What a week

It's been a crazy week.

It started off at the end of last week (any week that starts off at the end of another week is, by definition, a crazy week) with Intel's 925X launch. After finishing up the CPU and PCI Express part of the 925X series I immediately got to work on my third HDD review using the new benchmark suite - a review of the 16MB buffer Maxtor MaXLine III. I mention that this is the third review, because the second review (the Raptor RAID article) has actually been done for quite some time but because of the amount of content that we have going up these days it's been pushed back until next week. The Maxtor MaXLine III review just went live, so be sure to check it out - I think there's some decent potential for NCQ on desktop systems, you just need to be the right type of user to get a benefit from it (sort of like Hyper Threading...read the article to understand what I'm saying).

I've done some benchmarking on the Hitachi 7K400 (400GB) drives (a few benchmarks even made it into the MaXLine review), but the real heavy benchmarking will be underway tomorrow and on into next week. I'm still trying to figure out a good way to do sound/heat testing for the hard drives, and it's something I want to do right so I'm going to spend some more time on trying to devise something worthy of inclusion into our new testing methodology.

Last week we got a lot of work done on the new site as well as planning for future growth. The new site is coming along very well and we're still looking to launch it in early July, but there's still much more to do before we're ready. The new sections are ready to go and we're well ahead of the game in terms of producing content for those new sections. We've already got our first digital camera roundup in the works and have already completed an article that should be going live around the time of the new site launch.

I've got two major articles that I'm planning on working on next week for publication sometime further down the road; the articles are a piece on Dothan (finally) and the long awaited kickoff to the Mac section, detailing my experience with the platform. At this point I've got no clue when I'll be doing all the writing and testing associated with those two articles, but I'm sure I'll figure it out shortly.

Derek is also working on some pretty cool articles, including reviews of the various differently clocked versions of NV40 and NV45. We just had an AT staff meeting tonight and I'm pretty psyched about what's coming in the next 2 - 3 weeks. There are no big launches, but we have enough interesting roundups and articles to keep you busy :) Wesley is hoping to have a Socket-939 roundup out sometime in July as well as a look at some pretty interesting memory. I'm also hoping to see the return of Small Form Factor reviews to the site in July as well, but I'll talk more about them later.

I think that's all for now. Forgive me if I'm babbling, just a bit on the tired side today. It's been a long day and I have a feeling I'm not going to be able to pull myself away from the test beds to get some sleep for a little while now :)