What happened to the sponsor?

No offense to PerfectCr, but I do not go to TR to get caught up on wrestling. Please avoid discussions of sports of any kind. There's no relevance to technology for me. Just my opinion. Tech Report is still my favorite tech news/review site...

Wow techreport deleted my comment about 260 factory overclocking showing clear examples how the reloaded version is overclocked. I've been a long time reader but this is telling something.

Here's a 8 pages how the review is biased.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=31&threadid=2235...

I have to address some points about the 216core vs the 4870 review.

Firstly,It is unfair to compare a about 15% overclocked 216gtx to a stock clocked 4870.

Secondly, the so "mentioned" 4870 "1GB" acted like the 512Mb version at both 1920 and 2560 resolutions which makes me wonder whether a real 4870 1GB has been used cuz @ anandtech the 4870 1GB beat the 280gtx in 4 out of 6 games at 2560 res. and almost matched the 280gtx in the fifth one at 1920 res.So probably, AMD has sent a 512MbB version of the 4870 to TR cuz there is no reference 4870 1GB.And that explains why the 4870 beat both the 216gtx and the280gtx in all the tested games "except for cryshis"at 1680 res and loses at higher resolutions.

Thirdly,claiming that an overclocked 4870 would't have done a difference is inaccurate,cuz 10% overclocking brings 8 fps over 80 and 7 fps over 70 and that would let the overclocked 4870 surpass the 280gtx in all the tested games at all resolutions.

The podcast is about the community that is TR. I don't remember people bitching when the podcast talked about the BBQ, Fantasy sports, Darknight, or half a dozen other things that don't relate to computer hardware. The podcast isn't always going to fit peoples narrow views of what subject matter should be covered. Personally the stuff on folding and the movie review did nothing for me. I know that there are other people that are interested in it though so I didn't go whinning like a little girl about it like some people feel the need to do.

I would say on the overclock topic. G/CPU have a reference or rated clock speed considered the standard (stock) Hz. If a GPU manufacture goes below this, IMO, its an underclocked card. While if they go over it then it's a overclocked card. Just because it ships that way doesn't change the fact it's not the normal vanilla card. A lot of this comes down to the the cooling solution provided.

What? PerfectCr gets an interview, but when I ask about Ron "Shortbread" Hanaki I'm met with silence? That's pure bull****!

Re Core i7: Chinese site PC Online has another set of benchmarks [1] (in Chinese) comparing a Core i7 940 at 2.93 GHz with a Core 2 Extreme QX9770 at 3.2 GHz as well as downclocked to 2.93 GHz.

They've compared single-channel operation with dual- and triple-channel, and it appears that there isn't that much difference between dual- and triple-channel memory performance, and in a significant fraction of the benchmarks, the Core 2 Extreme beat the Core i7 clock-for-clock. I haven't read the text, since I don't speak Chinese, and I haven't tried reading its translation [2] through Google Translate yet, but if this is representative, I'd find Core i7 a bit underwhelming outside of workloads that are computationally multithreaded and which can benefit from SMT.

The memory benchmarks also tell me that Lynnfield (the dual-channel cheaper product to come out in the second half of next year with much cheaper motherboards) will be quite performance-competitive with Bloomfield, clock for clock.

[1] http://diy.pconline.com.cn/cpu/reviews/0810/1438115.html
[2] http://www.google.com/translate_c?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http://diy...

Re the G45 chipset: I'm looking forward to seeing how NVIDIA'S MCP7A-S chipset (GeForce 9300 or 9400) fares. If I recall correctly, it also incorporates Blu-Ray decode, supports LGA 775 processors and has an IGP that isn't quite as anemic as the GMA X4500HD. And unlike their previous generation GeForce 7050, 7100 and 7150 IGPs, it supports full dual-channel operation.

"probably the best thing that can happen is that AMD succeeds in its strategy of building not the best chip, but maybe the best value for the short term"

So basically back to the K6-2 days. That imho would be sad as AMD have come a long way since then. We'd be turning the clock back almost 10 years, at least for the short term. The only real improvement is on the chipset side, not using the VIA and ALi chipsets and less than top quality motherboards that the K6-2 had.

It doesn't download when I hit "Update Podcast"

(OS X 10.5 iTunes 8 )

The end of the podcast is cut off for me. Ends at about 1:10:00 or so...

EDIT: nevermind refreshed and full audio loaded.

Thanks for the clarifications and comments about the Battle royale card comparison.
I was a little surprised to hear you say that "Why would anyone buy the stock clocked version of the 260 Reloaded at $289 when you can get a whole lot more performance for only $10 more"
Given how close the results were doesn't that exactly reflect the concern people having been posting about stock versus factory overclocks?
$10 is still within the range that we would say"They are in the same price bracket" so why not test the stock one?