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Atomic Live 2005
Author: Geoff RichardsPublished: 16th December 2005
Vendorific
Atomic Live 2005 was by no means a monster tradeshow - the Australian market is deemed by many to be too small to justify a regional office - but it was well supported by those who attended.
The Green Army of NVIDIA had one of the largest stands, which occupied an entire end of the hall. They had a few SLI demo machines running Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2 and for many people, these were the fastest systems they had ever had the chance to play games on.
Seagate had a small booth which attracted a lot of attention. Their neat, windowed demo system looked unremarkable until you read the sign next to it that said it had two terabytes of storage. Yep, two thousand gigabytes courtesy of four 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA drives running RAID 0 at the new 3Gb/s standard (often mistakenly called SATA-II).
Arguably, it was nothing that anybody with the right motherboard and £800+vat couldn't replicate but it still definitely qualifies as cool. What is interesting is how the whole 1000 vs 1024 debate is magnified when reaching such enormous capacities.
Take a close look at the drive properties and you will see that while the four drives technically add up to the correct 2 trillion bytes, by the time you divide by 1024 instead of 1000, you're left with only 1.9 million megabytes, 1863 gigabytes or just 1.81 terabytes. Indeed, some people would argue that since two terabytes is technically 2048GB, this discrepancy has cost you a whopping 185GB - more storage than many people have in their entire PC! Seagate is no different from any other hard drive company in this regard, but it's still a rough deal.
On a more flippant note, there is clearly a market for two-inch SATA cables.
ASUS was one of several manufacturers exhibiting their motherboards but the keen-eyed enthusiast would find their Extreme N7800GT DUAL of greater interest. This is a GeForce 7800GT-based card that features not one but two GPUs for what is essentially SLI on a single PCB. G-gnome was impressed by the heatsink shroud design and by the cable routing for the external power. It also clearly impressed the Warcraft Orc, who had wandered down from the Vivendi stand.