Sony BDP - S300 Blu-ray player

Yeah, I broke down and bought a Blu-ray player after Toshiba threw in the towel on the format war.

A few things to note:

1. The Blu-ray player takes much longer to start up than the HD player which I thought was pretty slow. This is like a couple of minutes, I swear, even with the latest firmware.

2. The upscaling of SD DVDs is not anywhere near as good a quality as the Toshiba HD player.

3. Blu-ray DVD prices (which were already high) have actually gone UP since the end of the format war. $40 as a retail price for many Blu-ray titles is ridiculous.

Well, my price point is first any Blu-ray DVD under $15, then $20 and on rare occasions, $25. $15 to $20 being the sweet spot.

XFX GeForce 8800GT review

The XFX GeForce 8800GT video board is just so over the top in value! This is one of those purchases where you say to yourself “why didn’t I buy this sooner?”.

My previous video board was an EVGA GeForce 8600. The difference between these two boards, for example, in viewing and playing a game such as Hellgate: London is like comparing a drawing done with a crayon to a high resolution photograph. Without any performance tweaking other than installing the 8800GT, the frame rate in that game went from 7 frames per second to 42 frames per second. So not only was there a massive visual improvement, the speed of game play was also greatly enhanced.

The Alpha Dog graphic theme of the board, rendered on the box and the board itself looks very professional. In the box there is also an “I’m Gaming Do Not Disturb” card to hang on your door.

Although it is not documented on the XFX web site, you do need to have a 400 watt or higher power supply unit (PSU) with a PCI-Express power cord to plug into this board. I have an HP Pavilion with a quad core cpu and 3G of RAM that only had a 300w PSU. I purchased a Raidmax 650w modular PSU just to install this board. Uninstalling your present PSU is very straight forward. Simply unplug all the PSU connections in your PC, take out the four screws holding your PSU to the case and remove it. Reverse that procedure to install your new PSU. When you are shopping for a new PSU, get a modular one so that you only use the cables you need inside of your PC, which will help keep it cooler.

While the XFX GeForce 8800GT video board does have its own cooling fan, with the large fan on my new PSU as well as the case fan on my PC, I have not had any overheating issues and I tend to run my PC 16 hours a day.

This is a great board, and I highly recommend it.

April 19, 2008 - P.S. The board is too hot for me to run with my PC case cover closed. Unfortunately my PC is an HP Pavilion and the space inside is too tight for me to add a cooler to the video board.