Now that my SLI review has been published I can talk a bit more freely about the issues I encountered over the weekend. ASUS' first revision of the A8N-SLI Deluxe was absolutely horrible, I had all types of stability problems - many more than I ran into with the MSI board I reviewed weeks earlier.
As soon as ASUS learned of my problems they worked on getting me an updated board, but unfortunately it didn't make it to the States from Taiwan until yesterday afternoon. I had struggled the entire weekend to get only about 20% of my benchmarks done on the buggy first sample, but as soon as I got a working board I went to town on benchmarking.
Unfortunately, being tied up with the buggy board all weekend I didn't have a chance to finish up the Half Life 2 CPU scaling tests. I'm down in NC until Saturday for Thanksgiving, so I won't be able to get to it until I get back. If you all still want me to do the article "so long" after Half Life 2's release, I'll gladly invest the time to do it. It's probably a day or two of solid benchmarking to do what I was planning on doing, so just say the word and you'll have it.
I'm a bit on the tired side so I may turn in early (or end up getting up in an hour to get some writing done). It's good to be back in NC but I'll talk more about that tomorrow.
Goodnight folks.
As soon as ASUS learned of my problems they worked on getting me an updated board, but unfortunately it didn't make it to the States from Taiwan until yesterday afternoon. I had struggled the entire weekend to get only about 20% of my benchmarks done on the buggy first sample, but as soon as I got a working board I went to town on benchmarking.
Unfortunately, being tied up with the buggy board all weekend I didn't have a chance to finish up the Half Life 2 CPU scaling tests. I'm down in NC until Saturday for Thanksgiving, so I won't be able to get to it until I get back. If you all still want me to do the article "so long" after Half Life 2's release, I'll gladly invest the time to do it. It's probably a day or two of solid benchmarking to do what I was planning on doing, so just say the word and you'll have it.
I'm a bit on the tired side so I may turn in early (or end up getting up in an hour to get some writing done). It's good to be back in NC but I'll talk more about that tomorrow.
Goodnight folks.
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RotoSequence - Saturday, November 27, 2004 - link
There seem to be some serious problems with the SLI board from Asus-BigZ from bit-tech.net has tried everything available to him to get the board just to boot. The darn thing wont even power on for more than a half second, and it was brand new and factory sealed!AtaStrumf - Saturday, November 27, 2004 - link
CPU scaling article? Well, of course!Maybe you could try and figure out how much RAM is needed for smooth playing as well. There seems to be a lot of conflicting info on that. I know I absolutely need 768 MB (512 is horribly stuttering), but others have no problems with 512 MB. I play at 1280x1024 High Quality on R9800Pro A64 3200+. Free disk space (thanx to STEAM forcing me to install on C: I have only about 500 MB) or maybe install position (on same drive as WinXP or not -- I have it no the same, again thanx to STEAM) may have something to do with it. It shouldn't be too hard to stuff up the drive HL2 is on and see when and how it impacts performance.
yelo333 - Saturday, November 27, 2004 - link
Yes, a CPU scaling article would be great.And, as #4 said, I would really, really like to see how a low-end radeon(I'm thinking something in the range of a 9200,9000, or 8500) would play the game.
friedrice - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
I just want to know if I can play Half-Life 2 on my Athlon 2400+ XP and a Geforce 2 GTS with 32MB of memory, equipped with 512MB of DDR Ram.rezdog - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
definetly, a cpu scaling article would be great! Thanks for you hard work ANAND!If you get tired of all those 6800 gt's sitting by your desk, feel free to send one to me :)
smn198 - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
Yes please. As it is a CPU limited game I'd love to see what sort of difference slower CPUs make. Ideally across an ATI and nVidia card from this and the previous generation time allowing.crazycpuman - Thursday, November 25, 2004 - link
Hi Anand,A new article about Scaling will be great.
A study about memory latencies will be great too, with all these new tech, integrated memory controllers, dual channel, DDRII, etc.
I read the memory guide, where it explains all about cas, cas to ras, etc. But it will be great that you can explain how those numbers translate into the latencies seen in cpu-z or siencemark.
I´ve read that Johan de Gelas will be working for your site, That´s great!!.
He wrote several tech articles at Aces about how the designers look for performance in x86 with lots of deep examples and how the processors work. I hope he can write future articles like those with all the good stuff that anandtech has. It will be a perfect mix.
I congratulate you for your site, It´s very usefull, fun and with lots of reviews and information and it doesn´t take sides.
r4v3 - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
CPU scaling article? Hell yes. I want to know if my P4 1.6GHz w/ Radeon 9600 256MB system will hold up (please don't laugh). Your articles are always better than everyone else's anyway.Houdani - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
CPU scaling article? Yes please.Regular folks like myself would consider a CPU article extremely beneficial.
Thanks!
chag - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
yes, please!i found the source GPU articles to be extremely trivial and redundant (blah blah blah hl2 runs wonderfully on your grandma's checkbook calculator's video card blah) but everyone is using AMD FX-2012 or 90000000+
keeping within the perspective of real-world, common systems is a plus. "how would this game perform on MY system?" or "how would this game perform if i upgraded this or that?"