the PC has finally caught up with the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) computer I used to write my thesis on back in 1980. On that 1-MHz MOS 6502–based PET computer with its whopping 4 KBytes of memory, I had a word proc-essor (which might have been called Wordpro) that was made in England, an add-on program that did real-time spell-checking called “Oops” (that’s not a typo, that was its name), and a real-time keystroke-saving program so every-thing I did was always and immediately backed up. Now to be…
Mod this, dude
Posted by Jon Peddie on February 26th 2007 | Permalink
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Figure 6. Matto’s opening screen—welcome to hell. In a recent Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs story (rFactor encore), Ted Pollak, our super-duper, super gamer analyst, goes nuts for a racing game mod (and it is pretty damn spectacular, if I do say so). I, however, went for a FPS. Not just any mod or any FPS, but Crytek’s “Farcry” and the Matto mods. If you haven’t played or don’t know about “Farcry,” don’t read any further. If you know about “Frycry” and have played it, or tried to play it, you know the Crytek engine is very powerful. Crytek is a game…
Beauty and the beast
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 6th 2006 | Permalink
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We get our hands on Playstation 3 as well as AMD’s 4x4 This week we got to play with two black beauties, one a monster, the other smaller but almost equally powerful. I’m talking abut an AMD 4x4 and a Sony PS3; read on. When we returned from a long and tiring trip to India we found a giant box in the lab (and a somewhat smaller one on top of it.) We were tried and said, let’s check it later, and then we went off to celebrate the US holiday, Thanksgiving, with friends. We should have never left, and may…
Doing more, seeing more
Posted by Jon Peddie on May 22nd 2006 | Permalink
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We have been testing a variety of multi-screen controllers. The three hardware solutions we’ve looked at have been VillageTronics, Newnham Research’s USB-to-VGA adapter, and Matrox’s TripleHead2Go. All of these devices are external to the computer, with the exception being VillageTronics, which is a PCMCIA PC card. We’ve written about VillageTronics several times, and this time we’re looking into Matrox’s nifty little box, the TripleHead2Go. The hardware installation is simple. The box connects to the PC via a standard analog VGA (sorry, no DVI for now) cable, and reports resolution via standard EDID structure, appearing to the PC as a single, very…
Wireless sucks
Posted by Jon Peddie on February 13th 2006 | Permalink
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That's right, you heard it here, up here on the mountain where we work by candlelight and still wax our own saddles. OK, it's not that bad, but we have learned that wireless isn't all it's cracked up to be, the QoS leaves a lot to be desiredÑeverywhere, except maybe Paul Ottelini's office. But we have a couple of remote spots up here and running a long Ethernet wire is just impractical. The problem is compounded by our experiments with EPCs and DMAs, and we've found that all of the units we've tried to get working can't get through our simple,…
Watching TV, and playing games – it’s all in a day’s work
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 21st 2005 | Permalink
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This week at Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs (MTTL) we're still watching TV on our PCs, but portable TVs now. We're trying to make things explode around here, but so far the only thing we've had any success with has been the microwave—boy, you should have seen that baby light up before it lifted off, but that's a story for another day. Today, it's TV. ADS InstantTV Cardbus If you think you'd like to watch TV on your PC, and you're using a laptop, you've got three choices: use an external TV module connected through USB, use a TV tuner PCMCIA card,…
This ain’t your dad’s “Quake”
Posted by Jon Peddie on November 21st 2005 | Permalink
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Opening scene, all hell is breaking loose. I recently got a copy of “Quake 4”; you should get one, too. You should get one if you like FPSs, with stunning graphics, lots of action, lots of weapons, opponents, and levels. If you don't like that kind of stuff, well, go play “Everquest,” or “WOWC.” As many you know, I've been on a rant for the past year or so about the lack of originality and the overuse of sequels (I'm so looking forward to “Doom XXVII”). But go tell that to George Lucas-wouldn't you line up to see just one more…
Monitor madness on the mountain
Posted by Jon Peddie on August 11th 2005 | Permalink
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As you know I’m a big advocate of multiple displays: “The more you can see the more you can do.”-Jon Peddie, 1998. It’s one thing to preach it, it’s another to practice. I’m practicing. The first step was to attach a second monitor to my shiny new HP nw8240 mobile workstation. What a great machine this is, 1680 x 1050, 15-inch screen powered by an ATI FireGL V5000 that not only runs real apps, but also runs “Splinter Cell Chaos Theory” in all its glory, and it’s got plenty of glory. (Speaking of game glory, have you seen the “F.E.A.R.” demo…
Compaq nw8240
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 7th 2005 | Permalink
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MTTL got paint all over its new computer this week. It's OK, though, because we Ctrl-Z'ed it and cleaned it all up. We mean, of course, that this week we got a Compaq nw8240 mobile workstation to play with and we also got our hands on a beta version of Corel Paint Shop Pro X. Sweet. Super easy install, none of that close all other applications, must reboot stuff. Unfortunately, we're going to have to reboot on the Paint Shop Pro review we wrote, since it turned out to be embargoed. We'll tell you all about it real soon. So, let's…
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Jon Peddie
Dr. Jon Peddie is a pioneer of the graphics industry, starting his career in computer graphics in 1962. After the successful launch of several graphics manufacturing companies, Peddie began Jon Peddie Associates in 1984 to provide comprehensive data, information and management expertise to the computer graphics industry. With those same goals in mind, he left JPA to form Jon Peddie Research in 2001 to provide a more customer intimate environment for clients, and to further explore the business of multimedia. Peddie lectures at numerous conferences on topics pertaining to graphics technology and the emerging trends in digital media technology. Recently named one of the most influential industry analysts, he is frequently quoted in trade and business publications, and contributes articles to numerous publications including as well as appearing on CNN and TechTV, and a contributor to Advances in Modeling, Animation, and Rendering. Peddie is also the author of several books including Graphics User Interfaces and Graphics Standards, High Resolution Graphics Display Systems, and Multimedia and Graphics Controllers. Jon Peddie is recognized as one of the leading analysts in the country by AdWeek Magazine.
