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64 bit doesn't improve perfomance by that much, certainly not the 25% or so that Yonah has over the Turion.

Personally, I can't say about 25% in 64 over 32, but I can say very, very, very noticeable (from a bit slugish desktop to completely snappy as never before). Didn't do benchmarks, just accidently installed 32-bit version, figured that out in about one hour. Reinstalled 64-bit, forgot benchmarks. Next time I plan to do that without accident and actualy run benchmarks.

Here is a benchmark on Windows though (OS 32-bit against 64-bit on the same architecture, didn't found any test on Linux)
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 665&page=1
While 64-bit lagged on few (streams only, and that doesn't account for 20% of tests) it was sometimes even more than 3x faster on others. So, registers do mean a LOT.

Sad, but true. Yonah is dualcore, Turion in test was singlecore. Turion dualcore is yet to come out in few months. I pointed out that too. And said it is worth to wait. But I never said that Turion (that one used in tests) is faster than duo. This is why I prefer Turion over duo (price/performance and the fact I run 64-bit Linux, duo is 32-bit).

Dualcore over Singlecore having performance gain of less than 25% (now here I'm counting 64, 32 bit diff)? SAD. And Turion dualcore comming out in first six months of 2006:) Guess which one I'm buying. Name definietly won't start with I... or be named after a fruit

Uh.. notice the little "e" next to PCI in the article and summary? That means it's PCI Express, which is better than AGP and where all high-end graphics cards are going now.

They may fall like snowflakes on Buffalo here,

Maybe if you mean Buffalo, NY

I have yet to come across a BSOD joke "in the wild." A quick search of Google returned 81 pages of what passes for Geek humor. But damn few questions from end-users, and nothing from sources like "Consumer Reports."

That's funny, my Google search for BSOD yielded all sorts of links:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 647
http://www.ntbrad.com/bsod.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsu pport/learnmore/russel_july09.mspx
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/bsod.pd f
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/bsod.pd f
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bus iness/columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bus iness/columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm

I haven't done anything with my AMD Athlon XP sticker yet. There's a black/green rectangle at the bottom. Does it change colour depending on the temperature?

Good question. I don't know. Somebody should just try it. I was googling for it, but it seems that the sticker doesn't change its color. But there are GeIL RAM modules with attached color-changing stickers on it.

I just got me this one, corsair, this one is on fire :) http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 706&page=2

Gotta quit playing with those tweaking utils.

Hint: Disable write-caching. Instructions

And another thing

"FSP Group Epsilon FSP700-80GL
FSP contacted us recently (3rd week of August) to let us know that a similar configuration will be sold by them at retail under the Epsilon brand. Their FSP Group Epsilon FSP700-80GL is a 700W supply with similar characteristic. Connector configuration is still to be decided and we'll let you know what it is as soon as they've finalised it, but expect dual PCI Express graphics power, plenty of SATA and a modular ATX cable. Hopefully presentation will be spot on, too.

The certification for the Epsilon FSP700-80GL is complete, the unit passing CE and complying with the European Low Voltage Directive and FSP have used an external testing house for the certification. Look out for a full review of the unit as soon as we can get our hands on one."

http://www.fsp-group.com.tw/english/1_product/2_de tail.asp?mainid=1&fid=98&proid=462
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 841&page=3

However, the small royalty that Apple Computer and other patent holders have initially demanded from users of FireWire ($0.25 per end-user system) and the more expensive hardware needed to implement it ($1-$2) has prevented FireWire from displacing USB in low-end mass-market computer peripherals where cost of product is a major constraint.

USB 1.0 FDR: Released in November 1995, the same year that Apple adopted the IEEE 1394 standard known as FireWire.

Yes http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 727&page=2

A dozen? Don't be so conservative. :) I couldn't find any transistor count number for the MC68030, but this page says the MC68040 had 1.2 million transistors (quite a jump up from the 68,000 of the original MC68000).

A Pentium 4 seems to have either 55 million or 125 million, depending on the core generation (those are "Northwood" and "Prescott" cores, respectively), all according to this page. There might be newer generations still, I'm not 100% up to speed on Intel CPUs.

Thus, you can fit either 55/1.2 = ~45 or 125/1.2 = ~104 MC68040s in the transistor budget of a single Pentium 4. Of course, this is just back-of-the-envelope numbers, and I'm not enough of a silicon geek to know how much "glue" would be needed. Plus, trading cache transistors for gate transistors as this calculation does is probably not OK. Not to think about memory bandwidth requirements to feed 55 cores ... But still--one can dream!

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 403

"While the AthlonXP 3200+ gives the P4 3.0C a good run for its money, the P4 is slightly faster in the end as you'll see."

A Gigabyte Mobo factory tour was released a while back. It goes into detail about population and soldering of the board. Lots of nice pictures!

whoops - something I forgot to add that post...

How much would these people love an optimized math library? They've got specialized software they run and have specialized users, so they can put that extra effort to get 10% faster results (or however faster it would be)

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 727&page=3/ You don't need to do anything to make a cluster
It'll do that for you.

Anyone care to comment where a card like this Geforce will be REQUIRED?

Air Shower Using Rule
When You Enter Air Shower
Please Push and Pull the Door Tenderly

are those load bearing paper clips?

If yous opens it, please carefully closed

you thanks us.

I work for a company called DEK (www.dek.com), and our machines are featured in this article http://www.pcstats.com/index3.html Can we now claim to have been slasdotted?? (indirectly)

Check out that "fine motivational strategy" sign on page 10...

Be more responsible
Complain less
Be more attentive
Make lesser mistakes

Yay. I feel so motivated just reading it.

Check out that "fine motivational strategy" sign on page 10...

Be more responsible
Complain less
Be more attentive
Make lesser mistakes

Yay. I feel so motivated just reading it.

I was gonna write up a post about the absence of FireWire on PCs when I found this article and was surprised to learn that FireWire was once the core of the PC98 specification. Only until Apple tried to charge several dollars per PC and the voltage specifications of the neccesary chips proved to be very high it was dropped from the PC98 spec.

I'd always thought that FireWire was kept out of the standard PC spec because Intel didn't invent it. In a way the rise of USB is ironic because Apple was instrumental in making USB a success. Until the original iMac it was routinely called the Unused Serial Bus.

Do I still need the XP firewall? I also just bought Norton AntiVirus and it comes bundled with Norton Personal Firewall. Should I use Norton Firewall instead of XP firewall. Or do I need a software firewall at all?

At work, we just got a slew of Aopen XCCube machines (they were out of the white ones, so I got black), and I have to say, they're quite potent. Onboard gig-E, onboard SATA, DVD drive, and room for several HDs internally (and more if you get a stack of firewire enclosures and slap in some 300-500GB drives).

The machines are fast enough to do anything a fileserver would need (and then some) they're quiet, as they use Duron chips for low heat/power, and they look good enough to put on your desk or whever you want them (if you're so inclined).

Considering that the cost of these machines was $699 CDN ($570 US) for a full small package, I'm imprsesed. You could probably do better building one one your own with a large case, but for a place where space is an issue (or where you don't need THAT much HD space or don't want to build one), it's an interesting machine.

With regards to compiling, it is absolutely not true that P4 beats the AMD FX. In fact Athlon 64 wins all the compiling benchmarks.

As for video encoding, if encoding performance is seriously important to you, then you should be using a 64-bit OS for video encoding. The use of 64-bit code gives a significant performance boost compared to 32-bit code, enough to surpass the Intel offerings.

I'd take Toshiba (business models) over any other wintel notebook except IBM. Sometimes over IBM too, such as my with my Libretto.

Some of the stuff Toshiba (and IBM for that matter) put out for home consumer use is very poor though.

Ian

Hmm... this benchmark is a bit odd. They got 96.8FPS at 640x480 with the 2.8PM. They got 87.8 with the A64 4000 (Asus A8V).

Now, with the EXACT SAME VIDEO CARD, and with the same amount and type of RAM, PCStats (hey, it was the first thing I found when googling for A64 4000+ OC reviews) got 110FPS on an NF3, and 108.7GPS on a VIA chipset, both at stock. OCed (to 2.72GHz, from 2.4), they got 117.1 on the VIA.

Yes, it would be illegal to steal a copy from a store. Why, because the store is deprived of a copy.

Now, one thing you'll find is that the RIAA is very vocal on what is illegal about music copying, and very quiet on what is legal. They'll skate the issues of legality by stating all the borderline illegal acts.

So, to go on with this a bit:

You make an MP3 copy of a song because the CD you bought expressly permits you to do so. But then you put your MP3 copy on the Internet, using a file-sharing network, so that millions of other people can download it.

Mp3 copying legal. P2P downloading legal if own the song (on CD, etc). P2P uploading to others is a grey area because you don't know if the other person has an original copy, in cases where they do they're entitled to a digital reproduction of the same original work (IOW you can get an Mp3 copy of a CD if you own a CD, not if you have a cassette I suppose).

Now to further move on, in Canada downloading is legal but uploading supposedly not:

[article]

And of course, laws are subject to change, and it's the people that change them. I personally don't support downloading music if you don't have the rights to it. However, there isn't a proper alternative.

The RIAA will not replace your disc when it becomes a coaster due to normal wear and tear, but they do everything they can to prevent normal users from making duplicates, even personal ones. In fact, the DCMA seems aimed at expressedly blocking even legal duplications, despite fair use - as other laws already made "piracy" illegal the only intent seems to be to put a block between the 'protected' media and the consumer.

That being said, I just bought a bunch of CD's off of garageband.com/cdbaby.com.
They'll probably be seeing more of my business in which case I'll not have to worry about RIAA idiocy anyhow.

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?article id=592&cid=1
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/athlon64-fx55 /index.x?pg=1
http://www.bit-tech.net/review/364/
http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=266
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 666
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=331
http://www.amdreview.com/reviews.php?rev=fx-55-400 0
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/processors/amd 4000_fx55/
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlo n64-fx55.html
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=614

It's huge and tough and build like a tank: It's got an enormous padded main compartment, a secondary full sized compartment big enough for another computer, a third full sized compartment with pockets for accessories, and a big zippered pocket on the outside.

After 8 years of constant abuse: All the seams are still well sewn and sealed on the inside and outside, so there are no loose threads or freys, like most backpacks develop. The fabric hasn't torn, the zippers have never broken or jammed. All top quality material and workmanship!

It's so well made, that it's still in excellent condition after 8 years. I would definitely get another one, but my old one still has years of use left in it.

Here's an article reviewing Tom Bihn's "Smart Alec" and "Monolith" bags. He has many models specifically designed for laptops, that you can order on his web site, and the prices are quite reasonable!

His web site says: "Tom Bihn has been designing and making bags for well over 20 years. The daypacks he made when he was 13 years old are still in use. And in Santa Cruz, California, where Tom grew up, his laptop cases and book bags are almost legendary."

-Don

Here they are.

Mobo, Vid and cpu = same.

If linux was faster I would actually switch... I spend so much time tweaking windows maybe linux would be easier...

The Light Speed Memory Architecture (LMA) that was present in the GeForce3 has been upgraded as well, with it's major advancements in what nVidia calls Quad Cache. Quad Cache includes a Vertex Cache, Primitive Cache, Texture Cache and Pixel Caches. With similar functions as caches on CPU's, these are specific, they store what exactly they say.

PCI-X seems fine to me and is backwards compatible. I`d rather have compatibility _and_ increased performance rather than just increased performance.

Please read this article, it is very informative: Introduction to PCI-Express: the AGP8X Replacement

To quote:
"The trouble is, while these technologies [66MHz PCI, PCI-X] have, or soon will find a permanent home in the server market, the complexities and extra costs they introduce to motherboard manufacturing mean that they will be virtually unknown at the desktop level. PCI-X, for example, requires a controller for every slot and that is just too expensive. "
...
"Approved as a standard on April 17 2002, PCI-Express is intended to be an evolutionary upgrade to the existing PCI bus. It will maintain complete hardware and software compatibility with all recent PCI devices."

Firewire - 400 Mbps
USB 2.0 - 480 Mbps
Just as fast, and there are no fees, good luck

Apple, who owns the patents for FireWire, killed its Golden Goose by demanding a license fee of several dollars for each PC, which Intel and most computer makers found to be economically untenable. This opened the door for USB. Intel gave the USB technology to their OEM partners royalty-free (as they do today), and IEEE 1394-FireWire-was quietly dropped from the PC 98 specification. Apple backed off their high-priced position, down to today's 25-per-PC license fee, but the damage was done. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 104

You are thinking of PCI Express. PCI-X is faster than standard PCI but no where near as fast as PCI Express and is not intended as a replacement for AGP.

PCI Express, which is set to replace AGP comes in several speeds and motherboards will only have one 16x PCI Express slot suitable for use with graphics cards

So unfortunatly this will have no effect on CPU prices

In this positive review of the 191T, they state that the contrast ratio is 500:1. The Samsung site lists that unit with a 700:1 contrast ratio.

Does this balance everything out?

Now that's just where you're wrong historically, here's why /. hates Nvidia, or seems to. First of all Nvidia develops drivers for their cards and doesn't release the source code for it, keeping most die hard Linux junkies away from that which they want the most, information! Second, they do a fine job of having fast drivers, and easy to use products, which makes most /.'ers and Linux users content with their closed drivers.

ATI, on the otherhand, "works with open source developers", by providing them information about their products, allowing them to write their own drivers. This keeps ATI from expending much money to support Linux, and it severely limits your choices as a Linux only gaming consumer.. to Nvidia...

I'd wager that in a /. poll most people would say that Nvidia is the card in their Linux computer...

Also, ATI was the giant long before Nvidia rose to power. Go look at your old OEM video cards, the name on them isn't Nvidia.

Since it's redundant, I won't make a seperate post for this, but I had my own bad driver experience with ATI's TV Wonder VE. I bought this card and put it in an XP computer since I was worried about the Linux drivers and wanted to be sure it worked before setting it up under Linux. The driver install went smoothly, but afterwards the computer would only boot to a BSOD. I threw it in a Mandrake box and it worked like a charm. Amazing to me that someone can reverse engineer a product and write a driver for it better than the company that made it, and had full access to the information....

I'm voting with my wallet from now on. ALL games, hardware, and computer accessories that I purchase from now on MUST have Linux support.

You can find a little info on them here.

I have a 52X that still works well. Quietest freakin' drive I've ever used.

Hi ramen - I guess you're referring to the same point made here.

I don't disagree -- a USB-only mac would have helped spur USB adoption. But Apple was clearly a follower in this case, leveraging the widespread adoption of a royalty-free standard. According to the article itself, USB was already supported by a "vast army of cloners" before the imac came out (the article is dated Aug 98). In other words, Intel and party had been successful at getting motherboard makers to provide USB ports! The device support was just a matter of time.

This Firewire v/s USB article gives a good perspective on the whole issue. While Firewire is the better engineered standard, there were questions about Firewire's power usage and the high license fees being charged by Apple.

All -- Thank you for your polite responses to my original post. Some moderator took a rather dim view of it though - modding me down to zero. :)

I wanted to find some more information myself about Linux supporting 64-bit processors and this is what I found. Mandrake will have support by early 2003, I'm not sure if it's done now or not but it should be nearly done. Redhat is also offering support for the X86-64, check out the news release. Personally I think this is a great oppertunity for Linux to catch up to MS in market share. I look forward to upgrading...

My box:
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP/MP/4 1532 MHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
Score: 1294

Now, if I go to the Futuremark Project Search, enter my exact system, and change out my GF4 for a Radeon 9700, the top results are in the 4500 range. Which would suggest that I could get a 200% performance boost by buying an ATI card. However, game benchmarks suggest the 9700 would buy me a much smaller gain (5-50%, depending on the game/resolution/options). IMO, 3dmark places a bit too much emphasis on the newest DX9 features to be useful as a general performance benchmark.

What are you talking about? USB is slower than SerialATA not faster... Much much slower in fact.

Here's a quick comparison

SerialATA 1.0 - 1.2Gbps (150Mb/sec)
USB 2.0 - 480 Mbps
USB 1.1 - 12 Mbps
Firewire (IEEE1394) - 400 Mbps
Parallel Port - 1 Mbps
Serial Port - 0.115 Mbps

Figures taken from the actual spec on serialata.org and from here.

Nick...

Using this site as an example to estimate power usage, we get:
240 computer blades in Green Destiny x 6,480 hours uptime (9 months) = 1,555,200 computer hours of uptime

Assuming the only thing changed on the blade is the CPU -- and North Bridge chipset, since the Crusoe includes
a North Bridge on die and the P-III does not -- at full blast the Crusoe consumes about 1.75W of power and the
P-III + NB consumes between 4.5 - 8 W, depending on chip model. However, the 4.5W number is an approximation
from the 0.13 micron ULV P-IIIM chip running in "Battery Saving" mode, or SpeedStepped down to 300 MHz. Running
at full 700 MHz tilt, with NB, we are still talking 5.75W of power consumed.

1,555,200 * 0.0175Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $2,721.60 electricity cost/year (Crusoe)
1,555,200 * 0.0575Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $8,942.40 electricity cost/year (Intel)

A saving of approx. $6,200/year in direct electric costs.

However, the big savings comes from the heat dissipation of the units. While the newer LV/ULV P-IIIs do not require
active cooling, they still run quite a bit warmer than the Crusoe units. As a result, you don't stick a rack
full of them in a room that isn't temperature controlled. The difference in the air conditioning bill can
easily reach tens of thousands of dollars.

In business, there are two types of money/budgets. One-time grants and acquisition budgets are large chunks of
cash. Recurring expense and operations budgets are smaller. Being able to get a large chunk of cash to BUY a
cluster/supercomputer is one thing. Being able to go back year-after-year and get the funds to keep it running
is another project altogether. $15,000 - $20,000/year for electricity used in running/cooling computers is a
LOT of money to some people. This doesn't include construction or maintenance costs on a custom facility/room.

As far as reduced administration costs go, many conventional supercomputers required chilled water and other
special considerations for operation. People with experience managing things like Sun E15000s and Cray T3Es
are few and far between. They are the last of the "high priesthood" of computer administrators and cost a LOT
of money to employ.

A blade server, on the other hand, is a bunch of x86 computers running Linux -- nothing a couple of grad students
can't learn the ins-and-outs of over a term. Maintenance contracts, spare parts, etc. are also TONS cheaper for
the blade/cluster solution as opposed to high-end SGIs, Suns, Fujitsu and Cray super-computers.

Another site with a bit of good supporting information is
PC Stats.

First, that massive 20 GB/s of bandwidth is going to be needed, every bit of it. There is no bandwidth-saving logic on the chip at all, unlike ATI & nVidia's latest. Since occlusion detection can make a significant difference, and Z compression & fast Z clear also help a great deal (ATI claims their 8.8 GB/s performs like a 12+ GB/s system, a 36% boost), the Parhelia could be considered to have only 55% more bandwidth than a GF4 Ti4600 instead of 110%. If the next-gen offerings from ATI & nVidia have similar memory specs, the Parhelia could be at a significant disadvantage almost as soon as it comes out.

Second, the Digit-Life article mentions that early scores (from very raw drivers) show a mere 20-30% increase in scores over a Ti4600. Now admittedly this should increase, but Matrox are not known for their 3D driver optimisations, and nVidia are. A unified driver architecture will give you a head start right out of the gate, as you can take some advantage of previous optimisations immediately, whereas Matrox will have more work in front of them to get their drivers performing near the potential of the hardware. Look at ATI; it took them 6 months of focussed effort (and the odd quality hack along the way) to get their drivers up to scratch. Matrox have not traditionally given their 3D side or their software side as much attention, in my experience.

To me, while the triple-head feature could be useful to some (though I dislike external DACs - it's difficult to sync them closely to internal DACs, causing monitor beats), the 10 bit colour is to be applauded, and the vertex handling sounds very nice, anyone looking for performance would be better advised to wait for R300 and NV30.

On a slightly different note, was anyone else disappointed by the quality of the 16x AA screenshots? I expected more. The edge-only AA feature sounds like a very good idea (though it will not help alpha textures, just like multisampled implementations), but I'm a bit jaded after the miracles promised by ATI's SmoothVision didn't exactly set the world on fire. Guess we'll have to wait for performance figures.

Also, I wonder what their yields will be like. 80 million transistors on a 0.15 micron process sounds like something that's difficult to do cheaply.

One person measured the SS50 at 56dba:
Viahardware Small Form Factor & Quiet PCs Forum

And a number of ppl on that forum have complained about the noise--the SV24 was loud, but the SS50 is even louder :P

Apparently the excessive noise is die in large part to the crappy PSU fan, but

And incidentally, for the crowd that thinks undervolting the fan or using a low rpm fan is the solution, note that at 26'c ambient, the CPU already measures >50'c (more figures on page three of the above link).

For those of you too lazy to go to Google, here's a link to the Antec cases page. There's also a mixed review here, with some better pictures. In agreement with the article, 2/3 of their product lines come in either black or grey. I actually think the grey looks better, though - the black ones look too much like the new Dells for me.

The Abit KR7a with 4 RAM slots has ram issues which cause it to give memtest86 errors. This has been hypothesised to be caused by the non-standard amount of ram slots. This was a huge source of grief for me, and I eventually returned the board and had to get credit for the store. As this board also has 4 RAM slots, I would watch out for this board. I will never buy Abit products again because of their extremely high RMA rate.
Please follow this link for details on the problem.

I agree completely about VIA's stability problems. Out of all the computers I've had based on VIA chipsets (about 4 or so), the only one with a decent amount of stability was the ASUS A7M266. Except for that one oddball stable board, it's been a horror story of:

• random lockups with the GeForce2 (no, it *isn't* that the power supplies are too small when they're all in the 450-550W range! :-)
• data corruption problems with the infamous 686B southbridge
• not being able to run CAS3 memory at 133MHz (on a Duron) (note, maybe I am just stupid, but shouldn't a 512MB CAS3 DIMM behave the same as a 128MB with respect to this?)
• conflicts with the Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI 512, Live!, *and* Audigy, and finally
• the notorious Windows Driver Upgrade Treadmill (well, at least VIA actually *does something* about their bugs :-)

Personally, I'm terrified of VIA chipsets at this point. I like the AMD 760MP much better. :-)

Amen. From a couple of quick searches, my Commodore 64 ran about 0.4 MIPS in 1984 and
a current PC (Athlon 1.4Ghz) runs about 4000 MIPS.

My C64 started instantly, gave me access to the display with no lag, and already had drivers loaded to deal with the disk drives, printer and screen.

Today's PC is 10000 faster, roughly speaking. Is it really more than 10000 harder to do all those things nowadays? My PC takes a couple of minutes to start up, even when I haven't changed hardware between restarts and it already knows all it needs to know from the last boot.

Granted, my current PC has 10000 times the memory, and about 100 million times the storage, but the basic interface and OS really should be a bit quicker feeling by now. At this rate, we'll never get to 2001-style AI (or Buck Rogers In The 25th Century-style neon roller disco).

Right now I miss my BX board, and unless AMD starts making their own chipsets, or they get 3rd parties to make damn good ones, nobody will put the hammer series to any good use.