Well, here I am, almost one week into Windows 8 testing, and I couldn't be happier! I'm getting used to the Metro Start Menu quickly, and was so impressed by the performance boost on my laptop that I blew away Windows 7 on my main desktop and stuck the CP on there also. NVIDIA's drivers are pretty much completely up to the task of running on Win 8, and I've been testing with SLI and 3D Vision, and everything is very good. Although I don't have any hard data yet, I'd say that running around in Star Wars: TOR is smoother at 120Hz than it was in 7. Applications seem to snap up quicker, and everything just feels snappy. Even more so, all of the programs I use on a daily basis just worked, mostly. I had to use the IT basic driver for my Officejet printer, but that works like a champ now. I also had to coax Adobe Acrobat into installing but hitting the MSI directly as opposed to the "setup.exe" that we all are used to hunting out. However, I can say with confidence that this is a very solid build.

There was one issue that I couldn't get over though: hard locks. I could easily tell that the culprit was something in the hard drive subsystem, as I would be listening to music and it would just start repeating like a broken record. The mouse would still move, and some things would even work for a second, but within a minute the system would totally lock and I'd have to hit the reset button. I first thought that the Intel drivers I installed for my RAID system were the culprit, but that turned out to not be the case after reverting back to the shipping ones. I finally went to Google and found this little tidbit of joy:

http://www.windows8devblog.com/post/2012/03/04/Fix-Windows-8-Beta-Freezing-Up-%28Locking-Up%29-Windows-8-Consumer-Preview.aspx

When I opened up the control panel, I saw this:

Windows obviously knows that my C: drive is an SSD, but it was still trying to defrag it. That's not good. I've followed Ken's advice there and turned off defragmentation completely, and we'll see how that goes. Hopefully that's what has been causing my hard drive system lock ups, and it'll be all good from here on out.

More to come, so stay tuned!

A lot of press is pushing that Windows 8 is only good for tablets, and they are missing a lot of the features that Microsoft put in there for us desktop power-users. One of the big questions I had out the gate was how Microsoft would handle dual monitors. Well, here's half of the answer (click for full size):

As you can see, my setup is a little unconventional for dual screens. I have the wonderful Asus VG278H as my central monitor, and then an Acer 23" sitting portrait next to it on the right. You can tell from this screen shot that Microsoft has decided to give us taskbars on both screens for when we're in the start menu, and the monitor on the right never leaves "desktop" mode. That means you can have a website open over there and use that data in apps in the start menu. Let's see how that would work (again, click for full size):

We have a full desktop over to the right, and our start menu open on the main desktop. You can still have some gadgets open over there if your live tiles are not showing you everything you would like to see, and you have a taskbar on your second screen.

What's really going to take some getting used to is the fact that you can have a Metro app open and still use the desktop on the second screen. Or, if you are really desktop oriented, switch them up and use the "second" screen as your main.

There are some other neat things that we'll be showing off over the next few days, so be sure to stay tuned!

So some new Ivy Bridge Macbook Pro benchmarks have supposedly hit Geekbench, and I thought I'd size them up against a Sandy Bridge Nordic PC Thor, mostly because the Macbook Pro actually scored higher than the newest iMac. The new 3rd Generation Core series from Intel is still shaping up, but so far it looks like you'll need a box cutter and a very steady hand to get good overclocks from this newest CPU because of a poor interface between the CPU silicon and the heatspreader. Since we tune and tweak all of our CPUs in the Tyr line and up, we actually get better performance from Sandy than Ivy at this point.

Needless to say, let's take a peak at what the numbers have to say:

First off, we're comparing a 4.8Ghz Sandy Bridge to a 3.7Ghz Ivy Bridge. Right off the bat, we've got an extra Ghz on this machine with our tweaks. That shows up nicely with a 45% gain over the Macbook in Integer performance. However, Ivy's got a trick up it's sleeve in this particular Floating Point benchmark. We have seen rare cases where Ivy really takes off, and Geekbench's FP test is obviously one of them with a commanding 10% lead.

Once we get to memory though, things are a little different. Both machines are outfitted with DDR3-1600, 8GB of it to be exact, and Ivy should beat out Sandy in raw memory bandwidth. However, our Thor has a solid 14% lead in Memory and a commanding 28% lead in stream (or memory bandwidth performance). Whatever Apple did to the RAM in the new Macbook looks like it is causing a big performance hit. The results for the iMac with 4GB of DDR3-1600 are even more pathetic at just 5557 and 4741 respectively. That's 51% lower than the Thor's Memory and nearly half in stream.

Realistically, the only way to get such horrible memory scores are with a single DDR3 module as opposed to dual-channel operation. I talked a little bit about that in the last article, and it appears that if there is indeed a 4GB option to the new iMac, it'll be a horrible performer.

I wish that other vendor's systems garnished enough media attention for us to compare our systems to everyone else's, but for now we'll just have to be happy taking a solid win over the new Macbook and iMac from Apple. We've already took out the Mac Pro with our head-to-head competition last year, showing that in Photoshop and Premiere, the clock speed of our overclocked, water-cooled systems can trounce the extra cores of a 6-core Westmere. We're proving day in and day out that we are the guys you want to come to for design workstations, and Apple just cares about phones and pads these days.