Blog - January, 2009 | bit-tech.net

This was meant to be a Fallout 3 DLC review

Posted on 31st Jan 2009 at 08:30 by Joe Martin with 70 comments

Joe has lately been trying and failing to review the new downloadable expansion to Fallout 3, Operation Anchorage. It seems that Microsoft just doesn't want to let him though and is fighting back with every worthless inch of Games for Windows Live. Now Joe has had enough.

Latest Sapphire 4850 X2 BIOS goes some way to silencing noise issues

Posted on 31st Jan 2009 at 00:27 by Tim Smalley with 9 comments

At several points during the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 review we published a week or so ago, we complained quite vocally about the amount of noise the card produced when it was sitting idle. Although not quite as loudly as the card itself.

It was so loud that we unanimously decided that the card wouldn't go anywhere near one of our own home PCs - I'm probably the most tolerant to noise in the bit-tech office and it was even far too loud for me.

Following the review, Sapphire admitted that it was "aware that [the 4850 X2] had some issues with noise on the first pass of these boards." At least we weren't alone.

Welcome to the bit-tech Blog!

Posted on 30th Jan 2009 at 14:51 by Tim Smalley with 19 comments

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have launched the all-new bit-tech Blog. It's a feature that we have wanted to add to the site for quite some time now, but only now have we managed to actually roll it out. You see, we've had our share of distractions in the last six months or so, which prevented us from finishing this section of the site off.

For those of you who think we're heading down the path of no return, fear not because we're not going to be telling you about what we ate for breakfast (but I had Shreddies and Weetabix since you asked). Instead, we're going to treat the blog as an area of the site to sound off about things that don't fit into any of the news or article categories.

But wasn't that what columns were for?

A little column here and little blog there

Posted on 30th Jan 2009 at 13:27 by Jamie Cuthill with 2 comments

It must be over a year since the editorial team first made noises about a blog on the site and as much as I loved the digs asking "Where's our blog?" and "If we had a blog...", I was elbow deep in more urgent projects.

Fast forward to the Dennis acquisition at the end of 2008 and one path they were keen to take the site down was the creation of bit-tech blogs. Having tied up the loose ends I was currently working on at the end of 2008, I moved into the Dennis tower of London to start working on this very blog you are reading now.

I'm sure Tim will be introducing you to the wonderful insights you can expect to find on these pages but I'm here to explain a little about the format.

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard

Posted on 30th Jan 2009 at 11:05 by Richard Swinburne with 4 comments

We've tried and tried and tried over the last few months to get this motherboard to work, and eventually we sometimes just have to call it a day. And that's often one of the hardest things to accept because we've ploughed so much time into it.

One of the benefits of our new blog is that there's now a medium for us to forewarn you about those products that come into our labs but don't make it through the review process after many, many man hours trying - for example, this board has been on and off the test bench for nearly three months now. It gives us a chance to name and shame products that really don't meet the grade at all - we hope it won't happen too often but you never know... this could become more regular than we'd expect.

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard Hardware Fail #1: ECS X58B-A Motherboard

To cut a long story short, our first board was sent back to ECS in Taiwan after our initial failed attempts to get it working. The company claimed it was faulty and sent another they guaranteed as working - it even came with a nice "It works!" sticker on the box.

How Football Manager changed my life

Posted on 28th Jan 2009 at 16:44 by Harry Butler with 2 comments

A few years ago, I had nothing but a casual interest in the coming and goings of the world of football. Sure I'd pay attention when the World Cup or European Championships rolled around every couple of years, but the inevitable seasons of the British Premier League, or even football in general, were about as foreign to me as a healthy snack to a drunkard.

That was until a friend convinced me to try Football Manager 2007, Sports Interactive's masterpiece of management, something which he had to do a great deal of arm bending to accomplish.

In the past I couldn't have given a toss about footballers, thinking they were a bunch of overpaid, over hyped idiots who's job it is to simply run around for 90 minutes. And yet here was a game that centred entirely on tracking individual players form, managing egos to get the best out of players and paying ludicrous amounts of money to secure the services of a greasy teenager.

And I bloody loved it.

Games I Own: Gabriel Knight 3

Posted on 28th Jan 2009 at 11:15 by Joe Martin with 5 comments

As I said in my previous post, I'm tackling my games in no particular order other than that which I happened to dig them out of the pile next to my PC at home. The last game on that list - the one buried at the bottom of the pile, is Sierra's Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.

That said though, I don't actually dislike Gabriel Knight 3 - I like it a lot. I remember playing the demo off a PC Gamer cover disc and then going out to buy it as soon as it was released.

As a fan of all the usual old-school adventure games, part of what I liked most about Gabriel Knight 3 was that it was a modern and dramatic take on this genre. It was 3D, it was scary and it felt really engaging. It didn't matter that I hadn't played the first games in the series - this one was enough to draw me in.

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography

Posted on 27th Jan 2009 at 17:38 by Richard Swinburne with 5 comments

Urgh, another day, another hardware failure. I was aiming to have a review of DFI's LANParty 790FX-B M2RSH done this week - it's all tested (albeit slower in every-single-benchmark compared to the MSI DK 790GX Platinum), and I literally only unplugged everything for some photography, before putting it back on the test bench again for some more stress testing.

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography Hardware Death #1: DFI motherboards don't like photography

Sadly, the LED readout says only 88 and the fans spin up to their full flow without a hint of relent. Changing every piece of hardware later has no impact - something static must have hit it, which is surprising considering I passed on wearing nylon underwear today.

Where's the innovation? Right in front of you!

Posted on 27th Jan 2009 at 14:56 by Tim Smalley with 3 comments

It's fair to say that the current economic crisis has hit the technology industry - we've seen big layoffs at many of the biggest tech companies, with AMD, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sony and Western Digital all announcing significant workforce cuts. However, some companies argue that it's not just the recession that is killing their revenues - they're citing the rise in popularity of netbooks as a major catalyst as well.

Frankly though, the industry appears to be looking for a scapegoat and the success of low cost, ultra portable devices like netbooks seems fitting from the industry's perspective, but that doesn't make it right.

For example, Microsoft blames the rise of netbooks on its lower profit margins because it has to sell Windows at a lower price in order to compete with Linux-equipped netbooks. While that is fair enough, it is not a reason to hate netbooks - instead, Microsoft should think of it as another sale, because the netbook was and never has been sold as a replacement to traditionally more powerful machines.

Games I Own

Posted on 27th Jan 2009 at 14:12 by Joe Martin with 0 comments

So, this marks the start of the blogs, does it? Well, that's fantastic. I've long been saying we need somewhere to cut loose around here and the idea of having a more informal platform to sound-off than the columns page sounds great to me.

To be honest though, there is one problem. I already have a blog. It may be a Wordpress one, not a marvel like this one created by Jamie, but it does the job for me when I choose to update it with personal rants and updates. Which makes me think of what I can put on this blog that won't just end up there.

And it's at this point in the blog post that I jump into an entirely separate point that I can't be bothered to introduce properly. Blogs are better for that type of stuff than articles.

So, I made a list of all the games I own at home the other day. I was waiting for a game to install and it seemed a good way to pass the time. Strictly speaking they aren't all the games I own - there are countless titles that have been lost or sold over the years, plus a good dozen or so that I didn't care enough for to bring with me when I last moved. All in all though there are 108 games that I have with me.

Tags games i own, gaming

bit-tech.net

This was meant to be a Fallout 3 DLC review

Latest Sapphire 4850 X2 BIOS goes some way to silencing noise issues

Welcome to the bit-tech Blog!

A little column here and little blog there

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard

How Football Manager changed my life

Games I Own: Gabriel Knight 3

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography

Where's the innovation? Right in front of you!

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