ShaneBaxtor.com

Over the past 7 years in the I.T. industry I’ve seen a lot; the coming and going of brands, swings in brand loyalties, and bad batches of products. Having to deal with product issues and warranties is part of the job but gives you an acute perspective of certain brands and products. Now not all brands or products are perfect however we have culled our range to reflect the brands and products that we have the least amount of issues with.

At iBuyPower Australia and PC Maniacs you will only see a small amount of brands; and most of the time you’ll find only a handful of the company’s product inside those categories as well. There are a few reasons for this, as mentioned above known issues with a brand or product make me wary of listing them. My businesses tend to cater for the mid-range to high-end user so it’s pointless for us to list many of the low-end items.

For arguments sake I’ll use AMD CPUs as an example. Right now we don’t sell anything AMD CPU related be it the CPU themselves or motherboards that support them; this is simply because Intel offers such a good deal on performance and price. I have absolutely nothing against AMD, I think their products are fantastic, however Intel have a better product in just about every way.

It hasn’t always been like this; once upon a time it was the other way around; back in the AMD Athlon64 days it was very hard to sell or recommend Intel CPUs as AMD had the upper hand for a good 2 years or so. These brand swings in performance/price have always been there and will always continue to occur, it’s these changes that affect the trends of our buyers and in turn effect the products we list and stock.

This swing is more common in the video card arena, with AMD/ATI and NVIDIA battling it out for the crown on a regular basis. Sometimes this crown changes between the two on a monthly basis, more often than not it’s a 3-6 month cycle. NVIDIA held the crown for most of last year with the GTX 285/295 but this changed in October of last year with the introduction of ATI’s HD5870 and shortly after the HD5970.

Shortly after this introduction most GTX 200 cards from NVIDIA dried up so I de-listed them on my websites. Both GTX 200 and HD 5000 series are great products but if we can’t get stock of GTX 200 cards then it is pointless to list them; with mid-range to high end user being our business this means that the categories are flooded with ATI based video cards only. This may change with the release of NVIDIAs GTX 470 and GTX 480 cards slated for (possibly) late March, only time will tell on this one.

Surprisingly I don’t get many emails asking for certain brands or products that aren’t listed on my websites. I’m quite OK with this as it shows that customers who want a certain brand or product that I don’t sell are already buying it from another reseller or understand that I only list quality components and chosen to purchase one of my listed brands, either way I don’t have to deal with any possible warranty or product issues from a brand we don’t feel comfortable selling.

There’s a reason I list the brands I list on my websites and it’s not because of some dislike for a company but a combination of quality, supply, warranty turn around and more. Computers just aren’t a job to me but a hobby and if a brand isn’t good enough for my system I feel it’s not good enough for yours.

About Rex: Rex is our first Featured Blogger on ShaneBaxtor.com and brings with him the knowledge and experience of working in the IT Industry the past 7 years. Owner and operator of two of Australia’s popular e-Tail stores iBuyPower Australia and PC Maniacs he’s able to offer us a perspective that most people don’t hear about.

This is a bit of a weird situation and because of Chinese New Year it’s really hard to find out what is actually going on. The other day I wrote about the NDA papers coming through and the week of date being set for the HD 5830. That’s all good and well; we’ve been told our ATI sample of the HD 5830 was shipping Friday or Monday so I’ll have one with plenty of time to spare.

I always have at least another model at launch from one of ATIs partners, it seems that AIBs have been told not to ship retail samples out though. I was also told that they were told not to ship to their distributors yet.

Tracking down a second sample of the model just 2 days before CNY holidays was hard, from most companies I was told “We can’t ship due to our factory already shutting down.” Now this I can understand, and with the NDA date looking to be around the 26th companies will be able to come back from CNY and get a sample out in time.

I’m a bit closer with some manufactures then others though, I had a few actually tell me that ATI had told them they can’t ship out to reviewers and one even told me they weren’t allowed to ship to their distributor.

I’m either thinking that ATI don’t want the cards to arrive over CNY and have companies just start selling them since they will have no contact with the Asian companies that shipped them, or there’s not enough product to get around to everyone at the moment which would also come as no surprise with the way HD 5800 series supply has been like since launch.

While you’ll no doubt see a review of the HD 5830 in the final week of February who knows when retail supply will come. It’s possible that reviews of the product are being pushed forward before mass stock is ready just to make sure people see the model before NVIDIA release its 400 series which still doesn’t have a date. NVIDIA aren’t stupid though, they could come back after the CNY holidays and say we’re shipping samples today NDA is March 1st; while doubtful it wouldn’t come as a surprise to some.

The first thing I need you to know is that I’m under NDA when it comes to the HD 5570, in less than 24 hours though you’ll see a review of the model on TweakTown. After testing the card though and having a look at the whole ATI line up from HD 5400 to HD 5900 I’ve come to the conclusion that ATI are the best they’ve ever been.

For starters the companies financials aren’t completely up the creek like they have been over the past few years, more importantly though the company has been fast and aggressive with the HD 5000 series when it came to performance and models.

I’m not going to say they took advantage of the delays from NVIDIA and it’s 400 series because ATI didn’t know that was going to happen, but there’s nothing wrong with some luck. ATI got lucky here, maybe NVIDIA bit off more than they could chew, who knows but the delays have helped ATI plant their feet in the ground and move forward.

Speaking to a few people recently I found myself saying that ATI had the engineers to make good cards but the company on a whole lacked aggression, hunger and synchronization to be a real dominate force. This has been changing over the years and I think this is the first time where we’ve seen the company really coming together.

I look at people like Terry Makedon who heads the Catalyst driver team and not only do you have someone who knows what they’re doing but you have someone who really gives off the feeling that he enjoys his job, you get that feeling that when that new month’s driver gets WHQL approved a smile comes to his face and the rest of the team.

We seem to be seeing great synchronicity from everyone at ATI, everyone talks to everyone, and while someone in one department doesn’t know everything about every piece of technology they have a general idea, they don’t have to fake it, if they don’t know they ask someone else and a response comes quickly.

The most important thing for you to know though is that over the past five months ATI have had it easy on the competition front, what they need to do now over the coming months as NVIDIA open the flood gates is stand strong, offer new features through the Catalyst driver set, increase optimization in popular games and continue to let gamers know that buying a HD 5000 series card was the best decision they made.

What a week it’s been, we’ve heard heaps of little rumours about the HD 5830 and NVIDIA finally let us know what the name of its new series will be. With a couple of NDAs though this weeks samples have been fairly crazy.

Thursday saw the HD 5450 launch and I was ready with the Sapphire HD 5450 and ATI HD 5450 that arrived on Monday. MSI also let us know that the HD 5770 HAWK they sent was going to be under NDA till today so that came in early in the week and went straight to the testbed. This is an absolutely awesome version of the HD 5770, if you’re interested in this series I would highly recommend that you head on over to TweakTown and check out the review here.

Over the weekend the HD 5570 from Sapphire will hit the testbed in time for the NDA early next week, it’ll be interesting to see how this model sits between the HD 5450 and HD 5670. Gigabyte also sent over the new HD 5670 OC which will get a run sometime early next week.

On the RAM front Kingston sent over there new 24GB HyperX kit that was seen at CES last month, we’re still figuring out the best way to test this kit so we can see some advantages from the huge amount of memory on offer. If you’ve got any idea on benchmarks please feel free to leave a comment below.

Last but not least another high speed kit arrived, in this case it was a 4GB kit from G.Skill that is part of the PI Series. Coming in at 2300MHz DDR it’s not the fastest kit to date we’ve tested but it’ll be interesting to see how it performs.

Next week will be interesting, we’ve got a few companies that are hoping to get products ready before Chinese New Year, it will be either really busy or really quite. After that though it should be fairly full on with the HD 5830 launch and NVIDIA GTX 400 series launch in March.

For our Australian readers don’t forget about our competition here sponsored by PC Maniacs and iBuyPower Australia, and for everyone else don’t forget to check out the Global competition made possible by Corsair.

It comes as no surprise that I wake up this morning to word that a new date for the HD 5830 was set, the 18th date, while I feel should be possible for ATI wasn’t going to fly for long due to the fact that it fell straight in the middle of Chinese New Year.

Now if there was a problem; getting a hold of a US ATI representative wasn’t going to be too much trouble but getting any information out of Asia was going to be extremely hard. So what I’m now hearing is the week of the 22nd.

This would pretty much be spot on with what I thought, a release date on the 26th or there about. The most important thing for ATI is that the model comes out before NVIDIA open the flood gates. Chinese New Year starts at the end of next week so there’s not going to be much time for the date to jump around again.

Fingers crossed that this date is locked in internally and we see it before February comes to a close. As always if anything new comes in about this model we’ll keep you updated including NDA papers with a date and time.

In some typical snooping around I’ve managed to get a date on what should be the HD 5830s launch, at the moment I’m currently hearing the 18th of February, there’s no reason why it should take any longer to come out as the issue with the HD 5830 regarding the ASIC was jumped on quickly and didn’t seem to be all that serious.

With that said it’s possible this date could get moved around slightly with it falling in the middle of Chinese New Year, unless companies have samples to ship out by the 12th it’s possible that the date could get pushed back to the 26th or even later due to Chinese New Year falling between the 14th and 21st of February.

The biggest thing for ATI is that the card launches before the new GTX 400 series, if they don’t the green light from the release of the new models is going to be too bright for the HD 5830 to combat and the model will fall in between the middle of GTX 400 series content on websites all over.

As always if anything chances we’ll let you know, if the Feb 18th is true that means that NDA paper work should be showing up soon, once we have that we’ll have a locked in date for the model like we did with the HD 5400 and HD 5500 models.

It seems that the people behind the NVIDIAGeForce twitter account decided to let us know what the two models for the new GeForce series that are due to be released hopefully in March. It seems that many people are slowly showing less and less interest over the series as delays continue to plague the model.

To keep everyone talking about it though we’ve heard that the first two models we’ll see from NVIDIA are the GTX 470 and GTX 480. We’re not sure why NVIDIA has chosen to skip the 300 series name, one person I spoke to from ATI made mention that maybe they’re worried about it sounding like the model is too far away from the HD 5000 series. How much truth this actully holds we’re not sure, we’ll probably never really find out why they skipped the 300 series name, mind you it’s possible that they’re maybe going to release mid range models under that name.

As the weeks go on we’re seeing more and more information come out about the models, of course NVIDIA is giving us the information and it’s all positive for them. We’ll no doubt be making up our own mind when the model arrives in March. We’re sure the models going to be fast but it’s exciting to find out what is on offer that NVIDIA hasn’t told us about.

One NVIDIA partner has said to me that while they haven’t got any official documentation from NVIDIA about the new models they’re pretty sure they’re correct.

As more information becomes available on the model we’ll let you know, what we really want is a solid date for the launch. We probably won’t hear that till March unless the release date is in the first week of March, in the case we’ll hear something closer to the end of February.

Let me start by making a few things clear, the first is that I use Eyefinity technology in my day to day usage, the image you can see above is my desk and that’s three Dell U2410s hooked up to a HD 5970. Second I know that I really gave surround gaming a beating the other day, but the reasons in that post though are why NVIDIA is going to lose the battle.

Today though I’m going to tell you why ATI and the Eyefinity branding is going to lose the war when compared to NVIDIA. Multi Screen technology is the future for computing in many ways, the biggest problem at the moment though is that both companies are spending too much time focusing on the gaming aspects of the technology and not the productivity aspect.

NVIDIA concentrating on the gaming side I can understand, the bottom line is that the way they are implementing Multi Screen Technology is flawed, and the reason it’s flawed is because it was added at the last minute. When NVIDIA discovered the technology in ATIs new HD 5000 series Video Cards it became clear that this is going to be the future, for that reason NVIDIA found a way to offer the same kind of technology, because Fermi was so far along though going back to the drawing board wasn’t going to be an option which meant we were going to see limitations.

Now the information we have from NVIDIA about the Surround Gaming technology is a bit limited at the moment, it does give us most the information we need though and even if a few surprises do pop up it doesn’t look like the technology can beat out Eyefinity.

Eyefinity is fantastic, I use it daily and love every second of it, I moved to my 3x 24″ setup from a single 30″, at one point thought I was using a dual 30″ setup, on a whole that setup just felt kind of stupid, it was massive and when I wanted to game a giant bezel down the middle did nothing for me, so I ended up back at a single 30″ which I thought gave me the desktop real estate I needed.

Towards the end of December thought I got WOWed by Eyefinity, and not in person, of course ATI didn’t let me know of any events where I could see the technology in person, albeit I give them some of the most quotable lines in my reviews which have shown up in their meetings and the fact that I review probably more video cards in a given year than anyone else. We won’t worry about that though. I got WOWed by screen shots and YouTube videos of people playing HAWX, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and more.

Thinking back now I don’t know why I let these videos persuade me because I barely have time for games, the bottom line is these videos and screenshots did persuade me. Since I have more Video Cards then I can poke a stick at getting into Eyefinity was only going to involve the cost of monitors (I don’t really review monitors and asking a company for three of anything is generally hard). When I finally set it up thought, fired up Sims 3 which seems to be the only game I have installed and realized that it looked completely crap at 5760 x 1200 I thought I had made a mistake with the purchase of these monitors.

The holidays came to an end and it was time to get back into work, feeling a bit bummed that I didn’t take full advantage of Eyefinity I was a bit concerned that $2,000AUD had been dropped for no reason. The launch of the HD 5670 changed this though, and in a big way since it was time to get back to work.

I consider myself a bit of a multi tasking master, I run two VNC windows on my machine, one to my server which has my MSN and all those useless programs that you don’t want clogging up your main PC and my laptop which runs my email so when I go away I don’t have to transfer files or that, I shut my laptop down and away I go. I have all past emails on my hand and when I get home I open it up, let it log onto the network and away I go again.

Not only do I have those two windows open all the time but when I’m benchmarking I have an excel spreadsheet for all my TweakTown graphs that takes up a whole monitor, along with that I will have a review or blog post open in word, folders to my main documents open, websites to double check pricing and specifications of models and images of the product I’m reviewing.

The nature of the three monitor setup opened me up to a new world of desktop real estate that I didn’t think existed. With Eyefinity this was done with one card and with ease. Productivity is at a new level, I’m more excited about all the windows I have open on my screen then I ever was about the gaming side of things.

The sad thing is thought that I had to discover this myself, sure ATI put how Eyefinity can expand productivity in between gaming and entertainment but every image you look at is about gaming, it’s Dragon Age on three screens and HAWX on six screens, it’s how this game works at 5760 x 1200 and that one at 7680 x 1600. Talking to editors after Eyefinity events they said, WOW it looks great, but it’s so gimmicky.

It’s true, and when you combine the fact that it’s expensive to get into an EyeFinity gaming setup it’s clear that the market is going to be a niche. You’re not catering to a market that is just gamers, you’re catering for a market that is for gamers who have serious cash to blow.

The focus of Eyefinity needs to change, it needs to be pushed as a tool. It needs to be pushed as something that is going to increase productivity, make multi tasking easier. ATI / AMD need to tell people who multi task that Eyefinity is the end to Alt Tabbing. NVIDIA can’t do this at the moment, they can’t push a technology that is aimed at people who have productivity in mind with a solution that requires two cards, or is resolution limited (We can’t confirm we’re limited to 1920 x 1080, but it’s the feeling we get from the white paper).

I spoke to someone today and they told me, ATI are going to hold an event pushing the productivity with the HD 5870 2GB card. This is the worst thing they could do, you don’t want to show people that you can do Eyefinity with a $500 card and then say it can also be done with a $99 one. People are going to think that clearly there’s going to be something wrong with the $99 solution. ATI / AMD, Manufactures, Wholesalers and Retail Stores need to show people who want productivity a setup of Eyefinity with a $99 card, on a box that costs less than $1000.

Gaming got my attention because I have the luxury of putting a HD 5970 into my own machine for less than it would cost most people to buy a HD 5670. The lack of time I have for games though let me discover what Eyefinity was really about, or at least should be about. A CEO, CFO, Stock Broker, Marketing Manager, Office Manager, e-Tailors and more aren’t going to see gaming though and go that would be great for my office.

I like ATI, I probably like ATI more than NVIDIA, there seems to be a certain attitude that people who work for NVIDIA have, they seem to think that we should bow to them because they are NVIDIA. I don’t hate that though, I understand it, I’m proud that I work for TweakTown, one of the largest Tech Websites in the world, if you tell me you work for JohnsAwsomeHardware.com I would probably have the same attitude.

NVIDIA can have this attitude though because they’re smart, they’re only pushing the gaming side of things at the moment because that’s all they can really offer you, if they promote productivity ATI / AMD would win because of a single card solution, the fact that a wide variety of prices are covered thanks to a huge model line up and more.

I guarantee you when NVIDIA release then generation of Video Cards after Fermi Multi Monitor Technology will be pushed, and it will be pushed to every user, from that person who sells on eBay and has photos, emails, websites and more open at a single time to CEOs of mega corporations where multi tasking is part of their everyday life.

Eyefinity will already have this stigma that it’s for Gaming, NVIDIA won’t have this, at the moment it’s called Surround Gaming, it won’t be called that in the future. When they can offer everyone a single card solution Multi Screen Technology or MST will become a name for the technology, something that doesn’t sound like a technology that only caters to one segment.

Eyefinity is a good name, it doesn’t sound like something that gamers will only use, ATI / AMD though need to change the way the technology is perceived though. Be that via creating an arm off Eyefinity that is something like Eyefinity Production+ or just push more than gaming under the Eyefinity name.

Sure, go to E3, setup Eyefinity with the hottest games, but make yourself present at tradeshows in which companies who could use this technology are, setup in front of the New York Stock Exchange and let brokers know this is the future of buying and selling shares, because you know what? NVIDIA will make sure they don’t miss out on this market.

Eyefinity do better what Matrox has done for years, now when we talk about Eyefinity we say things like “Yeah, Matrox use to do something similar but it wasn’t as good as Eyefinity.” What ATI / AMD need to do is make sure that in twelve months time we’re not saying “Yeah ATI had a similar technology but I love how NVIDIA offer the technology for my office.”

Today I understand that Eyefinity is a fantastic tool for productivity, I only truly understood this after taking the leap on the technology for gaming, something that most people won’t do.

I don’t want people who want to increase the way there business works wait twelve months for NVIDIA to release the same technology and market it better. I’m going to become a one man marketing team for Multi Screen Technology. I have two goals:

One is to make sure that people understand that Eyefinity isn’t just for gaming, this is a technology for anyone who is on a computer hours upon hours a day for work, people who have to Alt+Tab between screens, people who bought 30″ monitors because they needed more desktop real estate.

Second I want ATI to improve the technology, and I want NVIDIA to hit the market hard with it. This setup is going to be more useful then 3D Vision will ever be for NVIDIA.

We need to see more companies offer DisplayPort monitors, more companies offer three and six arm 24″ and 30″ monitor arms, we need manufactures, wholesales and salesman understand the technology so when they get asked a question they can give an answer.

This is a big post, but I have a plan, a goal, an agenda! Over the next few weeks there’s a few things I want to do to help bring this technology to an audience outside of gamers. So keep posted because while ATI / AMD will win this first battle in Multi Screen Technology NVIDIA will win the war because they’re hungry for success.