text:
Seagate Announces New Laptop and Desktop SSHDs (Solid State Hybrid Drives)by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/5/2013 9:28 AM EST
- Posted in
- Storage
- Seagate
- Hybrid Drive
- SSHDs
51 Comments
Back to Article
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkI wonder if it has write caching, and I wonder if the 750 will finally get that promised firmware update with it. How big is the flash on the 1TB laptop drive, still 8GB? Where does the performance increase come from apart from aerial density then? And is the spindle speed still 7200rpm, since they were going to stop making 7200 drives? Reply
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkAh, drat, that's all up there. Nevermind silly old me, although i'm still curious about the first two questions, what happened to that write caching firmware they promised? Reply
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkSince the NAND is the same size and type as the one in the 750, shouldn't that be able to get a firmware update with the write caching? Reply
piroroadkill - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkWhat's the point of making the drive slower than the old Momentus? I know they were abandoning 7200 RPM, but for their performance drive, that makes no sense.
POSSIBLY if they added more NAND, but it's exactly the same amount as the 2nd generation Momentus XT.
Also, anyone keeping score here notices that these drives are using MLC NAND, and the previous 2 generation Momentus XT were using SLC NAND.
Yup, that's right, these are using no more NAND, and vastly cheaper NAND, and slower speed spindles.
This makes absolutely no sense. Shit drives, Seagate. Reply
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkI wonder if the aerial density makes up for the spindle speed? If it's slower than the 750 I would feel better though, lol.
Hmm, I wonder if the NAND difference from the last gen drive will prevent last gen owners from getting that write caching firmware? Reply
dragosmp - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkThey seem to have a lower price than the 7200RPM Momentus XT, but otherwise all the points you make are perfectly valid: slower HDD (at least in terms of access times) and lower endurance NAND.
My 2 cents: these will show up (maybe) in cheap laptops to make them feel "just as snappy" as the more expensive ones. Otherwise a 64GB mSATA + any HDD is a faster solution and not much more expensive. Reply
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkSo the SLC in the old ones would actually be even better for write caching? In that case I really do hope they update the firmware with that new functionality on the old ones, there seems to be no reason not to then other than greed. Reply
dragosmp - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkIt would seem more logical that if they were to activate write caching on any SSHD, it would be on the SLC based. However the controller must support it too, which it may or it may not on the old XTs (afaik). On the newer 5400RPM disks you may find a very good controller that would do better wear leveling than the XT's; although the SLC has an inherent advantage, that can be crippled by controller+firmware; the same way MLC/TLC can age pretty well as seen in Samsung's 840 series.
I'm really not hopeful that they'd enable write caching on older XTs for many reasons: why bother if they can't monetize, no tradition in good enthusiast products and support, they're sailing on a nickel and dime market and last but not least if they'd make the old XT looking too good the new one would look even worse.
That said I'd like that old disk updated as it had a lot of potential. For the new ones I think 32GB + 5400RPM 500GB is ideal under 100$. Reply
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkDuring the reviews of the 750 reviewers had access to a write caching firmware I believe, so the drive must support it. Whether they will release it is another matter. Reply
Hubb1e - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkNo reason other than greed? Dude, you need to rethink that word. This is a company whose purpose is to make money. There's not much business sense to upgrade old hardware with better features if you're not selling that hardware anymore. Sure, you want to keep them stable, but why spend extra cash to improve a product that is no longer on sale? That is not in the best interest of the company. That's not greed, that's business. The less money a company makes, the less people it can hire and the less products it can develop. Welcome to the real world. Reply
DanNeely - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkThese are much cheaper though. The Momentus never gained much traction because it was too expensive to serve as a mass market substitute for magnetic drives. Seagates current 500gb/1tb laptop drives are priced at $60/95 on newegg vs $130 for the old 500GB Momentus; a $20/5 price premium is a lot easier to swallow than a $70 one. At that price you might as well get a 32/64GB cache SDD and a standard HD instead. Reply
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkI got the second gen 750 for 130, I thought the 500 was cheaper than that by now. Reply
DanNeely - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkMust've been a sale price. Newegg isn't listing that one at all, and Amazon wants $140 for it. Reply
lmcd - Thursday, March 07, 2013 - linkLOL my 500GB was $50 on sale. Reply
mayankleoboy1 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkyeah.
Its like the marketing guys told Seagate that they needed a "NAND" in the checklist. So the engineers came with this solution.
If these can do startup and shutdown similarly to a real SSD, i guess its OK. Reply
rwei - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkI was pretty happy with the performance of my 7200rpm laptop drive. I did eventually jump on a 256GB (240? don't remember) Vertex 3 since they got so ridiculously cheap and I had a second drive bay.
Honestly, other than the boot time (now like 16-20s on Windows 7) I didn't notice a big difference. I don't open enough things to care about 0.5s vs. 1.5-3s load times.
You know where I do notice a difference? Loading stuff off of my secondary 1TB 5400RPM drive, which I use primarily for media storage. I'd like to see 8GB of cache help with that.
This decision baffles me. Reply
Mr Perfect - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkLooks like the race to the bottom has claimed another fine product. I wonder how this will impact sales? Anyone savvy enough to buy a SSHD in the first place is probably going to be checking technical specifications. Reply
name99 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - link"This makes absolutely no sense."
Oh grow up. These drives are VASTLY cheaper than their Momentus XT predecessors.
You may not like their specs, and I don't either, but pretending they are "poorly designed" is just stupid. Seagate know their market better than you do, and I suspect these drives will sell in far higher volumes than Momentus XT ever did.
If you're going to criticize something, criticize the things that appear foolish, even within the business context. Playing games about "some writes will be cached --- but we won't tell you which ones" is ridiculous --- it makes them look like they plan to sell vaporware ("buy our crappy firmware today but we promise it will be updated soon" "how soon?" "well, in about the same amount of time it takes to update the average Android phone...").
And I don't see what strange market segmentation games they think they are playing by keeping a cache off their 3 and 4TB drives. Yes, you could argue that those drives are primarily purchased as large streaming storage for movies and music, and 8GB is small. But 8GB would hold the indexes for the drives --- for the Mac the various HFS+ data structures and Spotlight indices, for Windows the equivalents --- and would still make them feel more responsive in every day use.
The message Seagate SHOULD be sending is "hybrid drives are the future and we are going all in to do them well"; the message they are actually sending is "we don't know WTF we are doing, but please buy these things if you're buying low-end". Reply
piroroadkill - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkSeagate does know the market, and with the "solid state" part of the name they will stick these in laptops and get a bullet point that confuses the average joe.
It's still a product that has specifications designed by marketing, not by the engineers. Reply
Wolfpup - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkYep, these look worse. I mean if you're looking for a 5400RPM drive, then okay, but the second gen Momentus XT uses SLC, probably has 4x the RAM cache, and of course the drive itself is slower.
I have to say I'd rather have a normal 7200RPM drive than a hybrid 5400RPM drive. I suppose from their perspective they're hoping to reduce devices they have to design and build, but I don't want to go back to 5400RPM... Reply
Notmyusualid - Monday, March 25, 2013 - linkYes, I'm keeping score. And agree with everything you've said.
I had the 500GB XT with SLC nand, and it was w o n d e r f u l.
Why they are stepping backwards, is hard to fathom. Reply
vectorm12 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkToo bad about this since the 7200.5 disks are the only ones I've found that work flawlessly in RAID on Adaptec controllers.
Currently I've got eight of them running in raid 6 for datastorage on my workstation.
Great little drives as they are both reasonably quiet and don't require much in the way of cooling.
Hopefully Seagate will make the new models RAID-compliant but I'm not holding my breath. Reply
kyuu - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkThe Momentus XTs worked fine in RAID. Why would these be any different? Unless there's something special about your Adaptech controller? Reply
dgingeri - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - link$149 for a 2TB drive with 8GB of flash cache? That's a gyp. I can get a 2TB Seagate drive for $90 and a 32GB SSD for $40-50 and have 4 times the cache. Granted, this would be workable on more systems than the separate drive setup, but those other systems wouldn't even be available with an expensive drive like this. They need at least 32GB of flash cache at that price point. Reply
kyuu - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkThese are MSRPs, not necessarily what you'll see them selling for at retail. You could always find the Momentus XTs for well below their MSRPs, unless you didn't bother to check around. Reply
MadMan007 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkIt must bother HDD makers that their regular spinny drives can last for years and years. This way, once the NAND wears out the drive will 'fail' and you'll have to get a new one. Brilliantly nefarious plan, Seagate! Reply
tipoo - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkOn the last drives the drive would just segment off the worn out NAND and continue to function as a regular hard drive if absolutely none was less. The spinning disk would likely die before that happened though. Reply
Mr Perfect - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkHe was all busy hating on NAND and now look, you ruined it. I hope you're happy, Mister Factual. XD Reply
flyingpants - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkExcept you have it backwards.. all spinning hard drives will eventually break, most of them within about 5 years. SSDs on the other hand do not out of write capacity for like decades. Reply
DanNeely - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkFlash cells have an ~1 decade life span independent of being written too many times. Reply
kyuu - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkWatch out, your ignorance is showing. The NAND, MLC or no, is likely to outlast the mechanical portion of the drive. Even if the NAND does fail, the drive is able to continue working without it (without the benefit of NAND caching, obviously). Reply
paul878 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkWhat is the life expectancy for the 8g of MLC? Reply
HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - link...I'd really rather see WD get up off their hands and give us the Raptor we all wish they'd make.
A 10K RPM Raptor with 64 gigs of MLC and a large bit of memory for cache. Pop it out at 1 TB for $200-$300, people would gobble that up.
As it is, I think Seagate should have pushed the MLC component up to 16 gigs as a baseline with the 32 for the high end 3/4 TB versions.
8 is going to be really, really pathetic. Reply
ShieTar - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkExcept for the fact that 1TB SSDs will probably hit $300 early next year, at which point that raptor would become absolutely useless.
As it is, you can already go and pair the current 1TB raptor with a 64GB cache-SSD by yourself for around $300, but that same money also buys you a good 500GB SSD. Who needs more than 500GB desperately but is happy with 1TB? And do you really expect WD to develop a special drive for this tiny group of customers? Reply
Creator1326 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkI have the first Momentus SSHD and it's hard to believe that the big new announcement is STILL 8GB? Underwhelming. It should be closer to 64-128GB like Apple's "Fusion Drive". Reply
kyuu - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkNo, the big new announcements are 3.5" drives, and much lower price points on the new drives. Reply
AnTech - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkSeagate hybrid drives are a JOKE with only 4 or 8 GB flash. See the Apple Fusion Drive for a good implementation (hint: 128 GB flash inside). Reply
kyuu - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkEven the 1st-gen XTs with only 4GB were a huge improvement over standard HDDs is everyday usage. You can do a lot with even just 4GB-8GB with good firmware and caching algorithms. You can easily fit the file index and boot sectors in that, along with some commonly accessed blocks of system files and application data.
Devices with more NAND would be great, and are certainly incoming. However, calling these a "joke" due to the small amount of NAND is just ignorant. Frankly, with these price points, I can't see any reason to get any other HDD unless performance just isn't a consideration. Reply
Mr Perfect - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkThe Apple Fusion "drives" are two physical devices, aren't they? I know people where talking about building their own Fusion setups by popping a SSD into a HDD only Mac. OSX saw that there was a SSD and HDD, marked it as a malfunctioning Fusion setup, and then offered to "rebuild" the array/cache/whatever. Reply
Wall Street - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkWell, Apple charges $250 to upgrade a 1 TB HDD to a 1 TB Fusion - I don't think that Seagate has that as a target market. Also, I think people are misjudging their use of HDD space. For 99% of users, 128 GB or data is way way way more than enough to cache the IO intensive random read program data and is well into caching media files which don't really benefit from the flash storage. People in this thread have both complained about the cost of the drive relative to the 7200 RPM standard drives and the size of the cache, so I think the compromise is about right.
Don't underestimate small amounts of Flash. Look how big 8 GB of RAM feels. Don't look at the size of your HDD and the size of your folder, 80% of your windows folder is fonts, unused drivers and the hybernate file - they don't need to be cached. I'm using a 32 GB flash cache and it feels plenty fast for windows boot and 90% of programs. Reply
slashbinslashbash - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - link"80% of your windows folder is fonts" What in the world ever gave you that idea? My Windows folder (Windows 7, vanilla install) is almost 19GB and the Fonts folder is less than 400MB. Reply
Tams80 - Thursday, March 07, 2013 - linkThe Fusion drive is actually two drives.
While 4 or 8GB is not much, I can tell you that even 4GB is a noticeable step up from just a 7,200rpm HDD. Start up and frequently used programs are much quicker to start up; the whole point of them.
Still, a 2.5" SSD and a 2.5" HDD, or a mSATA SSD and 2.5" HDD are better options, as you can fit the whole OS and frequently used programs (the whole program as well, not just the start up part) on them. They are more expensive though and; the former can mean you have to sacrifice a second battery/ODD/weight saver and the latter often a 3G/4G/UTMS modem. Reply
nerd1 - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkI think they are still vastly overpriced, as 128G SSDs now cost LESS THAN $100. And more and more laptops nowadays has mSATA slot too (except for apple :]) so I don't see any reason to get hybrid HDD at all. Reply
ET - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkI'd wait for some benchmarks, but I can see buying these for the laptops I have, if they get a reasonable performance increase for normal use. Not that I really use my laptop (tablet fulfills my needs), but my wife's could use this. Reply
ET - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkBy the way, looks like they're currently selling way over the SRP. $110 and $150 for the laptop drives at Newegg. $82 (with shipping; good price) and $145 at Amazon. Reply
Wolfpup - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkIn case anyone's looking to buy-the second gen Momentus XT has a 7200RPM 750GB drive, 32MB RAM cache, and 8GB SLC. This has 5400RPM, presumably 8MB RAM, and 8GB MLC. Every spec is worse, save for the extra 250GB. Reply
cjl - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkWhy would you presume a cache size of 8MB when the last gen one had 32? Even low end drives tend to have 16MB cache... Reply
T2k - Thursday, March 07, 2013 - linkSomeone is truly clueless at Seagate - look at WD, at least they will ship their hybrids with 32GB flash, now that's something, that will make a difference. Reply
fteoath64 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkIf Seagate has ANY sense, it would build a multi-port sata chip in the disk and has an msata connector (space for it, there is enough space on the metal parts of a 3.5 inch disk) so one can plug any of your own Msata drives into the HDD. Then run with it from a single sata port!.
The beauty of this design is on a Mac, it can become a Fusion drive right away!. PC based users can use their own caching software or just (JOBD) install an OS on the msata and use the HDD as data drive. On recent Intel board SRT the thing .... (8G of MLC these days!, ha!.). Reply
chas488 - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - linkThe best way is to get a WD Raptor drive and a Sandisk 30g cache drive.I love the setup and got the Raptor for half price at Newegg when they were on sale. I found out after reading a lot of reviews that the Sandisk cache drive has the best software. This setup is fast and have had no problems with it. Reply
chas488 - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - linkGo with the WD Raptor and the Sandisk Cache drive you will love it. Reply


text:
World of Warcraft Performance Guideby Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/23/2005 12:17 PM EST
- Posted in
- GPUs
59 Comments
Back to Article
biegstvo - Tuesday, July 08, 2008 - linkCPU seems to make a difference. I only have a 1.8 Ghz, and it's slow, but I'm not sure how much that has to do with the fact that it's a Celeron, with it's cut down cache, etc. If I got a 1.8Ghz P4, or even 2.* Ghz, would that help a lot?
(I realize socket 478 is old, but I still have [cheap] room ahead of me even in this outdated format.) Reply
edeus - Monday, October 31, 2005 - linkIt would be good to know if there was raid on this test machine - as CPU tests may have been skewed because of it. Reply
shady28 - Saturday, January 07, 2006 - link
This article should be updated in some way. With the advent of battlegrounds, the biggest performance hits come in battlegrounds where there are 30-40 vs 30-40 other players. The front lines can easily have 60 people PvPing, plus a dozen or more NPCs thrashing around.
I can say unequivocably that a Radeon 9600Pro is incapable of dealing effectively with this. I seriously doubt anything below a 9800XT can give you even moderately good framerates in those circumstances. I'd also like to see something showing any differences in 512MB cards vs 256MB vs 128MB in games like WoW and EQ2, since those games have tons of textures and constantly have to reload new textures as you move around in-game (both for the landscape, and textures on other players representing their armor and weapons as they come into visual range). Reply
xinc - Friday, May 06, 2005 - linkTo poster 50.
Yes, when ram comes into question, it would be more beneficial, to have at least 1gb of ram to avoid lag issues.
Graphical quality wise, my laptop sucks for detail, and frame rates are mediocre at best (I use default settings for details etc), however with 1gb of ram, I am lag free when passing by the auction houses in Orgrimmar, and Iron Forge.
Thanks to Anand & Co. for performing these tests... at least it gives us as the general public an idea of how to spec a "WOW gamebox"
Now my question to anyone reading these comments, and who would know more about performance... would you choose either a Geforce 6600GT or a Geforce 6800? (not GT just 6800)
it's about a $80 premium for the 6800 where I live in Canada. Thanks for any help. Reply
Solanio - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - linkI'm running it on a Mac with all settings set to max, highest refresh and all shaders on and I'm noticing hardly any lag*. But I haven't been able to compare it to a PC yet.
People even complain about lag in open channel when I'm not suffering any. - But again, what seems 'normal' to me might seem slow to others. I'll know better when I'm able to compare.
I have a G5 dual 2GHz with 2 G RAM and the 6800 Ultra DLL NVIDIA card connecting via DSL.
I do have to say though that visually the game is beautiful and I'm really enjoying it.
*(The only time I notice lag is when I log on at peak times, there's sometimes an initial second of jump and then now and then rarely when entering an area like Goldshire, when there are a bunch of characters and I've been off somewhere else, like Westfall - but that is rare and it only happens for a moment and then everything is smooth). Reply
bluebob950 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - linkwhat model 6600gt did you use in your test? Reply
Anemone - Monday, April 11, 2005 - link2gb for the more intense raids helps noticeably on the Intel side of things.
matbe - Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - linkGreat article! It's hard to test mmorpg performance but you succeeded. Must be a first, at least with such reliable tests! Again Anandtech impresses me. Would love to see a test of the more graphics intensive EverQuest2 too! Reply
DPOverLord - Monday, April 04, 2005 - linkRam wise does this mean if we plan on building a computer it makes more sense to buy the ram now then later? Reply
drdavis - Friday, April 01, 2005 - linkOK, followup to the Mac post. I was looking through the Mac support forum on the WoW community site. The FPS rate drop is a known issue that was introduced and a fix is in the works. So, hopefully Blizzard will have it soon!
See http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=w...
Conspiracy - Thursday, March 31, 2005 - linkI'm running an Intel 2.8GHz 800FSB overclocked to 3.4 and 1GB of memory. I also have a Geforce 6800GT Ultra. Nice setup and can play any game at max rez w/o issues. Even WOW is quite nice. However I did have a lot of issues with disk swapping, mainly in big cities like Orgrimar. I fixed it by setting up a Raid 0 config. I rarely, if ever, get any disk swapping issues. This is a pretty huge key factor with performance IMO. Reply
drdavis - Thursday, March 31, 2005 - linkIt was great to see the comparison to the Mac as I am a Mac user playing WoW (PowerMac G5 dual 2Ghz with ATI 9800 Pro) as well. I agree with the assessment that the bottleneck is most likely the OpenGL driver. I am curious, it would be nice if a comparison could be made to the PowerMac running an Nvidia 6800 instead of the ATI card. I have been told that ATI never was one for screaming OpenGL performance and Nvidia usually did a better job with OpenGL drivers.
eastvillager - Wednesday, March 30, 2005 - linkThe only WoW performance issues I have are on Blizzards side of the connection, lol. Reply
eastvillager - Wednesday, March 30, 2005 - linkReply
Pinnacle - Tuesday, March 29, 2005 - linkWhile I commend the intention of doing a performance review on game that are not first person shooters, I think you have missed the point. Yes your enjoyment of warcraft is going to depend on your hardware, but GPU probably has a secondary role to CPU, memory, internet connection speed, LAN speed and probably a host of other items.
What I would like to know is something concrete about how much data is moved about while playing the game, and what you guys think the WoW servers should/could be running on to implement the game. Sorry if I sound too critical - I think The Anand Team does a great job! Reply
Brunnis - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - linkHey, Anand, did you ever get around to checking that AthlonXP 3200+ system of yours? Every test that you do with that system shows it being EXTREMELY slow. I've never seen an AthlonXP 3200+ doing this bad on any other site... Some results that you've published with that system have even been proven wrong. Most notably the 263kB/s WinRAR result (normal is 380-400kB/s).
Just as the results from some of your previous reviews, this one shows the AthlonXP to be clock-to-clock as fast as a Prescott CPU. This is just as rediculous now as it was in your old tests.
Are you really SURE that everything is okay with that AthlonXP system? I'm still not convinced. Reply
jiulemoigt - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - linkOk I'm confused there is a built in frame counter in wow so benchies should be cake. Oh and approacing the action house isn't video cards probs it's lag from too many people. The numbers are not right I have a AMD64 3200+ that gets more frames than the graph when set back down to the right clock speed, and the FX-55 when paired with a 6800gt is signifactly faster than the graph what did you use to get the frames per sec? Reply
Mizuchi - Friday, March 25, 2005 - linkWouldn't more memory help with disk swapping? Reply
mdk30 - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link"We found a maximum of 3% variation between runs as long as there was no disk swapping that occurred during the benchmark (more on that later)."
Did I miss the follow-up to this comment about disk swapping? I just went back through the article again and still can't find anything. I've had annoying stuttering problems with WoW when my drive is working hard, so I was just wondering if there was anything that I could do to minimize that effect. Reply
Mizuchi - Friday, March 25, 2005 - linkHoly crap. I ran the game with default settings, like use high quality textures and shaders and the game looks sooo much better. Guess that's the difference with a DX9 card. I will play on my laptop now, I think. :)
Cancelling that order on the Dell. Keeping the RAM. I'm going to find a video card deal and get in... so much more enjoyable with better visuals. Choppy frames is still a problem, but I might get over it. Reply
Mizuchi - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkI have a generic laptop that I bought from Hugebee Corp (forgot the name of their smaller retail online storefront) that seemed to be an ECS model with a P4 2.8 GHz w/HT, 1GB mem, 5400 RPM drive and 9600 Pro. I'll see how it runs at it's native res, 1280x800 (WSXGA I think), and see if it's smooth enough.
As for settings with my 2500+ XP Barton, 512MB, 7200 RPM (8MB Cache), 9700 Pro system, I'm running 1280x1024 with LOD, Shaders enabled (sub options off), and everything else min or off. These settings seem to run the fastest. Getting ~60 FPS normally... I guess I am fretting too much over crowded areas and upon landing from flight.
For reasons unknown, the game runs choppier at lower resolutions. I went as far as restart my system with the lower res saved for my next log on and it still seemed choppier, just to prove that something was wrong. My monitor drivers are installed and working and it runs at 60 Hz at all supported resos... Reply
BopTop - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkFinally some benchmarks on MMO's. I'll agree with the previous posters, although I don't play it, I would also like to see EQ2 broken down.
As an aside, I've read there's also been an issue with Intel's speedstepping cpu's to cause players to alternatively speed up and slow down ingame. This has actually led to accusations of speed hacking and bannings. Would be interested to know if this is a legitamate bug or a cover-up excuse. Reply
Kouri - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkGreat article, it's very difficult to bench WoW.
Too bad you don't have any mobile GPU benchmarks. I've been trying to figure out how to get the best quality/performance ratio out of my Dell Inspiron 9100 (/w a Radeon Mobility 9700 128MB) for a while now. Just going outside and doing normal quests you can get away with a lot of the higher quality settings, but going into cities or encountering a large number of players will get you killed (I think having lower texture settings really helps here). Reply
ElFenix - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkthanks for throwing in an AXP! Reply
darfur - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkThis is just to the person who asked why their AA doesn't work in game. You need to disable the full screen glow effect, then AA should work just fine. Reply
Aikouka - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link"Oh, one more question. Why don´t you write anythink about the command rate (1T or 2T) you used - it´s quite important! And if I remember correctly a tRas of 10 is not optimal for NF4 boards. I think its 7 or so. Possibly there are similar problems with the P4-setup."
#25, I noticed on my Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR motherboard with Mushkin PC3200 that the tRas makes about no difference whether it's set at 8, 9, 10 or 11. The difference in memory benchmarks was quite negligible. However, command rate (going from 2T to 1T made an obvious difference.)
One thing I'd like to comment on ... for WoW, I upgraded from my old GeForce FX 5200 to a MSI GeForce 6600GT, and let's say that WoW acts WORSE on my 6600GT. I did raise the graphics settings, but even then, the card has no problem handling them. What it tends to do is this:
The screen is flipped horizontally and then rotated 180 degrees, not to mention a ton of textures are missing. This is one of the "better looking" WoW screw-ups that I get on my new card, and what's even better is when I get the beautiful stop error x8E on nv4_disp.dll :P. It's quite annoying. Reply
Gholam - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkBy the way, there's another repeatable scenario that you can benchmark on: flight. Take a bat/gryphon/whatever, preferrably along one of the longer paths, and measure the FPS as you go from point A to point B. Since the path is the same, results should be more or less comparable - players running by below fall into the margin of error :) Reply
Malladine - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkOk, i take that back. It did slow down noticeably when large numbers of people were around, say 100+
AH was usually ok, but tping into IF took 30 secs to become smooth, i assume due to loading all the gfx Reply
Malladine - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkBefore quitting a month or so ago, I ran this game from release @ 1600x1200 with everything maxed out and it was always smooth.
1gb PC2700
9800 non pro Reply
digit - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkmy bad, just checked, pci-x 16 slot, sorry Reply
digit - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link#23
did you check the motherboard specs on that computer?
when i was looking at them to get one for my girlfreind the motherboard didnt have an agp or pci-x slot for an addon video card.
i could be wrong though... Reply
g33k - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkTypo on pg 4. "Thankfully from a performance perspective, the Radeon 9800 Pro behaves very similarly to the X700 Pro (a big slower, but nothing huge)" Reply
ppi - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkThanks for the article, I would however have one comment.
The test itself does not show it, but in practice the game is quite CPU dependant, especially in areas where it counts - when the game gets crowded.
My resoning behind this is that when I'm increasing or decreasing resolution by one step, performance difference is always minimal in any realistic scenario.
I'm not sure how to test this, though. Maybe if you could stuff a full raid (40 ppl) in some corner of the game. I'm quite sure CPU dependancy would then be MUCH more pronounced. Reply
Hans Maulwurf - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link"I'm all about getting a lot of bang for the buck and here's what kind of system I chose to get"
-Well, you shouldn´t buy a Dell.
Anand, great review. I had to build a PC for EQ2 some time ago and couldn´t find any benchmarks. This WoW benches would have helped. Thank you!
What I don´t understand is why Blizzard offers no benchmark for WoW. It would be very usefull. I thinks your benches are like the flyby UT-bench (though it´s not your fault - anything else is impossible for you), but a botmatch-like bench would be more interisting. I guess Blizzard could build a good benmark level with ease.
Oh, one more question. Why don´t you write anythink about the command rate (1T or 2T) you used - it´s quite important! And if I remember correctly a tRas of 10 is not optimal for NF4 boards. I think its 7 or so. Possibly there are similar problems with the P4-setup. Reply
segagenesis - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - linkI almost thought that was a downgrade until I read you plan on adding memory/video. Not too bad a deal but I almost feel compelled to ask "why?" when its not significantly different than your previous system. Im still using the same XP 2400+ for ages yet get a consistent 30+ fps just about everywhere (discounting large towns where it will drop to 15, but still... what kind of computer does good in Ironforge when there are 50 chars on screen?). No jittering at all.
Mizuchi - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkGreat article. This was exactly what I had been wanting to know, but it came 1 day too late, as I've already ordered a system without any recommendations.
I am on a two year old 2500+ XP Barton with 512 MB PC2700, 80GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache, Radeon 9700 Pro system. General gaming away from many players is smooth, but going through the Crossroads, Origrammar, Ironforge, and flying on a gryphon/wyvern would be terribly choppy. I would guesstimate where I would run by holding down the movement keys during lag and then wait a second for an update and continue until I did what I had to.
It is also a pain to alt+tab out to use Thottbot, which is why I so rarely use it... (I end up being the one of the newbs to beg in /1 (general chat) for hints).
Along with the new system I've bought, I ordered extra RAM (2x512 Cosair Value Select $93 shipped from Chiefvalue.com) in order to multi-task better. And plan on looking up a good priced 6600 GT card.
I'm all about getting a lot of bang for the buck and here's what kind of system I chose to get:
Dimension 4700
Pentium® 4 Processor 530 with HT Technology (3.00GHz, 800 FSB), Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition Qty: 1
Unit Price: $739.00
Processor Pentium® 4 Processor 530 with HT Technology (3.00GHz, 800 FSB)
Memory 256MB DDR2 SDRAM at 400MHz (1x256M)
Keyboard Dell Quietkey® Keyboard
Monitor FREE! 17 inch Ultrasharp™ 1704FPT Digital Flat Panel
Video Cards Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900
Internal Hard Drives 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Floppy Drive and Memory Keys No Floppy Drive Included
Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
Mouse Dell 2-button scroll mouse
Network Interface Integrated Intel® PRO 10/100 Ethernet
Modem No Modem Requested
Document Management Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 6.0
CD or DVD Drives -- Read, Write and Store Data Single Drive: 48x CD-RW Drive 48CDRW
Sound Card Integrated 5.1 Channel Audio
Speakers No Speaker Option
Productivity Software Pre-Installed WordPerfect®, Powerful Word Processing
Security Software Pre-Installed No Security Subscription
Digital Music Dell Jukebox - easy-to-use music player and CD burning software
Digital Photography Paint Shop™ Pro® Trial plus Photo Album™ Starter Edition
Limited Warranty, Services and Support Options 1 Year On-site Basic Plan
Onsite System Setup No Onsite System Setup
Internet Access Services No ISP requested
Mail- In Rebate $150 Mail In Rebate
Miscellaneous Dimension 4700
Financial Software QuickBooks® Simple Start Special Edition (limited to 50 contacts)
Purchase Intent Purchase is not intended for resale.
Save $50 on select Dimension™ 4700 desktops through Dell Small Business.
Expires on 2005-03-24 06:30:00 - $50.00
Belkin SurgeMaster 7-Outlet Qty: 1
Unit Price: $17.00
You save 50% on Belkin surge protectors from Dell Small Business!
Expires on 2005-03-24 23:59:59 - $8.50
Free 720 Color Printer (Value $49.00)
Free Dell Color Printer 720 Qty: 1
Unit Price: $0.00
Dell Color Printer 720 Free Dell Color Printer 720
Hardware Support Services 1Yr Ltd. Warranty- Advance Exchange
Small Business customers receive FREE 3-5 day Shipping on select all Software and Peripheral items priced $50 or higher!
Expires on 2007-12-31 06:30:00 - $5.50
Sub-Total $697.50
Shipping Discount -$5.50
Shipping $0.00
Estimated Tax $41.85
Total $739.35
Dell just had a good deal going, considering the $150 MIR ($600 cost). It's like getting the monitor for $300, processor $200, HD $50, Mobo $50 and everything else free (Windows XP Home, Printer, Memory, CD-RW drive, KB/M, software, and Dell's support). Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkJust a quick FYI: Level of Detail (LOD) has nothing to do with the textures. LOD is a ploygon scaling algorithm, so as you get closer to an object more polygons will be added to make it look more realistic. Done properly, it should be hard to spot. Unfortunately, doing LOD properly is very difficult.
With the high-end GPUs, polygon performance generally isn't enough of a problem to make enabling LOD necessary. Lower end CPUs and GPUs can benefit, of course. In the past, I've seen LOD have less than a 10% performance impact, so I'm happier leaving it enabled in most games. (Not that most games actually expose LOD as a tweakable setting....) Reply
ViRGE - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkI wholeheartedly agree with the Mac statements after playing it on a Mac myself. I have a 12" PowerBook Rev. A(867mhz G4, GF4 MX420, 640MB RAM, etc), and the performance I get out of WoW while on the road is abysmal(single digit frame rates when more than a handful of characters are on the screen). Just for comparison's sake, I loaded up WoW on a somewhat similar PC(AXP 2100+, GF2MX original, 768MB DDR, etc), and there's simply no comparison between the two; just eyeballing the FPS has the PC at well over 2x the performance. I even managed to isolate the CPUs in all of this, with the PowerBook almost never hitting 100% CPU utilization in this test(it hovered around 80% or so), meaning the PowerBook should have the edge over the PC, but as I stated before it was losing badly.
I have a feeling a lot of this has to do with the fact that the Mac version is using an OpenGL renderer while the PC is using DirectX, but still 50% is insane. It beats not having WoW at all, but there's still some sort of large bottleneck in there, and I'm fairly sure it's all related to the graphics subsystems. Reply
civilgeek - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkI too would like to see a review like this for Everquest II. I don't play WOW and have not seen its graphics first hand but from the looks of the cards\resolutions that are being used in this review... Everquest is putting a lot more stress on the cards. I know that every video card I have seen thus far will crawl to a halt with the graphics turned up to Extreme Quality at 1280x1024. It would be very interesting to see where the bottle necks are and what card would do the best in this scenario. Reply
gotsmack - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkWhen measuring fps, could you also show the most common lowest fps achieved?
I want to see what the lowest will be, if I upgrade my hardware. Reply
trs80m1 - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkGreat article, though I was disappointed to see that the ATI 9600XT (my card, of course) got left off. Hope you get a chance to add that, since I'd like to keep that card when I build a new A64 system soon.
Two other requests: City of Heroes performance review, and how does the Internet connection affect framerate? i.e. Cable vs DSL vs Dial-up
Thanks again! Reply
segagenesis - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkI dont think WoW even supports AA, at least on my card (read above). I force enable it outside and it works up to the character selection screen, but in game it goes away (back to jaggies). What gives? Reply
Glayde - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkHey I want to say thanks for doing comparisons on a game I play, it's hard to compare other benchmarks to actual results i'd get in game.
One thing I'd like to ask about though, none of your tests were with AA enabeled? (since AA isn't changed in-game in WoW, you need to do it out of game).
cHodAXUK - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkNice article, how about a look at EQ2 and DAoC Catacombs as well? The later has just had a major DX9 engine upgrade and all the old art/textures/models have been overhauled. Reply
Gholam - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkHeh, approaching Orgrimmar auction house/bank area in prime time really puts the stress on any system :) I have a Winchester running at 2.6GHz and a 6800GT PCIe at 420/1200, and it's still a little choppy there, especially on initial approach, although I suspect that is due to bunches of textures being loaded. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkFor this particular test LOD didn't dramatically influence performance, but you all right, if it does annoy you turning the option off definitely helps.
That comment was made for lower clocked Northwoods, I've made the appropriate clarification in the review.
The big difference ends up being in overall smoothness of gameplay, which is determined by minimum frame rates as well as averages. Unfortunately due to the nature of the test being non deterministic not all of the minimum frame rates make total sense, thus we left those statistics out.
Take care,
Anand Reply
WooDaddy - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkMy favorite part about the review is on the last page:
"And as always we found that the Extreme Edition is a waste of money"
I think anyone who is BUILDING a computer who uses a Intel processor for GAMING is nucking futz! I mean how many AT reviews do you have to read until you get it in your think skull that Intel is absolutely not the best way to go for gaming!?!</rant off>
Sorry about that... Seriously, though. Good review. Time to upgrade the Ti4200 128Mb. I've been waiting for a review like this. Reply
Illissius - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkThe 6600GT is only 15% slower than the 6800GT? That seems rather very odd... Reply
OrSin - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkAlittle off subject can we get beachmarks with some RTS games too. Thier was time when they were all 2d games, but now alot of them are 3d now. Kohan 2, and Axis and Allies both use the Grybo engine. This engine is used in quite a few RTS games. Most games have in game films so you can re-run the film to test thier game play.
Thanks. Reply
EODetroit - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkInteresting, I might have to try that some time, thanks for the quick reply on resolutions... might let me see a wider FoV, useful for PvP. Reply
SDA - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkNice, thorough article. I was surprised at how competitive the 6600GT was with higher-end cards in WoW... looks like it'd match or outperform the X800 Pro across the board. Thanks to the CPU scaling section, I can come to a fairly safe conclusion that this isn't because of other system bottlenecks.
I tend to agree with #2/7 on LOD. If LOD isn't invisible or damned near it, I disable it immediately. It hurts my brain to see a blob morph into a tree.
Question on widescreen: how does WoW generate the widescreen picture? That is, is it horizontally stretched or vertically clipped relative to the 4:3 image, or is it actually the same with more added on on the sides? Reply
sbuckler - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkWhy is my northwood cpu too slow? - you never tested with one so how do you know? Going by previous comparisons it's probably faster then a similarly clocked 5 or 6 series pentium. Reply
EODetroit - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkOh yeah, #2 is right, to be harder on the video cards, turn "Level of Detail" off. Its a feature that replaces far away textures with low detail ones, and subs in the high detail textures on the fly as you get closer. Keeping high detail textures on regardless would have been a more interesting test.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkEODetroit
1280 x 768 is the resolution I used, it's a widescreen resolution that some folks have been using because of its 15:9 aspect ratio.
Take care,
Anand Reply
EODetroit - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkNice article, its practically the first of its kind, since almost no one looks at MMORPGs even though they can get really low framerates at times. I heard EQ2 is the most graphically intensive game on the market, bar none, you might look into testing it too.
WoW is now my game of choice, replacing Enemy Territories (I'm a FPS guy at heart, but WoW is fun and I'm hooked). I'm hoping that when Battlegrounds comes out, it'll be like ET on crack, except taking months to max your character instead of minutes.
One thing... on Page 4, you list the one of the resolutions you tested as "1280x768". Is that accurate or was it really 1280x960 or 1280x1024, which seems more likely.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkWoodchuck2000
Ask and ye shall receive, the first page has been updated :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
segagenesis - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkMinor points... I would add that using LOD causes a noticeable level detail change ass you walk along, you can see the obvious detail changes. I keep it *off* even if it reduces performance because otherwise mountains/trees/stuff look like they are morphing as you get closer to them :P
Also, in large areas like the barrens setting the terrain distance to 100% makes a difference compared to Teldrassil as you showed. I still get 30 fps which is fair enough for a 9800 pro at max detail. Reply
Woodchuck2000 - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - linkAny chance of picture rollovers? I'm finding hard to spot some that many DX8/9 differences scrolling up and down! Reply
vetonveton - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - linkI have pen intel{R} pentium{R} 4 CPU 3.00Ghz 2.99Ghz..... RAM: 1 GB.... grafic:96 MB!! Can i play WOW on this??? please guys,I need a quick answer! Reply

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Blog Directory
Browse the Blog Directory
Browse blogs from wide range of categorized blogs on our blog directory. Whether you are looking for niche blogs, personal blogs, Brazil blogs, Home blogs, Move or Relocate blogs you can find them all in our blog directory.
Submit your Blog
Or, Submit your blog and be included on our search engine friendly blog directory.
Brazil Move or RelocateBrowsing Brazil Blogs » Home Blogs » Move or Relocate Blogs
Go over the latest blog sites about move or relocate a home at BlogsDB. Add Move or Relocate blogs and promote on our most visited blog directory on the web.
No blogs are found on this category yet.


text:
Apple iPod Nano (new)
My husband got me a new Ipod Nano (3rd Gen) for my birthday and I am absolutely addicted to it. I have several movies and TV shows loaded, a bunch of songs, photos.... It is an absolute must have. I have the red one. Totally gorgeous!!


text:
The large-scale version of a popular metal ceiling pattern, Large Floral Circle 24-in x 48-in nail-up panels in brass has a hammered surface around the pattern for extra detail.
Armstrong products contribute to your comfort without sacrificing our commitment to the environment. From high light reflectance ceilings that can reduce the light fixtures needed and maintaining good indoor environmental air-quality, most of our ceiling products contain at least 24% recycled materials and some as much as 95%. We are proud to offer products that support the environment.
Recycled Content: 54%
Armstrong products are designed to be installed with specific installation systems. View the list below for the materials you'll need for the best results.
Direct Apply-Nail-up
Find out how to install this product.
View Installation Information
Armstrong offers a variety of accessories to make your installation easier or to enhance the look of your new ceiling or wall. View the list of accessories below designed for use with this product.
If you can't find what you're looking for, please choose one of the options below.
If you don't have a ceiling tile item #, you can upload a photo of your existing ceiling and a customer service representative will contact you with a replacement product or recommendation. Please note: the response time may take 1-3 business days.
A customer service representative will respond to your questions within 1-3 business days.


text:
All posts tagged "Joseph Mallozzi"
Comics/ 6 years ago
Review: Dark Matter #2
After a suspenseful and enigmatic debut, Dark Matter shifts into overdrive with its second issue. The crew of a mysterious spacecraft...
Comics/ 6 years ago
Interview: Joseph Mallozzi On 'Dark Matter'
Joseph Mallozzi is most widely known for his work on all three Stargate series (SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe). Since Stargate was...
this week in horror
This Week in Horror - May 1, 2017 - Rawhead Rex, Unbreakable, ...
Rawhead Rex is getting a 4K restoration, M. Night Shyamalan is making a sequel to Unbreakable and Split, and The X-Files will return for an 11th season! It's This Week in Horror with Whitney Moore!Posted by Bloody-Disgusting on Monday, May 1, 2017
Trending Now
R.I.P. 'Predator' Star Sonny Landham
Dark 'Gremlins 3' Script Ponders the Murder of Gizmo
A Really Strange New 'Cult of Chucky' Image Was Just Released
John Saxon Wrote an INSANE 'Elm Street' Prequel Back in 1987
Here's the Official Plot Synopsis for M. Night Shyamalan's 'Glass'
'Friday the 13th: The Game' Launches New Website; New Jason & New Map Coming Soon!
Overlooked Indie Horror Films You Should Watch: Volume 4
Third 'Jeepers Creepers' Opening in Theaters Next Month
Anya Taylor-Joy Reteams With 'Witch' Director on 'Nosferatu'!
'IT' Director Andy Muschietti Shares Feelings On 1990 Adaptation


text:
How To Cast Thicker Items?
Posted 27 May 2010 - 04:08 PM
Posted 08 May 2013 - 07:38 AM
Hello Ceramic Folks, I am interested in making duplicate copies of an item made from ceramic. This item would be basically rectangular in shape, about 31/2 " long, about 1" wide, ¾ " thick, with a ¼ " centered hole running its length. I keep running across things on slip casting but that seems more appropriate for thinner objects like vases and such. I know little of ceramics, so if someone could direct me to some reference work on how I might go about such a project it would be appreciated. Thanks, Jack
IMHO the thickness shouldn't be a major problem. However de-moulding the piece might be a major issue.
I've cast items with vertical sides, and the piece de-moulds reluctantly, but without major difficulty. Mainly
because the clay shrinks away from the outer walls of the mould, giving a little wriggle-room.
On the other hand, the clay will shrink onto the part of the mould modelling your central hole. Permanently.
You might get away with a very tapered hole, but I doubt it.
Regards, Peter
At this point you have to think about the accuracy you require, and the trouble you are willing to go to.
Most of the ideas I've seen are from the technical-ceramic rather than the pottery world.
A direct route is simply to drill the hole. Either in the greenware, or the fired ceramic.
I've read of people having de-moulding problems pre-casting a layer of paper-pulp in the mould as a
release agent. But this was because they were casting with difficult materials (alumina, zirconia, ...)
rather than addressing shrinking-on problems.
In the past I've toyed with the idea of casting a sacrificial rod into the piece. Using a material that either
burns away in the firing, or can be crumbled away after the firing. Our colleagues in glass-making and
metal 'sand' casting have been round this route. Not that I found anything that obviously applied to pottery.
- The world of casting-sand is a black art, often using exotic additives only available in industrial quantities.
- Glass artists tend to use things which crumble on firing at their temperatures. From a distant memory
things like plaster-of-paris with additives (e.g. sawdust?).
You might get away with making the sacrificial rod out of something like paper-mache, or even a cardboard tube.
Might want to water-proof the cardboard tube so that it doesn't loose strength when it gets wet. If you can source
tubes of reproducible size (waxed paper drinking straws?) you could have a recess in the mould to hold the straw.
Finally the thicker the casting the more time it takes, both to cast and the dry. Eventually you might want to consider
using some sort of paper-slip, with just enough paper-pulp to 'wick' the moisture. Might well reduce warping as well.
Posted 08 May 2013 - 07:45 AM
Posted 09 May 2013 - 09:52 AM
Posted 09 May 2013 - 10:18 AM
1 user(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 1 guests, 0 anonymous users


text:
The HTC One X for AT&T Reviewby Brian Klug on 5/1/2012 6:00 PM EST
- Posted in
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- Krait
- Mobile
- Tegra 3
- HTC One
137 Comments
Back to Article
frostyfiredude - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkIf there is one difference that really stood out between the International and ATT versions of the One X, it's the battery life. For all the talking nVidia did about Tegra3 allowing world beating battery life, it really got served by the S4 in that regard.
In the fall I really hope HTC makes a One X like phone with WP8 on it, if I'm not feeling cheap I think I'll buy one. Reply
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkYeah, that's really the most important thing for me. I'm glad Anandtech puts it earlier in the reviews. Reply
Chloiber - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIt's true. I'm currently owning a One X (international). I'm okay with the battery life (it's better than my previously HTC Desire). But as Brian has mentioned, software updates are on the way. The second update has been released yesterday. The updates are coming out nearly weekly! The improvements are huge in many aspects. The last update (released yesterday in Europe for unbranded devices) finally enabled 2D GPU Acceleration. That's right: 2D GPU Acceleration wasn't working properly before. It couldn't even be forced in the dev settings.
I really hope they can improve the device even more, and I'm pretty confident they will. To be perfectly honest, I would have preferred the S4 version of the One X. Nvidia still seems to have some problems with the T3 - again, I'm confident that the device's performance and battery life will improve massively over the next couple of months, but S4 seems to be the safer bet. Reply
pikahatonjon - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linki know its offtopic, however, how come it seems like the Droid Razr performs like 40% better than the galaxy nexus 58.7 fps vs 33.1 when they both have the same SoC? was there some error in the test Reply
frostyfiredude - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkHigher resolution display on the Nexus would be the cause of most if not all of the difference. 960x540 for the RAZR v 1280x720 for the Nexus Reply
PyroHoltz - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI really wish Anandtech would normalize the graphics benchmarks to FPS/megapixel of screen resolution.
Or, implement something that will take the fluctuations in native resolution, out of the equation a bit. Reply
Goty - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkJust look at the "offscreen" numbers, those are all rendered at the same resolution regardless of handset. Reply
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThe Offscreen Test is a seriously flawed one. It's clear that the act of rendering to the screen has a different penalty for different GPU's.
Since you have to render in actual 3D applications, this means that the Offscreen test is worse than useless since it's _misleading_.
You can't even say it's a VSync issue because in this very article, you have the GLBenchmark test at 720P where the results for both the Global and ATT OneX phones are both significantly below 59-60FPS. Reply
Goty - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkWriting of the framebuffer to the screen is the least part of what each GPU has to do and certainly has less of an impact that differing resolutions between screens; I highly doubt that writing out the framebuffer is even that different between different architectures. Reply
metafor - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkIt's very much in line with the V-Sync results we've seen with the MDP and other devices that allow you to turn V-Sync off.
The tests with the Qualcomm MDP show exactly this kind of difference with V-Sync turned on and off, even if the resulting average doesn't come close to 60fps.
Why? Because framerate can vary by a lot within the running of the benchmark. Simple sequences can burst up to the 100's of frames per second. That will throw off the average by a lot. Reply
UltraTech79 - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkWhy would this matter? It's not like you can upgrade the GPU or change the screen. Its an integrated package, so he shouldn't do that at all. Reply
randinspace - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkLOL Totoro! That takes me back to a far more innocent (and lower resolution) time. 本当になつかしな... Reply
jjj - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkno microSD = deal breaker
HTC is such a tease,almost having the device to buy ... Reply
sprockkets - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkWhat about the battery being non removable as well :)
Well, I'd like for it to be removable but it seems having a solid body wins out with the majority. Reply
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkI used to mentally require that, but I haven't touched the 16GB card that came in my Droid X. I thought I would've upped it to 32GB by now, but I haven't needed to do it. Reply
The0ne - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkJust depends on your use and needs. I absolutely require memory card expansion support as all my files will be stored on there (music, videos, movies, books, documents, work, and so on).
I was about to order this phone on Amazon for $150 but without SD support it's a deal breaker for me. Reply
g00ey - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkEXACTLY! And don't forget that Android games also require a considerable amount of storage space. The game Modern Combat 3 requires at least 1,75 GB of free storage to fit inside the phone. With the advancement of the GPU and CPU of smartphones we will soon see DVD sized games on handhelds. Imagine having 5 - 10 such games on a smartphone.
The internal storage that comes with smartphones these days are abysmally low and a lot of people out there don't want to rely on some sleazy cloud storage solution, especially when travelling around the world. Reply
Arbie - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link
I agree - a (micro) SD card is a necessity. I can't carry TWO devices around if I want both a phone and a file player. Too many mobile makers appear to be clueless about this. Very sad to see it missing from such an otherwise excellent device. Reply
ol1bit - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkCloud my man, Amazon stores it for free. Your local SD card is becoming not as important.
Not only that but who can listen to 32Gb of music?, just use Pandora.
:-) Reply
mbzastava - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkno one wants to be tethered to the cloud all the time. one can not be tethered to the cloud all the time. And 32GB of music is nothing if one wants to carry a decent variety. Reply
mbzastava - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkoh and i forgot data caps. enjoy running into those more often with LTE and having everything in the cloud. Reply
wdb1966 - Friday, May 04, 2012 - linkExactly!!!
On a device specifically targeted to multimedia users, its crazy to NOT have a microSD slot for expansion.
I hope an engineer somewhere lost their job.
I would not use this phone even if it were given to me for FREE! Reply
RussianSensation - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkSamsung S3 is going to launch this week. It's premature to recommend a next generation smartphone without testing the S3, at the very least. Reply
dagamer34 - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkI'll bet you good money that the US version of the Galaxy S III is basically an HTC One XL with a microSD card slot, Super AMOLED+ HD screen, and and 12 MP camera. Reply
lowlymarine - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkHasn't it more or less been confirmed that the GS3 is going to be using a quad-core A9 of Samsung's own design? Or did you not mean to imply it would use the same Snapdragon S4 SoC? Reply
jwcalla - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI think I read somewhere that the international version would be the quad-core Samsung A9, but the US version will be a Snapdragon S4. Something about LTE network compatibility. Reply
RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkWell at the very least considering it's launching this week, wouldn't you wait for a test against the S3?
For starters, the quality of construction already looks better than the HTC One and the screen will be larger.
Also, if you happen to listen to music on nice headphones the HTC One also falls short:
All these things already would alone make me want to wait to see how competing new generation Android phones would do. Reply
Impulses - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkYou do realize that review is for the Tegra 3 version no? The audio stack and hardware could be completely different on it, the AT&T One X probably shares more in common with the One S since they both run S4... Reply
RussianSensation - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkYa, I know that. There are other issues with HTC One, lack of Micro SD card, smaller screen than S3, worse quality construction most likelyl. Also, the video camera and still camera are not great either, and early benchmarks are showing that the Mali-400 and Exynos 4 Quad chip in S3 will easily beat the HTC One X:
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s_iii_pops_... Reply
Chloiber - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIt won't launch this week. It will be presented this week. Small difference. Reply
RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkYou know that HTC One is for pre-order still too?
Well if you need a phone right away, then sure get the HTC One. Considering most of us keep our phones for 2 years, I'll wait a month if it means getting a better phone. Can't go wrong with HTC One. Reply
NeoteriX - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link"It's premature to recommend a next generation smartphone without testing the S3, at the very least."
That's a pretty silly statement. There's always a "next best thing" on the horizon. Shall we keep delaying a recommendation waiting for the next generation device? The Galaxy S3 is going to be *announced* in a few days, which says nothing of it's actual release, internationally or in the US.
In other words, it could be several months before Anand or Brian get their hands on a US S3. Consumers need to make purchasing decisions now. If you want to wait and hope that the S3 may be better, that's your prerogative, but it certainly shouldn't be AnandTech's. Reply
RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThat's a pretty silly statement. There's always a "next best thing" on the horizon. Shall we keep delaying a recommendation waiting for the next generation device?
Umm...it's one thing when that something new is launching in 3-4 months from now. Samsung S3 is launching this week......
Do you keep a device for 2 years? If so, what's waiting another 1-2 weeks to see how it does? If you don't care sure. HTC One already has poor audio quality which is a big factor for us who listen to music on our phones. That alone is a deal breaker for me. Reply
metafor - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI will wait for the announcement before picking. But if it's anything like the Galaxy S2, a US buyer like myself will have to wait until October to get it :(
I'm currently trial-testing a One S. I'll be choosing between that, the One X or GS3 when I can get my hands on all 3. Reply
Skiddywinks - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI think you are missing something pretty big here.
The S3 was meant to be announced months ago, and the reason it was pushed back was because Sammy didn't want to do the typical where they announce a phone, and then can't actually sell any for months.
I think the S3 will be in consumer's hands a hell of a lot quicker. Hell, there are already pictures of inventory screens with them. Reply
metafor - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkConsumers in the U.S. The S2 was announced, then available for international customers within IIRC 2 months or so. That's perfectly reasonable and expected.
It then took godfarking forever for it to come to the U.S. carriers. Verizon never carried it, ever.
What makes you think Samsung is delaying the announcement for the sole reason of a U.S. market launch? Reply
dagamer34 - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkSamsung has already stated that they want to announce their phones closer to their actual launch date. It's silly that the Galaxy S II was announced in Feb 2011 and didn't get sold in the US for another 7 months! And with the HTC One X already available, they can't sit on this phone for 2 months. Reply
ol1bit - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI remember it took almost 9 months for the S2 to make it to America. I doubt the S3 will be any better.
This HTC rocks, and I'm bet will be way better than the S3. Reply
Skiddywinks - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkSee my reply to metafor, above.
Basically, you're (very likely) wrong. Reply
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - link"The One X on AT&T is really a One XL (L for LTE)"
The humor is strong with this one... Reply
Talcite - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkOn the display page, you said the SAMOLED+ has an RGBG subpixel. It should be changed to SAMOLED. The + variety has the regular RGB subpixel. Reply
Brian Klug - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkFixed, thanks!
-Brian Reply
metafor - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkWill there be a T-Mobile One-S review? I noticed there's data here on it but I'm kinda shocked at how different the battery life is, considering it's a 1600mAH battery vs a 1800.
Does AMOLED on the One-S really eat up that much power? Reply
Brian Klug - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThere will be a review of:
• One S T-Mobile
• One S International
• One X International
Sometime next week :) Reply
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkEach device individually? You guys rock! Reply
bigboxes - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkWill there be a HTC EVO 4G LTE review? You should include Sprint's variant as well. Reply
dagamer34 - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkAMOLED eats up a lot of power because of the tendency of webpages to be white, which sucks up a lot of power compared to black. Reply
metafor - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkYes but I didn't expect that much. The difference between the battery life here is startling. The One X lasts 4 hours -- or 66% -- longer than the One S despite having a larger screen with more pixels. The battery difference alone can't explain that. Reply
Rivensteel - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkI'm not certain that's correct. If you have an LED illumination you can locally dim your backlighting, but I don't think I've heard of that in mobile devices. If there's no local dimming, then theoretically black should be more power-intensive since you have to activate the LCD to block light transmission. Reply
NeoteriX - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link1) No local dimming LEDs on mobile devices; it comes with high thickness since the lighting can't from the side, but must come from a backlighting array.
2) Yes, black in theory does require power consumption from the LCD to block transmission, but from what I've seen, it's marginal compared to the powerdraw of the backlight itself, wireless antenna, SoC, etc. such that it's moot. Reply
metafor - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkHis point is that blacks on an LCD require far more power than on an AMOLED. Since a black pixel on an AMOLED = no power used.
I'm curious as to how the power consumption of a fully white AMOLED screen of equal pixel density and screen size compares to that of an LCD -- at equal brightness of course. This actually shouldn't be very difficult to test and really would be nice in one of these reviews.
Take the Galaxy Nexus or the upcoming GS3 and the One X, turn off everything (airplane mode, kill all background processes) and disable auto-lock/auto-dim. Turn the screen to various levels of brightness while displaying a pure white screen (several apps will do this).
Then see how long the phone takes to go from 100% battery to 0%. Extrapolate based on how large the battery is in WH rating.
Then compare the two. Reply
Lucian Armasu - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - linkWhich is why I find it very weird that Samsung didn't go with a more stock ICS dark look for their Galaxy S3. ICS feels like it was made for AMOLED displays, and yet Samsung refuses to use it. Shame. Reply
ilkhan - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkI stopped reading at this line:
"however the device does not work with T-Mobile WCDMA and the One XL page lists the correct air interface support."
The rest of it was totally irrelevant after that.
Pity. That screen has been getting tons of praise.
Maybe the OneX2 will include a proper GPU and TMo support. Reply
ilkhan - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - link(no edits?)
It was already borderline without a replaceable battery and without an mSD slot. The frequency support just closes the book for sure.
Which really is a pity. The android phones first got started by word of mouth "expandable storage, easy to hack, total control, function over form", the antithesis of apple. Now they are racing to embrace all the bullshit that apple did 5 years ago. We don't need 7mm thick phones. Gimme the extra 2 extra mm of thickness if it means I get an mSD slot and replaceable larger battery, I'll be happier that way. Reply
metafor - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkHaving come from a Sensation to a One S, I gotta say, I love the 7mm thin factor over almost everything else (the weight too). With dropbox and Google music, most of my needs for large storage has been eliminated. Reply
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkJust wait. When the market goes far enough in one direction, it opens up a niche market in the other direction.
You might end up having to use a developer device or something like that, but you'll get your wish. Reply
Zoomer - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI would like my 4 hardware buttons too. microSIM I suppose is acceptable, though the use of a special tool for access is not.
Physical Buttons
Swappable batteries would be a plus, if only for easier debugging / full off. Reply
Zoomer - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkOh almost forgot, HTC branding on the top of the glass. HTC's the manufacturer, NOT AT&T. AT&T is just pipe. ;) Reply
kmmatney - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkYou can always get an external USB battery to use an an extra battery (and it can charge other things to). Reply
sprockkets - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThat's why they make the One S. Shame that has to be the case, but you might like the metal case better. I wish I could open it like the sensation though. Reply
MrMilli - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - link"On the GPU side, there's likely an NVIDIA advantage there as well."
How do you get to this conclusion?
Qualcomm scores a little bit higher in Egypt as in the Pro test of GLBenchmark. I don't know why you would put any importance to the off-screen tests for these two devices since they both run the same resolution (which is even 720p) which takes me to my next points. Actual games will be v-synced and how does the Tegra suddenly become faster than the Adreno even though they both are still rendering at the same resolution as on-screen but just with v-sync off. I've always had a hard time accepting the off-screen results of GLBenchmark because there's no way to verify if a device is actually rendering correctly (or maybe even cheating). Can you imagine testing a new videocard in the same fashion? Reply
metafor - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkResults can vary with v-sync because Tegra could be bursting to higher fps values. The offscreen isn't a perfect test either but it gives you an idea of what would happen if a heavier game that didn't approach the 60fps limit would be like.
Of course, those games likely won't have the same workloads as GLBenchmark, so it really wouldn't matter all that much. Reply
ChronoReverse - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThe offscreen test is worthless really.
If at 720p, the same benchmark, except it puts an image on the screen, shows that the S4 GPU is faster than the Tegra3 GPU, then how useless is the offscreen test showing the opposite?
Furthermore, neither the S4 nor Tegra3 comes close to 59-60FPS, both tipping at around the 50FPS range.
It's pretty clear that by skipping the rendering, the offscreen test is extremely unrealistic. Reply
metafor - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIt doesn't need to come close. It just needs to burst higher than 60fps. Let's say that it would normally reach 80fps 10% of the time and remain 40fps the other 90%. Let's say S4 were to only peak to 70fps 10% of the time but remained at 45fps the other 905. The S4's average would be higher with v-sync while Tegra's would be higher without v-sync.
The point of the benchmark isn't how well the phone renders the benchmark -- after all, nobody's going to play GLBenchmark :)
The point is to show relative rendering speed such that when heavier games that don't get anywhere close to 60fps are being played, you won't notice stutters.
Of course, as I mentioned, heavier games may have a different mix of shaders. As Basemark shows, Adreno is very very good at complex shaders due to its disproportional ALU strength.
Its compiler unfortunately is unable to translate this into simple shader performance. Reply
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThat's still wrong. If you spike a lot, then your experience is worse for 3D games. It's not like we don't know that minimum framerate is just as important.
As you mentioned stutters, a device that dips to 40FPS would be more stuttery than one that dips only to 45FPS. Reply
metafor - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkI'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that v-sync'ed results will vary even if it's not close to 60fps. Because some scenes will require very little rendering (say, a panning shot of the sky) and some scenes will require a lot of heavy rendering (say, multiple characters sword fighting, like in Egypt).
The average fps may be well below 60fps. But peak fps may be a lot higher. In such cases, the GPU that peaks higher (or more often) will seem worse than it is.
Now, an argument can be made that a GPU that also has very low minimum framerates is worse. But we don't know the distribution here. Reply
Chloiber - Monday, May 07, 2012 - linkWell the benchmark doesn't measure your experience in 3D games but the fps. Reply
snoozemode - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThe ATRIX has a LCD pentile RGBW display, as well as the HTC one S, so LCD is definitely not a guarantee for RGB. Maybe you should correct the article with that. Reply
snoozemode - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkSorry one s is obviously amoled. Reply
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkIt's also the passable RGBG pentile, not the viled RGBW pentile. Reply
snoozemode - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThe RGBW in the Atrix is still bad though except for battery performance which is better because of more light coming through. Reply
snoozemode - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkWould be interesting to see battery performance on gps usage, especially on the 8260A and 8960let where the gps is 28nmthat on-die. Reply
OCedHrt - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkDoes the best wifi performance not affect battery life? I noticed the One X does have worse battery life on wifi. Reply
sprockkets - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkI don't know but with it checked on an HTC sensation the battery never charged up and that was on the 1amp charger with the phone. Weird. (this was done on the latest Android Revolution firmware for ICS on the sensation.) Reply
OCedHrt - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkDon't they have the same processor w/o the LTE baseband? Reply
3DoubleD - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkI know this is less important that the other battery life tests you've done, but it would be interesting if you could include some sort of idle power drain test. For one, it would be interesting to see how the Tegra 3 would compare to the S4 here, since the Tegra 3 has the low power companion core for idle tasks.
Also, you included a color accuracy chart it your iPad3 review, could that be added to the display reviews. It's much easier to interpret than looking at the CIE diagram.
Thanks for the great review... I'm pretty tempted to buy a white One X after this. I've been impatiently waiting and refreshing Anandtech for weeks now for this review! Reply
NeoteriX - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThe 40nm LP process used for the companion core may be a bit of a gimmick compared to the next generation smaller process fabs. In other words, it's clear that the 40nm LP process cuts down on consumption compared to the 40nm general process (so, compared with the Tegra 2 which is two cores at 40nm general process, there is battery savings).
However, it could very well be (and is likely) that even the 40nm LP process cannot compete with the 28nm fabrication process used in the Snapdragon S4.
It would be interesting to see, but my bet would be that the S4 wins even on idle. Reply
fm123 - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkThe only thing similar is the phone talk time battery life. Since the Krait has an advantage of 3G/4G integration and die size, the talk function largely removes 3G/4G function from the test (which Tegra does not have integrated), and the talk function itself is not too intensive. Reply
Stormkroe - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkI'd like to think that my incessant whining in the mobile forums are responsible for Exynos missing from the glbenchmark charts :) Broken scores, I tell ya!!!
PLEASE, as a favor to us old 2011 phone owners, re-review phones like the Sensation and Galaxy S2 now that they've gotten ICS. Reply
RamarC - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkbattery life vs capacity is useless if the end user can't replace/expand the battery. it doesn't matter if phone A lasts 7 hours with a smaller battery but phone B lasts 9 hours with a bigger battery. if both batteries are fixed, phone B lasts longer, period. now maybe an overall comparison of phone A vs B with all benchies summarized would be good, but even then cost on the same carrier would need to be considered . Reply
Stormkroe - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThe normalized portions is strictly for showing the efficiency of the phone as a whole package. In the case of the One X and XL, we get a rare opportunity to compare efficiencies without worrying about software, screens, battery manufacturer, etc, as they are all identical. We're then left with a pretty good grasp of how the S4 SoC compares to the Tegra3 SoC, as apples to apples as it's going to get. I'd suggest that maybe it's time you just started skipping over that part if you can't understand the relevance. Reply
sprockkets - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkWhat about MHDL? What resolution does it output at? Reply
3DoubleD - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkHow come there wasn't any comment on the ludicrously small storage space on this phone? How is 16 GB of flash acceptable in a TOP END Q2 2012 phone?!?
This thing costs well over $600 and we only get 16 GB of flash! How much does slow NAND cost? Would an additional 16 GB of storage really cut into the bottom line? How about making 64 GB standard? High performance SSDs are going for $1/GB, and the NAND in these phones is no where near that performance level... food for thought.
Why must HTC play down to Apple's level, then yet provide none of the upgrade options (which are in themselves insulting in a $600+ phone)? Reply
weiln12 - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI agree completely here.
I really don't care if there's expandable memory, I hardly (if ever) used it, I simply use DropBox now if I need to. However, I have over 12GB of music that I listen to every day. How in the heck do these Android phones get by with only 16GB of TOTAL space available?
I use a 32GB iPhone now, and part of me misses Android. However, as long as these "top-end" phones only have 16GB of memory, there's no way I can use them. It's a shame, because I'd really love to have a faster phone and better camera...but I can't give up listening to music. Reply
metafor - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkGoogle music :) Reply
3DoubleD - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkThe problem with stream music is that the majority of phone planes have data caps. Also, streaming music is more battery intensive than just playing local music files.
Also, the way the partitions are for the One X, you only have 2 GB for apps, which is perhaps just enough for heavy users today; however, apps are getting bigger, not smaller. I suspect that 2 GBs of app storage space will be too small for a large number of users during the reasonable lifetime of this phone (next 2-3 years). If anything, they should have made it 3 or 4 GB, but then the insanely small amount of room for pictures and video storage would be a limiting factor. Their real problem is they were just too ridiculously stingy with the amount of integrated flash and it's a real shame because this is a beautiful device. Reply
Goi - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkWhy is it that the One S performs better than the AT&T One X when they both use the same SoC? Reply
Impulses - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkLower res display, less pixels to drive. Reply
Goi - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThanks...I could've sworn I saw the One S leading in non-GPU results as well, but a quick check shows that I remembered wrongly... Reply
Stormkroe - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkScreen res, broseph. The one S is pushing less pixels. Reply
Tryad - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThe Sprint version has a larger battery and some other hardware changes, I was wondering if Anand is planning on reviewing it so we can see how much the battery changes add and other stuff like Bloatware compares to this one. Reply
Impulses - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkSlightly larger battery, kickstand, camera button, microSD slot, and a completely different casing made mostly out of aluminum (and some glossy plastic). Aesthetics aside, I don't see how it can be anything but an improvement, unless the CDMA stack gets bungled and it somehow wrecks battery life.
Sprint has been pretty good about bloatware lately too, they were one of the first carriers to let you uninstall/hide some of their bloat even before ICS allowed it (most of my EVO 3D's built in apps could be removed/hidden, not all tho).
Their network is another story but since there's no VZW in Puerto Rico and AT&T treated me like crap I'll stick with Sprint for now, the EVO LTE helped their cause a bit too. Reply
NeoteriX - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIt wouldn't be the first time a Sprint CDMA version of a phone suffered worse battery life than the GSM version... Reply
Impulses - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkThanks so much for putting out this review this quickly, I know carriers often have a hand in what phones you get to review etc (this one in particular being pre release) but AT reviews continue to be a cut above anything else on the web.
I seriously don't understand how you can be the only site out there that has a standardized method for battery life testing... Even beyond that tho, AT's reviews are simply the most informative, detailed, and less subjective phone reviews out there, bar none. Reply
Impulses - Tuesday, May 01, 2012 - linkOh and I'm looking forward to the One S and international variant reviews... I'm not even getting any of these phones but I still appreciate the work a lot. Any clue if you'll eventually get an EVO 4G LTE in for review? :p Reply
antef - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkHow did you remove the "AT&T" in the upper-left corner of the display in the status bar? Engadget had it displaying there in all of their pics. I would like to be able to remove that as well if I bought this since I don't need a reminder that I'm on AT&T's network. Reply
Impulses - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIt's kinda curious AT&T is the only carrier doing that, and rather annoying since it's wasted notification space. Kinda redundant too considering they also silk screen it on the phone itself and it's also displayed within the notification pane and/or the lock screen (what everybody else does). Reply
1ceTr0n - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkSimple, its marketing, like it or not. Likely will need to root phone and load different ROM to get rid of it Reply
antef - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI see it in some of the author's pics and not others. What's the deal? Reply
Impulses - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkApparently AT&T tag disappears when you actually have notifications, so at least they did that right. Reply
antef - Friday, May 04, 2012 - linkOh, interesting, thanks for clearing that up! Reply
1ceTr0n - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkBut i'll stick with my new white and sexy Galaxy Note Reply
akyp - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link"What's really interesting to me is just how many recent handsets from so many other OEMs have taken a similar design approach - microSIM, unibody polymer construction, no microSD card slot, and non removable battery. That combination of features seems necessary if you're going to craft a device with competitive form factor this generation, and no doubt even more vendors will update with that profile. Polymer makes sense because it's both a material transparent to RF, and easy to machine, and going with a microSIM makes sense since it's all about minimizing area that isn't dedicated to battery."
I strongly disagree with this trend and I think this is right up there with glossy 768p notebook displays in terms of absurdity and simply got to stop. It's not about making the device slim nor maximizing battery, as the One X stands out in neither. It's all about cutting cost and forcing users to upgrade devices sooner because the battery has gone bad and cannot be replaced easily, or the internal storage has run out and there's no way to expand it with a microSD. MicroSIM is an abomination created by Apple just because they can. Reply
xype - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link"The One X on AT&T is really a One XL (L for LTE), however in the USA the device carries full One X branding. We've got the International One X and One S variants which will be reviewed in short order, but for today we're talking specifically about the One X on AT&T."
Every time someone will tell me that Android branding is NOT confusing I will point them to this paragraph. Damn, you'd think the people at HTC are all retarded or something. Reply
Sabresiberian - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI've never owned a smart phone so maybe it's not the problem it is on monitors for desktop and portable computers, but I'm concerned about these screens getting narrower. I'd like to see that trend change, I think. In this, Apple looks to me like it's doing a better job.
;) Reply
Impulses - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThis screen is actually ever so slightly wider than last gen 4.3" qHD displays... Tho those were slightly narrower than the first 4.3" displays, so it's kind of a wash really. The iPhone's display is just smaller in every direction, I don't see how that's an improvement unless you have tiny hands or shallow pockets... If that's the case there's always the One S, it's barely any wider than the iphone, about half an inch longer, but it packs in a 4" display (shame it's Pentile qHD tho (. Reply
jefffeely - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link"The rear facing CMOS is a Samsung S5K3H2YX which Vivek spotted in the MyTouch 4G Slide. "
The Rezound has the same camera module as well.
I would love to see a camera comparison between the One X and another phone with the same module so as to see how much of a difference the dedicated ISP makes. Oh darn, guess I'll just have to go buy an One X now.
As a side note: thank you so much for doing this review. It is nice to be able to find something unbiased in the sea of hype. Reply
quiksilvr - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIn the Camera Section for iPhone 4S, it says:
8 MP with LED Flash, Front Facing Camera
But that is not correct. It SHOULD say:
8 MP AF/LED Flash, VGA Front Facing Camera Reply
ssj3gohan - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThe decibel scale being logarithmic, it's pretty much useless to graph it linearly. You get the false impression that for instance something that has a 77dB loudness is 'just' 5% less loud than something at 80dB, while in fact it's a 100% difference.
The loudness graphs would be much more informative if they would convey these actual differences. There are big, big differences between speaker loudness of phones and it is a legitimate point of review. Reply
skiboysteve - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI agree in principle, but 3dB is not twice as loud. 5-10 dB is.
I actually thought 3dB was twice as loud for a long time but someone finally showed me I was wrong. Google it :) Reply
Stormkroe - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkThe confusion comes from the fact that doubling power to a speaker gains you roughly 3 dB, so a speaker at 600 watts is only around 3 dB louder than the same speaker at 300 watts. Those darned sine waves :) Reply
ssddaydream - Saturday, May 05, 2012 - linkTrue, but the brain tends to perceive 10dB as twice as loud, even though it is 10X the power.
I agree that any graphs should be on the dB scale, so that it is easier to judge differences. Reply
EarthsDM - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkHi Brian, thanks for the review. What pages do you use for the mobile battery life test? Are they mobile formatted? Do they have Flash? Reply
Peanutsrevenge - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIf it wasn't for the lack of removable battery/storage, I would be all over this like a fanboy to Apple, but I would much prefer even a 5mm thicker phone to have those options.
I need to change batteries roughly once a week around 2-3pm and I'm not sure the added battery life over my Sensation would always see me through.
The removable storage... I just prefer to have it even though I only occasionally use it.
Nice review as always though chappies! Reply
dcollins - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI want this phone so badly. Would an unlocked version work on Verizon's network? Reply
Impulses - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkAbsolutely not. Reply
ssddaydream - Saturday, May 05, 2012 - link?
It should be possible with proper hacking. The Rezound can essentially be modified into a world phone, since it has GSM hardware.
The One X does have the required basebands. It will likely not work at all on T-mobile though.
Never say never, it is technically possible. I suspect the probability isn't too high, but where would we be today if everybody thought everything was impossible? Reply
icrf - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link"high-end smartphones (I refuse to call them superphones)"
thank you Reply
georgekn3mp - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkIm still loving my HTC Rezound 6 months later...and wondering why they backpedaled in some ways.
Rezound has 16GB internal and 16 GB secondary SD and can expand to 80GB with a 64GB card...
Rezound has true LCD 1280x720, vs. One X SAMOLED...guess that one could be a toss-up to user preferences as both screens are rated top in reviews...especially compared to Pentiles. So it didnt oversaturate colors..thats a good thing.
Rezound has removable battery and can be upgraded to 2750 extended battery or higher.
Of course I'd love to know why Anand never published a Rezound review when I know they had said they had one!
The camera on One X "may" be better but Rezound has an awesome lens too, even if it had issues with white-balance on default settings sometimes. Replacement camera apps seem to resolve that.
I cant wait to see what ICS does on a OTA upgrade from Verizon...even if it's only Sense 3.5 for Rezound vs Sense 4 on One X it should still have better performance on Rezound on ICS over Rezound on Gingerbread. Alternate ROMS have shown that power...
On Gingerbread with extended battery I easily get 24 hours battery life, I can only hope ICS isn't worse.
PLUS HTC has boot unlocker now... Reply
dagamer34 - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkThe One X has a Super LCD 2 display. The One S has the PenTile screen. Also, I don't think you can get the same structural integrity with a removable battery because that means the back needs to come completely off. The device cannot be made from one piece and needs latches to hold the battery cover. Reply
GTaudiophile - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI personally bought my first smartphone last week when Google started offering the Galaxy Nexus directly for $399. At first I thought I wouldn't like the screen size but after having used it for a few days, I can't imagine having something smaller. I received the phone in two days and have so far had zero issues. It came with ICS 4.0.4 installed.
The biggest selling point for me is the pentaband 3G radio. As someone who is loyal to TMO USA AND a frequent business traveler to Europe, the pentaband 3G gives me a lot of flexibility that no other phone to-date can. If either the One S or X came with pentaband, I would have bought one, even though I do like having a stock Google OS.
I have no doubt the HTC One X and S are great, but I am happy with my Galaxy Nexus. I don't think it will have a problem getting me down the road for at least a year or two. Reply
ectoplasmosis - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - link"I'm still waiting for a platform that can do 720p60 properly"
That platform, here now, is an iPhone 4S paired with the SloPro app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slopro/id507232505
The paid version can export raw 60fps files in 720p. Reply
UltraTech79 - Wednesday, May 02, 2012 - linkI wonder how high the 4S can go, and if it ends up being limited by the SoC or the flash storage. Reply
nitrousoxide - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - link3G time and LTE time are almost identical. Is the phone really running on LTE when you are testing? Reply
darklordkk - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - link9GB and 2GB?? Why?? Taking into account formatting, that's only around ~13GB at max. Where'd the 3GB go??
Even the ye olde Galaxy S i9000 had 16GB partitioned into 2GB for apps and data (1.85 shown) and 14GB for data (13.43 shown).. Reply
One43637 - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkI'm always amazed at how in depth your reviews are AT. Love them, please keep up the great work!
Great HW, I'm just slightly disappointed that the US version gets a neutered 16GB of storage, with no micro SD slot for expansion. I know the big deal was to use Dropbox to help augment that, but with really no true unlimited data options for the majority of wireless providers, this seems like a very big trap door.
I also have read somewhere that the AT&T version doesn't even include Dropbox like the international version. Great job AT&T and HTC... /facepalm
At least give me the option to buy a 32GB version! Reply
vision33r - Thursday, May 03, 2012 - linkNo MicroSD card, what good is a 720p screen when I can't carry all my animes and movies on the device. That means I can only store DivX lowres movies in order to fit in the built in storage.
Lame, SGS3 will dominate sales. Reply
glenns - Friday, May 04, 2012 - link"The phone is machined, not injection molded, from a single machined piece of polycarbonate plastic, and feels anything but cheap in the palm."
Can I ask where this bit of information came from ? As someone who works in the plastic moulding industry its just seems very unlikely on a mass produced product. I cant see any benefit from machining a thermoset plastic like polycarbonate as opposed to injection moulding Reply
Mbonus - Friday, May 04, 2012 - linkI thought HTC was one of the manufacturers that was going to provide unlocked bl. Not so for the early released units. Reply
ArmedandDangerous - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - linkThey already have, couple of weeks ago :) Reply
ssddaydream - Saturday, May 05, 2012 - linkWill a mod please ban this character? See the posts above.
WORSE THAN A TROLL Reply
kyan - Sunday, May 06, 2012 - linkOk guys, I'm gonna have to ask ya for some treasure hunting.
There was a youtube video I saw at work that did an amazing comparison video of the one x, iphone 4s, sony phone with bravia display tech, and galaxy nexus. I cannot find for the life of me where it is. Important note that the language was in chinese, and the review was meticulous and precise. Cookies for the person who can find it.. Reply
kyan - Sunday, May 06, 2012 - linkxperia s, one x, iphone 4s, galaxy nexus Reply
Goi - Wednesday, May 09, 2012 - linkI'd like to know what percentage setting on the One X equates to the 200nits that was used in the review. I've read so many people disputing the possibility of the One X lasting 6 hours with the screen on based on their own experiences. Reply
ArmedandDangerous - Sunday, May 13, 2012 - linkAny updates on the Tegra 3 HOX review? :) Can't wait to read the comparisons. I've already got the phone, but would like to know your views either way :D Reply
manik. - Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - linkAwesome one, yet again. Reply
marchi - Sunday, September 02, 2012 - linkI don't understand how the HTC One X is said to have an industrial design?
It's made of plastic, which is not something I would think of as industrial or strong
The design looks rather boring and in no way looks solid or tough Reply


text: Corridor of Change The transformation of Euclid Avenue Comments Email Print November 07, 2012 Updated The transformation of Euclid Avenue Related LinksThe Big Issue: March 14, 2011What happens if we're no longer witnesses? Morning Roundup Business headlines from Crain's Cleveland Business and other Ohio newspapers — delivered FREE to your inbox every morning. Sign up for the Morning Newsletter.


text:
The 5 movements of the Second Symphony are represented by various objects in the sketch. The "Todtenfeier" is represented by the weeping figure. According to Mahler's narrative, the protagonist recalls a sweet moment in his life in the 2nd movement. As such, the 2nd movement is represented by the rose held by the mourner. The protagonist's moment of bliss is shattered in the 3rd movement when he recalls the turmoil of human existence, which is represented by the dates of the 2 World Wars written on the shaded side of the coffin. In this sketch, "Urlicht" is represented by the illuminated rose on the coffin, with the rose also being a reference to the first line of the Wunderhorn song. Finally, the glorious finale of the 5th movement is represented by the beam of light shining onto the coffin.
Memorable Moments in Caracas
| Posted by Joanne Pearce Martin in Caracas
Lithgow on LA Phil LIVE – Tomorrow!
| Posted by John Lithgow in Caracas
At the Sarria Nucleo
| Posted by LA Phil Staff in Caracas
Extra, Extra – Read All About It!
| Posted by LA Phil Staff in Los Angeles
El Sistema In Action
| Posted by LA Phil Staff in Caracas
Behind the Scenes with KUSC's Brian Lauritzen
| Posted by Brian Lauritzen in Caracas
A Message from the Chairman
| Posted by David Bohnett in Caracas
Mahler Madness in LA – One Fan's Story
| Posted by LA Phil Staff in Los Angeles
For your "Mad About Mahler" Valentine, you can do two things - create a Mahler display like Judith did or get your Mahler fix this Saturday at a theater near you with LA Phil LIVE and Mahler 8. Better yet, do both!