Hewlett Packard

[Skuzzy]

Mip, guess what 99.9% of the users in the game use?  Bzzzzt!  Consumer products!

[gyrene81]

When we talk about HP products, There is a huge difference between consumer and business products. I think Skuzzy is talking about consumer PCs and laptops? right?

Whatever, you can allways install clean windows (or linux) to HP computer without extra software.

I have 10 years experience of selling and supporting HP products, PC:s, workstations, laptos, printers,  servers, storage and network products (99.99% of them business products) and they have been really reliable systems over the years.

Reliable compared to what? Where I work we're 100% HP. The last batch of Intel cpu blade servers we got had 80% memory failures because HP in their infinite wisdom bought Hynix memory to put in their enterprise servers. A week ago we lost a terabyte of data on a SAN enclosure, something that had never occurred since HP started selling the enclosures, 2 bad drives is all it took, and in the past week we have had 6 more drives go bad...the enclosure has only been running 8 months. Over the past 18 months we have had to replace 30% of the hard drives in our SAN enclosures. Their equipment isn't any better than Dell or IBM.

When it comes to HP, reliability is a relative term, relative to the amount of money you want to spend on support. The differences between HP's business and retail systems, is customer support and the amount of useless bloatware that gets installed, nothing else. All you have to do is look at the spares numbers, and the copy of HP supplied parts catalogue I have on my computer shows how many parts are exactly the same between commercial and retail. All the company does is change the spares numbers.

[Viperius]

When I visited the HP HQ in Switzerland everything I needed to know about their servers was instantly clear when I entered the critical systems datacenter and found only Sun machines 

[skribetm]

does AH2 have a benchmark? some "test" that can easily be reproduced across a broad range of systems.
ideally it could be a set of camera views detailing the FPS per scene. (like Hafl-Life2 benchmark).
it would make it easier to actually compare systems and prices vs. performance.

[Skuzzy]

It would not help.

Here is the problem.  Take two systems, which have the same exact hardware and run the benchmark.  You can easily end up with radically different results.

A good example is my personal computer at home. It is a lowly Intel E8400 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a lowly ATI 4850 video card, but it runs circles around most of the computers playing this game.  With Shadows on and every bit of eye candy going it never drops (disable v-sync) below 100FPS regardless of what is going on around me.

It is all about the configuration of the software and the applications/utilities installed.  It is not just a matter of what is running in the background.  My computer is tweaked to the extreme, yet more stable than any machine I have ever used before.  How many of you can boot (from the time the boot loader is read off the HD) your computer and get to your Windows desktop in 4 seconds (or less) flat?

One day, I need to write a book.

[morfiend]

It would not help.

Here is the problem.  Take two systems, which have the same exact hardware and run the benchmark.  You can easily end up with radically different results.

A good example is my personal computer at home. It is a lowly Intel E8400 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a lowly ATI 4850 video card, but it runs circles around most of the computers playing this game.  With Shadows on and every bit of eye candy going it never drops (disable v-sync) below 100FPS regardless of what is going on around me.

It is all about the configuration of the software and the applications/utilities installed.  It is not just a matter of what is running in the background.  My computer is tweaked to the extreme, yet more stable than any machine I have ever used before.  How many of you can boot (from the time the boot loader is read off the HD) your computer and get to your Windows desktop in 4 seconds (or less) flat?

One day, I need to write a book.

  Wow,I can go put the garbage out and be back before windows finishes loading............

[Spikes]

It would not help.

Here is the problem.  Take two systems, which have the same exact hardware and run the benchmark.  You can easily end up with radically different results.

A good example is my personal computer at home. It is a lowly Intel E8400 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a lowly ATI 4850 video card, but it runs circles around most of the computers playing this game.  With Shadows on and every bit of eye candy going it never drops (disable v-sync) below 100FPS regardless of what is going on around me.

It is all about the configuration of the software and the applications/utilities installed.  It is not just a matter of what is running in the background.  My computer is tweaked to the extreme, yet more stable than any machine I have ever used before.  How many of you can boot (from the time the boot loader is read off the HD) your computer and get to your Windows desktop in 4 seconds (or less) flat?

One day, I need to write a book.

Damn 4 seconds? Takes me about 30 (from windows boot) or so but I do have to type a pw into the box (puts on a few seconds).

I never really messed with the performance of my machine much since it's pretty fast for me (Q9550 @ 3.8-4.0, 2 HD5770s in CfX, 4 Gigs DDR2-800, 5400rpm hdd's). Not the greatest but it works. Skuzzy, I've read through BlackViper a bit but I'm sure I could do a bit more...

Btw I wouldn't consider the 4850 lowly at all sir! Compared to today's 5900 series yes but in it's own respect it's a great card.

[skribetm]

without a standard benchmark to quantify performance-
it is all meaningless.

point is, if you have similar hardware and mine scores well below the average FPS for that hardware class,
then at least we can point out that there is indeed some settings that need to be fixed on the system.

benchmarks arent just for bragging, ya know.