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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: milo_morai who wrote (104063)	4/11/2000 10:19:00 PM
From: Mani1	Respond to of 1571808

Milo Re <<I for one believe that is the main reason murder rates are so low, not the lack of>> I think it is because it is too cold in Canada for people to get out of their house and kill. Even if they did get out, imagine holding a gun with bare hands in -10 degrees weather! And you can't aim worth you know what with mittens on. All, lets drop this subject. Mani

To: milo_morai who wrote (104063)	4/11/2000 10:20:00 PM
From: milo_morai	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571808

Falcon Northwest Mach V Rating: Benchmark Test Results Manufacturer: Falcon Northwest Ashland OR, USA (888) 325-2661 (541) 552-1160 (fax) Tech Support: (541) 552-9169 Print this page 03/21/2000 This is Falcon Northwest's stab at building a killer rig, a no-holds-barred, money-is-not-an-object system. With all the talk about 1GHz CPUs, it's easy to forget that they aren't shipping in quantity yet, and even the 900MHz CPU used in this system won't be available widely for several weeks. With that caveat in mind, let's dive in and take a look at the Oregon company's latest hot rod. There are two key parts to this system that make it such a superb gaming platform. On the CPU side is the 900MHz Athlon. About the only downside to AMD's new part is the 300MHz L2 cache, which does affect performance in some synthetic benchmarks, but as we'll see shortly, it certainly doesn't seem to affect gaming performance. The other half of the system's core is the Hercules (Guillemot)/Falcon Northwest Prophet DDR-DVI Special Edition. I can see you rolling your eyes already. Falcon Northwest has tried this in the past, with its Xentor 32 SE cards, with somewhat dismal results for users who wanted to buy one. In the end, it only shipped about 30 of the high-end TNT2 Ultra cards, at which point the supply of that particular TNT2 Ultra chip variant dried up. However, in a separate conversation with Guillemot, the company stated that the design was entirely its own. Guillemot is confident about meeting Falcon Northwest's needs. And Falcon is currently restricting sales of the Prophet DDR-DVI SE only to buyers of new systems. If you're interested, you should definitely consult with the company to determine lead times. As it stands, the Prophet Special Edition will most likely ship with a core clock of 148MHz and a memory clock of 346MHz (effective). The cooling fan will plug into a hard-drive power-supply connector to slightly reduce power draw from the AGP bus. This will give the card a fill-rate spec of a tad under 600 megapixels/megatexels per second. There are a lot of other premium components in the particular Mach V we tested. The system shipped with an Adaptec 29160 ultra160 SCSI host adapter, a Hollywood Plus hardware DVD decoder, a Sound Blaster Live sound card, and a D-Link 10/100 Ethernet card. Mass storage is handled by a 36GB Atlas 10K, a Toshiba 8x IDE DVD drive, and an HP 9200 SCSI CD-RW drive. There's even an internal 250MB Zip drive below the 1.44MB 3.5-inch floppy drive. Falcon has definitely covered all the mass storage bases. The monitor is Viewsonic's latest naturally flat screen, the PF790. Rounding out the mix is a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer, a Keytronic keyboard, and a set of Klipsch Promedia speakers. This is a killer rig from any angle. With all this hardware goodness, my immediate concern was the stability of the system. Falcon Northwest uses the Gigabyte 71X motherboard, which uses the AMD Irongate chipset. But even fully loaded with 256MB of SDRAM and all the other hardware goodies, the system ran rock solid. This gives me a lot more confidence about Athlon systems than I've ever had, and it is a testament to the current maturity of the system and drivers. The AMD Irongate isn't exactly bleeding edge, but Falcon Northwest does plan to transition to KX133 in the future. Anyone worried about performance issues should stop worrying. On games, at typical gaming resolutions, the Mach V blows by most of the competition. The GameGauge 2.5 scores easily outpaced the Dell XPS800, posting a GameGauge 2.5 score of 65.5. One of the most salient scores was Quake III, demo 1. At 1024x768 at 32-bit color, the measured frame rate was 66.3fps. It looks like the era of 60fps 32-bit-color gaming is upon us. To be fair, the Dell system did post slightly higher individual scores in the CPU-intensive simulation tests, but the differences were quite minor. Part of the difference may be attributed to the faster L2 cache on the Coppermine CPU used in the Dell. Also, Jane's USAF does use Intel's SSE instruction set but not 3DNOW!. In the end, the Falcon Northwest Mach V is a supercharged gaming rig, and it should be able to handle any game thrown at it for the next couple of years. If the high price is a problem, just ask the boys in Ashland to configure it with IDE mass storage, and the price should drop well over $1,000. All in all, the current high-end Mach V is one killer rig. Appeal: People not wedded to a number (like 1GHz), who demand a blazingly fast gaming system. Pro: The fastest gaming system we've ever seen -- and stable, too. Cons: At $5,593, it's pricey. By Loyd Case falcon-nw.com