Tuesday, December 30, 2008

PHENOM II [The Gaming Phenomenon !]

AMD PHENOM II x4 940 Vs Intel I7 940



Phenom II x4 940 is also quad core like the intel i7 940 and is rated at 3GHz (15x200). it also has a HT Link of 1.8GHz, 256KB L1, 2M L2 and 6M L3 cache.
Whereas intel i7 is rated @ 2.93 ghz and has a L2 4x256 KB and L3 8MB [130 W]




AMD's Phenom II power consumption impressed - very positive! If you clock the Phenom II X4 940 with 2.6 instead of 3.0 GHz like a Phenom X4 9950 BE, he consumes 70 watt less under load. Under Idle it are 15 watt.

With a normal air cooling you can clock the Phenom II X4 940 up to 3.4 GHz without raise the voltage. If you take the voltage of 0.1 V, you can clock up to 3.65 GHz stable.



For past 2 years,
It has been Intel dominating the markets, with Core2duos completely destroying the athalonx2 series.AMD went through a lot of losses.But now they have a ray hope with PHENOM II "DENEB" coming out next month , to be precise jan 8th.With Phenom II coming out, Intel is gonna surely face a big pain.Overclockering geeks have already got phenom from 3.0 to 4 ghz with air cooling and 6 ghz with Liquid nitrogen cooling .More over to be sharp/ PHENOM II 940 is almost equal to i7 940 in the peformance overall, but not better.But when it comes to the price, Phenom II costs around 300 $ [Prices released approx 187 pounds] and i7 940 costs around 560$, we can see that Phenom II gives almost the same performance but at half the price.AMD could smell some fresh meat with this product hitting the shores soon.

ok.So lets go to the comparisons, ive went through various sites and i've got some mindblowing images for you ppl .

Firstly, Clear Sky @ 1680x1050 Resolution.
We can see that the Deneb is just 1 fps behind i7 940


2.Now, the world-debating game Crysis Warhead @ 1680x1050 resolution




Here, we can see that both the Phenom processors 940 and 9950 outperform i7940 in crysis warhead game.One interestign fact is that 9950 x4 is much lower than 940 in terms of price


3. Dead Space @ 1680x1050 resolution

At last, I7 is showing some domination. The intel-ultimate is going up by 14 fps compared to the Deneb here , to be precise there is not much difference in the peformance in the long run.



4.Far Cry2

As we can see from the above graph, Phenom II 940 takes the lead with 54 fps compared to 48 of intel i7 940.Games like these give a strong feeling that phenomII and i7 don't have much difference.


5.World At War


Surprisingly the C2quad 9550 takes the lead here , both the intel processors lead the phenom II approximately by 6-7 fps




So , With AMD PHENOM II releasing on jan 8th with the 300$ tag and from the above graphs
We can make an easy decision here by pointing everyone towards the AMD direction.
We get almost the same performance or even better sometimes compared to the intel i7 but at almost half the price of i7.
So for all the Budget Gaming freaks, I suggest go for the DRAGON PLATFORM

Dragon Platform : Phenom II + HD Radeon 4xxx + 790 GX motherboard

This is the Cheapest future-proof configuration which will last atleast for 2years from now [Taking into consideration that quad-core based games are very few/yet to come]

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Cowon O2 MP3/MP4 Player

Well... I'm Back
As usual ,
Tonight i was going through the Internet to get a good MP3/MP4 player,
As usual most of the forums contained iPods n Zunes. But then I Came through Cowon o2 ,
which is not as popular as iPod of Zune in the east ,but had some highly tempting features, when i went through various sites ,I realized that this product had a lot of stuff to give in a look. Now lets take a closer look into this :
It has a 32 GB Flash memory,With a 4.3" TFT screen
It can display colours of 16.7 million with a 480x272 Resolution which is quite outstanding,

Audio Formats Supported :MP3/WMA/ASF/AC3/FLAC/OGG/M4A/MATROSKA(MKA)/TTA/A PE/MPC/WV/WAV

Video Formats Supported :AVI/WMV/ASF/MP4/MATROSKA(MKV)/OGM/MPG/MPEG/DAT/M TV/DivX/XviD/H.264

Image Formats Supported :BMP/JPEG/GIF/TIFF/PNG/RAW

Not only this , it also supports TXT file,
which means we can store E-books and other Text files.

More over its 4.3" TFT is a Touch Screen

Data Transfer is done via USB 2.0
It contains a AV output type


Now comes the real Features of this Product :
Battery
Battery Type Built-in Rechargeable lithium polymer Battery
Battery Life(Audio Playback) Up to 18 hours
Battery Life(Video Playback) Up to 8 hours
Recharge Time 4.5 hours
Audio Properties
Frequency Range 20 Hz-20 kHz
Signal-To-Noise Ratio(SNR) 96 dB
Supporting Bit Rate Max 96KHz, 1.4Mbps
Speaker Mono 1000mW
Microphone Mono
Audio Extras 10Band, 8 set (Normal, Rock, Jazz, Classic, Pop, Metal, Vocal, User)

JetEffect (BBE, Mach3Bass, MP3 Enhance, 3D Surround)
Minimum System Requirements
Peripheral(s) Chipset: New TI's Davinci Chipset

Brightness: 400cd/m2 or higher

16 Ohm earphones: 32mW + 32mW

Supports user-developed program, built-in Basic/Scientific Calculator & Notepad

Supports Pre-Scheduled Playback & Recording

The Major +ves of this product are :
Support for720p HD DivX and Xvid content; Subtitle support ,
Good file type compatibility,Excellent sound quality,large touch screen etc

when compared to its rival ipods n zunes,
The battery life differs a bit, the battery life (audio) is just 18 compared to 30 and 36 hrs playback in zune and ipod Touch respectively...
but not to lose hope, when it comes to Video Play back..this battely lasts for 8 hrs compared to the 4hrs and 6hrs play back of zune and iPod.

Well when it comes to prices
Cowon O2 is marketed at 299$ when compared to 250$ zune120gb and 389$ (approx) iPod Touch

So for people who dream of watching movies while travelling,This thing gonna light up your dreams.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

ATI 4870x2

Hey Guys,
I Had a plan of buying a new computer , So i made immense research in the area of graphic cards
and then i found this..

ATI RADEON HD 4870x2

The Killer card!!!

Basically.. Asus Visiontek Gigabyte Sapphire diamond Powercolor MSI HIS etc provide these ATI RADEON HD 4870x2

Model
Brand Ranges From ASUS to HIS As mentioned above
Model Depends on the brand
Interface
Interface PCI Express 2.0 x16
Chipset
Chipset Manufacturer ATI
GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2
Core clock 780MHz
Stream Processors 1600 (800 x 2) Stream Processing Units
Memory
Memory Clock 1800MHz
Memory Size 2GB
Memory Interface 512-bit (256-bit x 2)
Memory Type GDDR5
3D API
DirectX DirectX 10.1
OpenGL OpenGL 2.1
Ports
HDMI 1 via Adapter
DVI 2
TV-Out HDTV / S-Video Out
General
RAMDAC 400 MHz
Max Resolution 2560 x 1600
CrossFire Supported Yes
Cooler With Fan
Power Connector 6 pin / 8 pin
Dual-Link DVI Supported Yes
HDCP Ready Yes
Packaging
Package Contents Driver Disk
User's Manual
HDTV Cable
DVI to VGA/D-sub Adapter
DVI to HDMI Adapter
CrossFire Bridge
S-Video to Composite Adapter


From my point of view, I guess this is one kick ass card.
For 500$ u get a 2 x HD4870 card combined into a simple chip.
This can make games like crysis run @ 60+ fps even in higher resolutions.This card looks quite big than it actually looks.
This is a Boon for gamers as it has a 512 bit interface which is just way too good,moreover the max resolution provided by this card is 2560x1600,Which means you can run this card on 22-24 inches monitor without the decrease in performance/pixel.The core clock speed with 780 mhz + the 1600 Stream processing units with the 2gb memory makes it the fastest card in the world right now.Of course the almighty GTX 280 was Smashed by 4870x2 and hence the competition between the ATI and NVIDIA continues!.If any person is planning to buy a New Gaming rig,I would suggest HD 4870 x2 is the way to go.The crossfire support for this card makes it more attractive.This card is so seductive, An ultimate gamer's dream would be a Gaming rig with ATI RADEON HD 4870x2 [Crossfiring it with another HD 4870x2 will make it INVINCIBLE for next 3 years]
Yeah Ofcourse , with the GTX 295 of nvidia around the corner, Lets see what card i end up buying,
but one highly irritating fact in the Geekzone is that , when people wait for the price of a product to go down , A new product outperforming the predecessor Comes out.
For all the ATI/AMD FANS, I guess the long awaited DRAGON PLATFORM is coming true with the phenom II Round the corner. Phenom II with 2 x HD 4870x2 Will be my dream rig. she is my future girlfriend ;)

The Reviews :[Comments By Customers @ Newegg.com]

1.Burt Reynold [High level Ownership 1month - 1 year]

"The latest drivers for the 4870s is amazing. I have them installed and have not had one problem with them artifacting with any games... even when playing old games. With new games like L4D, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Dead Space or any graphics intensive games, I constantly get 80+ frames with Anisotropic Filtering on Max and Anti Aliasing on Max (16x for both for most games). And at 2048X1536."

2.Twohype [Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month]
"Amazing Power, runs all apps with ease also in general the fan is low noise for the most part. This is the best card I have every owned - it is simply OUTSTANDING"

3.Gamey [Tech Level: somewhat high - Ownership: 1 month to 1 year]
"I purchased this card on 9/8/2008. Since then I have been getting every new game that has come out just to see if anything could slow this thing down but, to no avail. This card absolutely screams"