The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 7

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• Aikouka - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link

  I think it's good to keep in mind that it also depends on whether you care about the reward as well. Some rewards don't really change, so it might not matter. For example, I don't care if the Bane SMG is level 40 or 50... I'm NEVER going to use that gun.
  
  If you haven't had the "pleasure" of seeing that gun yet, here's a video of it from some random YouTube person:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB1CJ0l8kAc
  
  As a warning, you may want to ensure your speakers are at a suitable volume. ;)
  
  Also, some quests don't have an item reward, and it might be easier to complete then with the mobs below your level. Since you played the original Borderlands, I'm sure you remember how difficult the Circle of Duty quest line was in play-through 2.
  
  In regard to the play-through mechanic portion of the podcast, I'm becoming a bit tired of the whole play-through aspect of gaming. In some ways, I think Diablo III really ruined it with requiring the players to go play through the game three times just to reach the "true difficulty." Although, I've honestly never been the player that plays a game more than once just for fun. Fortunately for me, Runic Games was kind enough to simply allow us to specify the difficulty in Torchlight II.

• fusrodah - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link

  Your podcasts are very well done as far as not talking over each other much and the flow of the conversations. It would be cool if we could get some video as well, otherwise you guys do a great job. I appreciate all the hard work you have to do in order for all of this to come together. However, could you link to podcasts on your main links up top, your header I guess.

• Kevin G - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link

  I loved the sections about reviews and rating systems. If you bring back a numerical system, just be sure to start writing the reviews as if you were playing Halo 2 multiplayer.
  
  Also your Samsung 840 died? Got any details on what happened there?
  
  Looking forward to your thoughts on Windows 8.

• DerPuppy - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link

  http://www.dpreview.com/articles/6867454450/quick-...
  
  they make a pretty good case for the pixel binning-> upscale case with photos. Want throw some "engineering textbook" comments this way?

• LeftSide - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link

  Thank you so much for your photography rant. There is so much FUD out there. It is good to hear the truth every once in a while.

• cj100570 - Sunday, October 7, 2012 - link

  To me it came across like a rant from an iPhone fan. I'm no professional photographer but I've taken thousands of photos and have never had any photos, using a cellphone or point and shoot, come out with a purple tinge no matter how I hold the camera.

• runner50783 - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link

  I really enjoy your podcast guys, you know your audience and deliver!, There are other sites with tech podcast too but compared to this, those are more like entertainment shows really like The Verge cast or Engadget podcast. I like that you put out some very good arguments and we learn a thing or two.
  
  It will be awesome if you could have some kind of segments within the podcast dedicated to cover stuff in details, kind of what we have on TWiT where they add things like the enterprise pick of the week, recommended reading, etc, so that your audience can learn even more.
  
  I really liked the chat about the situation with PR relationships, no wonder why positiveness of reviews starts decreasing as days pass. It always seems like those with early access to devices like the iPhone tend to give better scores.
  
  All in all, great stuff :)

• BradCube - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link

  Running off the idea of using accelerometers to embed vector motion metadata for smartphone cameras, I thought Brian might be interested to know that the RED Epic and Scarlet camera's in their latest beta firmware builds have had their internal gyro's enabled for metadata recording. Should be some interesting results once software developers work out how to best use this data for stabilization, 3D tracking etc.

• crypticsaga - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link

  Write any number on a check and I will sign it in exchange for a book by Anand on the inner workings of technology journalism.

• ssj3gohan - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link

  I'm sorry for spamming my blog post again, but I've done some power analysis on IVB a while ago, with the Core i5-3570K. At full load (OCCT+Furmark), I'm seeing 14.79W going into the IGP and 41.28W going into the CPU side of things, with a very slight undervolt.
  
  blog post:
  http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/8217/fluffy2-...
  
  power breakdown:
  https://secure.tweakers.net/my.tnet/fotoalbum?acti...
  
  This is on a modded system, so that power breakdown is an absolute best-case scenario, but suffice it to say that HD 4000 graphics definitely don't fit into Haswell power envelopes, so I'm expecting at least a 2X power efficiency increase with the Haswell ultrabook parts.
  
  AMD power efficiency is well-publicized, they get around 10-12 GFLOPS/W with their 32nm parts (just behind southern islands):
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Islands_(GPU...