Win some CPUs

Let's do the fun part first. Several weeks ago I made a trip down to LA for some meetings and a little speech I was giving at a MSI event. While I was in the area I met up with some of the folks from Newegg including Ken Lam, their Vice Chairman and Howard Tong (VP). Howard is also a car guy so we end up sneaking away and chatting about our addiction pretty much whenever we get the chance. Howard is also one of the brains behind Newegg's warehouses, he's the man that lead the team that developed their very efficient inventory management and shipping system that has resulted in their extremely fast ship times. He's the first guy on the left in this picture (Ken is the guy on the right, not sure who the sketchy guy in the middle is).

Newegg actually let me take pictures of their warehouse this time around for publication, so you'll actually see an Inside Newegg piece on AT sometime later today. But while touring the facilities Stuart Wallock (Director of Marketing) and I came up with an interesting idea - to snag some Newegg hardware to give away to you all. The next thing I knew, they had me in a Newegg hat and I was filling orders. Originally we wanted to do a sort of golden ticket kind of deal where I'd drop a few of my business cards into customer orders and if you found one you could redeem it for a prize, but legal nixed that idea, so we went with a conventional contest.

The entry form and rules are hosted by Newegg, just type in your email address and there will be one prize given away every day from February 14 - 17th and on the 20th (basically one a day for the next 5 weekdays). You only have to submit your email address once and you will automatically be entered in the contest for all 5 days. The prizes? Five AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ CPUs, one for each day of the contest.

Just in case you missed it, the link to enter is below:

Click here to enter the Anandtech/Newegg Dual-Core sweepstakes!

With that out of the way, and now that everyone has stopped reading to go enter the contest, let's talk about work stuff :)

The Core Duo USB issue article went live after a very long couple of weeks of benchmarking. I've already whined about testing battery life so I shall whine no more. I am trying to get an updated Turion 64 notebook on the way to see how it responds to the issue, and for use in a long overdue Turion vs. Core Duo comparison.

As I pointed out in the USB issue article, ASUS notebooks I used in my Core Duo notebook piece are not ideal for comparing battery life simply because the integrated USB 2.0 camera triggers the asynchronous scheduler bug reducing battery life significantly without the fix. I am looking to revisit Core Duo's mobile performance in an upcoming article, as well as do a desktop performance comparison between Turion 64 and Core Duo. I've got the Turion CPUs here and I'm just waiting on a good PCIe board run them in, as well as an updated Core Duo desktop board. It should be an interesting comparison, although I wish the dual core Turions were here in time for the article.

A few of you have written to ask my stance on the whole AEG/NVIDIA forum shill situation. Honestly, I'm surprised it took this long for: 1) PR firms to think of the idea, and 2) for people to get caught doing it :)

For me, I'm all about disclosure; if NVIDIA, ATI, Intel, AMD whoever gives you an incentive to say positive things about them then you should just be up front about it. The beauty of the web is that there are so many sources for information that it's pretty difficult for someone to post something that no one can support or refute if it ends up being not true. Flame wars have been around since before PR firms started doing this type of thing, and they will continue to exist even if they didn't.

That's all for now. Vinney and I are driving down to NC this weekend to finish up some more house stuff. We've got to decide on paint colors, pick out door knobs and light fixtures so we'll have painted walls, working doors and lights when we move in :)