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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Xpiderman who wrote (9560)	12/12/1998 9:47:00 PM
From: Marc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

OK, let's talk about Tom's review and heat. This is PEAK take's on the review: 3 freshly minted reviews from Tom, Kyle and Alan for a total of nine. ATI is batting 8 for 9. Tom Pabst was the only one who gave it less than two thumbs up. Truthfully, I smell politics...bigtime? You might say so. What gives ? I put out a caustic rebuttal to Tom's comments on heat in his review but I took it down after 5 minutes. For Tom's benefit, I created a special page (just for him) where I will not "pull my punches". Tom, you know where to look It just isn't worth my or my readership's time. Here is what I will say: Most gasoline powered cars have a surface temperature well over the boiling point of water on several areas of the engine. The melting point of silcion is way above 400 degress celsius. The mass of the chip and surface area give the Rage 128 very little heating potential within a system. Local hot spotting within a chip has been engineered out of the chip both at the chip level and at the board level by providing a low time constant heat conduction path right to the ground plane of the circuit board. The Rage GL has a very even temperature profile across the chip allowing it to run with higher surface temperatures with less no chance of local hot spotting issues that shown up compettive products as board failures. Extensive in house tests have yet to show failures under "shake and bake" conditions with current production. These issues are routinely addressed and understood by OEM and system integrators. I guess we will see which chip they choose to use first of the fourth generation chips. In an apples-to-apples comparison with the same heat sink, the Rage 128 GL will run cooler. It is the only video chipset that has a chance of running naked today in 32 bit mode. ATI products carry a 5 year warranty for those who are still worried. My feelings is that the Rage 128 GL will have continued support and development at that point in time due to a new concept called "sufficient hardware/balanced software". This is why Linux flies on a 486 system. The software was written to perform acceptably on a 386 system and runs all older software. It is part of the grand scheme...simpler is better. I'll take my Rage 128 without the heat sink. Thank you. Anand has been reviewing the various web reviews of the Rage 128 and he gave a knod to two others as good reviews ..Tom's review...not suprisingly... was not one of them: December 9, 1998 ATI Review & More... - 9:49PM Well, thanks to the efforts of tons of reviewers out there, ATI provided all of us with a method to disable V-Sync in our Rage 128 benchmarks, so without further ado, check out AnandTech's ATI Rage 128 Review on the Video Reviews Index. A couple good reviews I've seen so far come from www.3dhardware.net and sharkyextreme.com, so you may want to check those two out as well. LOT'S MORE INFO HERE, angelfire.com Marc