If you haven’t heard, the new GameDealsCanada logo is up. You can read thoughts about it in my post earlier.
Today, I’m going to talk about the new Xbox 360 S 4GB that I picked up on Friday. GameStop was willing to trade my “Jasper” Xbox 360 (with one controller, A/V cable and power adapter) + $29.99 for a brand new Xbox 360 S 4GB. It was tough not to say no.
It’s the new fiscal year, ladies and gentlemen.
This means new challenges at work, new fiscal goals for companies and brand new games for me. For one reason or another, three major releases are landing on April 19. Mortal Kombat, SOCOM 4 and Portal 2 are fighting for my dollars and time on that day.
New year, new Intel processors.
Intel’s new set of Core processors are out and they’re mighty impressive. With regards to the architecture, they’ve seen the biggest overhaul since the Core processors initial debut back in 2006.
According to AnandTech, these processors offer “anywhere from 10-50% more performance in existing applications and games from Sandy Bridge”. While a very nice claim, it isn’t necessarily well represented in their own game benchmarks. I’d head over to the Tech Report’s review for some game benchmarks that actually tell you what resolution the games are running at along with the games’ quality settings.
In the end, if your game is something like Metro 2033, you’re not going to see a bump in performance with these new processors; being GPU bound is a bit of a downer considering how cheap these new beastly processors are.
For ~$216, the Core i5 2500K @ 3.3GHz (w/ a max Turbo of 3.7 GHz) looks to be the new Core i5 760. It’s affordable, it features unlocked multiplier for overclocking (which is really important with this platform) and it also features the fastest on-die Intel HD Graphics processor.
Why would you care about the integrated video? Well all these processors features integrated graphics now. You’ll get it whether you want it or not. And maybe people should take notice of these new Intel HD Graphics processors because they enable impressive video transcoding feature known as Quick Sync.
So what do you need to get with this new platform? Everything.
I got my hands on that Blue Planet Electronic power meter I mentioned last week on Twitter. I initially wanted to pick it up to measure how much power (if any) I would be saving if I switched my PlayStation 3 to the APS-231 power supply. But after those damn Chinese Ebay shops sent me a poor excuse for a used power supply, I held off until earlier this week when I decided to start this Home Server Project thing. After encountering some snags, I actually got Amahi working which meant I could do some power consumption measurements.
And here are the results at idle:
Testing Methodology
Measurements were taken shortly after boot up of the system. I waited until the system was completely idle and waited for the power reading to stabilize at a number for more than 10 seconds.
Comments
I actually measured the Shuttle ST20G5 first. I actually thought it was wrong and proceeded to test the PlayStation 3 which I used as a baseline thanks to “professional” measurements. It turns out that my measurements were in line. So what does this all mean?