The TR Podcast 150: From Mantle to Maxwell, and beyond

Date: February 26th, 2013
Duration: 1:20:01

Hosted by: Jordan Drake

Co-Hosts: Scott Wasson, Geoff Gasior, and Cyril Kowaliski

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Show notes
We're back after a long a depressingly long absence. Can you find it in your heart to forgive us? We really hope so...

Anyway, this episode kicks off with an update on our podcast hosting—and some juicy details about our listener base. Next up: listener mail and a slew of news stories, from the Comcast-Time Warner Cable axis of evil to rumored Broadwell processor delays. Then, Scott and Cyril dissect the performance of AMD's Mantle API, Scott reviews the GeForce TX 750 Ti, and Geoff shares his experience casually dating the Cooler Master QuickFire Ultimate mechanical keyboard. Tune in to find out if the relationship gets serious.

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/tweets:

Hardware durability? - from Mohi:

"Hi all. I have a question regarding PC hardware durability and reliability. In term of quality of components used on the PCB of say, a graphics card, which brand do you have a preference or less issues with from board vendors (Gigabyte, Asus, XFX, MSI, Diamond, etc.) Talking about the reference designs, we know for a fact that AMD cooling units are horrible and inefficient. But what about PCB components like chokes, caps, 'fets and so on? I have seen stories on forums or Newegg reviews of people whose reference board GTX 460s, 570s and 590 went bust because of overclocking and voltage increase, but haven't seen many cases of smoked Radeons. Would love to hear your thoughts on this."

Kavari and Carrizo? - from Bear:

"If Kaveri is the "first iteration" of the fully coherent APU, as I keep seeing across all the hardware sites, and I understand this question may be premature, just what exactly are we looking at with Carrizo, aside from better CPU cores and a performance bump/TDP drop? Isn't everything HSA from here on out just going to be on the programming side, getting devs to leverage what's there?"

Card upgrade recommendation? - from Jay:

"I have an older AMD card and looking at upgrading, been an AMD fan for years. With what AMD and Nvidia are doing to be different like g sync and mantle what would be a better card to get? does going from 128 bus to a faster one make a difference in games like Bioshock infinite and skyrim?"

Tech discussion:

• The podcast has a new host - Read more

  Comcast to acquire Time Warner Cable, create new axis of evil - Read more

  Rumor: Intel's Broadwell processors now delayed until late 2014 - Read more

  How about a Radeon R9 290X for 900 bucks? - Read more - Doge coin demand

  First look: AMD Mantle CPU performance in Battlefield 4 - Read more

  A quick look at Mantle on AMD's Kaveri APU - Read more

  Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti 'Maxwell' graphics processor - Read more

  Cooler Master's QuickFire Ultimate mechanical keyboard reviewed - Read more

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