cM :: MORLEY|DIGITAL

The greatest press release “days of glory” in the PC biz were when Brian Burke and Derek Perez of 3DFX and NVIDIA used to duke it out, in the mud, like a couple of drunk fools (I say that with great admiration, guys, please don’t take offense.)  It was seriously like attending a UFC match when those two turned up the heat.  I learned a lot just from reading their press releases and how they responded to the gaming community.

Stuff’s calmed down a bit since then.  We’ve all grown a little older as the industry has indeed grown older, and regrettably, more serious.  I’ve come to realize over the past year that we all do take ourselves way too seriously.  For some people, it’s the economy, for others, it’s the fact that this business now has billion dollar behemoths like HP and Dell in the fray and they are getting scared.

But dammit, the boutique PC biz is still a no-holds-barred market segment where you live on your wits and your last review.

So when Overdrive PC states that “No one else in the industry–and I mean no one–can match [us],” I have to call bullshit.  A quick look at their configurator for their high end machine, the all-new BigBlock.GTR reveals a very normal configuration of an Intel quad-core processor on an NVIDIA 790i motherboard. 

OK, nothing earth-shattering there.  Their “HyperClocking” technology allows for 3.8GHz+ on a QX9650 or 3.9GHz+ with the more expensive QX9770.

Newsflash, guys, MAINGEAR’s been building and shipping 4GHz quad-core Intel rigs since November of last year.  And we’ll do it on a QX9650, which saves you money.  Oh, btw, the Ephex also comes in three completely different flavors: a 790i platform, Intel X48, or even Skulltrail.  That’s right, two, four, or eight cores at 4GHz.

Now, why doesn’t MAINGEAR offer CrossFire on the 790i like Overdrive or HP?  It’s not an engineering feat - it’s merely a driver.  That’s right - AMD only needs to supply you with a custom driver to make CrossFire work.  We’ve got it.

But there’s a problem, or at least a problem that we see.  To us, it’s just a gimmicky configuration and we’d rather sell the best, not just what makes our supply chain happy.  First off, it’s slower than running CrossFire on an Intel chipset with native support vs the 790i with software support.  Secondly, the custom OEM driver updates are much slower than what AMD officially supports for the consumer at large (official AMD drivers don’t have this support, so don’t try to update your drivers yourself!)  And thirdly, and this is the kicker - at any time, NVIDIA can decide with a driver update to kill support for CrossFire at the chipset level.  Ouch.  We just don’t need the headache, and neither do our customers.

So there you have it.  Press releases aren’t written in a vacuum, they get read, and when there’s BS, someone’s going to call you on it.

A little birdy brought this to me last week.

For full specs, read here.  I also received a mATX version of this mini-ITX powerhouse, the DG45ID.

This fulfills all the players I mentioned in my article I wrote for DailyTech last year entitled “Video Processing: A Race To The Bottom.“

That was nearly a year ago, and our options today are fantastic.  AMD’s 780G led the charge, followed closely by NVIDIA’s 8200 chipset, and now Intel’s G45 solutions are starting to enter the fray.  It’s a good time to be an HTPC enthusiast, that’s for sure.

Just to be sure, I did test the DG45FC @ 1080p over HDMI running H.264 content ~30Mbps with 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 and experienced about 28% CPU utilization.  Not bad in my book!  That was with Vista 32-bit and ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre.