Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Well Spore has finally arrived after so many delays and seems to be receiving some mixed responses, though on average they do seem to be positive.

It looks like it could be a love it or hate it sort of game. A lot of gamers are criticising it for being repetitive and shallow. This appears to stem from the fact that the game covers 5 gaming genres over 5 stages. This has led to each section being implemented in a somewhat shallow manor compared to its fully fledged counterparts. However fans are praising it saying it is not a hardcore RTS but a great sandbox game appealing to the masses. Also the game should be viewed a whole rather as 5 individual games.

I have had chance to play it for an hour or so and I personally quite like it. I have found that I hardly game any more as I don’t have time and I just can not be bothered concentrating enough for complex RTS games or games where I actually need to follow the story line. With Spore I can load it up eat a few creature and evolve a little in whatever spare time I can find and just generally kill time.

Unfortunately I do have a serious issue with Spore which I think could massively effect its popularity. EA in their great wisdom have decided to use a modified version of the oh so popular and controversial SecuROM DRM software which will require authentication upon installation and when online access is used, it will also be limited to three installations. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all up for a company having some DRM on their software, after all they have spent millions developing it and I can imagine it is quite annoying when everyone copies it, however limiting the number of installations to 3 is criminal in my opinion. I personally re-install windows at least once a year because all the crap I have on it slows it down, my Girlfriend has a smaller brother and sister and they must of re-installed the Sims 20+ times because the computer can barely last a month before some of the crap they download slows it down.

Once 3 installations have been used the game will become un-playable and EA must be contacted to have the count reset. Now call me a pessimist but this sounds like it will cause no end of headaches. From my experience customer support centres have a tendency to be occupied by people no more intelligent than chimps. I will also bet any money that the customer support phone number will not be free-phone.

So OK what did EA expect to achieve with this copy protection? I am assuming they are trying to stop millions of people downloading the game via BitTorrent. Have they succeeded? Erm no, I read reports of it being available on Wednesday 2 days before the UK release. This included a keygen and crack. So well done EA you did a good job of stopping that.

Personally I think they best method of stopping piracy is to offer more than just single player offline gaming. I realise this is not always possible for games, but if online gaming is available and requires an original copy then I feel that most people are happy to fork out the money. The best example is Call of Duty 4. I think I paid about £30 for it and I have had hours of fun with it, easily making it worth its money.

Anyway even though I think EA are stupid for using this DRM I still bought it and I will still enjoy it!

Scan’s Great White, as shown to the left, has won the coveted Custom PC Dream PC 2008 award, beating competition from HP and Armari. Armari’s machine technically wasn’t fully entered, as the magazine chose not to fully review it since the submitted computer was a prototype not available for mass production.

Custom PC has had a Dream PC competition dating back to 2004. Previous winners include SavRow in 2004 (for a water-cooled machine featuring a single core Athlon64 and GeForce 6800 Ultra, a spec that cost several thousand pounds at the time and would be outgunned by a £500 laptop today), Armari in 2005 and Vadim in 2006. Scan’s back-to-back wins in 2007 and 2008 make the firm the first supplier to win twice.

Scan’s beast is based around the following spec:

• Silverstone TJ07 super tower case, finished with extensive chrome plating and laser-etched Great White logo. Various sections of the case are lit with white LEDs to give it a slightly more upmarket feel.
• nVidia 790i SLI motherboard
• 1kW Corsair PSU
• 3 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Extensive, custom-manufactured water cooling equipment from Aqua Computer and Alphacool
• Core 2 Quad Q9650 - overclocked to 4.4GHz from its stock 3GHz speed
• 2×2Gb Corsair Dominator DDR3
• 3 XTX GTX 280 graphics cards with 1Gb of GDDR3 RAM each, GPU clocked at 670MHz and RAM at 2500MHz
• 64Gb OCZ SSD - 2.5″ device with 143MB/sec read and 93MB/sec write
• Panasonic slot-loading DVD writer
• Panasonic slot-loading Blu Ray writer as well
• X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty sound card
• KillerNIC M1 network interface card with 400Mhz processor
• Vista Ultimate 64bit
• 24″ Zalman 3D monitor

How does it perform? In a word, fast. Custom PC unfortunately don’t provide extensive benchmark results but they claim to have seen it perform their standard video encoding benchmark to within a couple of points of an overclocked Skulltrail rig.

Price? That’s the tricky part. If you want the best, you can’t compromise - and that means paying Scan a total of £11,162.49 inc VAT. Reckon you could build better for less? What would you change? Leave your comments and let us know.

Microsoft have been having a lot of problems recently with its live service however it has not stopped them selling a whole load of 360s during the Christmas break.

Apparantly the company has shipped 17.7 Million Xbox 360 Consoles since its launch 2 years ago. On September 30 the figure was apparently at 13.4 million meaning they have sold over 4.3 millions units from October onwards. Pretty impressive really.

Ok so the details are a bit thin on the ground and the pictures are a little uninspiring as the unit is not branded. However some basic details on the new 9800 GX2 have been leaked.

This new NVIDIA graphics card is essentially a 8800 GPU using the 65nm Fab Process and in SLI on a single card. This will make it similar to the old 7950 GX2 and may support Quad SLI.

The Geforce 9800 GX2 will include:

1GB Frame Buffer

Two PCBs

Two 65nm GPUs

256 Stream Processors.

This information was from [H}enthusiast and they believe it to be trustworthy.

We previously announced that nVidia was about to launch the new 8800 GTS 512Mb after nVidia accidentally added it to there product page. As of today nVidia has officially launched the card. As with the new 8800 GT this card is this card is based on the G92 architecture which uses a 65nm fabrication process.

nVidia has been making a bit of a mess with its naming conventions as the performance of each set of cards can vary wildly. The 8800 GTS is possibly the main suspect, there are currently 3 varieties out already. 2 using 96 stream processors with 320 and 640 MB respectively and 1 with 112 stream processors with 640 MB. The 96 Stream processor 8800 GTS had 1600MHz (effective) memory clock with 64GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The new 8800 GTS which uses 256-bit memory interface, hence 512MB, uses a 1940MHz (effective) memory clock with a memory bandwidth of 62.08GB/sec.

The old 8800 GTS had 6 shader clusters each featuring 16 stream processors, 4 texture address units and 8 texture filtering units adding up to 96 stream processors, 24 texture units for addressing and 48 for filtering.

The new 8800 GTS has 8 shaders, 16 stream processors, and 8 units for both texture addressing and texture filtering. This results in more shader and texturing power than the 8800 Ultra. Putting it simply the card is quite a bit cheaper than a 8800 Ultra but should manage to compete in terms of performance (with memory bandwidth limiting performance slightly).

Bit Tech have had chance to do a review of some of the new units with some excellent results. If you are really interested in the performance of these cards I would recommend you read their review.

Some of the main findings from the review included that the card had less power usage than the 8800 GTS 320MB while idle and slight higher under load. This is mainly due to the new 65nm process.

Overall the performance was very similar to the GeForce 8800 GTX while managing to be quite a bit cheaper than the GTX. The GTS should retail for about £220 inc VAT with the GTX being around the £280 mark.

If you are using a large monitor 1920×1200+ and your budget handles it, it is still recommended to use the 8800 Gtx or Ultra due to their increased memory bandwidth.

Ok so this is not really a professional review of the Zotac Card, I do not currently have all the software to perform a proper benchmark and I my main computer is a 4400 X2 (939) with 2Gig DDR memory. I assume if I did perform any benchmarking tests the CPU and Ram would be the week link lowing the scores. So this is more a post of subjective personal opinion rather than a impartial objective review.

Anyway, they other week I decided my twin 7800GTs were getting a little old and not providing the performance I would like in my computer. I was seriously considering just building an entire new system, but its close to Christmas so spare cash is short.

After the release of the new 8800GTs based on the new and fancy 65nm process (read more on Fabrication Process here) and the superb results it was achieving I decided to fork out for one. The idea was the small (ish) investment would prolong the life of my system until mid next year or so allowing me to save up and get a very high end system.

I have to be honest I have never really heard much about Zotac before, but from what I gather they are quite new to the market and they are a subsidiary of PC Partner who are also the people behind Sapphire. My choice in buying the Zotac was purely from a financial perspective, the company I own, Dolphin Promotions, is VAT registered, normally all my computer purchases are claimed back from the nice VAT man but I decided buy through Pixmania Pro, whom on proof of VAT registration will not charge the VAT. Yeay for me. To be honest I think the final price only saved a little over a normal 8800GT but the Zotac is clocked higher than the reference cards so I was hoping to squeeze a little more out of it.

The card arrived very fast, thanks Pixmania. Unfortunately my new Benq 24″ Monitor had not arrived, no thanks there Pixmania it was in stock when I ordered but took 2 weeks to arrive. Anyway I was restricted to a 19″ Acer monitor initially. Installation was simple though I used the latest drivers from NVidia rather than the Zotac supplied ones. One of the first things I did was install the demo of Crysis. I had previously installed it but my 7800s just could not cope, even at low settings, I expect with some messing about they would of just about coped.

Crysis immediately set the optimal settings to medium, while I can not provide FPS details the game ran very smoothly and I was very happy, Crysis really is a beautiful game.

Since then I have installed Windows Vista, Hell Gate London, Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2: The Orange Box and the full version of Crysis. What’s the point of having a 8800GT if you don’t have any decent games eh?

Vista set my system performance to 5.0 with the Ram being the weak link, the Graphics had 5.9. The system ran all the games perfectly on High settings so I am very pleased so far. I have since also received my 24£ Benq, while I have not had much time for gaming on it I tried out Crysis. I have only set it to 1680×1050 at medium settings so far, from what I have heard most systems struggle with Crysis at 1920×1200. The game ran perfectly smoothly at these settings and I am hoping I will be able to push it a little further.

Overall I am very happy with the Zotac, for the price it has more than met my expectations. If you would like a bit of a technical review Bit Tech has a review of the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OC, this is slightly slower than the Zotac but should provide similar performance levels. PC Labs has a Crysis benchmark with a combination of cards including the Zotac 8800GT Amp Edition (Mine was the standard edition). The PC Labs Benchmark is a Turkish to English translation and only uses 1024×768 resolution, but it is still a good review.

Well this morning I started work to find an email off Pixmania saying my Zotac GeForce 8800 GT had been dispatched. Rather annoyingly they said my new 24" BenQ G2400W was waiting to be delivered. It was in stock when I ordered it so I am a bit annoyed!

Anyway UPS have just delivered the 8800GT so I will be happy for a little while. I can’t say I have really heard much of Zotac before, however DriverHeaven.Net gave it a good review and it is an overclocked 8800GT running at 660MHz Core,1800 MHz Memory Clock and 1600 MHz Shader.

In comparison the Nvidia reference cards run at 600, 1800MHz and 1500MHz. So there should be a bit of a performance tweak over the reference cards.

In fact Bit Tech just reviews the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB which uses 625MHz core and 1,566MHz Shader. So a tad slower than the Zotec. There opinion was

We still continue to be impressed by Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT and in the grand scheme of things, and BFGTech’s overclocked card continues that trend.

On the whole, BFGTech’s GeForce 8800 GT OC card delivers and it earns a recommendation from us.

Hopefully I won’t be disappointed!!!

I think it was only the other week when ASDA screwed up and had bottles of beer available for 1p. This time is the turn of Tesco, they have been accidentally offering Xbox 360 consoles online for just £33.24.

The pricing slip-up would have meant a giant saving for customers, as the Xbox package was meant to cost ten times as much.

Sharp-eyed shoppers were quick to spot the bargain on the supermarket giant’s website. At least one customer ordered 39 of the knock-down consoles online and had the payment accepted - but they have not been delivered.

The deal offered the Xbox 360, the Forza Motorsport 2 and Viva Pinata games plus a wireless control pad.

According to Trading standard it is illegal to raise the price of a product if the customer has already had their offer accepted. However the Tesco website says if they make a mistake with the price, they are not obliged to stick to it. It is not clear if Tesco will honour the order however the Asda mistake mentioned above was apparently not honoured.