ddr3 posts

Ardent fans of this column will doubtless have noticed that BI has been a little, shall we say, thin on the ground of late. There are two main reasons for this -- one, BI's biennial sojourn to the other side of the country for a week of testosterone poisoning, and, two, a multi-week stint with a rather demanding guest around the house.

The guest in question, however, wasn't an unemployed former college buddy, a surprise visit from the in-laws, or a couch-surfing second cousin. It was, rather, a sixty pound, gloss-black obelisk -- Alienware's top-of-the-line gaming system, the Area-51 X58, tricked out by them with damn near every bell, whistle, and go-fast toy in their arsenal. And BI had their blessing to, and we quote this with great relish, "Send it back as a smoking pile of slag. But, seriously, watch Iron Man on the Blu-Ray drive first."

We were skeptical. Surely, entrusting someone of BI's questionable restraint with a valuable piece of equipment would carry more stringent usage guidelines than, "Give it back when we ask for it." They were adamant -- this was the third such system released to the wild, and they wanted it to be abused.

Fortunately, the conference call ended before our mad laughter began.

Okay, not awards, per se, but at least some recognition of things that didn't suck -- stuff like improved performance and big price reductions (sometimes). Generational advancement in the CPU and video card arenas brought more power to our desktop systems than ever before. DDR3 stopped costing its weight in gold. The Phenom... got its ass handed to it all year long. (Seriously, AMD? You can't roll out a replacement soon enough.)

Also, one of the biggest legends in the realm of physical vaporware finally came to market, but BI doesn't see a lot of folks ponying up two grand for the Optimus Maximus keyboard. At least it made it to market after a rumor-and-tease gestation period that rivals that of Duke Nukem 3D.

There were a handful of big stories in the realm of gaming hardware in 2008, and, for a change, they were almost all good news for gamers.