Processor Shipments Break Record in Q3

With a recession, especially like the one we're in now, many people begin to appreciate the value of money a lot more, and tend to cut back on their regular spending. After all, is a new appliance really that important if it means rent will be hard to pay next month? Certainly, there are a few markets that can escape an economic downfall, with food being one of them (but even there I'm sure some cut down, and in my case, that wouldn't be a bad thing!). But as we're discovering now, it's becoming apparent that PC processors is another market that can escape a decline.

During Q3 2009, processor shipments didn't just break a record, but it broke the record of total parts shipped in a quarter. There was a staggering 23% increase of shipments between Q2 and Q3, with a revenue gain of about 13% during the same period. Notice how those two figures don't quite line up? The reason of course, is the netbook. While companies like Intel would like everyone to believe that netbooks aren't a replacement, but rather an addition, I'm willing to bet that at least right now, many people who were thinking of purchasing a full-blown notebook, have decided on a netbook instead.

I'm no authority on the matter, however, so I could be wrong. But, if the trend continues into Q4 and Q1 2010, we might just begin to understand the full force of the netbook, and just how imperative they are to our PC industry. Netbooks may be underpowered when compared to a regular notebook, but a proven fact is that most people don't need more power. Today's computing focuses almost entirely on the Internet, so as long as a netbook can handle online tasks without issue, many people aren't going to understand or appreciate the benefits of moving up to a real notebook.

Thanks in part to its Atom processors, Intel had a dominating lead in overall processor sales during Q3, with the Santa Clara company accounting for 81.1% of total shipments, at the same time accounting for 88% of the mobile market. AMD had an increase to hit an overall 18.7% and 11.9% in the mobile market, while Via was left with 0.2% and 0.3%, respectively.

"The story about 3Q09 leads with Atom processors being sold in mini-notebooks (a.k.a. Netbooks) manufactured and sold in China," said Rau. "While Atom processors led the PC processor market to reach record unit shipments, on the revenue side, their low average selling price led to notable price erosion, more than 7 percent." Among vendors, Intel kept its place at the top of the charts, enjoying an 81.1 percent share of the worldwide market for processor shipments. That left AMD with 18.7 percent and third-place Via Technologies with 0.2 percent.

FRAPS 3.0 Released with Support for Windows 7, DirectX 11

Here at Techgage, our virtual toolbox is chalk-full of various applications and utilities that we can't do without. We pick and choose from our collection depending on what we need done, whether it be to stress-test a CPU, kit of RAM or a graphics card, or to compare performance from one component to another. But there's one tool in particular that we simply couldn't go without, and over the years, it hasn't been replaced or ignored, as it's far too valuable.

That tool is FRAPS, by Beepa. FRAPS is best known as being the small tool that allows gamers to capture their gameplay as raw video, but what we use it for mostly is for its benchmarking feature. With it, we're able to start an FPS recording as we begin a benchmarking run, and stop it a minute or two later, at which point we're supplied with a file that gives us the minimum, average and maximum FPS information. This information works its way into our reviews, wherever game benchmarking is involved.

The reason I bring all this up is because the company has just released a new major version, 3.0, and it includes a few new features worth talking about. The first and most notable is that it supports DirectX 11. That counts for both benchmarking, taking screenshots, and also recording video. The previous version just won't work. And with DirectX 11 support must mean Windows 7 support, and no surprise, it's indeed found here also.

Interestingly enough, there's even support for NVIDIA's GeForce 3D Vision. FRAPS will essentially record a "stereo AVI" that can be watched back with the glasses. So what you see during your real gameplay can be experienced a second time. I haven't test this out, but I'm assuming this would result in file sizes twice as large as a normal recording. Other features include the ability to record video to lossless RGB, and also the ability to mix both game sound and an external audio input, like a microphone.

Unlike most companies who charge an upgrade fee for a new version, there's no such thing here. If you own a previous version of FRAPS, you can simply log into the site and grab the latest version. If you don't own a copy, or haven't use the application before, you don't know what you're missing!

New features and a new look! Fraps is now compatible with Windows 7 and the latest DirectX 11 games. Ventrilo & TeamSpeak users have long wanted a way to record their microphone and speakers at the same time. For Windows 7 and Vista we've added realtime sound mixing to our video recording so you can now capture both sides of the conversation! NVIDIA have recently included stereoscopic 3D support directly into their drivers. If you play your DirectX9 (D3D9) game with 3D Vision enabled you can use Fraps to record the game in full 3D too!

The Quest for Useful Real-World SSD Benchmarks

As I have mentioned in our news section in the past, we've been working on getting some storage-related content up on the site for a while, but as things go, issues keep arising, and it never seems to happen. As it stands, however, we're closer than ever to getting such content up, and I'm confident that you'll be reading some articles in the next few weeks to come, tackling both HDDs and SSDs.

If there's one thing we've learned over the past few months, though, it's that storage benchmarking is hard. Alright, let me elaborate. It's not that benchmarking is hard in general, but it's hard as heck to find appropriate benchmarks that people care about. Throughout all of our content, we strive to deliver as many real-world results as possible. I think it's fair that if we are to deliver information, it should be as realistic, and it should be information people can relate to.

But with storage, things are tough. Synthetic benchmarks will show benefits of faster drives fine, but when it comes to real-world tests, the task of showing the benefits of either HDDs or SSDs becomes very complicated. Believe it or not, the vast majority of scenarios we've tested simply don't show real differences in performance from drive to drive, as long as we're talking about drives with like speeds (7200RPM drives would of course be faster than 5400RPM, but even then, it's primarily the synthetics that would prove it).

For the past month or two, Robert and I (yes, there's another Robert in case you haven't noticed) have been working together on conjuring up the best possible SSD test suite. The problem, of course, is despite having a nice collection of synthetic benchmarks, we have almost no real-world tests, with the main exception being SYSmark 2007 Preview (ironically, still not a true real-world benchmark). In our CPU reviews, I focus a lot on applications such as image manipulators, video encoders, 3D rendering tools and more, but in all of our testing, performance differences between an HDD and SSD in either of these is non-existent.

As a specific example, our Adobe Lightroom test sees 100 RAW files converted to 100 JPG. You'd imagine that a test like this could push a storage device nicely, but that's not the case. In the end, the time-to-completion was identical on both an HDD and SSD. The same applies to video encoding. The problem is that neither of these scenarios push the kind of bandwidth we need to see faster drives, like SSDs, excel. But on the other hand, our scenarios are realistic.

What's frustrating about all this is that SSDs are fast, and offer real benefits to consumers. But for the most part, what we're seeing is that the benefits have exclusively to do with application loading, Windows loading, game level loading, and other like processes. Random writes are of course much faster on an SSD as well, but outside of a synthetic benchmark, it's very difficult to find a real test that can help prove that.

So my question to you all is this... what would YOU like to see us tackle in our upcoming SSD content? Is there a real-world test that you're confident would highlight the benefits of an SSD, or benefits from one SSD to another? Please let us have it, because we could sure use some ideas. If not, we'll have to resort to including some more mundane tests, such as SSD noise levels! *

* Yes - that was sarcasm.

Tech Roundup - November 10, 2009

Motherboards & Processors
• ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO - Motherboards.org
• ECS Elitegroup P55H-A - Phoronix

Displays & Video Cards
• ATI Radeon HD 5850 Crossfire - Motherboards.org
• HIS Radeon HD4890 iCooler x4 - Tweaknews
• Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1GB Vapor-X - TweakTown

Memory & Storage
• Corsair Voyager GT 128GB - Technic3D
• Crucial 4GB Kit DDR3-1333/PC3-10600 - ocinside
• SanDisk Extreme Pro 32GB CF Card - TestFreaks
• Seagate Savvio 15K.2 SAS 2.0 6Gb/s 146GB - TweakTown
• Seagate XT 2TB SATA 6GB/s - Legit Reviews

Peripherals & Gadgets
• Eagle Arion ET-AR504LR-BK 2.1 Soundstage Speakers - Benchmark Reviews
• OCZ Eclipse Double Laser Gaming Mouse - Virtual-Hideout
• PowerMat Wireless Charging Unit - TestFreaks
• Verbatim Easy Riser Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse - iGadget Life

Cooling
• Noctua NM -I3 SecuFirm 2 and LGA1366 Mounting Kits - Hi Tech Legion
• Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Compound - Hi Tech Legion

Chassis & Power Supplies
• Chieftec BL-01B Chassis - ThinkComputers
• Corsair Obsidian 800D Chassis - techPowerUp
• Nexus Edge Chassis - Red and Blackness
• Ultra X4 850W Modular Power Supply - ClubOC

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• Installing Mythdora 10.21 Guide - MissingRemote.com
• The TR Podcast: 10th Anniversary Edition - The Tech Report