GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

My Dream Laptop
Posted in Gamer PC | October 30, 2008 8am

Long ago I failed to understand the point of gaming notebooks. They never seemed fast enough to run the games I cared to play and I always had a decent desktop that I could either build real quick or use whenever the need for gaming arose. In the past few years however I’ve come to really appreciate them, mainly because of their portability and ease of setup.Whenever I’d have an impromptu LAN party at my house the first several hours were always spent scrounging up hardware, installing Windows, configuring systems and dealing with silly problems that never cropped up before that night. I never had the space or spare hardware to leave gaming machines ready, and if I did have a system setup I’d eventually just start using it for testing as soon as our LAN party was over. My friends weren’t the biggest fan of this. Systems that were ready a day before were now running SYSMark.And here’s where gaming notebooks really came into play. Mobile GPUs have gotten powerful enough that it’s possible to play games that are a generation old, quite well. You can even play the latest titles if you’ve got enough GPU horsepower or turn down the settings a bit.Mobile CPUs are also easily comparable to desktop counterparts, so you’re not giving up anything in that department. And with the advent of SSDs you can actually equalize disk performance between your notebook and desktop as well.So when ASUS asked me what I’d like to see in a gaming notebook, without limits, I got a bit excited.Upgradability is terribly important with gaming notebooks; mobile GPUs can quickly get out of date, especially with major PC game titles coming out every 12 – 24 months it’s real easy for your gaming notebook to be lacking in the umph department. The problem with GPU upgradability in notebooks is that the thermals for these things are rarely designed to be forward looking enough to accommodate any GPU, but hey this is my dreamworld so I want a gaming notebook that can accept at least one to two generations of GPU upgrades. CPU upgrades are a necessity but we’ve got those already, so I don’t need to ask for too much here.Display panel technology is particularly important, I’d like to see an IPS or PVA panel used in the notebook, preferably with a 1920×1200 display resolution. The TN panels that are oh-so-common on notebooks can be nice, but I’d prefer something a bit better for my dream gaming notebook.Stylistically I’d point no further to the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro from Apple, they’ve got the best build quality out of any notebook I’ve used and look great. Just because this is a functional device doesn’t mean that it can’t be pretty too.Given that gaming notebooks are generally large I’d like to see two 2.5” drives used here, a SSD boot drive using Intel’s X25-M for applications and main game installs, as well as a large (500GBperhaps?) mechanical disk drive for game images, backups and all other data.The final request would simply be for a healthy set of I/O ports. I’d like to see DVI or DisplayPort out standard for connecting to a larger monitor. I hate to mention Apple again in such a gaming focused discussion, but I believe it may have hit on something important with its latest 24” display. Apple includes a power connector for the MacBook/MacBook Pro on its 24” display, making it easy to keep your notebook charged and connected to an external display without using your cumbersome power brick (speaking of which, a more svelte power brick would be nice too). To get such a thing for our dream gaming notebook would obviously require some standardization and work between both the notebook makers and the display vendors, something Apple doesn’t have to worry about given its control of the entire platform, but a particularly optimistic PC OEM could easily deliver something similar.There are my thoughts – how about yours? Did I leave anything out? What would you like to see on your ideal gaming notebook?

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Notebook vs Desktop
Posted in Gamer PC | November 5, 2008 10am

Several years ago Intel made a prediction: that notebooks would become more important than desktops, thus justifying the birth of the Centrino platform.  Believing in such a thing back then was silly, notebooks were far inferior to desktops in every aspect.  Their displays were horrible, portability wasn’t that great, performance was poor and they were hardly flexible.As time went on, the gap between notebook and desktop performance began to shrink.  Intel first addressed it with CPUs, building the Centrino platform and eventually all of its desktop CPUs off of the same basic architecture that it used in its mobile cores.  These days you can get nearly top binned processor frequencies in a notebook just as easily as you can in a desktop.As Intel made headway in the CPU space, ATI and NVIDIA pushed further with mobile GPUs.  Quite possibly the biggest gap continues to exist between desktop and mobile GPU performance but given the right form factor, you can actually play modern games on a notebook without giving up too much.  And if you’re playing titles that are a generation or two old, a reasonable mobile GPU is well suited for the job.LCDs also improved in quality and technology, today’s LED backlit panels offer good viewing angles, fast response times and a slim enough profile to be used in some very stylish implementations.The final separation between desktop and notebook performance was always the disk drive and as of the past year or so, we’ve seen that divide narrow.  Solid State Drives are small enough to fit in a 2.5”  drive bay and offer the same performance as you’d get in a larger machine; Intel’s 2.5” SSD is easily as fast if not faster than the best 3.5” HDDs you get in a desktop PC, and with the advent of the SSD the final bricks of separation between notebook and desktop performance came crumbling down.Going forward I expect to see the difference between a desktop and a notebook diminish.  Apple touched on something very interesting with its new LED Cinema Display; the monitor has a built in power adapter for Apple’s notebooks.  As the line between the notebook and desktop gets blurrier I’d expect to see more situations like this, where your desktop is simply defined by the monitor you plug your notebook into when you’re at your desk.  It’s also possible using PCI Express cabling, to have your GPUs stored outside of your machine, perhaps in the base of your monitor, to improve gaming performance while docked in desktop mode.The possibilities are limitless but I suspect that this notebook vs. desktop debate will fade away and a new discussion will form over the next few years.  At that point we’ll be debating MID (Mobile Internet Device) or PC...

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

The Evolving Face of Performance
Posted in Gamer PC | November 12, 2008 8am

Whenever Intel releases a new CPU I always get asked the same question: why would I need anything faster?  The answer I’ve been giving over the past few years is to look at much of science fiction to understand why we need faster CPUs and faster PCs in general.  The sorts of interfaces you see in movies like Minority Report, or the portability and usability of computing devices from the Star Trek world are all grounded in reality - we just need the algorithms and the processing power to enable them.  Because we haven’t hit the holy grail of computing, we must continue to push for higher performance.  While the latest Core i7 processors may not make checking your email any faster, the sort of performance increases they offer is necessary to continue the upward trend of improving overall PC performance to eventually enable the usage models and applications of the future.  I remember hearing people argue that CPU performance had gotten out of control in the Pentium III days and that we didn’t need anymore; the fact of the matter is that without the CPUs we’ve had since then, things like YouTube would have never been possible.  I will concede however that somewhere along the line PCs got fast enough where a new performance category emerged: fast enough.  The line between PC and consumer electronics device is quickly blurring, and we’re getting to the point where you want devices that have historically been dumb to have a little bit of intelligence.  Accessing web content on your TV or pulling up recipes on your fridge all require some amount of processing power, just not the same as running Fallout 3 on your PC.  These fast enough PCs highlight an important shift in how we evaluate performance of our computing devices; we need to look at both raw performance as well as user experience.  Raw performance of CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, memory and storage devices is great data for determining what components should go in the first category of computers - the ones pushing the edge of performance and enabling new applications. Evaluating performance by looking at the user experience enabled by the hardware however, that matters more to the fast enough category of PC hardware.The iPhone is the perfect example, no one ever dared benchmark the device because doing so would simply point out that its hardware was tremendously limited.  In my review of the first iPhone I complained that it needed faster hardware, but that the only reason I even brought that up was because Apple had fixed the user experience to the point where that I felt like the iPhone could actually be limited by its raw performance.Apple managed to fix issues with the interface on a smartphone not feeling fast, or looking smooth or generally being modern.  The user experience saw the biggest impact in performance, yet the raw hardware itself was unbelievably slow.  The same is true for devices based on Intel’s Atom hardware; the platform is fast enough to do a lot, what’s lacking are the improvements in ergonomics, industrial design, battery life and user interfaces to make these things truly perform well.  The performance metric here isn’t how fast the CPU is or how many frames per second it can render, but rather whether or not these devices, be them smartphones, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), Tablet PCs or netbooks are useful.And fundamentally, while I believe that Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have done tremendous jobs of pushing the limits in conventional performance benchmarks, I believe the rest of the industries, both PC and CE, have failed them in properly taking advantage of the horsepower and delivering devices that perform well from a usage standpoint.What about you all?  Have any devices that you believe not only perform well in the conventional sense but also do so in the user experience sense?
I’d love to hear about them, regardless of whether they are DivX/x264 players, NAS devices, MIDs or GPSes - they are the rarity in our industry today and that has got to change.

NOTEBOOK PC PC : DISCUSSION

Input Devices: The Era of Touch
Posted in Notebook PC | November 19, 2008 10am

While processing power will continue to grow over the coming years there are two areas that I expect our industry to make significant strides in: display and input technology.  The last major revolution in display technology that we’ve been fortunate to have was the move to LCDs and going forward it appears that within the next 5 years  we’ll have some very impressive 3D displays brought into our homes.   I’ll save that discussion for another day however, today I’d like to talk about input devices.The iPhone showed us what could be done with touch on a relatively affordable consumer device, and that’s just the beginning.  In terms of size, the iPhone’s multi-touch interface is highly efficient.  What you can do with such a compact touchscreen is actually quite impressive, it’s a more useful interface than larger 5” displays on a Mobile Internet Device thanks to the software design and the touch interface itself.Imagine for a moment what would happen if you were able to maintain the same interface efficiency but on a slightly larger device.  What I’m envisioning here is the Star Trek tablet, something with a 5 - 7”  screen, ultra thin, with a touch interface that changes depending on the context.  A big iPhone if you will.  This is the type of device we need, not a bulky MID running Windows XP.There are many hardware improvements that need to happen before we get there but that’s the longterm vision of touch.  In the shorter term we’ll see touch used in Windows 7 and perhaps even Apple’s Snow Leopard, both due out in the second half of 2009.  I was talking to some friends last week about how we’d see touch implemented on the desktop, I don’t believe it’ll necessarily be a move to touchscreen displays although I’m betting we’ll see more touchscreen devices, instead I’m guessing we’ll see larger trackpads being used as the enabling tool for touch interfaces on notebooks and desktops.It wouldn’t be hard to integrate a large trackpad on a desktop keyboard with enough room to perform the sorts of gestures that would actually be useful (e.g. pinching, stretching, flipping).  Given the rapid move to notebooks in the market, the trackpad being the vessel for implementing touch just makes sense to me.I’m guessing we’re only a handful of years away from some of the user interfaces we’ve seen only in science fiction coming to light.I wrote that the iPhone’s interface felt like it was made in 2007, I wonder how long it’ll be before I can say the same about desktop PC interfaces...