So I am off tomorrow morning to Georgitsi, a beautiful village in the Taygetos mountain near Sparta. I’ll be heading there with some friends to have a good time, and spend the Easter holidays. So unless excessive amounts of food and alcohol take up all of my time, I plan to do some reading as well; I’ll take Dexter by Design with me, the new novel by Jeff Lindsay, to see what happens when Dexter returns from his honeymoon in Paris 
I return to Athens on Monday, but I don’t plan on sticking around. I’ll probably go to Larissa on Tuesday, and then to Kavala on Thursday to meet up with the gang there. And, of course, on Saturday, 25/04 I’ll be in Thessaloniki. The reason?
Yup, one week after ASOT 400 Armin van Buuren is back in Greece, this time in Thessaloniki and I plan to be there. A night to remember for sure, as only Armin can deliver. My next blog post will probably contain lots of info about that particular event, so until then, I want to wish everyone a happy Orthodox Easter and see you soon!
To be honest, it has been a while since I’ve played any game – mainly due to the fact that I got tired of them. You will of course argue that there have been many titles that deserved my attention the past year, and I fully agree. The only game that actually got some attention was NBA 2k9, and that’s because I could simply play a couple of games, leave it be for a while, and then pick it up again. It was funny, because even thought I was aware of all the new releases, I never actually played any of them; I used them for benchmarking, comparative analysis as far as IQ is concerned, but game playing? Nope. Even after I got myself lots of free time, I couldn’t find myself willing to install a game, and just play. Hence, I watched all 7 seasons of 24 in about 20 days (but that’s a different story altogether 
)
Well, a week ago I decided that this was going to change. I spoke to a dear friend of mine (and Catalyst beta tester) that I know is a game-a-holic, and asked him for suggestions. He recommended several titles, and I thought I should start with Wanted – Weapons of Fate. It seemed like a good choice, so I started playing, and I quite enjoyed it I must say. But then one day, I was browsing the Rage3D PC Gaming section, and one game was getting rave reviews : Braid. So I said, what the heck, I’ll try that one too, see if it’s any good. So I got it from Steam, and started playing. It was only when I looked at my watch and realised that 5 hours had passed, and it was 6am, that I knew this one was a true keeper.
For those of you not in the know, Braid is a platform/puzzle game. With a twist: you manipulate time. And that exact manipulation is what makes the puzzles brilliant, you have to manipulate things to your advantage, so that you can get all the map puzzle pieces. While you progress, you encounter even more complex puzzles, more time-manipulation variables (I am on World 4 right now, and when i go right, time goes by normally, when I jump, time freezes and when I go left, time rewinds; crazy ). Its graphics are excellent (you really need to see it in motion to appreciate it), and the music is also very atmospheric. Definitely one of the sleeper hits of the year, it’s getting rave reviews everywhere. So check it out and you will definitely get hooked, just like I am right now 
As many of you know, I haven’t been a part of AMD PR for the past three months. The economic crisis that hit out industry took a toll in my (former) company as well, and many capable people were left without a job. So these three months served as a much-needed break from all this; after all, when your beloved subject becomes your job 24/7, sometimes you need to step back away from it all in order to fully appreciate it again. So, apart from some posts in Rage3D’s Off Topic, I stayed away from everything, on purpose.
Well, that’s about to change. I intend to start writing again, just don’t know whether it will be for a magazine, website or just post thoughts in this blog, which I have neglected the past two years. We’ll see. I do want to write a piece about the current state of the graphics card industry, so that’ll probably appear here first, and we will see where that takes me.
So all I wanted to say is that, I am back, and intend to be back :) I also updated the blog theme again, so bear with me while I customize it to my heart’s content as usual.
After quite a while, I decided to ditch the old blog template - I like this one much better. Of course it's still largely uncustomized, so I'll update it in the following days.
... and yes, I'll try to update more often :D
So, with the cat (or should I say Spider) out of the bag, here are my impressions of the whole thing. I believe that, what AMD presented in Warsaw is the beginning of a new way of thinking for many consumers. These days, believe it or not, consumers buy products based not how much performance they'll get for their €. Meaning, they decide that they have, let's say €500 to spend, and then see what's out there that can give them more performance.
Let's start from the foundation of the whole thing: the motherboard. AMD's 790FX is probably one of the best motherboards out there, bar none. It's definitely feature-packed, and it has support for several technologies that are to become mainstream soon, like PCI-e 2.0. But, the beauty of it, lies in its backwards-compatibility. So let's just say that you have an Athlon64 X2 right now, and you want to upgrade to the latest and greatest. You also don't have the money right now to get both a new CPU and a motherboard. What you do? Easy. You get a new AMD 790FX mobo, and you breath new life into your Athlon64. Better yet, initial testing show that this particular combination makes the Athlon64 overclock to heaven and back, with some impressive results hitting the net. Couple that with AMD Overclock, which is an excellent tool that will allow you to play and tweak at your heart's content, and the combination is surely promising, to say the least. Plus, if you don't want to invest in a Phenom right now, and would rather wait until AMD releases a higher-clocked version, you can.
Second thing, is the processor. The Phenom is the very first true quad-core processor out there, and many were disappointed with its initial clock speeds. But, I say, just look at the big picture. Did you actually see the prices these chips were released at? Affordable quad-core for everyone - plus, together with the 790FX you have some exciting stuff like un-ganging the memory, and so on and so forth. You probably saw in the various reviews around the net that memory performance was lacking - well, the truth is that several benchmarks don't actually recognise the Phenom's new architecture, and they think they're dealing with an old Athlon. Hence the low results. As for overclockability, I can only speak for the 2.4GHz Phenoms we had in Warsaw - each of them reached 2.8GHz easily, so I doubt that would be a problem.
Last but not least, the HD3850/HD3870. It's a midrange attack from AMD - these chips are cheap to produce, consume very little power and their performance/€ ratio is excellent. Plus, you get scalable Crossfire configuration with one to four cards (in the FX mobos). We had Crossfire X systems on show, which are working already, and the drivers should be released when the new year arrives. A special surprise was on show too, with a system running HD3870 X2 cards in Crossfire, showing how scalable this architecture really is.
But let's get back to the Spider platform. The beauty of it is that these three components actually work together. Meaning you actually see performance advantages by pairing all three together. It's the first release of its kind, and I didn't see many reviews on the net stretching that fact. I believe when reviewers have more time on their hands with the new platform, they will appreciate its advantages. I will post some benchmarks and impressions too as soon as I get a Spider system here to play with.
You can find all the crappy pics I took here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kombatant/SpiderLaunchWarsaw2007
%5B21%5D.jpg "Braid: World 4 screenshot")
