Quick Look: Mac OS X Portal Performance
It’s been a while since anyone treated Mac OS X as a first-tier gaming platform, so when Valve announced that they would be bringing their Steam service and the Source engine to the Mac, it was big news. After a roughly 2 month beta period for the Mac versions of Steam and the Source engine, yesterday Valve finally released the first wave of their Mac gaming efforts.
As it stands Valve is taking a gradual approach to rolling out their back catalog to the platform. Even though Steam is out and the Source engine has been ported, this week has seen the release of only 1 Source game for the Mac: 2007’s critically acclaimed Portal.
While it’s not the most graphically intensive Source game these days (that title belonging to Left 4 Dead), at this point it’s as good as anything else for looking at the performance of the Source engine under Mac OS X, particularly considering how long it’s been since a game’s original developer did the Mac port. So with that in mind, we went ahead and took a quick look at Portal’s performance under Mac OS X.
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Mushkin Releases SandForce-Based Callisto SSD Series
The name 'Mushkin' may no longer be familiar to you. A few years ago, they were big players in terms of DDR performance memory - but have not always kept up the pace with hardware development. In 2010 however, alongside OCZ, SanDisk, Intel, Corsair, and other SSD manufacturers, they are diving head first into a highly competitive arena.
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Sparkle Announces $200-$250 1000W-1250W Power Supplies
In terms of power supplies, it can sometimes become astounding at how much a company will charge for a unit, and whether it is valid, in terms of features and warranty/support. So when Sparkle are announcing a 1000W Gold rated unit for just over $200, we sit up and take notice.
This is Sparkle's first venture into the power supply genre of computing (previously, they sold only graphics cards), and they are advertising two units, the GW-EPS1000DA and GW-EPS1250DA, their 1000W and 1250W units respectively. Both units come with a five-year warranty, upgradeable to a lifetime warranty upon online registration of each unit.
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Gigabyte Announces Their New Flagship Motherboard: The X58A-UD9
Gigabyte are currently attacking the X58 market; with no less than 10 boards, from the budget EX58-UD3R (and it's upgrade, the X58A-UD3R) to the premium EX58-EXTREME, their latest board tacks on the moniker of the X58A-UD9.
In terms of board features, you get support for 6-core Gulftown processors, 4 way SLI and Crossfire X across 7 PCI-E 2.0 slots using 2 NF200 chips (for x16, x8, x16, x8, x16, x8, x16 lanes), support for tri-channel DDR3-2200+ memory, onboard buttons for power, reset and clear CMOS, 2x Realtek Gigabit ethernet connectors, 2x SATA 6Gb/s connectors using the newest Marvell controller, and 2 USB3 connectors.
Unsurprisingly, Gigabyte are also marketing their own specific motherboard standards: DualBIOS, allowing for BIOS backup protection; Hybrid Silent-Pipe 2 design for heat conductance across the chipset and VRMs such that a fan is not needed (however connectors are provided for water cooling); and a hardware control IC for precision voltage control. Gigabyte’s penchant for high phase counts also rears its head in the form of a ’24 phase’ VRM (current handling capabilities are unknown to us at present). Also of note is the On/Off Charge support, allowing USB devices to be powered by certain USB ports when the motherboard is powered down - Gigabyte can utilise this by supplying 3x more power to these USB ports.
The board is obviously aimed at enthusiasts wanting to break overclocking records. There's no word on price, but it's most likely to be more expensive than the EX58-Extreme, which currently retails at a $349 minimum.
If this board comes our way, we'll let you know how it performs.
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