I am sitting at the AMD “Zambezi” reviewer day event now at the company’s Austin office. Finally some real answers to some real questions. So far what I am seeing and hearing seems to be quite promising, but unfortunately, I am bound by the code of silence until approximately mid October, when the NDA expires. :)
I sincerely hope that there won’t be any unplanned delays and everything goes as planned. Because if it does, there will be some really great options to choose from. Think about getting an unlocked 8-core processor with all the bells and whistles on the feature and functionality side, but for a very, VERY, low price!

Once the technical and the marketing presentations are over we are in for a real treat: some extreme overclocking fun with liquid nitrogen. I will see if I can sneak out a photo later.

Where do I start? I know it’s been a while since I last wrote anything in my personal blog. A lot has happened since then, mostly good stuff. I have two beautiful kiddos, traded sunny California for just as sunny Texas, discovered a new hobby that I am really passionate about. One thing hasn’t changed though: I am still fully dedicated to X-bit labs and so are my colleagues in the USA, Europe and Russia. The site has been around for 11 years now. We survived the economic meltdown and continue to deliver our signature in-depth content to almost 2 million readers worldwide. When I think about it, it is, in fact, pretty awesome…

I know that the info in the About Us section is in desperate need of an update, and I will hopefully get to that very soon. We have a few great new editors on our team, whom I will introduce to you shortly. And if you like to know more about us, do not hesitate to ask. I will try to put more faces to the names on our site, so that you could see that despite heavy technical stuff that we write about, we are, in fact, a lot of fun, too.

That said let me start with a little personal update. As I already mentioned, I have two beautiful children (compliments are in order :)). My little boy named Nikita is now 3 years old and my princess-girl, Elizabeth, is 17 months. They express a lot of interest in computers (which is probably in their genes) and definitely are of great help when it comes to drop-testing the components.

I now live in a small town of Round Rock, TX in Austin area, don’t mind the humidity (which I barely feel, frankly speaking) and absolutely love the thunderstorms and Texas BBQ.

So, this is a brief recap of all significant, even life-changing things (to some extent) that happened over the past few years. I will continue to post updates and share some cool things with you in my blog, so don’t go too far. And in the meanwhile I need to take a group picture of 8(!) Asus mainboards that arrived in our lab recently. What does it mean? Well, there are going to be a lot of Asus product reviews on our site very shortly :)

What an ugly weather we got for the New Year ’s Eve this time! I went to the Big Bear resort, where my friends have rented out a big 6-bedroom house. We did it last year, but the house we had then was too far away from the skiing, so we made it there only once. This time, we were just 5 minutes away from the slopes and were really excited about getting some snow-fun. But, the mother-nature didn’t feel like pleasing us whatsoever. It has been raining for 4 days running, and the winds were so bad, that quite a few trees and power poles went down. And the snow? Well, 6-inches of the greatest snow they had so far were reported the day we got back home, that is today. What a frustration!

However, despite bad weather we had a terrific New Year celebration. Over 30 friends came to our party, we had food, drinks, barbeque chicken, lamb and pork kabobs, music, the Santa Claus and Snow Maiden with gift and jokes, and a lot of fun. I will have some crazy party pictures for you later, when I get back from CES.

However, I cannot accept a winter with no snow. So, now I am considering a trip to Tahoe, so that I could finally get some skiing…

I would like to congratulate everyone with the New Year! May all your wishes come true and may this year 2006 be the happiest and luckiest year for you from all standpoints.

I am resuming my Blog after a pretty significant pause. I hope nothing will prevent me from writing something interesting for you any more. :)

So, stay tuned for more news and funny stories.

Merry Christmas!

On behakf of X-bit labs team I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas. Have fun, be good and thank you all for being our friends and readers. :)

Happy Thanksgiving! I recieved this greetings moving froma  couple of friends of mince, it is simply hillarious. If you haven't seen it, you have to do it now: click here to check it out.

After that, we decided to give up the traditional turkey and made a roast duck. It was so good! :)

Happy Halloween!

What a wild night it was :) I don't think I have to describe how crazy can people go on Halloween. The picture below speaks for itself:

Did you do anytyhing crazy?

Guys, I have something really exciting going on here: I am going to be playing paintball for the first time in my life tomorrow. I have to confess that I am a pretty good shot (I am not very modest, I know that :) I sometimes go to a shooting range and my favorite is a compact GLOCK 19 (Caliber 9x19mm).

Anyway, tomorrow my friends are planning to go to a paintball park somewhere to the north of LA, and I am really excited to go. Now that look at the box of paintballs in the corner of my room, I started wondering: does it really hurt when they hit you with this? These paintballs feel very hard to the touch. In fact I heard multiple stories: some say it hurts bad, and you get bruises all over you after a game like that, the others say it is not that bad at all. Ok, looks like we’ll see tomorrow. We are leaving at 7:30 in the morning, and I still have to get something to wear (I assume the clothes will be ruined completely after the game). Anyway, none of my girlfriends agreed to go: it already means I am going to be involved in some REAL action. I like that :)

So, if I don’t check in with you tomorrow, then… then don’t worry about me: it simply means I had terrific time and I am taking some time off the computer to rest :)

Well, well, it is Sunday night, and I decided to take a look at the exciting stuff we will have ready for you next week. Want some details? Here you go.

Tomorrow, we are going to offer you a roundup of six system cases from Thermaltake. I am a happy owner of the Thermaltake Tsunami Dream (we have already reviewed this baby some time ago, you can check out our article called Thermaltake Tsunami Dream PC Case Review), but this time we will introduce to you five other solutions. I’ve seen these guys: believe me you are going to love them too :)

After a busy Monday we are planning to talk a little bit about the situation in the memory market. I am going to finally post my monthly Memory Market Overview (it took me so much longer this time, sorry about that). The beginning of back-to-school season has definitely told on the memory market, so check out the overview.

In the middle of the week we will offer you a detailed review of the PowerColor Bravo X700 graphics card, which is equipped with a fanless cooling solution and is claimed to be very overclockable.

And finally we will make sure you have something exciting to read over the weekend. So, stay tuned for an exclusive review of a dual-core AMD processor in a dual-processor workstation.

Have a great week!

I have just talked with my younger brother. He is in Moscow, but one of his friends was in New Orleans when Katrina hit the city. His friend is OK now, but stories he was telling my brother over the phone are shocking. Here is what he told:

"It is insane! I couldn’t even imagine things could turn that bad. When the authorities announced mandatory evacuations, most residents didn’t pay any attention as usual. If they had evacuated every time there is a hurricane, they would have to go away at least five times a year. Usually, people evacuate from small towns, because most of the private homes, about 90%, here in the South are made of plywood, carton and plastic. The strongest part is the stairs, the rest of the house can be driven through easily. So, these homes usually get blown away when hurricanes hit. The buildings in New Orleans are much more solid: stone and concrete. People usually didn’t evacuate from them in case of hurricane alert. They got a lot of water, food and bear and stayed in watching the News or National Geographic channel. They started warning the people only 24 hours before the storm that it is not going to be the same this time. Everybody finally realized that it was going to be REAL bad. And then things just got out of control. Total chaos everywhere! Like in the “Mars Attacks” movie. All highways were jammed. It took a friend of mine 10 hours to get out of the city. And if you didn’t have a car, you could simply forget about getting out of there. No public transportation was available, so about one forth of the citizens stayed in town. Most of them were poor African American people, they simply had no where to go.

I spent four days on the roof of the house. There were other people on their roofs around all this time, but no one came for us all these days. We saw a rescue helicopter once, the guys shouted something in the loudspeaker and went away. The worst things started happening when some of the people ran out of drinking water. They got hysterical, were running around the roofs, screaming that they were dying from dehydration. I tried to calm some of them down (those closer to my house) by teaching them how to distil water steam and a few other tricks that could help them make some water they could drink: no luck. I had the impression that if the rescue operations didn’t start soon, people would simply go nuts out there. But no one showed up to help.

Having realized no one was going to come for us, I decided to try and make it out of there on my own. I searched through the junk in the loft, found a children’s swimming-pool, inflated it, wrapped up my passport, laptop and some clothes into a couple of trash bags and took off. After a while I saw a US army amphibian. I started screaming to attract their attention and they took me onboard, but only after I opened the trash bags to prove that I was not a marauder. They gave me a bottle of water and said that the massive rescue operations with military presence should start tomorrow. Kind of late, ha?

What can I say? The screenplay writer of the “Hard Rain” movie was a Nostradamus: it was all just like in that movie, only worse…”

We all pray for those who got caught in the disaster…

No, no, I haven’t given up the tradition of revealing our review plans for the coming week. Today is Monday and I would like to share our plans for the nearest future with you. We really have a lot coming.

In just a few moments I will finish reading and put up a review of four CPU air coolers from Thermaltake Company. We are going to look at Big Typhoon, Silent Tower, PIPE101 Rev.2 and Sonic Tower solutions. Check it out later today.

Tomorrow there should be a review of new DDR2 memory modules from Crucial that are capable of overcoming the 1GHz speed threshold. We will be telling you about the features and performance of Crucial Ballistix PC2-8000 memory compared with the rivalry products from OCZ, Corsair and Mushkin.

In the middle of the week we will continue looking at the most interesting air cooling solutions in the today’s market. Not so long ago we introduced to you a revolutionary Zalman CNPS9500 LED cooler with unique heatpipe design. This time it is going to compete against a few powerful rivals from Thermaltake and Titan. Don’t try to guess which one is going to be the winner. Just check out the article when it comes out :)

And of course, we would be proud and happy to finally offer you the so long awaited Mega review of 17 contemporary GPUs tested in 30 different games and synthetic applications. This is something you can not miss. Almost a month of testing and days of analytical work resulted into this monstrous article, which should be your guide in the graphics market for at least another half a year (this is when the next Mega review like that is going to be posted).

So, these are just a few highlights of the coming week. Of course, there will be more than that!

Congratulations to all of you on the first day of the Fall! :)

In Russia we have a holiday on this day: we celebrate the beginning of the Back-to-School season. It is not an official day-off though, on the contrary, this is the first school day for the entire country. Here in the US school starts at different times: sometimes, it may start in late August, sometimes in mid September, it depends on the school, on the program, etc. In Russia all schools, colleges, universities start their fall term on September 1. They call this day “the Day of Knowledge”. Back in the days when I went to school in Moscow we used to have special school uniform. For boys that was a dark navy suit and for girls that was a dark brown dress with an apron: black on regular days and white on special occasions (nothing like a French maid :), I wish I could find some pictures for you). So September 1 was a special occasion like that: kids go to school for the first time after a 3-month summer break. Parents would see their children to first grade for the first time, everyone would have flowers and each school would have a special welcome meeting for all the kids and teachers at the school porch and at 8AM on this day the first school bell would ring signaling the beginning of a new school year.

I really used to like this tradition. It felt like a real holiday, especially for the first-time school kids. I believe they still have it almost exactly like that, with that only difference that there are no uniforms any more and kids wear pretty much what they wear in the US. However, the flowers, first school bell and the holiday spirit remained the same.

I didn’t feel this holiday spirit today though. When I realized that it is September already, I just had the feeling that the three summer months have passed a way too quickly (which is unfair). Although it is summer in CA all the time, so I shouldn’t be complaining. The only difference for me would be the dramatically increased amount of work to be done daily, just like back in the school days :)

I have been dying to see this movie for a long time now. To be honest I haven’t seen that many eye-catching commercials with it (which is the way I almost always make the decision about watching or not watching the movie). However, almost all my favorite actors are in this movie, so I thought it should be worth watching. Besides, I haven’t seen Mickey Rourke for ages, and I used to really like him a lot since back in the days.

Anyway. I know that this movie has been in the movie theaters for quite a while now, but to be honest, I am not a big fan of going to the movies. I prefer the coziness of my sofa and flexible control options to a big screen and the sound of crunchy popcorn chewing around me. I know I might be somewhat old-fashioned, you think, but I really enjoy my 41-inch TV and PSB Home Theater speaker system.

Well, to the movie. It was great. Excellent cast: Mickey Rourke, Benicio Del Toro, Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, the “Frodo”-guy (I keep forgetting his name all the time). But more to that, the great work of the camera men and art director. The black-and-white gamma with a few bright colors added to highlight some selected details worked really great. I’ve always liked that style in photography when they have a black-and-white or brown-and-white picture with one small detail in red color, something like a rose or lipstick, for instance. The movie is all made like that (the yellow guy looked incredibly scary, because the color stood out so much). And have you paid attention to the make-up Mickey Rourke’s character had? I only recognized him when he smiled (of course, I knew it was him, but I was looking for some familiar face traits).

Frankly speaking I have never been a fan of comic-book movies: there is usually a pretty stupid story behind (Spiderman 1 was probably the only one I really liked). I think one of the major reasons why I don’t like them, is because they try to give up the comic book concept, such as relatively primitive comic book plot without much character development, a simple succession of actions with no complicated connection between them, and simple distinction between the good and the evil. Once they forget all that and try to make it into a serious action movie “the Hollywood way”, it turns into a stupid mixture of special effects.

Not in “Sin City”. It was a life comic book, and I truly had the impression of following the pictures of the comic book myself.

I would watch this movie again. Just my 2c. :)

Yes! This is what I was talking about when I said that it promised to be a great weekend for me. Maybe some of you have seen this incredible fight on Sunday night. Let’s me tell you what I am talking about here.

On Sunday night they broadcast the Final Conflict Event in Saitama Super Arena (Japan) – the heavyweight title Mixed Martial Arts match between the Russian heavyweight champion Fedor Emelianenko and Croatian Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic. These guys were simply amazing. I watched as few matches with both of them before. Both have their killer strengths.

Fedor (you can get his detailed info on height, eight, wins, etc. here) pounds the opponents into the matt like no one else would do. And he has the deadliest punch I have ever seen. As far as I know his right hand was injured, however, it doesn’t prevent him from punching with his left (and right) real hard. Besides, he is a master of Greco-Roman wrestling, so once the opponent is on the floor, Fedor is running the show. On the floor he is deadly. And at the same time he can free himself from the clinch easily, even when it looks like he has been caught.

As for Mirko “Cro Cop”, he is taller and lighter (you can find all his info here). He works in an anti-terrorist squad in Croatia and is a kick-boxer. His main strength is his kicks and knee kicks, IMHO. He knocks opponents down with one kick easily (they actually showed some clips from the previous fights: he was unbelievable!).

So, this was THE fight. Exciting, tense, and victorious for the Russian fighter after three rounds. Fedor remained the heavyweight champion.

Here is a picture from the fight (Fedor on the left, Mirko on the right):

You can read the interview after the fight with Mirko “Cro Cop” here. He said: “I am disappointed, sad and very tired”.

Right now I look forward to the next fight Fedor Emelianenko is going to be in.

Ok, It’s been a while since I updated you on what is going on in our labs last. Sorry about that. Today I would like to share with you some of our review plans for the upcoming week.

As you may have already noticed we have just posted a review of an external optical drive from ASUS - ASUS SDRW-0804P-D DVD±R Burner (you can click here to read the review now). Very nice portable solution for burning disks on the go.

Tomorrow I will try to make your Monday better with our exciting CPU article devoted to a Value processor from AMD that would bring AMD64 technology (64bit extensions) to the Value environment. So far that’s all I can tell you about the upcoming review, so check out our site tomorrow, to make sure you don’t miss it.

Later in the week we would like to introduce to you a new power supply unit from FSP - BlueStorm AX500-A. We have already reviewed FSP PSUs in the past (see our article called FSP Group Power Supply Units Roundup). This baby is a newer model from the FSP Group solutions family.

On the multimedia side we are to talk about a solution from Creative Labs that should bring high-end audio to your laptop. It will be Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS Notebook – an audio card with PCMCIA interface. We will see if it really does offer you the sound quality you would expect.

Also, we have an article on the new Maxtor OneTouch II External HDD with FireWire 800 interface almost ready, and this will be a very good continuation to our recent review of the similar product supporting USB 2.0 interface only (see our article called External Hard Disk Drive from Maxtor: 100GB OneTouch II Review). Now you will get a chance to compare which one is faster for your needs.

Another really exciting article will be devoted to the first Socket 939 mainboard for enthusiasts based on the ATI RADEON Xpress 200P chipset – Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9 mainboard. The results are very controversial, so I am sure you will like this material a lot (I always like it much more when things get complicated: give food for thought :) )

Whew… Another week has almost flown by. Sorry I didn’t right anything during the IDF, I think everything I wanted to say and share with you, guys, is all in my IDF Coverages, which you can check out in the Editorial section. This was an interesting one, I really enjoyed the keynotes, and some panel sessions were worth going to. Besides, IDF is a good place to meet interesting people, which I surely did :)

On Friday I attended the ECS special event – Editor’s Day - hosted in their US headquarters in Fremont. What can I say? Very well organized event, the press have been taken great care of. However, from the contents prospective I think the guys need to work harder next time. The most frustrating thing was that despite some interesting ideas they tried to present, the speakers were simply unable to handle all those technical questions that streamed down on them from the audience. It’s a pity they didn’t have any engineers present, so that we could address our questions about the new  technology to them.

The main goal of this entire event was to deliver the message to the public that ECS is going into the high-end and Enthusiast mainboard market. If you have read our news and Computex coverage, you may already be familiar with their solutions, such as their PF88 HYBRID mainboard (with the help of the SIMA card you can turn your LGA 775 Intel platform into AMD Socket 939 platform). At the Editor’s Day they introduced two new SIMA cards that allowed using a mobile Intel Pentium M processor or an AMD Socket 754 processor on the same LGA 775 platform.

They also spoke about their new SDGE initiative (Scalable Dual Graphics Engine) that allows using a second graphics card in the SLI-type of configuration (or Crossfire-type, referring to ATI terms). In other words, with the ECS platform you should get dual-graphics at a relatively low price. I wouldn’t make any conclusions right now about this solution, as it is still quite far away from the actual launch and arouses a lot of questions, which need to be answered. But I would like to give them credit for creativity, of course: it was definitely a unique approach.

Ok, guys, this is my weekend piece of news for now. Enjoy :)

P.S.: Tomorrow is going to be very exciting for me. Let me leave you wondering what I am talking about :)

Well, tomorrow on Tuesday the IDF show is taking off. Or shall I already say today? For me it is still tomorrow, because I am about to get some sleep this night. Just have to finish writing :)

Well, what do we expect from the IDF Fall 2005? In fact, I cannot remember that many Intel Developer Forums where they really announced something big. I believe the one that was truly remarkable, was the IDF when they announced their Extreme Edition series, and even gave out some samples. Since then, IDFs do not reveal that many surprises to us. However, I wouldn’t say that these shows are not interesting or useful. No, we don’t hear any breaking news there that often, but I think it is not what IDF is about. Many people would agree with me, I suppose, that we all come to IDF with a clear idea of what the highlights of the show are going to be. We all know what we will hear about, but it is not about the news that much, but about the way Intel guys discuss things we already know or have some idea of.

This time dual-core roadmap should be the No.1 topic for discussion.

Let’s see if this one proves to be interesting. I hope it will be :)

First of all I would like to thank everyone for the hints on that Bachelorette thing. It was really very helpful. The most important thing is that it made me more confident about what I was about to do.

The pleasing thing is that everybody had fun and I got thumbs-up for the party. I tend to believe that it was pretty sincere reaction. :) Anyway, here is what it was like.

With a list of over 20 people, I couldn’t afford to have my place trashed, so I decided to rent out a hotel suite, especially, since Hollywood is just around the corner. Ok, I got a nice room with a view and 1,000sq.feet space. The only challenge at that point was to somehow get all the people up there when they arrive, because to get to that floor you needed an elevator key, and there was a big message board next to the lady at the reception desk saying “no party policy”. Being absolutely sure that they will kick me out immediately, I told the receptionist that I was expecting a few of my girl-friends to come down for a drink to my suite (and it worked!).

The next thing was to make it look like a party room, and to get food and drinks up there. I chose the easy way: we went to Costco and got all the stuff there, my only concern was how to get it all upstairs without attracting too much attention. Max was making fun of me all the way, because he was pretty sure that the entire hotel is partying on the weekends. And, he was absolutely right. When I saw people loading boxes of vodka, gin and snacks onto carts, I realized that my margarita-mix sets look like a joke compared to what was really going to happen in some suites that night.

Done with the food, a few hours left for decorations. I chose the easy way here. I went to the Hustler store and told them a need a complete package for a bachelorette party. They did a great job on picking out the items for me (funny, but not offensive things), however, not a really great job on the bill… Did I have the choice? :)

I won’t go into details about the actual party, I can only say that every time someone knocked on the door, I thought this was hotel security who came up here to arrest me. Girls were laughing, squealing, and making all sorts of wild noises (positively wild), so that you could think that someone is getting killed inside this room. However, I think hotel people were already used to “quiet couple-of-drink parties” like that, so thank god they didn’t pay much attention.

By midnight the place got completely trashed, and since it was Sunday people started leaving for home (I was a designated driver for at least one third of the guests). This was a good thing, because no one got really drunk.

Well, that was it. Now I know what an American bachelorette party looks like :) However, I know one thing for sure: I wouldn’t want anything like that for myself :)

Let me share some experience guys. During the past few years I changed three phone companies. And you know what, right now it seems like I found an ideal solution for myself.

Ok let me start from the very beginning. At first I used to be with SBC. I don’t remember exactly what my plan was any more, but I was very unhappy about they customer service, and billing issues. So, when one of our friends recommended Time Warner IP phone, I immediately started doing some research on that.

They were offering IP phone unlimited including long distance within the US for $39.99 or something close to that. And very acceptable rates to Russia :) which is very important for me, because I established a good habit of calling my Mom every weekend and talking to her about all the news here. And you can imagine, of course, that a conversation like that cannot take less than 30 minutes.

However, there is no limit to perfection. And just about a month ago I switched to an even better deal. I bet you know Vonage Company. We advertised them on our site a while ago. However, I switched to Vonage not for marketing reasons :) So, after having done some analysis of our phone usage model, I discovered that we do not really talk that much on the landline. And there was a great plan at Vonage when you could get 500 minutes for only $15+tax. I switched to that and have had it for a little over a month now. At first I have to admit there were some problems with the reception (kind of echo and some background noises) and some problems with the connection (the network was busy and I couldn’t call some people once in a while). Frankly speaking, I was really frustrated and thought I would have to go back to the Time Warner IP phone soon. But these problems are not longer bothering me (maybe it happened just during the number transfer period) and I haven’t had any issues for over a month now (touch wood :) oh, yes, and they are offering REALLY cheap rates for Russia :)

Anybody can share their experience with other phone companies? I think that would be interesting.

Great news, people: we just found a new Russian restaurant in the valley with excellent Russian cuisine. The name of the place is Red Square and they have a large outdoor patio with a fountain (soon to be put in service) and wooden benches and tables.

Now let me explain why the excitement.

There are quite few good Russian restaurants in LA area. I cannot say I am a big fan of my traditional food. In fact, I love Russian cuisine, but it is not something really exotic for me, as you may have guessed already :) However, every once in a while, I feel kind of nostalgic and want to enjoy the dishes that I wouldn’t normally make at home. This is when my friends and I would go to a place like that.

The problem with most Russian restaurants, is that they tend to lose quality with the time. When the place just opens, the food is excellent, and then…. They build up their clientele, and do not care about the quality any more, because there is not much choice as far as affordable and more or less traditional Russian food is concerned.

And the new place, is truly great. The interior of the restaurant is nothing special, they didn’t bother to put any traditional Russian decorations, for instance. However, the soups, appetizers and main courses they serve are very good. I just hope they won’t follow into the footsteps of those other places. So if you are in the area and would like to taste what a Russian dinner is like, you should definitely check it out.

Those who are interested, can e-mail me for the address :)