www.ncix.com I didn’t have as much time with the card as I really would have liked, but here are some limited results for you.

www.ncix.com Check out the 1080p gaming performance of the Bulldozer FX against its closest rival from the Intel side: The 2500K!

I fire up Crysis 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Metro 2033 and examine the results when running in PCIe 4x, 8x, and 16x mode.

www.ncix.com Big dogs need a big yard in which to run around. For this heavyweight battle I’ll be pitting the GeForce GTX 580 against the Radeon HD 6990 in and “ultimate showdown” with my 30″ HD+ monitor!

Or more accurately why I cannot do them. /ragequit

www.ncix.com Let me start by saying I do NOT recommend doing this… Normally I have no qualms about showing you guys how to overclock and unlock your hardware, but the power consumption and heat output of this card goes up so dramatically when overclocked, I do not know what the long term effects would be….

www.ncix.com 1080p or 1920×1080 or “full HD”. Whatever you prefer to call it, I’m going to put the GTX 590 through the paces against some of its competition at this resolution to see how it performs.

As mentioned to me in the comments under the Tech Tips video we did on the Corsair S128 SSD hard drive, the drive does NOT read at 150MB/s sustained and the reason for the WAY out of spec performance numbers is that the drive had not yet been fully formatted. That’s my mistake and when I did some follow up testing, it read at a normal ~90MB/s….. Or so I thought.

Enter the X25-M, on which we have a Tech Tips coming out shortly. I was doing some testing with this drive, moving files from the Corsair SSD to a RAID-0 array with two X25-M 80GB drives, and I observed the transfer speeds you see above. They were verified using the good ‘ol fashioned “calculator + file size + stop watch” method and it looks the drive will actually read at about 120MB/s, but only if you’re doing more than one concurrent read. Transferring just one file (as you can see) will cap at 90MB/s. Still not the 150MB/s I originally reported, but it’s better than spec by a long shot…

Phenom II is a lot of things. Performance leader is not one of them. What it is though, is a return to value and competition with Intel’s mid-range at stock, and competition with Intel’s high end when overclocked.

The Phenom II really reminds me of the Barton core. It’s not the fastest, but it’s fast enough at the right price. I did some quick & dirty benchmarks of the Phenom II 940 Black against Intel’s latest and greatest Intel Core i7 just to get a point of reference for cost to performance. Forgive my fail Excel graphs…

So basically with a little bit of overclocking, enthusiasts can get about 90% of the performance of a Core i7 Extreme 965 for a fraction of the cost. Sure you can do it on the Intel side too, but at least AMD is an option again.

Well I decided to do some follow up performance numbers that include more drives as well as RAID-0 results with the Seagate 7200.2 drives, and the long and short of it is that I will be replacing my Samsung F1 with a pair of Seagate 7200.2s when I do my next reformat.

The performance difference is not staggering, but when combined with the reduced noise, reduced power consumption and reduced footprint (I”ll be sticking the 2.5″ drives to the back of my motherboard with industrial velcro), it’s an easy decision to make.

Here are some comparisons to some other drives that I found interesting. The mobile drive’s performance looks quite disappointing in direct comparison to the F1 750GB, but when compared to a more equivalent drive (Seagate 7200.10 160GB) it’s a closer fight.