The TR Podcast 81: Superbowl ads, Sandy Bridge trouble, and a graphics giveaway


Plus a trio of gaming stories, listener mail, and more
by Jordan Drake — 10:58 AM on February 17, 2011

The Tech Report Podcast Date: February 17, 2011
Time: 1:31:11

Hosted by Jordan Drake

Co-Hosts: Scott Wasson, Cyril Kowaliski, Geoff Gasior, and special guest Jason Fox

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Sponsored by Asus. See the show notes below to find out how you can win one of Asus' GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards!

Show notes
After answering a listener mail question, we start the show by welcoming guest podcaster and TR blogger Jason Fox. Jason is a professional copywriter in Texas, and he has developed an annual tradition of reviewing each year's array of Superbowl advertisements on his personal website. Together with our U.S.-based panelists (Canadians don't get to broadcast Superbowl ads), Jason discusses his list covering the best and worst of this year's offering. See the links to each discussed ad below.

Moving on, we begin our proper tech discussion with Geoff's newly scoured ultraportable before bemoaning the Canadian bandwidth quota conundrum. We then quickly dive into the billion-dollar mistake that took Intel's Sandy Bridge chipsets off store shelves. Listen for what went wrong, what Sandy Bridge early adopters can do about it, and what this means for Intel in the year to come. As the episode draws to a close, the panel dives into our most recent reader poll, Geoff's exploration of how memory speeds affect Sandy Bridge performance, and a trio of PC gaming stories.

We've got something a little special for this podcast, too. Thanks to the kind folks at Asus, we're giving away a free GeForce GTX 460 to one lucky podcast listener. You can find out more about the contest and enter here.

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

Follow us on Twitter - Scott - Jordan - Geoff - Cyril - The Tech Report

Listener mail:

Overclocking Brazos? - from Paul - (0:02:05):

"realized from looking at your coverage and AMD's product slides that Bobcat wasn't supposed to be super fast and is intended more as an Atom killer. And I'd go for one of the dual core ones over Atom, so I guess they succeeded in that regard. I'm a little surprised by the lack of news on overclocking the things though. Is there really no clockspeed headroom on a 1.6GHz chip? It might be because I'm old, but being able to crank one of those up to ~2.4GHz sure would take me back to the 300A Celerons and the Spitfire Durons. Cheap, good enough to great performance, and with the added bonus of running cool and quiet.

Is anyone else hoping to see some potential here? There's some Mini-ITX boards that look pretty decent supporting the platform."

Tech discussion:

That's all, folks! We'll see you on the next episode.TR

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