A fun weekend

Friday night Vinney and I decided to head down to our favorite pizza place in CT (neither of us are a fan of New Haven-style pizza it seems, so we have to head down to Fairfield). We ended up seeing Sin City later on back in Branford. The movie wasn't bad, not great in my book but it kept me entertained. About 30 minutes before the end of it, the power in the movie theater went out. Not around the movie theater, just in the building itself. We waited for around 10 minutes, someone mentioned that it wasn't going to be coming back on and they had no clue what caused it. We got free passes, but were a bit upset that we were going to have to re-watch the entire thing just to see the end (or wait for the DVD). Luckily, as we were driving away from the theater the lights came back on and we only missed about 10 seconds. Movie saved :)

I got some work done on Friday, most of the longer benchmarks for the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition platform. It looks like the impact of higher latency DDR2-667 vs. low latency DDR2-533 isn't actually all that great on performance for the platform, which explains why both Intel and NVIDIA had no problems shipping DDR2-667 memory in their test platforms.

We had a house guest yesterday, one of Vinney's friends was in town so we took him around a bit (read: dinner and then back for some Halo 2). I tried staying up and actually accomplishing something last night, but I got very little done. I've been trying to construct a good test to compare the NCQ implementations of Intel's and NVIDIA's SATA controllers and I think I may finally have something. I'm running tests now and hopefully I'll know more by the end of tonight as to whether or not my tests are successful. I'm spending a lot of time on NCQ given the outcome of Part II of my Intel dual core preview; Purav is going to be handling storage reviews from now on, and after his review of Seagate's 7200.8 drive he'll be hard at work on a multitasking/NCQ performance article.

I've built a Windows XP Professional x64 Edition box and I've already started playing around with it. I've been keeping a bit of a journal similar to my Macdates from last year, but the entries aren't nearly as interesting (since it's still basically the same OS as the 32-bit version). My findings will be grouped into the x64 article (which will also include performance stats) later this month.

I know a handful of you asked for the nForce4 and x64 articles before the Splinter Cell piece, but it's looking more and more like the Splinter Cell piece may be finished first, just because it's much less involved than the other two. I'm running tests for all three reviews simultaneously, it's just a matter of which finishes first. I'll keep you posted on how things progress, but I'm hoping for at least the SC and nForce4 articles to be published this week.

The weather is finally starting to perk up around here; it's still not at that magical 77 degree marker, but at least it's not freezing anymore.

There you have it - your AT weekend update :)