knopflerbruce

IMO if the mods require NDA documents only a handful of lucky guys have access to, then we could sy that sharing the mods is a good idea. In other cases, it's just knowledge or skill. I don't know much about electronics, and if you want to be at the very top I guess you SHOULD know enough to figure out your own mods. Back to school, people:D As for the leagues, I'm all for merging if all HW boints count for the total:p To be a bit more serious, I can't imagine disabling the points will help in many ways. Then people will ONLY focus on the cutting edge stuff - I bet very few guys like Karl and Sam would get noticed without points, even though they deserve some attention more than most people who run 3960x and 4x 7970 on LN2 right now;)

It doesn't hurt, but make sure that the default option is that anyone can use the scores.

Add the mouse tweak for transp. 2d too

I think it's a good idea for 3 reasons: 1: the cap is still there, so existing score are not worthless 2: you don't have to limit the performance of your storage setup, which is completely against what we should aim for 3: it can be coded:)

I posted a suggestion somewhere: Post the real result, type the real XP startup speed in a box while submitting, let the bot engine calculate the "new" score assuming 220 XP startup if the score is higher than 220mb/s. Got the impression it was a good idea, but no decision was taken:p The score formula is pretty straight forward, so this should be easy to code.

Great The mouse tweak for Transparent windows should be listed, too - just move the mouse while the test is running. Aero must be enabled. WMV Power Toy helps the WMV subtest - can't remember the exact settings, but I'm sure someone else can help us out:D

In a few weeks benching 7970 will be hell too, if you want the top scores at least:D

But not accessible from the front page:D

Use your photoshopping skills and show me the button I cant' find it:p

Well, you can always use the same argument for each GPU. You got one killer setup => points in a bunch of 3D benchmarks. Benching 1x and 4x GPU are two very different things. I'd say running 05 and 06 using the same GTX580 is more of the same thing than using one or more of the same GPU.

I dunno... I'd prefer separate categories, the database will look much cleaner that way.

What stage did he win? PS: we could use a "previous competitions" button, there is one in the challenge list - I couldn't find the November competition... only january is visible.

I don't think separation by brand is such a good idea. Then we have to separate nvidia and amd for GPUs as well. And then some people will want us to separate different sockets from newer ones, and then........... we end up with what we call Hardware Points:D I don't know exactly how the "employed bu manufacturer" rule works, but one way could be to put everyone hired by a company making computer parts in the pro league, without taking the "relevance" of the components into account. Or we could just go by the very basic components, such as mobo, memory, CPU and GPU manufacturers. We have to draw the line somewhere, we can't judge all cases individually - that will take alot of time an resources + it won't be fair at all, we're humans after all - we make mistakes:D

I like that idea of team elimination. Most time as leader is also a good idea, would like to see how that works out in a competition. One more note: stage details should be made public a while before the competition starts (1 month maybe?), so people don't have to spend the first 14 days tracking down the HW.

Sounds interesting! If the idea is to make a "season", why not have a few competitions spread out over a few months? Then it's more like a season the way it's defined in sports.

This is slightly OT, but is ramcache just a pcmark05 issue, or is the same thing a problem in 04, vantage and 7 as well? If we decide something isn't allowed for 05, does that mean it's not allowed for ANY benchmark?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but launch dates are more or less confirmed more than a month in advance - at least rumours of launch dates are known. So no need to save everything in just one month (which is hard for anyone I think, at least if we're talking about extreme edition CPUs). An extra month would help a little bit, but it wouldn't matter THAT much. Plus you can usually sell the previous generation HW you've used, so you don't have to actually pay the full price of the newest generation CPU/GPU. Then, if you sell your stuff while it's still top end you'll get alot of $$$ for it, and the $$$-gap you have to cover from your own pocket is less. Con: you have no CPU/GPU for a while. As for wife issues: I wouldn't tolerate being bossed around like that:D You've got a hobby, which is quite normal. She can be the LN2 bitch if she wants to, no?

It's not a disaster, but it should be pointed out in the competition main page that you can use multiple sockets. It's also a bit weird that you can use multi-socket boards, but unlocking cores isn't allowed. This is just feedback, that's why we run these competitions - then we see flaws we didn't think of, and remember till we have more serious competitions. But these flaws must be mentioned, or we wouldn't be aware that they exist:D

A month is not what I suggested either. I said a week for benching. Shouldn't be that much of a problem to tell your wife you'll be busy after work for ONE week. After all, these releases don't happen that often. I already thought about work, you don't bench 16h straight - so if i didn't I would've said 60+ By 30+ I meant one pr day + maybe two the days you don't go to work. At least as some upper limit. Plus, I'm not sure if it really helps - when the NDA is lifted and people get their parts they'll still post scores on different sites (XS, ORB...) - which is not good for HWBot as people won't visit this site to find the current records.

It's still silly. But I doubt it's relevant except for maybe 1x, where I bet the gain by getting another core is alot bigger than in the other cases. It also limits the number of tri core chips alot, unfortunately - I guess you have to either use Phenom 8000-series, Athlon II 400-series or Phenom II 700-series. But here we won't have multi socket issues:D

I wonder how that works - I was thinking ramcache was something you messed with after entering the OS:p maybe the HDD rule should be that you should be able to install windows on the drives used. You can't install windows on a setup with only RAM available as storage. (and if that is possible at a later time, I say we allow it - then the RAM would work exactly like a regular harddrive).

If the launch date is known a few months before (which is often the case), then there's plenty of time to save $$$ to buy a card, and the extra weeks won't really help. When the card is newly released most scores will be competitive. Competitive doesn't mean #1, after all. 1 month is way overkill anyway. That's 30 days - you don't need 30+ sessions to get a set of decent scores. How about a 10 days delay? Then you have a week if you assume 3 days of waiting for the card to arrive in the mail, which should be enough if you just use those days for benching.

So 4.5 months after we change the rules we want to remove the boints? Pffft. We had a chance to remove the benchmark, and we didn't - this is too early to start talking about that sort of stuff if you ask me. Plus, I don't see any real issues - ramcache shouldn't be allowed if we look at the current rules (you can't boot from ram cache, I guess)

I don't get what you mean by "save", but the rest is easily done within a week. You don't need 4-5 days to run a few benchmarks. Maybe you'd get better scores if you had a month, but does that really matter? Why not make the grace period 6 months so everyone would have binned a bunch of good cards while we're at it?

Why not set the date at launch? That's the most reasonable date. 1-3 months is too long, at least - that's for sure. You don't need 1-3 months to find and buy a piece of hardware if you got the cash available at launch. And that part isn't really our problem. I agree that hardware shouldn't receive boints before the release date, but that's it. Or make that 1 week after launch, maybe. Then people who buy at launch have a good chance at benching before the "ban" is lifted.