Home sweet home

So it took me an astounding 12 hours and 15 minutes to drive back from New Haven last night; the traffic on I-95 was unbelievable. If anyone has figured out the perfect route to avoid traffic on I-95/NJ Turnpike going north I'm all ears. I'll tell you more about the weekend and my trips to CT but for now let's talk shop shall we?

So September could be considered to be CPU month, with the release of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and the Athlon 64 and if you call it that, then October would definitely be Graphics month. If you haven't guessed already, Derek (new CPU/GPU guy here at AT) and I have been spending a lot of time benchmarking graphics stuff over the past several days. We've ended up with no less than 10 new games as a part of our new graphics test suite; we're both over at the lab right now starting our final tests on the suite for a review sometime this week. Unfortunately we are very short handed on Athlon 64 parts (and our CPUs on order have yet to come in) so the first comparison with this new suite will be done on either a 2.8GHz Intel processor or a Pentium 4 3.2 Extreme Edition. We're making the call now and you'll most likely find out which CPU we used when the review hits.

For those of you looking for benchmarks on more CPUs, have no worries as we'll be doing a CPU comparison under the new test suite very soon. Our first priority is to get the video cards compared on the fastest platform possible (thus doing a pure video card comparison) and then worry about CPU scaling.

Speaking of video card stuff, we're hoping to have the Half Life 2 benchmark soon to do an updated comparison with NVIDIA's latest drivers. I'm hearing that the latest Detonators NVIDIA is working on fix the issues that Gabe outlined in his list of complaints and improves performance significantly. It seems like the 5900 Ultra is now slightly slower than the Radeon 9800 Pro with AA/Aniso disabled, and slightly faster with it enabled; I'm hoping to see for myself shortly. I haven't heard anything about how the 5600/5200 perform with the latest drivers, but I'm guessing the performance isn't as competitive.

That's all for now, I've got two tests tomorrow morning (I love making up work after being absent to cover IDF) so I'm going to be busy with that tonight as well as helping Derek with this review. Derek and I will be co-writing this review as it will be his first major GPU review, but he will be doing the majority of the analysis (I'll just be keeping a watchful eye over him).

Take care