Yes, I am still alive and No I have neither retired, nor am I on vacation. Since last Monday I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area working hard and fighting the odds. I did not mean to skip the last week's Monday Blurb, but several micro-catastrophes kept me from doing it. One of the major problems was that my luggage was only flying over a day after myself. I can't blame Lufthansa for it, who I still consider as an excellent airline, but huge amounts of snow in Stuttgart and the ridiculous organization at Stuttgart airport as well as Frankfurt airport kept my luggage from making it from one flight to the next. Well, that was only the last problem of my odyssey to the Bay Area.

Arranging The Start Of A New Era Of Hardware Reviews

Since last Tuesday I am working on five major projects at the same time and they need all of my attention. The most important, most time consuming and certainly most interesting one is the build-up of a major test-lab over here in sunny but currently cold California. I am in the lucky situation to have found some of the world's best professionals to work in this lab and if I am talking of a major lab then I really mean it. This won't be a small room with a big desk and a few people working on a few computers, it will be a highly professional institution with no less than up to 30 test stations that will all run in parallel. It will be supervised by one of the most skilled performance experts of this planet. My excitement about this long planned project kept me from focussing on writing, because slow updates won't only very soon be a complete thing of the past, this lab will provide more hardware reviews than any other institution has ever provided for you before. Tom's Hardware Guide is now existing for almost three years and the success of this website has finally made it possible to take this major step. Thus I would thank all of my readers for keeping the faith in my team and me, you will soon be rewarded better than you would ever have expected.

PIII, K6-3, Voodoo3 And TNT2

At the same time I am testing the currently hottest hardware products as already listed in the Monday Blurb from two weeks ago. I can promise you one of the best reviews on Intel's upcoming Pentium III as well as on AMD's K6-3 processor and I would like to thank Intel as well as particularly AMD for their excellent support of this project. I'm currently still spending my nights finishing up the last test runs and the results will soon be published on this website.

3Dfx has a big event coming up in a few days, they will present their Voodoo3 chip to a selected group of press people and I am making sure that my review of this promising 3D chip will seriously kick butt. We shouldn't forget another 3D-chip maker who is also working on its new product however, NVIDIA and the TNT2. Let me give you only this little hint: Don't underestimate NVIDIA! Whilst 3Dfx is drawing all the attention to their Voodoo3 chip, NVIDIA is cooking on something that will probably surprise most of you out there. I am currently dedicating the rest of the nighttime that is left from CPU testing to the testing of those two chips.

3D Games For Benchmarking - A Sad Story

This 3D-chip testing brings me to my next topic, 3D benchmarks. You certainly remember that I have always preferred real world game performance testing to synthetic 3D benchmarks. However, whilst you have an incredibly hard time finding some actual 3D games that would let you use them for benchmarking, there are more and more synthetic benchmarks coming up. I have spent a major amount of time in the last days and weeks on finding new games that are feasible for 3D-chip comparisons. The upcoming reviews will again not use synthetic benchmarks, since none of the new 'marks' could really convince me, most of them are perfect for CPU-comparisons but not for finding the best and fastest 3D chip or card. I found a few games that I could use, but I would like to pledge for MORE FRAME RATE TESTS built into 3D-games!!! We all know that those performance-meters are built into every 3D-game, since the game developers need to know if their game runs fast enough. Id is one of the few companies that have not only provided us with excellent games, they also didn't have a problem to let us know how to benchmark with those games. I wonder why it has to be that most other game developers have such a problem with that. Are they embarrassed to show in hard numbers how many problems many of their games have with different graphics cards? Do they want to come across particularly smart and cool by hiding the benchmarking abilities of their games from the public? What is it with you guys? Shouldn't Id be a company you could learn from? Well, all those game developers who try and hide those benchmarking cheat codes from us as much as they want to keep a secret about the number of women they've ever really managed to satisfy are responsible for the popping up of more and more synthetic 3D-benchamrk programs that make a perfect target for cheats of 3D chip or card makers and which provide a bad service to the easy number-believing users out there.