March has come and gone and it left behind a slew of new technological gadgets that make the mouth water;
The new Ivy Bridge CPUs;
Although IB isn't extensively better than Sandy Bridge, it's an improvement.
SB CPUs have proven to be the best CPUs ever released by Intel, with the 2500k (originally clocked at 3.3Ghz) being capable of running at 5Ghz (or slightly less, depending on the silicone lottery) with relatively mid-range air cooling, making this chip stand truly head and shoulders above anything that AMD could ever release.
IB, on the other hand, has some slight heat problems, hitting the "heat wall" around 4.5~4.6Ghz.
Mind you, a 4.5Ghz IB chip performs equally to a 4.8Ghz SB, so you don't really lose out on power if you go with IB instead of SB.
Also, the series-4000 IGP is actually a capable (yes, i *am* surprised) graphics processor, making a build with no graphics card a real possibility. And to top it all off, IB chips cost the same as SB.
Now, some people have actually argued that IB is bad because Intel didn't manage to put out yet another ultra-mega super upgrade, but i see it differently, and here is why:
First of all, the heat problem is related to the new 22nm fabrication process AND the use of trigates; you might say "who cares", but eventually CPUs would have had to be made this small, and the trigate is as well a technology which will pay in the future. Considering that IB includes two new techs in one bundle, i'd say it's not doing so bad.
Second, the consistency with which IB chips hit 4.5Ghz on air and using almost stock voltage. Not all SB chips overclocked so far, some went 4.4, 4.5, and IB performs better than those - and we have yet to see the new steppings.
Third - they are cheap. You get a HT enabled CPU with 4.5Ghz of new-architecture computing power for .. $320. Expensive? I don't think so. The non-HT 3570k even costs $220, and is even more gamer-friendly.
And foruth and last .. well, this is subjective, but hey, have you not considered that at least IB doesn't make your 2500k look like a piece of shit?? Think resale value and all of that.
Two new GPU series, AMD's 7 series and NVidia's 6 series.
First off, the better GPUs, the NV GTX680.
Expensive, true. At $500 a pop (or more), and with only 2Gb of VRAM, they do in fact look like these were meant to be the Ti (midrange) cards, but got rebranded because NVidia found out they had a better product than AMD and had no reason to push out "the beast".
But looking at this card with a little more attention, one sees that it's not just got much more potential (with three times the CUDA cores of a 580) to tackle games for a long time, but it's also quieter (it's really quiet), uses a ridiculously small amount of power (think of those poor people that four years ago bought 1200W PSUs at $400), delightfully over-engineered, has great drivers from day one, gets better FPS than anything that AMD has, and well, it's just plain awesome.
On the other hand, AMD has the 7-series, which uses more power, tried to make things quieter but they came out nowhere near as quiet as the 680, and is generally a brute compared to the opposition - works bad in some games, stutters, poor drivers, etc ..
They also are guilty of commercial fraudolence, as people have found out, since lower-end cards have been made to run a lot slower than they actually can. Ofc AMD doesn't want to compete with itself.
But that's not entirely bad, as the cheaper 7850 can be made to run at its proper voltage / speed and it turns out it's quite an overclocking beast, allowing the cost-concious gamer to get a great (if somewhat loud and power-hungry) GPU for a decent amount of moneys.
SSDs for the masses.
Forget the OCZ Vertex 4, what i'm looking at is the astounding Mushkin Enhance Chronos, a 240Gb SSD for two hundred dollars; Why, just last time i looked at SSDs they were dodgy, incredibly expensive and most came in at around 60Gb;
This baby pulls 550Mb/s in read and writes, 90k iop/s, and it's big enough to function as your only HD; unless of course you are the sort of person who stores every episode of every show ever watched, but for your average gamer guy, it's plenty of space to keep some films, some music, the OS, and whatever else you need pretty much every day on your PC.
Incredible RAM.
Now i said before about "getting excited about RAM", and by golly this new stuff that came out is amazing;
Not only W7 responds well to large amounts of RAM (up to 16Gb, actually, with the performance going down after that), and the fact that you can actually run a RamDisk with that kind of stuff, but IB chips respond great (compared to the earlier i7 Gulftown chips) to higher frequencies and especially to a T1 command rate.
And the kicker is: it's dirt cheap.
One stick of 4Gb, DDR3 1333mhz RAM will set you back a whopping $17. Seventeen dollars.
A high-end 4x4Ghz, 2166Mhz kit with LED lights on it will set you back a hundred bucks or just slightly more. Seriously, who doesn't want high-end RAM that lights up and flashes messages on their PC?
The H100 and the EVO.
Both new, the H100 is the first ready-made, liquid-based (WaterCooling) CPU fan all-in-one solution, and it's a steal at $110, with twice the joy as the earlier H50, H60 and H70 models were a wild disappointment. If you need to keep your CPU cool .. drastically, this will do it for you.
But even better is the CoolerMaster Hyper 212EVO, a slight change from the $20 212+, with better heatpipes and a nicer base, and for $30, it will work - for all practical purposes - just as well as Corsair's more expensive solution, given that IB talkes a lot less voltage to get near that "heat wall".
Ofc if you plan on smashing, that heat wall, then you might want to look might hard at the H100; but for the money, the EVO is unbeatable - no reason to buy anything else, really.
So, all in all i'm quite happy, and looking foward to my next system build.
Where i am not happy, is with PC cases - they still make them too ugly, too full of plastic, flimsy, and badly thought out (or just too big). I guess i will have to take in serious consideration building my own.
Scribbling from Edinburgh.
