Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850

SAPPHIRE 100226L Radeon HD 3850 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card

I love how technology advances!  I’ve been holding out from an upgrade of my Saphire Radeon x1600 256MB Video Card for a while now because there’s always something better!  And boy, oh boy am I glad I did!  I kept thinking about getting an ATI x2600 series card, but never could really justify it.  When the ATI HD 3000 series of cards came out it didn’t take me more than a slight price drop to justify the purchase.  For the same as what I paid for one of my ATI Radeon x1600′s (Used to have two in crossfire, gave one to Credal a while ago though, so been running a single for some time now) I was able to get a ATI Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 with double the video RAM of my current card up from 256MB to 512MB.  Also GDDR3 instead of GDDR2 so everything about it is a HUGE improvement, for the same price!  Now when I was looking at the ATI 2600 cards they were the same price as my current card, and even a decent 165% faster in most games than my current x1600.  But since I was planning on going to Vista, it was a good idea to be on a DirectX 10 card, which is another reason for the 2600 upgrade… luckily ATI came out with the new 3000 series of cards, and the 3850 just so happens to be at the mid price range for video cards.  I was EXTREMELY happy abou this as the HD 3850 with 512MB of RAM is about 200% faster than the 2600′s and obviously MUCH more powerful than the old x1600 I had been running.  Power consumption isn’t that huge of a concern either, as it’s got the new 55 nanometer (NM) die.  It’s nice to finally be able to play all of my games at full resolution (1680×1050) with some sort of anti-aliasing, and antistropic filtering.  Plus I’m ready for Vista as soon as it gets here!

Years ago, when the first primitive heat spreaders started gracing memory modules, the response from enthusiasts about the scene was varied – some felt that they helped to uniquely identify sticks and dissipate heat, while others felt that the utilization of thermal tape was providing more of an insulator than a medium to transfer the heat. To this degree, some users slipped the spreaders off, while others added them on – often with little difference. As time rolled on, heat spreaders become commonplace, with manufacturers adding their own flair to sticks with unique spreaders around. While some manufacturers took to adding other bits onto their sticks – like the Pro and Xpert lines from Corsair, many of us still felt these additions to be frivolous. In that spirit, we look at Corsair’s Dominator line today. With a promise of better overclocking through greater heat dissipation, it’ll be up to us to determine if the DHX technology contained within can become overclocking fact, or passed off as simple frivolous fiction. Let’s get started

The Modules

Packed in a custom formed PVC package, these thin modules stand out for their bold ridged looks, which clearly draw inspiration from their past two lines listed off in the introduction. Looking at them from the front, you’ll either see the dominator logo, or an extended ratings sticker gracing the front – depending which way your vendor’s packed them into the sleeve before shipping them down your way. Extending from those spreaders are myriad thin black columns, each helping to carry away the heat generated by the faces of each module, and looking to the sides of the forward spreader, a small hint of gold plating adorns the customized black PCB, printed and developed specifically by Corsair to carry heat away from the modules via the ground plane.

Its through this custom PC and design to dump heat into the ground plane that the DHX technology is derived. Termed as DHX – an acronym for Dual path Heat eXchange, this technology is intended to help alleviate the stresses generated on the modules. By pushing a portion of each stick’s heat into the ground plane, and the rest into the anodized silver fins between the black fins attached to the faces of the module, these sticks are capable of handling much higher voltages with lower temperatures – to a degree that I was able to operate them at their rated voltage (2.4V), frequency (1,142MHz), and latencies (5-5-5-15) passively, with only mild heat generated by the modules in a case with moderate airflow. This will definitely come in handy when users are pushing the sticks further and further on 680i motherboards, especially with the high voltages certain motherboards (see DFI) will soon be able to provide. Granted, these custom heat spreaders and PCBs do come with a price premium, but considering the entry level modules aren’t all too much more than standard sticks, I’d wager the efforts are worth it.

On a side note, these sticks have been built and bred for NVIDIA’s brand new 680i platform, utilizing EPP to help the new users come to the high clocks required by the sticks – some time s without even boosting the FSB with the ability to un-link the memory and front side bus frequencies. Moving back to the packaging, the inset pamphlet does a rather good job of explaining what’s been outlined above, advertising these modules as perfect for “A system built to exceed standard expectations” – in short, boasting their high frequencies as being the perfect companion for casual overclockers. Rather then spend time splattering the packaging in awards from all across the web and print worlds, Corsair’s made a bit of an effort for the casual user – by flipping the pamphlet open, you can see a simple, 3 step process to installing each module – something that every enthusiast is usually able to do without seeing the target area. Then again, considering its pitch toward the common user, it’s nice to see the simple effort made to allow them to get the job done out of the gate, rather than asking friends for help on it. With this brief tour of the packaging done, it’s good and time to do an evaluation of the overclocking potential, and giving them a performance test.
Overclocking / Performance

The Test Bed
E6400, @ 3200MHz (8*400), 1.55V
Asus P5B-Deluxe, Stock. FSB Wall at 450MHz
2x 1024 Corsair PC2-9136 “Dominator” Modules
ATI X1600Pro 512 Advantage, Stock @ 635/355.5
Corsair HX620 Modular PSU, Stock.

For the time being, testing is being done on 3 fronts – theoretical (SiSoft Sandra), practical (Super-Pi), and theoretical gaming (3DMark 2001). Over time, other tests will be added (Doom 3, F.E.A.R, G.R.A.W and other time demos) in order to represent practical gaming. Along with that, Everest will also eventually be added to the loop to measure memory latencies.

Alright, you guys know the drill on how it’s done – since testing is being done with the P965 based ASUS P5B-Deluxe, all clocks will be locked to the FSB in one way or another, and while I would definitely love to be hitting 1,142MHz at 1:1, this board has a habit of hard limiting before 500MHz, which is somewhat disappointing; then again, it may be a processor wall. To the point, though. Before scaling the clocks up sky high, it’s usually nice to crank down the latencies, and see what sort of timings the sticks can hold at common speeds. For me, the prime of those speeds would be 800MHz – which is a nice 1:1 step with the FSB my E6400 oh-so-adores. As to the scores, just crack the screenshots open.

It’s actually rather unfortunate that modules rated for CAS5 at 1142 are unable (on this motherboard, at least) to boot and stay stable at CAS 3. I found that the lowest stable latencies I could muster at 800MHz (whether dropping the ratio at 266 FSB, or setting it to 1:1 at 400) would be 4-4-4-4 @ 2.4v. Boosting the voltage here didn’t help much, possibly due to the known weakness of the P5B on v-dimm. Based on the results of others with these very sticks, I’m fairly sure that booting CAS3 on the 680i would be possible, though asking for CAS2 would be a definite stretch.

Still, booting with the 4 pack of 4 latencies wasn’t all too bad, and they managed to carry their numbers to 1,000MHz, a figure which many out there would be rather enjoying at either 400MHz FSB (my 4:5 divider is wonky, so no dice there for you), or 500MHz. The modules were able to carry these figures up to 1,066 MHz (2:1 at 266), though not with much more stability than suicide runs. Raising the latencies to CAS5 helped here.

In order to reach the rated frequency, I unfortunately had to loosen timings out to what’s been listed on the box – the aforementioned 5-5-5-15. Beyond this point of 1,142MHz, there was actually NO headroom to be found on this motherboard, a limit not imposed by the FSB, which sat at 286Mhz (2:1 ratio). It’s disappointing that there was no headroom beyond this point, granted users picking up the sticks now won’t have any worry about holding onto them until a future upgrade. The article – will – be updated in future when a 680i board is in the house, but for the time being, just pop on over to the performance section of this article to see how these sticks dart about the benchmarks at the collection of frequencies listed above.
Conclusion
Though expensive, these sticks do give you a nice amount of headroom – especially if you can nail high FSBs on your P965 board. Along with that, they stay nice and cool, and considering the reports of some sets passing 1,300MHz around the web, I’d wager they have some promise for users who want to hold onto them. Along with that, the bold stylings and good builds of these modules ensure that they’ll look good in systems for a time to come now – along with having a nice, high resale value if you want to upgrade at the next speed hop along the way. For taking the first step toward this innovation, and offering a nice, fast path to your system future, these sticks are well worth the bronze award

Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion – if a high quality PC game doesn’t sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy.

Now, I don’t like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales. But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don’t think so.
Is it about business or glory?

Most people who know of Stardock in the gaming world think of it as a tiny indie shop. And we certainly are tiny in terms of game development. But in the desktop enhancement market, Stardock owns that market and it’s a market with many millions of users. According to CNET, 6 of the top 10 most popular desktop enhancements are developed by Stardock. Our most popular desktop enhancement, WindowBlinds, has almost 14 million downloads just on Download.com. We have over a million registered users.

If you want to talk about piracy, talk about desktop enhancements. The piracy on that is huge. But the question isn’t about piracy. It’s about sales.

So here is the deal: When you develop for a market, you don’t go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That’s what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they’re developing for. But not PC game developers.

PC game developers seem to focus more on the “cool” factor. What game can they make that will get them glory with the game magazines and gaming websites and hard core gamers? These days, it seems like game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen. I’ve never considered myself a real game developer. I’m a gamer who happens to know how to code and also happens to be reasonably good at business.

So when I make a game, I focus on making games that I think will be the most profitable. As a gamer, I like most games. I love Bioshock. I think the Orange Box is one of the best gaming deals ever. I love Company of Heroes and Oblivion was captivating. My two favorite games of all time are Civilization (I, II, III, and IV) and Total Annihilation. And I won’t even get into the hours lost in WoW. Heck, I even like The Sims.

So when it comes time to make a game, I don’t have a hard time thinking of a game I’d like to play. The hard part is coming up with a game that we can actually make that will be profitable. And that means looking at the market as a business not about trying to be “cool”.
Making games for customers versus making games for users

So even though Galactic Civilizations II sold 300,000 copies making 8 digits in revenue on a budget of less than $1 million, it’s still largely off the radar. I practically have to agree to mow editors lawns to get coverage. And you should see Jeff Green’s (Games for Windows) yard. I still can’t find my hedge trimmers.

Another game that has been off the radar until recently was Sins of a Solar Empire. With a small budget, it has already sold about 200,000 copies in the first month of release. It’s the highest rated PC game of 2008 and probably the best selling 2008 PC title. Neither of these titles have CD copy protection.

And yet we don’t get nearly the attention of other PC games. Lack of marketing on our part? We bang on the doors for coverage as next as the next shop. Lack of advertising? Open up your favorite PC game publication for the past few months and take note of all the 2 page spreads for Sins of a Solar Empire. So we certainly try.

But we still don’t get the editorial buzz that some of the big name titles do because our genre isn’t considered as “cool” as other genres. Imagine what our sales would be if our games had gotten game magazine covers and just massive editorial coverage like some of the big name games get. I don’t want to suggest we get treated poorly by game magazine and web sites (not just because I fear them — which I do), we got good preview coverage on Sins, just not the same level as one of the “mega” titles would get. Hard core gamers have different tastes in games than the mainstream PC gaming market of game buyers. Remember Roller Coaster Tycoon? Heck, how much buzz does The Sims get in terms of editorial when compared to its popularity. Those things just aren’t that cool to the hard core gaming crowd that everything seems geared toward despite the fact that they’re not the ones buying most of the games.

I won’t even mention some of the big name PC titles that GalCiv and Sins have outsold. There’s plenty of PC games that have gotten dedicated covers that haven’t sold as well. So why is that?

Our games sell well for three reasons. First, they’re good games which is a pre-requisite. But there’s lots of great games that don’t sell well.

The other two reasons are:
Our games work on a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
Our games target genres with the largest customer bases per cost to produce for.

We also don’t make games targeting the Chinese market

When you make a game for a target market, you have to look at how many people will actually buy your game combined with how much it will cost to make a game for that target market. What good is a large number of users if they’re not going to buy your game? And what good is a market where the minimal commitment to make a game for it is $10 million if the target audience isn’t likely to pay for the game?

If the target demographic for your game is full of pirates who won’t buy your game, then why support them? That’s one of the things I have a hard time understanding. It’s irrelevant how many people will play your game (if you’re in the business of selling games that is). It’s only relevant how many people are likely to buy your game.

Stardock doesn’t make games targeting the Chinese market. If we spent $10 million on a PC game explicitly for the Chinese market and we lost our shirts, would you really feel that much sympathy for us? Or would you think “Duh.”

You need a machine how fast?

Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the “Gamer PC” vendors sell each year could tell you that it’s insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there. This data is available. The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn’t a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you’re a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good. If you need to sell 500,000 of your game to break even and your game requires Pixel Shader 3 to not look like crap or play like crap, do you you really think that there are 50 MILLION PC users with Pixel Shader 3 capable machines who a) play games and b) will actually buy your game if a pirated version is available?

In our case, we make games that target the widest possible audience as long as as we can still deliver the gaming experience we set out to. Anyone who’s looked at the graphics in Sins of a Solar Empire would, I think, agree that the graphics are pretty phenomenal (particularly space battles). But could they be even fancier? Sure. But only if we degraded the gaming experience for the largest chunk of people who buy games.

The problem with blaming piracy

I don’t want anyone to walk away from this article thinking I am poo-pooing the effect of piracy. I’m not. I definitely feel for game developers who want to make kick ass PC games who see their efforts diminished by a bunch of greedy pirates. I just don’t count pirates in the first place. If you’re a pirate, you don’t get a vote on what gets made — or you shouldn’t if the company in question is trying to make a profit.

The reason why we don’t put copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor – we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.

One of the jokes I’ve seen in the desktop enhancement market is how “ugly” WindowBlinds skins are (though there are plenty of awesome ones too). But the thing is, the people who buy WindowBlinds tend to like a different style of skin than the people who would never buy it in the first place. Natural selection, so to speak, over many years has created a number of styles that seem to be unique to people who actually buy WindowBlinds. That’s the problem with piracy. What gets made targets people who buy it, not the people who would never buy it in the first place. When someone complains about “fat borders” on some popular WindowBlinds skin my question is always “Would you buy WindowBlinds even if there was a perfect skin for you?” and the answer is inevitably “Probably not”. That’s how it works in every market — the people who buy stuff call the shots. Only in the PC game market are the people who pirate stuff still getting the overwhelming percentage of development resources and editorial support.

When you blame piracy for disappointing sales, you tend to tar the entire market with a broad brush. Piracy isn’t evenly distributed in the PC gaming market.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.

In the end, the pirates hurt themselves. PC game developers will either slowly migrate to making games that cater to the people who buy PC games or they’ll move to platforms where people are more inclined to buy games.

In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I’d recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot. But then again, I don’t romanticize PC game development. I just want to play cool games and make a profit on games that I work on.

I wrote this article for Custom PC Magazine in the U.K. – it’s the latest issue, and it’s awesome. A warning though, this article is pure speculation! There’s my disclaimer before people start freaking out – this is pure “hookah smoking, sitting around with a bunch of friends and chatting” speculation…! I will write an extended version of this later.

A few months ago I wrote an article on some of my own personal thoughts about AMD’s strategic position in the market. I included some ideas around AMD potentially creating strategic partnerships with companies whose pieces fit snugly in their holes (can you guess who?). In the process of doing this they would also need to lighten up some of the assets, and scale the business back enough so profitable growth can be sustained.

Its funny how things seem to make sense when you’re involved in a business for more half your life. If you put all the pieces on the board and stare at them long enough they start to tell a story.

Going further into the potential strategies for AMD, I think they could try to spin of their CPU, chipset, and graphics technology businesses into a separate entity. At the same time they could spin the foundry business into a separate entity or division. I continue to believe that somehow they would need to be linked in order to maintain their X86 license among other things.

Now imagine if they did both of the above; their value on the foundry side would be cut, but on the technology side they may get some great valuations with higher multiples, and thus the IP side would become a great target for acquisition for Nvidia.

Now the question is who in their right mind would want to own shares in a foundry business? Perhaps they could work a deal so existing shareholders get a share of one and half of another, and perhaps if Nvidia decides to come out and play they could also offer some share benefits to existing shareholders.

In my mind it would be easier dealing with two or four giants, then the three header four armed abomination we’re currently contending with. It’s just too bloody confusing.

USAF wants 300 PlayStation 3s for “research”

Sony, Toshiba and IBM have long touted the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) to be supercomputer material. The designers of the Cell/B.E. said many times that the processor may be used in a variety of applications, ranging from entertainment to industrial.

Now, the U.S. Air Force is planning to put the Cell/B.E. to the test, and oddly enough, it plans to procure its processor samples by purchasing 300 PlayStation 3 consoles.

As written in its presolicitation notice posted late February, “The Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting a technology assessment of certain cell processors.”

While there are many other ways to obtain a Cell/B.E., some of which more capable than the one offered for videogames, but even the U.S. Air Force has a budget.

“The processors in the Sony PlayStation 3 are the only brand on the market that utilizes the specific cell processor characteristics needed for this program at an acceptable cost,” detailed the notice.

Strangely, the 40GB PlayStation 3 model requested by the U.S. Air Force specifies the inclusion of four USB ports – twice as many on the retail 40GB PS3 – and slots for Memory Stick/SD/Compact Flash, which are only available on the 60GB and 80GB machines.

It seems like not yesterday the number one game on both Credal and I’s Xfire profiles was Stronghold 2.  Now with only 162 hours and in third place it seems like we didn’t play the game at all!  Of course it kind of sucks that Xfire has some sort of glitch with Windows Vista and it shows me as ALWAYS in game for Company of Heroes.  Once I get in the game until I restart the computer it shows me as in game!  Which BTW I absolutely hate!  It doesn’t show a true record of how long I’ve been in game… the past 3 weeks I’ve probably gained 100 hours in CoH alone simply because I can’t get “out of game” without restarting my computer!  (I think it has to do with Vista’s caching system, since the game loads UBER faster if I’ve already had it up once… make use of that 4 gigs of RAM!)

Oh well, I still can’t deny the fact that I’ve got a good 600 or so hours in CoH, and at least 200 in Counter-Strike:Source.

Archmaille’s Xfire Profile

We’ve seen more than a few attempts to meld real guitars and Guitar Hero, but most of them involve wonky custom guitars — or worse, retrofitting your existing guitar with a dorktastic MIDI pickup. Well, it looks like a company called GameTank has answered the bell with a game called Guitar Rising, which allows you to use any guitar to play. The PC game takes audio input basically any way it can get it — direct audio in, microphone, or 1/4-inch-to-USB adapter — and allows you to play along with a catalog of tunes at beginner to expert difficulties. GameTank says Guitar Rising will be out late this year — check a video to whet your appetite after the break.

We’ve seen more than a few attempts to meld real guitars and Guitar Hero, but most of them involve wonky custom guitars — or worse, retrofitting your existing guitar with a dorktastic MIDI pickup. Well, it looks like a company called GameTank has answered the bell with a game called Guitar Rising, which allows you to use any guitar to play. The PC game takes audio input basically any way it can get it — direct audio in, microphone, or 1/4-inch-to-USB adapter — and allows you to play along with a catalog of tunes at beginner to expert difficulties. GameTank says Guitar Rising will be out late this year — check a video to whet your appetite after the break.

This one sure hasn’t generated much, if any, fanfare, but it looks like those that take their Rock Band wailing (a little too) seriously can now get their hands on a new and improved (and official) microphone. According to the appropriately-named Rocker74 of the ScoreHero forums, you’ll have to drop a hefty $50 to your hands on it, but for that you’ll apparently get a microphone that is heavier and “definitely” higher quality than the standard issue mic. There still doesn’t seem to be any official word on the microphone, however, so availability might be hit and miss for a while yet.

[Thanks, John P]

Update: As some of you have pointed out, it appears that the microphone’s packaging says its for PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, which would certainly be an interesting development, given that we still haven’t heard anything official about Rock Band for the Wii. More on that as we get it. [Thanks, garfep]

This one sure hasn’t generated much, if any, fanfare, but it looks like those that take their Rock Band wailing (a little too) seriously can now get their hands on a new and improved (and official) microphone. According to the appropriately-named Rocker74 of the ScoreHero forums, you’ll have to drop a hefty $50 to your hands on it, but for that you’ll apparently get a microphone that is heavier and “definitely” higher quality than the standard issue mic. There still doesn’t seem to be any official word on the microphone, however, so availability might be hit and miss for a while yet.

[Thanks, John P]

Update: As some of you have pointed out, it appears that the microphone’s packaging says its for PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, which would certainly be an interesting development, given that we still haven’t heard anything official about Rock Band for the Wii. More on that as we get it. [Thanks, garfep]