This seems to be a time when monitor features are growing fast. I'm personally going to stick with my 1440p screen until it stabilizes a bit.

The G-Sync/FreeSync battle is going to start. For gamers, this is going to be big. Right now, G-Sync only works with Nvidia cards, and FreeSync will probably only work with AMD cards. FreeSync is much better licensed, and I expect it will probably win eventually, but I tend to prefer Nvidia cards so I'm willing to wait until we get a clear winner.

Basically, my dream monitor right now would be:
under 28" diagonal
full AdobeRGB gamut or better, factory-calibrated (if significantly wider than AdobeRGB, needs 10-bit color support)
refresh rates up to at least 120Hz, variable using either Sync method as long as it works with any card I buy
resolution of 3840x2400 or higher (16:10 aspect ratio)
no need for multiple data links (as some current 2160p monitors do)
sub-millisecond input latency

I would naturally be willing to compromise on many of those points, but the way the market is going, I might not have to. And what I have right now is plenty good enough to last me until things become more future-proof.

The fundamental problem is that ISPs seem to be in a sort of quantum superposition regarding common carrier status. Whenever they're applying to use common land or using it as a legal defense, they claim to be common carriers. Whenever they want to charge people more money for certain things, they aren't common carriers.

Let's let them pick. Every year, let them choose whether they want to be common carriers or not. If they are, then they get the access to existing utility poles, and the immunity for any criminal traffic that may pass through their lines, that common carrier status entails, along with the requirements for fair pricing and universal access. If they choose not to be common carriers, let them charge whatever they want for whatever they want - but they have to build a completely private infrastructure, and may be liable for any traffic that crosses their network.

PS: "Fast lanes" basically don't exist online. You can't make some traffic magically go faster, you can only make all other traffic go slower.

Which will also spread around the writes. If you're writing a 4TB video across 10 disks, that's only 410GB to each, so you only get that much endurance used up.

Good luck with that.

The Intel 335 has a sequential write speed of about 350MB/s (the rest are around the same speed). Writing 700TB at that speed would take 24 days and change, with no breaks to do things like read any of that data.

This sounds like the action of a Congressman trying to discredit the NSA. The NSA obviously is not going to respond to this - if they did, they'd be inundated with requests from every small-town prosecutor wanting some more evidence (ironically, some might even get warrants for it). That would be worse than what will happen instead, which is that an anti-NSA legislator gets a talking point about how the NSA isn't using its data and isn't cooperating with the rest of the government (namely Congress).

Yes, it's just a political point being scored. But it's a point hopefully in our favor - or at the very least, one against our common enemy.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is the best way to get the NSA shut down. The general public has no control over it; trying to get them angry about it is pointless. The only way the general public could shut it down is by a revolution, and we're too well-fed and content to do that. But Congress could shut it down, so let's find every way to get Congressmen upset about the NSA. I wonder what a FOIA request for some congressional metadata would do...

You're arguing with the antecedent. I'm saying "if you care about X, the Titan is good", and you're accusing me of cherry-picking because the Titan is bad at Y and Z, even though I specifically called it out as not being good for anything except X in a performance-per-penny measure.

I am saying that one of the principal reasons to buy a Titan is if you have a heavy double-precision compute load. I then provided a benchmark showing that a Titan beats the 295X2 in such a load. It would be cherry-picking if I picked the one double-precision benchmark that showed the Titan in a good light, but a single-precision benchmark does not invalidate that.

If you are accusing me of cherry-picking, please provide a benchmark that shows a 290X beating a Titan in a double-precision workload. AFAIK the only double-precision benchmark Anandtech uses is the F@H benchmark I linked to originally.

I am not at all arguing that the results in the double-precision benchmark somehow invalidates the single-precision or integer results. If your workload isn't mostly double-precision, the Titan is not for you. But if your workload *is* mostly double-precision, the Titan is a viable card.

Don't worry, you can just download an e-goat. There's a good website for it, but they keep having to change the TLD for some reason and I can't keep track of which one it is.

Workstations, perhaps? There's a lot of scientific computing done using desktop-sized workstations, not supercomputers. And they're spending several grand on Xeon CPUs anyways, so a $3K GPU isn't that much more.

It's not cherry-picking if benchmarks like that are the primary reason to use a Titan. Particularly when I explicitly said so.

The Titan shouldn't be considered a top-end gaming card. It should be treated as a budget Tesla card - even at $3k, it's the cheapest card in Nvidia's lineup with full double-precision floating point performance (which no game uses, but is common for scientific computing, Tesla's market). And on tests using that, the single-gpu Titan and Titan Black outperform the 295X2 by a large amount. AT hasn't gotten to test a Titan Z yet, but you can tell it's going to wipe the floor with the 295X2.

Yes, Nvidia advertised the original Titan as a super-gaming card, and to be fair it was their top-performing gaming card for a while. But once the 780 Ti came out, that was over, and since everyone expects a 790 dual-GPU gaming card to be announced soon, buying any Titan for gaming is a fool's choice.

Nvidia seems to still be advertising it as a top-end gaming card, presumably trying to prove the old adage about fools and their money. It just comes off as a scam to me, but anyone willing to spend over a grand without doing some proper research probably deserves to be ripped off.

You forgot the USB port for keeping your phone charged.

When you've been getting your ass kicked for years, "not losing" can count as a major victory.

I think it's more "if you compile your game without Kinect, you will have access to that processing slice and Kinect won't". Whether the hardware is physically there or not is irrelevant to the reserved processor time.

I'd be keeping OS X on there - I would be switching from dual-boot OSX/W8 to OSX/Linux. I guess I could triple-boot, but that seems a bit excessive when I'd have a dedicated Windows machine as well.

I bought a 6870 as an upgrade to my Mac Pro, mainly because it was highly compatible with OS X (it only fails to show the grey apple screen during boot) and is far cheaper than officially-supported cards. It's also a good mid-tier card on Windows.

And according to this, the 6870 is also basically the best card for use under Linux using open-source drivers, so I guess it's just a very good card in general. When I do a new from-scratch build, I might put Linux on the old Mac so I can play around with Linux gaming more.