Posts tagged with Chassis
An Enthusiasts Dream Machine
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 3:29 PM
(15 votes, average: 3.80 out of 5)
Loading ...Simply blissful gaming!
Twist my arm, unreleased GPU meets, unreleased CPU meets unreleased Microsoft OS! When I was asked to build out a totally “unreleased product” PC and experience/blog on the tremendous gaming capabilities of such a system, I was all over it!
First things first, collect all the necessary components; as you can imagine this is a very easy task at AMD.
Components – CHECK
Chassis – Antec Skeleton (as this is easy to do quick uninstalls and reinstalls)
Birthplace – yes, we are human, even though we work and live in grey cubes
Lifting the veil!
Motherboard – Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P (AM3)
Memory – 8G Corsair XMS3 DHX DDR3 1333
CPU – Unreleased AMD Phenom™ II Quad Core (3.2Ghz)
GPU – ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 OC (unreleased at the time, available today)
OS – A super secret version of Windows 7
CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 quad core running at a stock frequency of 3.2Ghz, this CPU is scheduled to be available sometime in Q2.
The GPU is a third generation DirectX10.1 graphics card that is powered by the most powerful gaming GPU under $2601.. Availability of this GPU is April 2nd worldwide (today) and I was excited to test it early!
Some of the specs to the GPU are:
Compute Power – 1.36 TFLOPS
Core Clock Speed – 900 Mhz
Memory – GDDR5
Frame Buffer – 1G
Memory Bandwidth – 124.8 GB/s
Transistors – 959 million
Stream Processors – 800
On to the gaming experience.
Home office and test area – Yes, that is Tweetdeck open, yes that is an HP dv2 on the left and yes that is an Optimun Prime helmet beside my Master Chief helmet! Me=Geek
Just for clarity, I installed a really mature version of Windows 7 as the OS to go with the ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 software driver that we just released. This excluded me from using AMD Overdrive™ for overclocking2 or Fusion Gaming Utility3 as I did not have time to fully test these apps on Win7 (rest assured we’ll get to those in other blogs). Not to mention, I really wanted to give you a sense of the coolest gaming PC build possible!!!
If you have read any of my previous posts, you will quickly come to realize that I love Call of Duty 4: World at War, Left 4 Dead and F.E.A.R.2. These were my games of choice. As you can clearly see above, I hooked them up to one of my 30” DELL monitors and cranked all the game settings to the max. It was simply beautiful, truly cinematic HD gaming.
L4D, killing zombies on a 22” screen is boring, killing zombies while rendering with an HD4890 on a 30” screen was scary!! I have never been so stressed out while gaming (minus my first time playing DOOM).
Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!
F.E.A.R. 2, can’t say I’m tired of playing the first few levels of this game, especially on such a massive screen with so much horsepower!Between the CPU and GPU, F.E.A.R 2 purred along at 2560×1600 without a hitch, flicker or anomaly! It was the way the game was meant to be played! (no pun intended here)
Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!
The experience of CoD4 WaW was awe-inspiring! Nothing like running into a fox hole – gun a’blazin’ (or in this case, flame thrower a’flamin’) without the distraction of load times or annoying interruptions from hitches and flickers!
Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!
If you are a hard core gamer looking for the best GPU value in the market – and when I say value I do not mean cheap or thrifty, I mean hardnosed best product for the money – the ATI Radeon HD 4890 needs to be a consideration! Market leading performance, exceptional price AND actual availability on launch day! No PR gimmicks here folks, no paper launches, no “ball and cup” games, just innovative product, with industry leading features built by gamers for gamers!
Don’t take my word for it; here are some very reputable 3rd party review sites to verify my experience!
“Editor’s choice Enthusiast Gold Award”
Mark Warner, Brent Justice, HardOCP
“Bon” Award (performance 4/5, features 4/5)
“It is hardly known if the GTX 275 will be available in volume or at the price promised”
Clubic.com (France)
“It is not a completely new design, but the Radeon HD 4890 is an exciting product nonetheless. To put it simply, the Radeon HD 4890 is the fastest, single-GPU powered graphics card AMD has ever produced. And its competitive pricing and overclocking headroom should further its appeal amongst enthusiasts.”
“HotHardware Recommended Award”
Marco Chiappetta, HotHardware.com
Now, I need to get back to gaming on this beautiful piece of engineering…until next blog!
(BTW: I respond to most all comments personally, catch me here or on Twitter)
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
1 Internal calculations show that the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers 1.36 TFLOPs of raw compute power. Third-party testing shows that the fastest competing GPU, the GeForce GTX 280 graphics processor, delivers 1.06 TFLOPs of raw compute power. http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-GTX-285-card-605.html.
2 AMD product warranty does not cover damage caused by performance tuning, even when enabled using AMD software.
3 THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
CES 09 Flashback: What made the Cabrtosr Cool List
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 2:18 AM
For anyone who hasn’t figured it out yet, I officially have the best job in the IT world. For those of you still unconvinced, just read this post.
Walked the floor with none other than Charlie from The Inq…
After I spent 4 solid days locked in a 10×10ft white room briefing journalists and analysts and after a grueling panel discussion @Digital Hollywood, I was finally freed to walk the show floor…
It just so happened that the infamous Charlie D notoriously known as the slayer of “Corporate Pirates”, the destroyer of “Marketing Fluff” and the wearer of “the coolest t-shirts” from The Inquirer was in the AMD press area and agreed to accompany me on my technology pilgrimage.
Set forth young men and wander…
First stop The Sands Convention Centre:
Charlie wearing a stylish pair of Vuzix 3D Glasses
We stopped by the Vuzix booth and took a look at their “3D glasses for gaming” to experience the difference between their glasses and the other 3D glasses at the show, I have to admit, playing CRYSIS with these glasses rocked…You feel like you are in the game, you are able to play games and watch movies at 16:9 widescreen aspect ratios. The model we tried was only 4ozs and had an amazing 11hr battery life. I think these products have a future with the gaming community.
Before we left The Sands, I ran into an old friend, I took a quick pic of him lazing away watching a movie in 3D.
Tarindar from Hexus.net chill’in @CES09
Next stop North Hall:
Had a quick stop @ Dolby and saw some really cool technology, they really know how to max out the audio experience, more on that in a separate blog.
Moving on we came across D-Box and saw some very cool racing simulators. I jumped in one of these and took it for a spin, wow what a heart pounding racing sim experience.
d-box D-Box and it’s "true to life" racecar cockpit
Side view of the Cockpit awesomeness
After our brush with greatness on the virtual track, we headed off to hunt down Thermaltake’s booth.
Thermaltake had an amazing amount of hardware and peripherals on display, I had to narrow down the really cool tech as they had so much, here are the two top products (IMO):
Dual slot external HDD
Thermaltake SpinQ – Mix between Art and Design
This SpinQ cooler is practically silent and it does have uniqueness about it in terms of design. Notice the shiny award behind it, the SpinQ won a covenanted innovations award for Design & Engineering, Congrats TT.
The next stop was iZ3D:
3D Monitors in all their glory
Now these guys are hardcore 3D gamers…I had no choice but to sit-down and experience MSFT FlightSim (RIP) in all its 3D glory.
Yes, your immediate assumptions is correct, I tried to crash the plane, but MSFT does not allow that anymore
Check out these guys, they have some interesting technology, both with glasses and in monitor. I had a blast playing FlightSim in 3D to be honest. No worries, these 3D monitors are regular monitors as well; just exit 3D mode and take off the cool shades and you are back in “normal” everyday business.
When we were @iZ3D there was a loud brouhaha happening right outside so Charlie and I had to check it out…to our amazement.
Welcome to Race Car Sim heaven - $40,000 of pure bliss
The guys next door were Simcraft they are the proud makers of REAL <not for us gamers> full-motion simulators. Three monitors, multiple hydraulics a lifelike roll cage and 100% adrenaline fed gaming bliss.
Neither Charlie nor I had the nerve to jump in this badboy (mostly because the line stretched on for 400ft) so we didn’t actually try it out, but based on the sheer massive amount of people in line to do a few laps I am convinced this is a winner.
Oh, did I mention they are priced around $40,000 USD and professional race car drivers practice in them?
Moving along:
Over @ the Creative booth, I ran into my old (me not him) pal Fata1ty showing off his new Creative usb headset for gaming, gotta get me one of those.
Also, I noticed a few outliers in their booth check these out:
"Wetter is Better" goes the tagline - The World's first desktop personal computer cooled by patented total liquid submersion - ReactorTM
“
This beast is a fully submerged PC, yes, fully submerged in LIQUID, patented LIQUID, but still liquid, imagine.
The TEAM ATI guys did this back in 2004 @ a LAN party in Dallas, but their chassis was a fishtank and the liquid was mineral oil, who knew it would be commercialized. Wow.
Also, in the creative booth, we saw this:
NEC CRVD-42WX Curved Display
As they say – A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, 10,000 words
AMD Dragon Platform was everywhere
The show was a success for us @ AMD, here are some highlights in case you missed all the media during the show:
- ATI RadeonTM Mobility 4-series GPUs
- Dragon platform and Phenom II
- Watch the Phenom II X4 940 set the world record 6.5GHz overclock using liquid helium!
- You say you want even more overclocking vids?
Watch Team Finland break 3DMark06 records with the Phenom II X4 overclocked on liquid nitrogen.
- HP Pavilion dv2 (which won Best Laptop of CES – Laptop Magazine)
- AMD’s CEO Dirk Meyer and Satjiv S. Chahil of HP introduce the New HP Pavilion dv2 Ultra Thin Notebook
- Tremendously successful keynote with CEO Dirk Meyer
See you next year!
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.