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Here's another two other reviews, one at AnandTech and another at TomsHardware

My favorite sites and forums:
anandtech.com
couponcraze.com
dvdtalk.com
fatwallet.com
What are yours? Usually with those and the price comparison engines such as:
pricegrabber.com
and
shopping.yahoo.com
I can get all the bases covered...

I routinely check Ben's Bargains at least once a day. It's a very good summary of all the good deals posted to message boards like Fat Wallet without the YMMV (Your Milage May Vary) or PM (PriceMatch) crap. Also, I'm sure most Slashdotters know this already but AnandTech Hot Deals Forums is a great place to get computer related deals.

Before I make any purchase online, I always send it through Pricegrabber to make sure I'm getting the lowest price, as well as check Funtasia for any coupon codes to sweeten the pot. Be sure to check the merchant ratings. It's sometimes wiser to spend a few more bucks to get it from a more reputable vendor rather than go through the headache of harassing a company to send you your stuff and later disputing a charge with the credit card company (take it from one who learned the hard way!).

you wouldnt happen to be the kind of person who would prefer to buy say...a nice surround sound system or elevision instead of making a house payment would you?

oh..and im a gamer on a budget, and yes, i did pay for the OS, at the cost of a couple of games I wanted. Btw, you dont have to spend $150 on Windows...you can get it for just under $100; again, the price of a couple of new games. Dont justify you pirating software because you got your priorities wrong when you spent your money.

Dont buy toys and say "i cant make my house payment"; don't buy games and hardware and think "ohhhh windows is too expensive" is a justifiable reason to steal it.

How about, instead of encouraging someone to pirate software (nevermind what you think of windows and microsoft, nevermind the prices, encouraging theft is encouraging theft) we point him to some FREE games?

Like this list Now, no more excuses. Pay for windowsAND play your games, or switch to a free OS (and still play free games) and stop making excuses for yourself.

Anandtech theory:

http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.html?i=198 3
Late last week various reports began to hint that the US DOJ price fixing investigations against the Big 4 memory producers; Samsung, Micron, Hynix, and Infineon. The EU has launched a separate probe against the same companies with regard to the extremely unusual increase in DRAM prices that lasted between November 2001 and May 2002. As part of court documents in the now dismissed FTC case against Rambus, an email sent from a Micron employee claiming with regard to memory suppliers Samsung and Infineon states; "..if Micron makes the move, all of them will do the same and make it stick". Two months later, we began to see memory prices increase bizarrely. After the disclosure of this email (and others), the US Department of Justice has launched this new investigation on grounds of antitrust practices. Micron officials claim the email released from the FTC vs. Rambus case has nothing to do with the recent DOJ probe. So what exactly happened those fateful months in 2001/2002? At the time the incident, the composition of the memory market was slightly different than it is today: Manufacturer Market Share Samsung 30% Micron 17% Hynix 13% Infineon 12% Elpida 6% Nanya 5% Samsung was by far the largest DRAM producer in 2001, and one of the exclusive RDRAM producers as well (along with Elpida). Samsung and Hynix are headquartered in Korea, Micron in the US, and Infineon in Germany. Micron has a long history of complaining to the FTC about foreign memory manufacturers dumping memory into the US below cost in order to solidify contracts and market dominance.

You are not a very not cool new guy. Go back to AnandTech you silly bint. THATS RIGHT GO BACK TO ATOT.

I think this guy has got you beat... 23,002 traces of spy/adware!

As always Wikipedia comes to the rescue (and since it's released under the GNU Free Documentation License I can legally present the whole article to you nice people of Slashdot) :).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

Click of death

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

[edit]

The click of death is a failure mode typical of Iomega Zip drives. The term is also used more broadly to refer to failures of several other kinds of disk storage systems. In all cases, the click of death is characterized by a noticeable clicking or buzzing sound and is usually caused by a head crash.

The term became common in the late 1990s, describing a problem particular to Iomega's Zip drives. Zip disks, although popular, were not particularly sturdy (being exposed to the dust and grime of an unfiltered environment), and the drives were prone to developing misaligned heads. These damaged and dirty heads would try to read a disk, only get a marginal signal, then the controller would quickly snap the head arm back into the drive and out again, producing the click and (in many cases) tearing up the edge of the disk and even the heads themselves. Compounding the problem, the damaged disks would often go on to damage the heads of any other drive they were used in.

Iomega received thousands of complaints about the click of death, but denied all responsibility: often, to the fury of Zip drive owners, claiming that the problems were caused by the use of (functionally identical) third-party media. A class action suit was filed against them in September 1998. The case was settled in March 2001 and Zip drive owners were given a rebate, but Iomega's reputation has yet to fully recover.

On non-Zip systems (usually a hard disk), the click of death refers to a similar phenomenon; when a hard disk has a hard error or servo failure, the head actuator will buzz and click as the drive tries to recover from the error. Since the media is not removable on these drives, the defect is almost always due to physical abuse or a manufacturing error. IBM's storage division had their own click of death problems in 2001 with the mass failure of their popular Deskstar 75GXP hard disks.

External links

• Comprehensive account of the click of death at grc.com
• News article on the Zip click of death, from 1998
• Information on the Iomega class action and settlement
• 75GXP FAQ at anandtech.com

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for

This thread from anandtech deals with the same issue. There are some benchmarks in there if you scroll down and onto the next page. Check it out, it may give you some ideas of what you guys want to do.

> A system with a PIII chip, motherboard, 10 GB drive, ethernet card,
> GeForce 4 card has to be about $100 or so.

The XBox is not as simple as a basic PIII box. It also uses hypertransport links. Hypertransport is just showing up now in modern desktop systems like the Opteron and Apple G5.

OpenBSD's "W^X" is implemented using techniques discussed here. The hardware support the story refers to is most likely the presence of an "NX" bit in the AMD64 page table, to allow per-page permissions (which, by the way, Intel is apparently not going to implement, at least in their early AMD64-compatible parts).

I do not believe OpenBSD has a software protected stack. However, given that OpenBSD runs on platforms which have hardware protected stacks, it does have the ability to guard against those kind of overflows. Just not on x86 hardware. Well, except maybe a version that runs on the AMD64 hardware...


From here:
(NOTE: i386 and powerpc do not support W^X in 3.3; however, 3.3-current already supports it on i386, and both these processors are expected to support this change in 3.4).

You can use a little-known feature of x86 called "segments" to enforce non-executability of memory areas. It's just different from the regular paging system used to implement virtual memory, and COMPLETELY unique to x86. You can find a discussion about it here. The links in the thread have some good info.

Dell does this now, or at least will ..

Dell Inspiron XPS Preview

AnandTech! Also Known as ATOT

We own THE SCENE!!

Windows XP 64 is due out in the early part of H2 (around the same time as SP2). Longhorn is a different animal (the successor to XP).

Every decent downloader with a fat pipe got everything they wanted illegal music-wise back in the napster days. Come on people! Its 2004! Get opensource programs faster, download independent movies, get dj mixes streamed from the best clubs in the world. Cheap Porn for cring out loud! Or my new favorite- old Playstation games that I bought back in the day but they got eaten by my PS1 before I could finish them! With modern emulators they look better that some PS2 games. I can finally see the ending to Final Fantasy 9. All great stuff- Get all your music and get out. Your connection is better spent in other ways.

once BTX comes out, they'll all be more or less redundant, unless the BTX manafacturers somehow make them compatiable, which I doubt is very likely.

Here are some more benchmarks

AMDzone

AnandTech

XbitLabs

Ace Hardware

There are even more at AMDZones main page.

Mostly just trolling, but check out stuff like this makes one ponder for a bit about the whole thing.

The purpose of the PR system has been to reflect that the Athlon XP chips are more efficient and compare favorably to P4 chips, but the official explanation of them was indeed the Thunderbird comparison as seen in the first Athlon XP review by Anandtech.

These "Model Numbers" are supposed to correspond to the real world performance of the Athlon XP CPUs when compared to higher clocked competitors. While AMD will argue that the Model Numbers are used to compare the Athlon XP to an equivalently clocked Thunderbird, it's clear that the ratings are used to somehow bridge the clock speed gap between the Athlon and the Pentium 4.

If you took a few more seconds to search Geek.com you would see that they corrected their supposition that the XP model numbers were based on P4 numbers:

Apparently it is the performance relative to a Thunderbird Athlon and has nothing to do with Pentium 4. Many sites (including ours) have been reporting that the Athlon XP model number system will be relative to the performance of Northwood Pentium 4s, therefore allowing a 1.533GHz Athlon to perform like a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 Northwood.

I think the article got this wrong. If you read the Anandtech Report, they believe it is going to be an Opteron-ish number scheme, not an AthlonXP-ish one.

Quote from the report:

News broke earlier today that Intel will most likely change its current "Megahertz" strategy in favor of a more subdued "Model Name" approach. This does not necessarily mean Intel will change its processors to a PR rating, like "3000+". Rather, the new model system sounds very familiar to AMD's Opteron approach, with three or four digit numbers replacing the product name.

XEONS do not currently run at 800mhz frontside bus but will later this year which considering a data center environment - i'm sure that is what he was referring to.

As well the Pentium 4 achitecture shares the fsb bandwidth (800mb/s for each cpu) between all the processors on a multi-processor setup - while Operton's have independent memory channels (6.4gb/s for each cpu)

The recent anandtech article will provide some good information on this.

>Note also, as I continue spanking you with the truth, that I am being generous by comparing the physically largest 40 GB iPod to your 30 GB. The 20 GB iPods are even smaller.

Dude, you are so fucking wrong it isn't even funny.

Spank this, dumbshit. 4.02" x 2.43" x 0.78" @ 6.5 Oz.

That's 124.861365 cubic centimeters for the stupid, such as yourself. Oh, but sorry, I didn't expect you to be able to add. It's "difficult", isn't it?

You can't compare a MINI iPod when we're not talking MINI. We're talking NORMAL iPod.

Retard.

Go away and die in a hole.

Just on a small side-note while we're on the subject of PayPal, PayPalDamon, the CSR hired to specifically work on online relations, has quit as of last week. For those who don't visit any of the forums where PPD visited, PPD was PayPal's public face for those forums, offering PPD as a first contact for forum-goers who encountered any sort of problem(ripoffs, technical issues, etc), and generally kept the geek user base in touch with what was going on at PayPal. At this point, there are no annouced plans to replace him, and he will be missed.

Currently Intel's latest 3.0+ GHz offerings are spanking Athlon 64s in benchmarks with 32 bit applications.

I wouldn't really say that. Sure, if you want to buy the $1,100 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. But for normal, real-world users, the Athlon64's price:performance ratio kicks the P4's butt.

When excluding the overpriced P4EE and the AMD FX51:

AMD64 Wins: Business Winstone 2004, Content Creation Winstone 2004, Aquamark FPS, Halo, Gunmetal, Unreal Tournament, Warcraft 3, Quake 3 Arena, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Quake 3 Arena Source Compile

P4 Wins: SysMark 2004*, Aquamark CPU, DivX Encoding, 3dsmax r5, Lightwave 7.5

*SysMark 2004 is listed once, rather than each individual test. It heavily favors Intel and doesn't reflect other benchmarks or real-word performance.

SOURCE: AnandTech

I think time will show (barring any major gaffes) that AMD made the right move. First and foremost, the Athlon XP appeared to be reaching the end of its run. Cranking up the speed of the processor didn't really seem to yield comparable performance gains. In the early days the performance ratings on the XP line were a little iffy, but they were close enough that most people didn't really care. With the XP 3000, and 3200 though those ratings were dubious at best. The speed ratings ratings for the Athlon 64, however, are pretty accurate, even understated in some areas.

I recently upgraded my principle system and at the time, I was determined that the P4 2.8HT CPU was going to be the chip the machine was built around. It clearly trounced the Athlon XP 2800 in all tests for about $100 more. I was about to order when the AMD Atlhon 64 3000+ was released. It outperformed the Intel chip in most areas, was 64 bit, backwards compatible, and only $20 more. In my opinion, and Anandtech and Tom's Hardware agree, the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck CPU out there.

Pricewatch's Lowest Prices are...

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ - $205
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ - $251
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ - $401

Intel Pentium 4 3.0 (800) - $209
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 (800) - $273
Intel Pentium 4 3.4 (800) - $420

AMD Athlon XP 3000+ - $158
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ - $194

Looking at these benchmarks here and on the following page here. You can see, with the exception of pure media encoding, the Athlon 64's perform better. The margin is slim in some areas, and quite large in others. All this and the chips are a little cheaper.

In my opinion, the XP line was dead. It had gone as far as it was going to go. I think AMD knew that the 3000 and 3200 were more like the 2850 and 2900 and they weren't going to get any more mileage out of the design. I definitely think AMD made the right call putting all their eggs in the Opteron/Athlon 64 basket.

I think time will show (barring any major gaffes) that AMD made the right move. First and foremost, the Athlon XP appeared to be reaching the end of its run. Cranking up the speed of the processor didn't really seem to yield comparable performance gains. In the early days the performance ratings on the XP line were a little iffy, but they were close enough that most people didn't really care. With the XP 3000, and 3200 though those ratings were dubious at best. The speed ratings ratings for the Athlon 64, however, are pretty accurate, even understated in some areas.

I recently upgraded my principle system and at the time, I was determined that the P4 2.8HT CPU was going to be the chip the machine was built around. It clearly trounced the Athlon XP 2800 in all tests for about $100 more. I was about to order when the AMD Atlhon 64 3000+ was released. It outperformed the Intel chip in most areas, was 64 bit, backwards compatible, and only $20 more. In my opinion, and Anandtech and Tom's Hardware agree, the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck CPU out there.

Pricewatch's Lowest Prices are...

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ - $205
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ - $251
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ - $401

Intel Pentium 4 3.0 (800) - $209
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 (800) - $273
Intel Pentium 4 3.4 (800) - $420

AMD Athlon XP 3000+ - $158
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ - $194

Looking at these benchmarks here and on the following page here. You can see, with the exception of pure media encoding, the Athlon 64's perform better. The margin is slim in some areas, and quite large in others. All this and the chips are a little cheaper.

In my opinion, the XP line was dead. It had gone as far as it was going to go. I think AMD knew that the 3000 and 3200 were more like the 2850 and 2900 and they weren't going to get any more mileage out of the design. I definitely think AMD made the right call putting all their eggs in the Opteron/Athlon 64 basket.

Try the printable version of the article...

I think that a large part of the story was simply that the new Xeons are no longer getting hugely beaten by the Opteron like they were in the previous test performed by the same site. While the Opterons still held a noticeable lead in 4P setups, the 2P systems were all pretty close.

In Anand's previous test comparing the two chips the Opteron came out WELL ahead of the Xeon. Of course, the tests were somewhat different, and it's been demonstrated several times that the Opteron is the chip to beat in web serving (subject of the first test) but things are much close in more pure-database tests (second article).

As for other platforms, I do with they had been able to throw an Itanium2 setup into the mix. In fact, what would be even more interesting is if/when they get Win2k3 64-bit edition running on the Opteron (and maybe Xeons as well) and THEN compare it to the Itanium2.

Cache may always help but this is not as straightforward a statement as you indicate. It is highly dependent upon the architecture of the processor.

The reason the 4mb Xeon's are significantly outperforming the 2mb Xeon's is due to the shared bandwidth architecture of the Xeon's. The cache makes up for the lack of access to data via the FSB and keeps the very deep pipeline of the P4 series processors full. The long pipeline is the reason that cache misses impact the speed of the P4s so much - despite Intels attempt to improve branch prediction. Simply look @ the P4 Celeron's to see how they can be so utterly trounced by regular P4s @ the same clockspeed with little architectural difference but cache size.

Opterons/AMD 64s do not benefit as much from the boost in L2 Cache. Perfect example of this is the
Athlon 64 3000+ and Athlon 64 3200+

The 3200 has 1meg of L2 - and the 3000 has 512k - and both run @ 2 ghz. The performance difference between these two (in most benchmarks) is less than 10%
Anand Review of Athlon 64 3400+

So a doubling of cache at the same processor speed results in a 10% boost in performance 'maybe'.

Finally some applications are more sensitive to L2 cache sizes then others.

Therefore your statement "more L2 cache always helps" is strictly true - but the degree of performance increase must be compared against the increase in cost. And this benefit will change from processor to processor and application to application.

From this test:

With the Opteron, AMD introduced their first-ever 3-digit naming system for server/workstation CPUs. The first digit indicates whether the CPU was designed for 1-way, 2-way or 4- to 8-way operation. For example, the Opteron 100 series is only validated for use in uniprocessor configurations while the Opteron 200 series is validated for use in uni- and dual processor configurations. Finally, the Opteron 800 series is validated for use in up to 8 processor configurations.

Note that we used the phrased "validated for use" because there is very little stopping an Opteron 100 CPU from being used in a dual processor environment (an Opteron 100 is identical to an Opteron 200 and an Opteron 800). As far as we know at this point, AMD has not prevented CPUs from being used in configurations in which they weren't intended to be used. Although, it wouldn't be too hard for them to prevent it in the future if it becomes a problem.

The purpose of the test is not to test the memory, but to test the processors. Thus, they used the same memory in testing each processor configuration.

One of the purposes of the test was to show how the memory bandwidth bottleneck of the Xeons limits their effectiveness in 4-way configurations, which the Opterons do not have that problem. Doing this comparison with different memories would make things more complicated.

Additionally, you'll notice that Anand's final words recommend the Opteron for being at least equivalent and much cheaper than Xeon. This was also the selection process for their new forum servers, so you can bet that they aren't getting any kickback from Intel, or those would be Xeons.

If you still have doubts about the validity of Anandtech's testing, check out the benchmarks from their AMD vs. Intel web server test in December: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1935&p= 9. All on dual processor configurations. There is definitely no Intel bias in that test.

Really, I think some people ought to think before they flame like this. The benchmarks are showing the Opterons to be equivalent or faster in 2-way configurations and definitely faster in 4-way configurations, so what is there to complain about? The fact that Anandtech has consistently recommended AMD's processors just makes it doubly silly.

Anandtech had an Opteron vs Xeon test earlier too, AMD Opteron 248 vs. Intel Xeon 2.8: 2-way Web Servers go Head to Head where the Opteron trashes the Xeon handily. I guess that was more focused towards web serving, and now that Anandtech intended to replace their forums database server, they naturally based their latest test "AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon: Database Performance Shootout"on database performance.

"In a 4-way configuration AMD's Opteron cannot be beat, and thus it is our choice for the basis for our new Forums database server. We'll be documenting that upgrade in a separate article so stay tuned."

The parent is just senseless karma whoring-- this should be avoided so that we don't polute the moderation base. This is the direct link to the test results

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1982&p= 6

Full text

Test Results can be found here:
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1982&p= 6

id may 'reccomend' nvidia, but Valve's position on nvidia's performance in HL2 seemed a bit more tense and confrontational.

Mod me....

Informative:

If you're looking for a small form factor for high-end processors, you will likely find future products using the picoBTX form factor. The motherboard layout provides better cooling for hot processors that mini-ITX can't address. Here's a summary of the BTX form factors from Anandtech.

Interesting:

Has anyone figured out how to use the floating point power in their graphics cards for non-video applicaitons? Those things are becoming powerful that they use their own heat sinks. Just like we had floating point chips for the 486SX series, perhaps it will be more cost-effective and power-effective in the future to separate commodity, low-cost, and low-power I/O processing from floating point processing.

If graphics card developers start thinking of their cards as being more like floating point coprocessors and less like device controllers, they can help drive future floating point computing and leave traditional central processors to manage memory and I/O.

Redundant:

Imagine a beowulf cluster of video cards!

-ez

Disclaimer: I use a 500MHz Celeron on my desk and a 300MHz laptop at home. I'm not a luddite - I just don't utilize a 3D "rich" graphical environment to surf the web, create documents, and manage computers.

PCI Locking and more specifically.

PCI Locking and more specifically.

AMD processors CLAIM to have those features. However all third party tests show that they do not. If you have any evidance to the contrary I would love to see it as these two features (or the lack there of) have caused me problems in the past.

No, the emotion engine (made up of vector units and central processing unit) is seperate from the graphics synthesizer, which has a memory bandwidth of 48 gigabytes/sec. The Geforce3 (similar to the graphics chip in the xbox) has approximately 7.36 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Unlike what was said in another post, the PS2 -does- do trilinear filtering - Along with "Texture Mapping, Bump Mapping, Fogging, Alpha Blending, Bi-...Linear Filtering, MIPMAP, Anti-aliasing, and Multi-pass Rendering".

The problems, of course, are that the emotion engine and graphics synthesizer require a PhD in mathematics and computer science to be able to code for them, so their potential has barely been reached - even by Sony's own programmers.

Many people have pointed out that it really doesn't matter if one has just purchased an AGP card just because PCI Express versions are coming out this year... However, it may be influenced by the chipset support.

Intel's roadmaps reveal that none of their next-gen chipsets will have AGP support.

Similarly, SIS' roadmaps reveal that none of their chipsets will have AGP support either. That's for both Intel and AMD processors.

However, VIA's roadmaps show support for AGP throughout 2004 for both Intel and AMD processors.

So there's all the major players in the Intel game, and two for AMD. I would theorize that NVidia will go with whatever solution lets them pimp their high-end GPUs most effectively for their next NForce boards, but I don't remember seeing anything official about this. Anyone got a link?

Many people have pointed out that it really doesn't matter if one has just purchased an AGP card just because PCI Express versions are coming out this year... However, it may be influenced by the chipset support.

Intel's roadmaps reveal that none of their next-gen chipsets will have AGP support.

Similarly, SIS' roadmaps reveal that none of their chipsets will have AGP support either. That's for both Intel and AMD processors.

However, VIA's roadmaps show support for AGP throughout 2004 for both Intel and AMD processors.

So there's all the major players in the Intel game, and two for AMD. I would theorize that NVidia will go with whatever solution lets them pimp their high-end GPUs most effectively for their next NForce boards, but I don't remember seeing anything official about this. Anyone got a link?

Many people have pointed out that it really doesn't matter if one has just purchased an AGP card just because PCI Express versions are coming out this year... However, it may be influenced by the chipset support.

Intel's roadmaps reveal that none of their next-gen chipsets will have AGP support.

Similarly, SIS' roadmaps reveal that none of their chipsets will have AGP support either. That's for both Intel and AMD processors.

However, VIA's roadmaps show support for AGP throughout 2004 for both Intel and AMD processors.

So there's all the major players in the Intel game, and two for AMD. I would theorize that NVidia will go with whatever solution lets them pimp their high-end GPUs most effectively for their next NForce boards, but I don't remember seeing anything official about this. Anyone got a link?

The second issue comes with the macrovision encoding that the HDTV does via the SiS301C video bridge. If you have that form of video out enabled, programs like PowerDVD and the DVD play within Home Theater crashes. The easiest way to avoid this is just to disable video out and set the primary display to your monitor (CRT or LCD mode).

The cost is... Absurd. Even for a top-end gaming laptop.

Let's see. For $2,500, I can get an Athlon64 laptop which:
1) Dominates gaming performance (games, you know, the point of the Dell laptop's existance)
2) Will run for more than 45 minutes on battery, becaues of Cool'n'Quiet technology. Mine runs for about 3 hours on battery. Honestly, a high end Pentium IV in a laptop? While we live in infinite battery land, why not add a 21" CRT monitor?
3) Isn't a Dell laptop.

Or, if I still like Dell (they aren't bad for the price sometimes), and am not one of the 95% of the world's clueless that still believes the CPU clockspeed = performance, I can buy a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1.7GHz Pentium M (which is very close or equal in performance to a 3GHz Pentium IV in most tasks), with an ATI Radeon 9600 Mobile and 1GB of memory, for about $2,600.

I have to say, this new Dell laptop is clearly targetted towards complete idiots with too much money on their hands. It isn't even a "just for rich folks which can afford the finest things in life" unit, because those "rich folks" can get a hell of a lot more laptop for the price, and not have the cheap stigma that is attached to every Dell laptop (except the admittedly very good Dell Precision series (which is made by the same ODM that builds some of IBM's laptops).

On a somewhat related note, there's a recent article on anandtech about the Asus DigiMatrix, a barebone computer aimed at people building a home-theater PC. that's one sexy box, with a volume knob and case buttons and an LCD, video capture card, radio tuner, tv tuner, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, DVD/CD-RW, embedded audio-player OS, 7-in-1 card reader...

I'm seriously considering getting one of these and making a linux media station / fileserver. Obviously Asus supports only Win2k and WinXP, but it seems like a fun challenge getting all those cutting-edge hardware components to run in linux. Most of them, even the ethernet controller, are so new they aren't directly supported in the kernel yet. And getting all the various Linux media applications to start up and obey the case buttons automatically based on what is inserted sounds like a software project in itself.

Check out the Dell 2001FP. With a 16ms response, it's more than adequate for gaming.

On Windows, Opera doesn't "just disappear". It blows up in your face if it's going to do that.

BTW, I have seen Opera disappear on Linux, but some sites cause MozFirebird 0.7 to fall over FAST on Damn Small Linux.