“Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn’t take Lorraine out that he’d melt my brain”. – George McFly

PMS Clan and a future gaming superstar on our Quakecon booth

Well, its day 2 at Quakecon 2009 and my brain hasn’t melted, but I have seen a Darth Vader or two… In thinking about the ‘right’ title for my blog, “The Future” was an obvious choice seeing as how we have packed up #Area64 and transported it all the way to Dallas.

What is #Area64 you ask, well, it’s the secret place in Austin where AMD has all of its unreleased products, engineering secrets and where we keep the flux capacitor. As one can imagine, we need to keep such a place heavily guarded and hard to find, so, what do a bunch of AMD gamers do, we packed it up and rebuilt it in the Gaylord Hotel for Quakecon. I am currently writing this blog from the heart of our mobile #area64, the sounds of next generation technology humming away behind me!

Pete and Chris from AMD showcasing our Quakecon shirts…

Wait a minute, Doc. Ah… Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean? – Marty McFly

No, we didn’t bring our time machine but I am not going to comment on if AMD has built a time machine, that’s a completely different blog. But, we did bring what we expect will revolutionize the way you play games on PC’s in the future.

How does one gain access into #area64 and who gets access, great questions, here is what you have to do:

AMD will be limiting access to #Area64 to 100 almost random gamers, meaning anyone and everyone has a fair shot at “Seeing the Future”, just follow these AMD’ers on Twitter;

@IanMcNaughton – @Tweetoe – @Catalystmaker - @AMD_Unprocessed & @Caseygotcher

We will be tweeting hints and actions during Quakecon, it could be as simple as “The first 5 gamers who meet us at XX, gain access” or “Make a short video about Why you need or should have access to #Area64 and post to Youtube, gain access”.

Or, you could simply track us down and ask for an “on the spot action for access”.

Here are the shirts we are giving away, they are unique and numbered from 1-100, if you see anyone wearing them in the halls or BYOC, you know they have “SEEN THE FUTURE”!

The Future is Awesome!

As a special treat to all the readers of my blog, via this blog, you will be the first to download the latest ATI Catalyst 9.8 driver here:

XP

XP 32

Xp 64

Vista and Win7

Vista/Win7 32

Vista/Win7 64

[Update: Official ATI Catalyst 9.8 Drivers are available here]

Enjoy!

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.

When the guys from CoolIT approached me for a quote for their Domino press release, my immediate reaction was, “Let’s get it in the lab and send me a review unit to test”…

Here at AMD we have a full scientific test lab for thermal devices. We all know that a properly built PC is a careful dance of core temp, ambient temp, chassis temp – all at idle, mid and full load. We like to test for real-world conditions, especially for those lazy Sundays when the air-conditioning breaks and your PC whizzes away stuffed in a cabinet under a desk collecting large deposits of dust.  It’s our business to make sure our products run under the most grueling and sometimes strange environments.

Our lab guys were impressed with the Domino coolers they received. It was once thought that cost effective water cooling was impossible.  Unfortunately I cannot share any of the details from those tests as they are all still very cloak and dagger (considered as internal trade secrets), but to say the least, I was impressed that they – our thermal fellows – were impressed.  Now before I would ever give a “nod” to any product, I have to use and experience it first.

My hands on time with the Domino consisted of building out a new system based on AMD “Dragon” platform technology:

• Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard
• ATI Radeon^TM HD 4890 discrete graphics
• Corsair DDR3 Ram 8G
• AMD Phenom^TM II X4 955 3.2GHz processor
• 3x Western Digital HDD Totaling 1 Terabyte
• Corsair HX1000W PSU
• Coolermaster Cosmos 1000
• CoolIT Domino A.L.C

Domino installed in my Dragon System

The setup was surprisingly easy; I fiddled with the brackets and little bolts until I got it right. It took just as long to install a Domino cooler as it did to fully install a PSU.

Once it was fully installed, I checked for leaks, cracks, breaks and/or other signs of water in my system prior to plugging it in and firing it up!

Water flowing through your PC is absolutely foreign to many and frankly most PC users.  Why would anyone in their right mind want to have a water contraption in their PC, the answer is quite simple, superior cooling!

Water cooling has always been very expensive, labour intensive and a little dodgy at times.  Horror stories of broken piping, reservoirs cracking and water leaking that swiftly destroys your entire PC have been whispered everywhere in the enthusiast community.  A costly breakdown to say the least!

The old adage was “Cost effective water cooling is impossible”, well, until now.

The Domino made a tremendous difference in the hot air being expelled from the back of my chassis, it’s no longer “hot”, it’s simply a mild warm.  This helps in a room full of PC’s and 2 giant monitors, trust me, personal comfort becomes paramount.

Domino's operations screen

When I did a play test, I used CoD WaW and saw the Domino report a temp of 99degrees, 2079 rpm fan speed and 3123rpm pump speed on medium.

I switched it to the high setting and saw a decrease in temp, but an increase in ambient noise. The Domino reported a temp of 94degrees, 2824rpm fan speed and 3105prm pump speed.

The increase in noise levelled off to something more than bearable, but regardless, I game with headphones so the increase in ambient noise doesn’t bother me.  I really liked the “beep” feature, it audibly lets you know when something has been changed or goes wrong.

The Domino does not seem to be intended for a DIY’er who makes lots of changes to her/his PC on a regular basis.  It seems better suited for the gamer or enthusiast who builds and uses their PC in that config for awhile.  How often do you really upgrade your mobo and CPU anyway, every 6months? 9months? 12months?

As I am not a reviewer, nor do I claim to be, I almost completely rely on the reviewer community to recommend or not recommend a product, here is what they have to say:

Maximum PC gave it a 9/10 in its June issue.

PCPRO

PCWorld

TechRadar

CPU3D

OverclockersClub

FiringSquad

LegitReviews

Bit-Tech

Almost unanimously reviewed positively and recommended.

If you are a gamer looking to add “H2O” to your system, the Cool-IT Domino is a good option.

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.

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 10x10ft 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:

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.

Have you ever wondered just how much performance you can get from your current PC? Or, how much do you need to spend on a CPU vs. GPU? Or, do large containers of Liquid Nitrogen spewing vapour make your neighbours nervous?

At AMD HQ in Austin, TX in November we invited some of the top press in the world to preview our newest DT CPU, AMD Phenom™ II processor in a “Dragon Platform Technology Techday Event”. Here are the ingredients to a fantastic overclocking event:

• Lots of Tier 1 press from all over the world -- Check
• Cool Surroundings -- Check
• Lots of hardware -- Check
• Design engineers -- Check
• Massive containers of Liquid Nitrogen -- hehe -- Check
• Food, Food, Food -- Check
• A few pairs of welding mitts and safely glasses -- Check, Check, Check

And with this you have the makings of an overclocking smorgasbord!

Patrick Moorhead (AMD Veep of cool stuff) setting the stage before we unleashed our AMD Phenom II Processor overclocked to 6+GHz

Most gamers are satisfied with their stock CPU frequency, but there is the occasion, if just for pride or ego, a gamer wants to strut their stuff and showoff the headroom of their PC. At AMD we are no different; we wanted to showcase to the WW press the massive overclockability of our new Phenom II CPU.

Some of the most interesting conversations are had when a company allows their top talent engineers to converse directly with tech journalists, no marketing, no spinning, no positioning, just honest answers to questions and some crazy idea generation let me assure you!

left to right: Sanjiv Lakenpaul (AMD Senior Platform Engineer), ME, John Bruno (AMD Engineering Roadmap Strategist), Jeremy Laird (Tech Radar), Tarinder Sandhu (Hexus)

We were discussing the demo behind me - our competitor’s 3.2G i7 processor vs. our 3.0G AMD Phenom II processor playing CRYSIS and how a balanced platform is the right choice. Just considering CPU performance in a CPU centric synthetic benchmark is no longer relevant. A gamer has to consider their chipset, CPU and GPU as a holistic platform, in a lot of cases, investing more in the GPU and a little less in the CPU will deliver a better gaming experience. (I smell a future video blog)

On with the show! But first our own Sami Makkinen addressed the safety concerns around the demo and laid out the exact configuration and what to expect (little did he know, they would even surpass his world champion overclocking expectations)

Sami Makkinen (AMD Professional Overclocker and creator of AMD Overdrive)

“Have CPU, will Overclock” was the motto of the day, and overclock they did! Sami and team started with just an air cooler and achieved a monstrous 4+GHz overclock booting and playing CRYSIS.

But that was just the beginning, “Please stand back folks…6GHz is no barrier”

…add the Liquid Nitrogen and the 6GHz barrier was smashed!

A little fine tuning by Sanjiv and team prior to the final attempt

And in the end, everyone was able to witness a stunning 6.2GHz overclock of the AMD Phenom II processor playing CRYSIS and a further 100MHz to 6.3GHz booting…Just amazing.

This event was so successful we decided to take it on the road, we asked Sami to invite two of the world’s top overclockers to the US to personally take the AMD Phenom II processor through its overclocking paces and the result was awesome.

See the whole event …well worth experiencing!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X__HTuQ1CA

…or watch it on Mogulus

We then took it even another quantum leap forward and participated in an overclocking event in Las Vegas going HEAD TO HEAD vs. INTEL, yes, INTEL! I won’t ruin the fairytale ending, but watch this video to see AMD Phenom II Processor break records and establish itself as THE KING OF OVERCLOCKERS!! If that wasn’t enough to quench your thirst for Phenom overclocking madness, AMD traveled to Finland to break even more records.

Moral of the story: invest in your PC wisely, don’t be fooled by the “$1000 CPU hype”, in most cases a good sub $300 CPU coupled with a ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series gfx card is all any gamer needs to achieve the best gaming experience, and when the few times to need to “drag race your friends” or “show off to the new, cute neighbourhood girl” you can use AMD Overdrive and overclock your AMD Phenom II to processor massive frequencies, all with a few clicks and a wise purchase decision.

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. ]]> http://blogs.amd.com/play/2009/02/25/hitting-the-overclocking-stratosphere-in-austin/feed/ 0