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I gotta tell you what, on the heels of AMD annoucing they’ve sold 2,000,000 Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards, this video is not only hysterical, but indicates a more confident AMD/ATI - a company that is having a personality disorder right now with their lopsided strengths in the CPU/GPU market.

This video, however, makes digs at NVIDIA in ways that only geeks understand.  Hinting at manufacturing processes and defaults, memory speeds, etc.  The reference to the X58 is dubious as NVIDIA has said publicly that they will certify BIOSs for native X58 SLI support without requiring motherboard manufacturers to license MCP 200 chips - that’s only necessary if you want maximum bandwidth on multiple x16 slots.  But like I’ve said, the value of multiple graphics cards these days are dubious at best.

These “viral” videos are great fun to watch.  But it’s preaching to the choir.  It’s not going to prompt consumer behavior.  It’s not going to drive consumers to ditch NVIDIA and go ATI.  And if your branding campaign only creates awareness and doesn’t deliver to the bottom line, you win a big bag of fail.

A good example of similar marketing that is successful would be the Apple I’m a Mac commercials.  They aren’t successful because they are funny or witty.  They are successful because they communicate the simple premise that Macs are fun, easy, and reliable, and PCs are boring, bloated, and broken.  Of course, I would argue that most I’m a Mac commercials are down right lies at worst, and I chuckle every time I watch them on my ultra-reliable, uber-cool Vista Media Center PC with digital cable tuners.  But the point is that Apple has effectively convinced a large segment of the mainstream market the fundamental idea that Mac = good and PC = bad.  Republicans and Democrats do this all the time.

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But Apple is beginning to lose focus.  While the G4saurus video is cute and funny to people like me and most of you who read this blog, it’s really just AMD/ATI’s engineering group giving NVIDIA’s engineering group the metaphorical finger through their marketing department.  Apple has done basically the same thing with their latest I’m a Mac commercial - their marketing department is giving Microsoft’s marketing department the metaphorical finger after Microsoft’s relatively successful, relevant, and above all positive  response to the I’m a Mac commercials.  Of course you know I’m talking about the commercials where people from all walks of life state they are a PC and they are all different.  It’s simple, it’s relevant, and it’s positive.  It doesn’t stoop to Apple’s level and I think they’re quite enjoyable.  But it doesn’t prompt consumer action.  That’s where Mojave comes in.  Just check it out for yourself, I don’t need to expound upon it here.

My point is, while AMD has delivered the funniest viral video I’ve seen in this business, they need to come up with an effective campaign that not only creates awareness, but brings more customers to the table.  And that means they need a successful Phenom II launch, stay focused on the platform story, and continue to keep the channel happy.  Wait, where’d marketing fit into all that?  ;-)

The days of needing multiple graphics cards in your PC are officially over. While game engines have become more complex, and Crysis still confounds most people’s PCs, the fact is that we have reached a pixel density plateau when it comes to monitor sizes and the GPU battle grounds are being fought at 1680×1050 resolutions or lower¹. And the simple fact of the matter is that at that resolution nearly every game on the planet can be enjoyed by the mainstream gamer utilizing a single graphics card. The hardware side of the gaming industry has gotten that good.

But don’t tell that to AMD or NVIDIA or even Intel. Don’t tell that to the system builders, but would somebody please tell that to the tech journalists? The fact is that multi-card technology, not multiple GPUs on the same PCB, allows chipset manufacturers to stratify their offerings (read: charge more money), promising more performance and more “expandability” – but costing you more money.  The fact is that these technologies are aimed squarely at the 5% uber-enthusiast market and system builders who need to win synthetic benchmarks by 3% in order to pay their salaries that month. 

Expandability or upgradeability are the buzz words that these companies use to lure you to their higher end chipsets. They want you to think you need a second or third graphics card. But most effectively, they communicate to you that you are buying “future expandability” that will “future-proof” your PC. And they’ve effectively brainwashed the mainstream tech media into believing the same thing. It’s hard to find a review of a gaming system that doesn’t include the ability to add a second graphics card where the reviewer doesn’t “ding” the builder for it. 

But nobody has ever really studied the usage patterns and buying behaviors of customers who purchase multi-video card capable motherboards and SLI or CrossFire capable graphics cards. It is that question that intrigues me, and it is simple logic that leads me to the conclusion I have written in the opening sentence of this post. 

The main problem is, if you aren’t gaming at XHD resolutions that 24”+ monitors support, spending money on two high end graphics cards is a complete waste of money, and buying two mid-range graphics cards is pointless as a single high-end card that may feature two of the same GPU on one PCB can easily meet or beat it for around the same combined price. Factor in the total cost of ownership of forgoing a more expensive chipset designed for multi-video card support, and you really need to make sure you’re spending your money the right way.

Additionally, if you’ve spent your money on an XHD monitor, and only have a budget left over for a single high end graphics card, never mind the fact that you perhaps bought an unbalanced configuration, but the odds of a better single card solution being available by the time you can afford that second card are high. Why do you think EVGA offers a 90-day trade-up program? It’s essentially an insurance policy against the age-old truism that your system is obsolete the day you buy it. 

Don’t take my word for it. Kyle and Brent at [H]ard|OCP have been shoving the term “real world benchmarks” in our faces for so many years now that every piss-ant rag on the internet and in print uses the terminology without really understanding what it means. But if you really look at what [H] video card reviews show, you’ll find that at 1680×1050 resolutions and lower, my premise holds. From there it’s a simple matter of adding up the total cost of ownership to reach the playable settings (meaning a smooth gaming experience.) So be sure that you aren’t blindly buying a dual or triple-graphics capable motherboard for $200-$300 when a significantly cheaper, and perhaps a bit more boring, solution will suffice, allowing you to spend more money on a powerful, single video card that will better serve your needs. 

1. Source: Valve Steam Hardware survey, November 2008. 96% of players have resolutions set to 1680×1050 or lower. Sample size: ~1.7 million users.

You know the old saying, “Half of life is just showing up”?  I think it’s also followed by “The other half is showing up on time.”  While both are true, the former is what benefited MAINGEAR @ Quakecon 2008 this year.  We had a prominent position at AMD’s booth, and while the competition sent machines, no one bothered to send people. 

So we got to do a lot of mingling with AMD fans and gaming enthusiasts, and were really able to bring our message of performance, reliability, and customer service to the old and young alike.  Wallace and I were AMD’s “Ask the experts” panel and we had a lot of fun talking about AMD technology, being a boutique PC builder, and I even got to talk about some of my favorite subjects like bloatware, crappy chassis, and other stuff.

But two things just blew me away.  Getting to go up on the main stage and give away a MAINGEAR PC in front of a huge crowd of people was just awesome.  Everyone was so excited to be there and the kid who won our F131 was shaking as he filled out some paperwork.  We put a brand new system in the last of the first F131 chassis we ever used.  We painted it red for AMD/ATI, and it was kinda emotional for some of us as we were really giving a part of our history.

You can see me talking about it here.

The other great experience was being involved in a documentary about gamers and the gaming industry.  Wallace, Wendel, and I were all interviewed both one on one, and at our booth about what it’s like to be in the gaming business and actually make money at it, compete with the Tier 1s, what a boutique PC builder really is, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  It was produced by a Tonight Show producer and I have no idea where it’s going to air or when, but the last one they did ended up on MTV.  So we’ll see.

Which is why it’s with a heavy heart that I must tell you that I’ll be transitioning away from MAINGEAR shortly.  MAINGEAR has been a labor of love for me over the past year and was never about the money.  Wallace and crew really restored my faith in this business and I couldn’t be more proud of the work we have done and what we have accomplished.  They are truly a force for good in this business. 

But I’ve been offered such an incredible opportunity that every day this week I have pinched myself to make sure it’s not just a dream.  The possibilities are endless and I couldn’t be more excited.  I can’t talk much more about it, and I really wanted this post to be about my love and respect for MAINGEAR, so I’ll save it for another day.

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.

Don’t you just love witty headlines?

AMD last week announced a previously un-leaked SKU in the family of upcoming Phenom processors.  With all eyes on what AMD is going to do to compete with Intel’s dominating Core 2 architecture, AMD may have thrown the ultimate curveball before the game even begins.

Traditionally, multiprocessor configurations come in multiples of 2; in the case of the consumer desktop, your option is 1, 2, or 4 processing cores.  Currently, the most popular from both AMD and Intel on the mainstream desktop would be the dual core processor.  Intel has the Core 2 Duo, and AMD has the Athlon 64 X2, of the venerated and aging K8 family.  AMD’s new processor family, the Phenom, which will be released in the next couple of months, will span dual, quad, and now tri-cores. 

So what is the point of a three core processor?  The easy answer is that three is one more than two and that helps AMD space out their CPU portfolio in terms of price and performance. 

It all boils down to positioning.  AMD was smart not to go head to head with NVIDIA with their Radeon HD 2900 series.  Instead, they hit on popular price bands and features not found with their competitors.  It was a winning strategy that made up for publicly perceived architectural drawbacks with their advanced GPU.  With Phenom it may turn out to be a different story.  If AMD’s next gen processor has the luxury of competing with Intel’s current lineup for a couple of months before Penryn is released, it may be enough to regain precious ground lost over the last year.  All eyes are on Intel’s Penryn with its core tweaks, SSE4, and 45nm process, and that is where the protracted battle will be.  It remains to be seen just how fast Intel can bring this processor family to market.  However, AMD has created its own blue ocean with a tri-core Stars family processor.  Thanks to AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture, adding additional cores (in this case it’s actually subtracting) only requires a prerequisite number of HyperTransport links, or the communications protocol AMD uses for core to core transfer of information.  Intel is still using the tried and true Front Side Bus design, which currently limits the type of multi-core designs they can release to market.  Intel has no monolithic core design, and will be relegated to 2 or 4 cores on the desktop for quite sometime.

It is this competitive advantage that AMD hopes to leverage, and I believe it’s a winning strategy for a very large piece of the battlefield: the retail channel.  Walk into any Best Buy at the end of 2005, and you’d see a majority of the systems featured AMD processors.  For the first time in the company’s history, AMD actually beat Intel at something.  They had the larger share of the US retail market.  This increases mindshare which increases market share.  Blue Shirts, Best Buy employees, are a key group of market influencers that any company needs to court in order to be successful there.  Driven by enthusiast support in the gaming market – many of whom work at Best Buy – AMD was winning the hearts and minds.

Now, enthusiast support is firmly behind Intel, and AMD has had to play the old game of how-low-can-we-sell-these-things-for in order to maintain any type of hold in the market.  With a tri-core processor, AMD has the luxury of flanking the Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad.  It can compete with the former on horsepower, and it can compete with the latter on price.  Intel will have a hard time countering with its dual core offering when benchmarks show multimedia apps and certain games favoring more cores (watch 3D Mark 06 during the CPU test and you’ll see it only uses 3 cores – and 3D Mark is an IMPORTANT benchmark for retail customers.)   And with many of the Intel quad core chips filling higher ASPs (notable exception being the Q6600), Intel will have to cut lucrative margins it now enjoys in order to fend off customers who may not be willing to spend the extra cash on an extra core.

But CPU core count is only part of an AMD full court press that focuses on total platform performance.  The next three months will see many of the fruits of the new AMD/ATI effort, and Intel will have more to worry about than just CPU strengths as the focus shifts to the total platform.  However, both sides have brilliant people working for them, and Intel’s superior resources will be brought to full steam against any perceived threats by its smaller competitor.  The question is how fast they can execute, not IF.

The bottom line is I believe the tri-core is a Hail Mary retail play on AMD’s part that is likely to pay off.  We’ll see AMD tri-core machines occupying retail shelf space that may traditionally seat an Intel dual core system.   It’ll be an interesting 2008 for both companies, I’m sure.