When NVIDIA launched Fermi, it was clear that the company was taking a dramatic step away from classic GPU design. Fermi was made to crunch numbers and run code more than it was designed to run games. Sure, it can do both, but the results that we saw were that the chip needed much more power and produced more heat than the competition to do the same number of FPS. This changed when we asked the card to work harder by introducing tessellation to the mix, but on current games, the Radeons were a more efficient hardware platform.

The GTX 460 is being billed as "DirectX 11 done right" and I have to believe NVIDIA's marketing here. Simply put, the GF104 chip at the heart of this card is more like what we should have seen to begin with. The designers have trimmed the general-purpose GPU stuff from Fermi without sacrificing tessellation performance and have created a beast of a card that is designed for today's games. With overclocked performance coming near to the top cards on the market today, this is the value of all values in graphics.

While the GTX 470 and GTX 480 still have a very valuable place in our line-up, this new GTX 460 is probably the best bet for most gamers. If you haven't gotten on the DX11 bandwagon yet, this is the card for you. The 470 and 480 are here for those of us who want the best performance possible, and also for those of us that see games becoming more focused on tessellation performance.

For the past 4 years, Nordic PC has provided awesome systems with amazing value to some of the best businesses in the High Country, with very good results. We still have machines in use that are over 3 years old, and are performing better than some brand new machines at the same price points. This is the value of a factory overclocked machine for business owners, being able to stretch their equipment dollars out to get more years out of the same equipment. When the systems are stable and reliable at those overclocked settings, everyone wins.

However, times are changing here at Nordic PC. I've been taking on more and more service-related work lately, which means that while I still love building and supporting my own PCs and servers, I'll be very busy working on some machines that aren't as exotic (or nice to work with for that matter). They will get swapped out eventually, but for now, I'm running around trying to band-aid systems to get through the next couple of years.

This extra work brings a lot of revenue into Nordic PC, which in turn allows us to grow beyond our current small-town boutique vendor role into more of a national presence, however that process will take some time. Until then, know that Nate is still available directly, still able to sell machines as normal, and everything with sales is business as usual.

A few years ago, I worked with a company that was pretty small, but very tech savvy. We needed a way to share and collaborate on documents without using Sharepoints or anything complicated, so we signed up for Google Apps and started trying to use Google's online document editors. However, after just a few days, we totally abandoned the option, simply because the editors weren't user-friendly enough.

Google has come quite far since then, however once you use the Office Ribbon interface, there's no going back. I've also had formatting issues going from one program to another, so I've kept to Office for the past few years. However, Microsoft has now unleashed Office Live, and I've taken to the cloud once again.

Here's the little demo document that I made up to show off the features of the Word Web App, as it's called. Let's tear it down piece by piece real quick:

1. Right off the bat, styles are supported just like in the real Word 2010, so if you've become totally dependent on that piece of the ribbon, you'll be right at home. Oddly enough, the underline that should be on the title isn't there in the online version, but it's there in the desktop.

2. The font selection is quite good, and size, color and highlights all happen as well.

We all need a wrap-up every now and then, and with NVIDIA's DirectX 11 line finally shipping en masse, now is a great time to talk about what's out here now and what's right around the corner. First let's start with the green team:

I'd be lying if I said that NVIDIA has been firing on all 8 cylinders lately. Fermi has been a very big problem for them, as we all expected. The GTX 480 shipped without all of it's performance potential, and it is still hot and power hungry. If you look at frames-per-watt, things are not good with Fermi. However, NVIDIA does still have the most stable drivers out there, and the fewest issues as far as compatibility is concerned. And don't forget that GTX 480 is the fastest GPU on the planet, at least most of the time. GTX 470 is a much better bet, providing good performance at a better price, however it is still hot and hungry.

Last week, Valve released their very popular Steam client for Mac OS X. This included a list of games that were ported over to the OS including one of my personal favorites: Portal. However, in testing, Steam looks to have some serious issues on the Mac platform.

Anandtech, one of the best tech sites around, showcased the new Steam in an article entitled Mac OS X Portal Performance. In it, Ryan says "There’s clearly a difference in IQ between the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Portal, and it’s not in the Mac’s favor." He's referring to washed out colors, lighting effects not being rendered as well, and an overall lack of fidelity in the Mac client. But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

When it came down to performance, Ryan tested with a Geforce GTX 285 (as the GTX 400 series are unsupported on Mac OS, as is SLI which would be needed to make a GTX 295 work) on a Core i7 CPU and motherboard, a very similar configuration to Apple's $4000 Mac Pro specs or a $2200 Odin configuration. We all knew that OpenGL would be a little slower than DirectX, but how much?

For many of us, virtualization is something that is relegated to server cabinets and has no place on our desktops. However, in a couple of recent instances, virtualization has been the easiest answer to some of the oldest problems in computer history: desktop migration and compatibility. I want to go through a couple of scenarios real quick to demonstrate how this awesome technology can help even desktop users.

Scenario 1: Windows XP Machine we want to upgrade to Windows 7

As we should all know, Windows 7 provides many benefits over Windows XP, including a very solid backup solution, increased security, productivity and resilience. Upgrading your Windows XP machines should be a no-brainer. However, a lot of us don't want to have to deal with migrating our programs and documents over to the new machine, and this hurdle has stopped many upgrades before they even begin.

The above time line shows just a few of the more important changes in computer and console hardware and software over the past 5 years. Just a couple noticeable things about this:

1. When the XBox 360 came out in November of 2005, most PCs were running Windows 2000 or Windows XP with DirectX 9.0c for graphics. The 360 incorporates a DirectX 9.0c GPU with about 48 Shader Processors and a 3-core PowerPC chip at 3.2GHz.

2. The PlayStation 3 launched about one year later, also with a PowerPC chip at 3.2GHz, however this one has 1 main CPU and 7 little ones instead of the unified 3-core design of the 360. It also has a DirectX 9.0c GPU with about 32 shaders (although they are very different and comparable to the 48 in the 360).

3. 2 months after the latest console, Microsoft launched Windows Vista to the masses, alongside DirectX 10 hardware from both NVIDIA and ATI. The GeForce 8800GTX that was available had more than twice the power of the consoles' GPUs, and Intel's Core 2 Duo was a very competitive performer as well, despite the lack of a direct comparison between IBM and Intel's architectures.

4. While console development lay dormant for the next three years, PCs pushed on with the GTX 200 series video cards doubling performance and the Core i7 simply thrashing Core 2 Duo performance with it's 8-thread capability.

This is just a peak at what just arrived on the Nordic PC bench. Be sure to check out a review soon.

Swiftech Ultima XT Water Kit

Every few months or so, an aspiring malware coder comes across a new attack vector to hit us with. I remember when the "Shared Task Scheduler" was first used to keep a virus in memory on every boot, even a boot into Safe Mode. Later things like winlogon scripts surfaced, and more recently userinit.exe replacements. Just Friday I was confronted with a whole new beast, who comes at us by the name of "XP Internet Security 2010." 

Now I've seen "Internet Security 2010" and some others, which use nasty userinit.exe replacements to stay loaded, but this new one is of particular interest because of the way it takes over a system. I noticed that there were no entries in the HiJackThis log of a machine, so I figured it was surly a rootkit. However, that may not be the case. In one of the two infections I've seen, the software was using the standard class definition system to infect the system.

As expected, CeBit was a total gold-mine for Fermi news. This is the chip that will live inside the new GTX 470 and GTX 480 chips from NVIDIA. It is a beast of a chip too, more than doubling the number of processing cores from 240 in the current GT200 to 512 in Fermi. Here's what we're talking about, in terms of block diagrams:

                          GT200                                                                              Fermi