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Show notes
We have a nice cross-section of topics for you this week. We kick off this episode of the podcast with a question from an inebriated reader, then we delve behind the scenes of our new, overhauled system guide. After a look at the "product opportunity" AMD filled with its Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, we go over Seagate's new 1.5TB monster hard drive, and we chat about two new goodies awaiting GeForce users: the upcoming ForceWare 180 driver release and Elemental's Badaboom video transcoder. The episode closes with a discussion of the latest games, where Geoff explains what makes Dead Space so scary and Scott gives his impressions of Far Cry 2.

As a reminder, you can still enter our contest for a chance to win an Acer Aspire One netbook. Head over to the giveaway post to enter. We'll be taking names until October 30. (Once again, thanks to NCIX for providing the Aspire One that will end up in the hands of a lucky podcast listener.)

Send in listener mail, and we'll answer on the podcast. - jdrake@techreport.com

Listener mail:

Plugging the hole (0:04:23) - Anonymous

"Scott,

Random thought.

Back in the C2D launch days, there was discussion about the fact that on 1066MHz FSB CPU’s you only really needed DDR2 667MHz memory to plug the FSB bandwidth. Now granted 1333FSB and 1600FSB would theoretically up the size of the “hole to plug” with memory bandwidth, this idea breaks down with i7 and it’s non-FSB related communication path to the CPU. But the GPU is now the limited one… bandwidth wise.

Bla.

Given the interface speed for the memory controller, and the dual/triple channel chipsets coming, how does that conceptualization change? I’d love for you to think on this as you do your/the i7 review.

All the best. *hic*"

Tech discussion:

TR's fall 2008 system guide (0:10:42)- Read more

AMD's Radeon HD 4830 graphics processor (0:23:06)- Read more - Update

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive (0:32:57)- Read more

Badaboom 1.0 uses Nvidia GPUs to transcode video (0:35:33)- Read more

Nvidia spills the beans on 'Big Bang II' ForceWare release (0:47:13)- Read more

Geoff talks about Dead Space and Scott shares his thoughts on Far Cry 2 (0:58:27)