I was playing around with this JVC VHS deck, a product of my latest dumpster dive. I hooked it up to an X800 All-in-Wonder and made a VHS copy of Furious 7. The source file was an uncompressed BD rip playing on MPC-HC. I had MPC downmix the DTS MA 7.1 audio to a Dolby Surround encoded stereo mix going into the VCR. The end result wasn't that bad! The video was, well, typical VHS to put it nicely. The audio was surprisingly good, with lots of bass. My receiver was even upmixing the Pro-Logic stereo audio to 7.2.
I also got my hands on some first-gen i7 gear, something I've been meaning to play with for awhile now. It's an i7-920, overclocked to 3.6GHz. So far, the performance is good, but I was expecting a little more out of it. I suspect this may partly be my fault, as I'm no pro when it comes to 1366 BIOS tweakage. I'm also running my spare DDR3-1333 modules in it, which may be pulling performance down (even though the IMC only officially supports up to 1333). On average, the 920 @ 3.6GHz is only around 5% faster than my q6700 @ 4GHz and Phenom 1090T @ 4.07GHz. It only really pulls ahead of the 4GHz C2Q when apps use more than 4 threads. Nehalem is a beast at x264 video encoding; well ahead of the q6700 and nearly tied with the 6-core 1090T.
3DMark01 performance is very interesting. In this test, the i7 is actually slower than the C2Q and PhII. I'm still learning the ins and outs of Nehalem tweaking and overclocking, but the subpar 3DMark01 performance has me baffled.
Opteron 185 OC (3.13GHz, DDR-400 dual)
Win7: 28,983
WinXP: 47,464
i7-920 OC (3.6GHz, DDR3-1333 triple)
Win7: 49,065
WinXP: 62,880
C2D E8600 (3.33GHz, DDR3-1333 dual)
Win7: 49,834
WinXP: 63,401
C2Q Q6700 OC (4GHz, DDR3-1600 dual)
Win7: 57,170
WinXP: 74,592
PhII-X6 1090T OC (4.07GHz, DDR3-1760 dual)
Win7: 58,807
WinXP: Haven't tested XP on this machine yet
i7-4930K OC (4.6GHz, DDR3-2400 quad)
Win7: 92,357
WinXP: 116,074
The performance in 3DMark03-3DMark11 appears to be just fine. Only 3D'01 (and 2000) are slow on this machine. Hmm.
94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!