nigelt.blog.com

Well, I’ve been blogging with Blog.com for over a year now…and while the experience has for the most part been well (i was even a paid member for a bit). I’ve decided that I’m going to switch to Wordpress as my blogging platform.

See you all at my new blog. http://nigelt.wordpress.com

I may retract this decision someday But for now you can check my post with a brief writeup of some the spam I’ve recieved on this blog here.

New Features

This section provides information on new features found in this release of the Radeon™ Display Driver. These include the following:

• ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Unified driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
• ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Folding@Home performance enhancements
• ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 – Windows Vista HDMI audio driver support integrated into all ATI Catalyst 9.3 packages
• New AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK

ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Unified driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista

• AMD has delivered a single unified graphics driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista – demonstrating AMD’s Windows 7 graphics driver leadership and focus on delivering a stable and robust Windows 7 experience on AMD hardware
• Delivers full WDDM 1.1 support under Windows 7 on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products
• Delivers improved gaming performance under Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista
• All future ATI Catalyst postings will deliver one single unified driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista

ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Folding@Home performance enhancements

• Using ATI Stream™ technology, owners of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client and upcoming cores in conjunction with ATI Catalyst™ 9.3

http://tinyurl.com/cf6rd9

With Windows 7 being the new hotness that could make things spiffy for many new (and some old) computers whenever it ships, every new build just adds to the anticipation.

Making its way through the intertubes as we speak is Windows 7 build 7057. Rejoice — Microsoft is making progress! Deciphering the file name of the disc image indicates that this build was compiled on March 5, 2009, reports Neowin.

Interestingly enough, the About Windows screen indicates that this evaluation copy is good for a year, expiring in March 2010. Though run this unfinished version of Windows 7 would be assured that the final version, perhaps even for retail, will be available before the evaluation license expires.

—

I’ll post some screens of this one, been using Build 7000 for some time. More Benchmarks? i think so.

Update: and more info

FileName: 7057.0.090305-2000_x86fre_client_en-us_Retail_Ultimate-GB1CULFRER_EN_DVD.iso
MD5:  2a3863afe3453d1be642201fd3260ab2
SHA1: 0f32dfe92d544f4690ab91c02b59dba665d4ca0f

—
Hello, new Twitter-er!

Using Twitter is going to change the way you think about staying in touch with friends and family. Did you know you can send and receive Twitter updates via mobile texting or the web? To do that, you’ll want to visit your settings page (and you’ll want to invite some friends).

Activate Phone: http://twitter.com/devices
Invite Your Friends:  http://twitter.com/invite

The New York Times calls Twitter “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” TIME Magazine says, “Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app,” and Newsweek noted that “Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.” What will you think? http://twitter.com

Thanks again for signing up!

- Biz Stone and The Twitter Team
http://twitter.com/biz
—

So after reading about The Pirate Bay Trial aka #spectrial and getting updates for Quake Live via #quakelive , I finally decided to make a twitter acct

http://www.quakelive.com/

Earlier today i noticed a queue of 30,000. Now its around 8-10K. Was able to get in and play once, but only the Training Mission. Feels a lot like Quake III Arena.

If your new to quake live, do yourself a favor and get the plugin *before* waiting in the queue of 30,000 people only to be told to download a plugin and wait for another 30,000 people.

Filename: QuakeLiveNP.msi
Filesize: 3.78mb (3,966,976 bytes)
CRC32: 54862EF4

QuakeLiveNP.rar [uploaded.to]

Thats the plugin for Mozilla at least.

I’ll update with some more screenshots…

Update:

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for you very funny. check it

www.MelodyBoxOnline.net
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Get yoour Bonus rinngtone ;)

www.GiftAllGift.net
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heyy look herre, very funny

www.PrizeAwardDept.net
—

Those are the three messages I’ve gotten, its probably all the same malware. [it all came from the same person] I’ll work on isolating the process and getting some info out.

There’s few times a tech like myself gets excited about a new operating system or driver. Usually, this only happens when the next version of Windows is announced or a there is a major kernel revision in linux.

But this time, It’s Catalyst 9.1 Drivers, now with support for OpenGL 3.0 OGL 3.0 is like the DX10 that can work on XP, You should all know where to get it, but if not.

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp

As usual the RSS feed is still a release behind

From the relnotes…

The Catalyst™ Software Suite 9.1 contains the following:
• Radeon™ display driver 8.573
• HydraVision™ for both Windows XP and Vista
• HydraVision™ Basic Edition (Windows XP only)
• WDM Driver Install Bundle
• Southbridge/IXP Driver
• Catalyst™ Control Center Version 8.573

New Features
This section provides information on new features found in this release of the
Radeon™ Display Driver. These include the following:
• Full OpenGL™ 3.0 support
Full OpenGL™ 3.0 support
This release of ATI Catalyst™ provides full OpenGL™ 3.0 extension support.
The following is a list of OpenGL™ 3.0 extensions added in Catalyst 9.1:
• ARB_framebuffer_object
• ARB_half_float_vertex
• ARB_texture_rg
• EXT_texture_array
• EXT_texture_integer
• EXT_transform_feedback
• NV_conditional_render
• WGL/GLX_create_context (for new 3.0 contexts)
• GLSL 1.3
• ARB_color_buffer_float
• ARB_vertex_array_object
• EXT_draw_buffers2

I’ll have this downloaded and installed in a moments time, will update…

Since Microsoft released the Windows 7 Beta for download to General Public, I decided to preform an actual install, as opposed to a Virtual Machine install that I’ve been doing. Now i know that people have benchmarked XP versus Vista versus Win7 before, but *I* haven’t done it

I’ll be benchmarking the following items:

Futuremark 3DMark06
Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
WinRAR v3.80 700mb compression/extraction times
SpeedTest of Network

We’ll see if i can come up with anything else in the meantime. For now here’s some screenshots and the system specs:

Motherboard: ASUS M2A-VMCPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Overclocked to 3.02GHzGPU: ASUS EAH Radeon HD 4670 512mb GDDR3 OverclockedStorage: 320GB SATAMemory: 2GB [2x1024MB] Kingston DDR2 800MHz

Stock GPU, 3DMark Vantage - Windows 7 Build 7000

Overclock GPU, 3DMark Vantage - Windows 7 Build 7000

3DMark 06, Stock GPU - Windows 7 Build 7000

3DMark 06, Overclock GPU - Windows 7 Build 7000

3DMark 06, Stock GPU - Windows XP Professional SP3 Build 2600

3DMark 06, Overclock GPU - Windows XP Professional SP3 Build 2600

Windows 7 Build 7000
================
Compression time of a 696mb DivX AVI File: 9:09sec

Extraction time of resulting 690mb RAR file: 30sec

Downstream: 8192
Upstream: 615

3DMark 06 Stock 7428
3DMark 06 OC    7502

3DMark Vantage Stock 3165
3DMark Vantage OC    3291
Windows XP Professional SP3 Build 2600
=============================

Compression time of a 696mb DivX AVI File: 6:58sec

Extraction time of resulting 690mb RAR file: 25sec

Downstream: 9404
Upstream: 612

3DMark 06 Stock 7436
3DMark 06 OC    7772

Reposts:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=81741
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=721414
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/overclocking-tweaking-benchmarking/15415-windows-7-build-7000-vs-windows-xp-sp3-build-2600-benchmarks.html

Source: microsoft.com

Filename: 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso
Filesize: 2.44GB

This looks like the same build that leaked to the internet not long ago.

Once its down downloading ill compare CRC’s and MD5’s

I think i might actually do a real install with this one…we’ll see.

And there giving out keys too:

Update: CRC checks out, This is indeed the same build that leaked earlier.

Update again: Some screens of post-install, activation. Upgraded my Vista Install to a Windows 7 one. Will post benchmarks soon.