AlexHopmann.com

It looks like Gigabyte has a GeForce 8600GTS that has good enough cooling without a fan. It requires an extra slot of space but this could be a great option for media-center machines.

This is just too cool. Whistler is putting in a Gondola between Whistler and Blackcomb peaks. This should make it way easier to get around, ski one mountain but meet people for lunch on the other one, plus it seems like an awesome view. 1.8 miles of unsupported cable, 1300 feet above the creek at one point. Hopefully opening in December 2008.

I do hope at the same time they continue to work on some smaller improvements to make it easier to get around. They have added new terrain like Symphony Bowl that make the slopes fairly uncrowded even with hordes of people but there are still bottle-necks in uplift in the morning and it can be really difficult to get around between various parts of the mountains.

There is one confusing point in some of the write-ups on the 8600. One of the key features in the new cards is the improved media playback performance, but its not clear if the 8800 also has this capability. If not, its a pretty serious mistake for NVidia to have your top-of-the-line parts missing something key that the lower-end parts support. One key marketing strategy is that if you have a “best of everything” model, people will pay a big premium for it-Microsoft got this right with Vista Ultimate after screwing it up with XP. Sure, some people complain about how much Ultimate costs, but I doubt Microsoft ever intended to sell a high percentage of it. Still, they make a lot more money with that one to the same peope buying the $600 video cards or the people who would buy a Mac Pro with Apple’s signifigant mark-up. Still NVidia is going to have a problem one their hands if their $600 video-card can’t play HD movies as well as their $200 one can.

Another interesting alternative might be the 8500- apparently its about $100. Apparently its going to suck for high-end 3d games, but if it can do great media-playback (and it should be good enough for Vista Aero Glass) and can get by with passive cooling (which apparently the 8500 can) it could be a great choice. Often getting a quiet fan on your video card can be tough and they are the loudest parts in a modern computer often so this could be a very good thing.

NVidia launched the 8600 graphics boards today (as well as some lower models). These are priced in the $150-$230 range and should provide plenty of performance for the media center machine (I’m pretty sure I’m going to want an 8800-class card for the workstation machine). To me one of the key aspects of the 8-series of cards is they provide full decoding for high-definition video.

I’m a little disappointed that the AnandTech write-up did not include media-benchmarks or noise level measurements. I guess I’ll have to wait for the real boards to hit the market for that info.

I’m tempted to get one of these to upgrade my existing Media Center- it should run fine in the existing machine and then I can move it to the new one once I build it. I’ll probably wait for the new ATI (AMD) series to come out and then make a decision.

Also- PLEASE REVIEW THE DRIVER STABILITY. The only thing I could figure out on that was that its a total mess on the NVidia side with different drivers for XP vs. Vista and different drivers to download for each different board.

Also- Tom’s Hardware reviews the Hitachi 1TB hard-drive. The interesting bit here is that the read performance is very good and is creaping closer to the Raptor. Especially on Vista (where its smarter about moving stuff around for sequential reads) this should help with boot and application start times, although the seek times are still slow (which hurts performance for compilers and databases). Still given advances in RAM caching and memory sizes I bet a compiler is mostly working from RAM now for reads so this isn’t the factor for a developer workstation that it used to be.

My only other concern is that this drive runs very hot- the hottest they have tested yet. The Hitachi drive has 5 platters which is a lot to cram into the 2.5″ form-factor and is probably related to the temperature. The recent research suggests that the temperature doesn’t hurt drive life that much for the first 2 years, but does impact it quite a bit in year 3, just as the Hitachi warranty expires. Seagate has a 1TB drive coming out shortly that should hopefully have a 5-year warranty and that uses 4 platters which should run cooler and in theory might even get better read performance (due to higher density).