Author: Chuck
Date: 04:08:25 11/24/05
Happy Thanksgiving! The Novag Obsidian (http://www.novag.com) has been out for about 2 years now. It was interesting as part of a new wave of chess computers from Novag after a long period. It is also very unusual in that it incorporates 2 CPU's where almost all chess computers use only one. To top it off, these are H8 processors - as far as I know, the Obsidian is the only multiprocessor computer ever made using the H8. However, I really haven't noted any reports of how the Obsidian performs. Even the Schachcomputer web site (http://www.schachcomputer.info) doesn't have any information on the Obsidian. So I decided to fill the void. I've run the BT2450 test suite on the Obsidian and played a number of games at Game in 1 hour, 17 so far. The games I will post later. Below are the results for the BT2450 for the Novag Obsidian: Posn Seconds 1 113 2 898 3 71 4 900 5 900 6 900 7 900 8 29 9 155 10 488 11 900 12 900 13 69 14 900 15 5 16 7 17 617 18 900 19 421 20 900 21 71 22 29 23 14 24 900 25 900 26 1 27 900 28 900 29 19 30 900 Total Time: 15,607 seconds According to the description of the formula for calculating the ELO correlation for this test on the Rebel Chess web site (http://www.rebel.nl/rebelfaq/rc3faq03.htm), we have this result: Novag Obsidian BT-2450 ELO: 1930 Probably the addition of some RAM would have improved the result significantly. One note about the test is a problem, the info displayed is not configurable so by default you only see the 1st move of the best line once every 12 seconds or so (it shows for 2 seconds). So in some cases, I had to replay the move to try to get the initial selection of the correct move to the nearest second. This was difficult and doesn't help the accuracy of testing. Hopefully, Novag is not too far off in developing the replacement to the Obsidian now, especially since Christmas is near. Cheers, Chuck
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