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https://www.tomshardware.co.uk...

And a quick comparison:
https://www.samsung.com/semico... - 1200TBW
  vs
https://www.intel.com/content/... - 17,520TBW

Really? It's almost as if a certain chip vendor would like to downplay the seriousness of their shite hardware design or something.

"According to some researchers, the ME has access to âoeeverything,â including network, memory, and the cryptography engine" FROM http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-amt-vulnerability-me-dangerous,news-55499.html/

* TRY THIS INSTEAD (I came up w/ it & so far it's been pretty solid & 'up-voted' by our /. peers in the past) https://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11338175&cid=55522717/

(See subject - Your heart was in the right place though)

APK

P.S.=> You'll understand HOW/WHY it'd work since it works "off-motherboard" in your router (using port filtering to block Intel AMT/ME)... apk

Dammit forgot link http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...

Zen/Ryzen has better performance per watt than any Intel chip currently offered and the next 6 months or more. You are either Intel fanboy/shill or you have been living under a rock. Tom's actually measures the wattage draw directly from the CPU, 4-core Intel draws more power than an 8 core AMD chip. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...

News: Even AMD couldn't avoid posting pictures of a nice shiny red AMD developer system that's clearly running a Haswell-E CPU with an LGA-2011 motherboard to make the "X2" or "Pro" or whatever they are calling it be functional.

They did that with Project Quantum as well, and essentially said "Eh, we know people will want pre-builds with Intel CPUs, so we've got that option". The article says that the pictures are of a system built and sold by Maingear, so I'm guessing Maingear insisted on an Intel CPU for market reasons.

AMDs integrated graphics USED TO leave Intel's in the dust but these last few generations Intel has been working very hard to fix that and it seems with their latest generation they are suceeding.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...

Yes you can sign in without it, the point is, it is difficult enough to make people switch : http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...

Bollocks. An M2 to PCIE adapter is twenty bucks.

SanDisk A110 M.2 card with PCIE adapter benchmarks:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...

Africa is on the equator, so the climate is like Florida or New York in Summer but all year round.

Erm... Africa's quite a big place, with lots of different climates. Nearly all the north of Africa is desert climate, so nothing like Florida or New York. South Africa has ski resorts, Tangiers is Mediterranean climate.

Any building without air conditioning becomes an oven. So having a 32" 600 watt plasma display wouldn't be appreciated. A small 12" black/white CRT is ideal and the bulkiness prevents looters from stealing it.

One of the major advantages of LCD and LED TVs is their lower power consumption. See this page for a quick comparison. CRTs have awful power consumption, even tiny ones.

Unlike AMD hardware that performs fp64 math on fp32 hardware at significantly reduced performance

I'm almost certain this is false. Got a source?

AMD has been known to outperform nVidia at double-precision work.

You obviously have never torn down a server. I've built thousands.

Bullshit and here's why:

The last place I was at paid over $300K for a Sun machine with 128 cores and 1TB RAM. I priced the same machine, with 128 cores and 1TB RAM for something like $20K, but with faster components made for gaming use.

This is such a load of crap it's hard to fathom you had anything to do with server procurement at any point at all. First, you can't (even today) build a 128-core/1TB RAM box using gaming components, so you're looking at a cluster of smaller boxes vs one big box. That impacts the software infrastructure in a big way. For example it's a vastly different affair to run one big DB instance vs a cluster of 12 little ones (not to speak of the extra money you'll spend on these extra instances). Clusters massively complicate administration, backup, replication, disaster recovery, etc.

RAM is different. It's claimed they use ECC for the safety of your data. In practice it's so you can't go to the local computer store to buy more.

Another reason you don't know what you're talking about. ECC absolutely *does* work and bits do flip in memory, which in the absence of ECC can result in data corruption or unplanned machine downtime. I've had the OS detect faulty memory sticks via ECC before.

Corps tend to buy from the manufacturer because "that's where we got the server, and it was expensive."

No, they do that because that way you have a valid support contract and can blame problems on a supplier if stuff goes down the drain (as it often does). Obviously you've never had to stand in front of top-brass and try to explain why your multi-million dollar project fell flat on its face because of a few bucks you've decided to save on some el-cheapo memory sticks.

Box? Well, rackmount for racks, desktop for not-racks. I've seen plenty of people ungracefully stack rackmount boxes on the floor of a corner office, and complain when they need to pull out the bottom one. That's not so different than racks. I've seen people rack mount where they put in a shelf, and then put 10 servers on top of it without ever putting in the rail kits.

It's not exactly the boxes fault when you guys are idiots and stack rack-mount servers.

With only a very few exceptions, they're the same chipsets, using the same technologies.

Have you *ever* had a server motherboard in your hands?

Hell, even the hard drives are gaming, or are making their way there. SCSI was the only way to go, even though SATA overtook the performance long ago. Then they started putting 2.5" SAS drives in, which are laptop SATA drives with a bigger pricetag.

I give up. How could this shit have been upvoted so much? The performance gap between a 2.5'' server SAS drive vs a 2.5'' laptop SATA drive is *huge*. And that's before we get to the way these things tend to behave in failure scenarios in large-HDD storage arrays (do you even know how a freakin' JBOD works?)

You obviously have never torn down a server. I've built thousands.

Bullshit and here's why:

The last place I was at paid over $300K for a Sun machine with 128 cores and 1TB RAM. I priced the same machine, with 128 cores and 1TB RAM for something like $20K, but with faster components made for gaming use.

This is such a load of crap it's hard to fathom you had anything to do with server procurement at any point at all. First, you can't (even today) build a 128-core/1TB RAM box using gaming components, so you're looking at a cluster of smaller boxes vs one big box. That impacts the software infrastructure in a big way. For example it's a vastly different affair to run one big DB instance vs a cluster of 12 little ones (not to speak of the extra money you'll spend on these extra instances). Clusters massively complicate administration, backup, replication, disaster recovery, etc.

RAM is different. It's claimed they use ECC for the safety of your data. In practice it's so you can't go to the local computer store to buy more.

Another reason you don't know what you're talking about. ECC absolutely *does* work and bits do flip in memory, which in the absence of ECC can result in data corruption or unplanned machine downtime. I've had the OS detect faulty memory sticks via ECC before.

Corps tend to buy from the manufacturer because "that's where we got the server, and it was expensive."

No, they do that because that way you have a valid support contract and can blame problems on a supplier if stuff goes down the drain (as it often does). Obviously you've never had to stand in front of top-brass and try to explain why your multi-million dollar project fell flat on its face because of a few bucks you've decided to save on some el-cheapo memory sticks.

Box? Well, rackmount for racks, desktop for not-racks. I've seen plenty of people ungracefully stack rackmount boxes on the floor of a corner office, and complain when they need to pull out the bottom one. That's not so different than racks. I've seen people rack mount where they put in a shelf, and then put 10 servers on top of it without ever putting in the rail kits.

It's not exactly the boxes fault when you guys are idiots and stack rack-mount servers.

With only a very few exceptions, they're the same chipsets, using the same technologies.

Have you *ever* had a server motherboard in your hands?

Hell, even the hard drives are gaming, or are making their way there. SCSI was the only way to go, even though SATA overtook the performance long ago. Then they started putting 2.5" SAS drives in, which are laptop SATA drives with a bigger pricetag.

I give up. How could this shit have been upvoted so much? The performance gap between a 2.5'' server SAS drive vs a 2.5'' laptop SATA drive is *huge*. And that's before we get to the way these things tend to behave in failure scenarios in large-HDD storage arrays (do you even know how a freakin' JBOD works?)

I just saw your new sig and realized that you weren't actually trolling. I puked a little.

You are in good company, my friend: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/365266-33-hdmi-text-fuzzy-works-fine (1st hit on your sig-link)
"I suggest you use [CTRL-Shift-Print Screen] to capture the screen image, instead of taking a picture like you did. Then post them..."
"EDIT: Looking at your screenshots, my eyes cannot detect any fuzziness in HDMI connection. They look the same. Maybe I should use magnifying glass to see it."

The stupid. It burns.

Anyway, I realized I was way too harsh. There is no merit in being unkind to the mentally retarded.

I call nonsense on you. Perfect example: Waterproofing. It would be trivial to make a waterproof (or at least water resistant) phone. Yet there are none. In fact, just having your phone in a overly humid environment will likely ruin it. This is clearly by design.

Sony's Xperia Z is notoriously water resistant: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Xperia-z-tablet-water-resistant-tablet-phone,news-42109.html

VT-d is not only for servers. I found it's use because of my countless cycles of attempts to dual-boot windows and linux (as in I eventually ended using just windows...repeat afte 6 months).
Now I boot linux, do the web browsing and stuff, but when I want to play, I just start my VM and play.
Linux: i5-2500 IGP
Windows: Radeon 7950 (started with 5850)
My over 80 hours of Skyrim are Xen exclusive. DeusEx HR was maybe 20-30h native, followed by more than 50h in VM.
This is my original post (closed since then): http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/336186-33-full-gaming-virtual-machine
This is another thread that I joined and posted some benchmarks: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1039531303&postcount=27

Updating can be disabled for games, you can even specify which ones you want to auto-update and which ones to never auto-update.

Googling turned up these. It doesn't seem that Steam has a good solution for the weekend-with-dialup case, even with whatever the Do Not Update feature gives you.

I'm not saying Steam is worse than the competition, just that it's sometimes worse than no DRM. Having dealt with GreenManGaming's "Capsule" client (it's pretty awful: there's no equivalent of Steam's Backup feature, for instance - you're just meant to re-download) I now appreciate Steam's features and maturity rather more.

SecureBoot is enable by default on Win8 machines. It might have complicated things, as I don't think 7 truly supports it. Of course, any tech worth is salt should know about these things.

Intel is behind ARM when it comes to mobile devices but I haven't heard them spread any FUD about Win 8 yet. In fact, only last year, Intel was telling everyone that Win 8 on ARM would not be backwards compatible with Win x86/x86-64. MS all but called Intel a liar. Then six months later MS confirmed what Intel previously stated.

now? I gave away a 800mhz P3 with 512 megs of ram 3 years ago, sure its not a credit card, but it was a pizza box
just cause you make it small does not mean its the only thing available

(ps waiting on my pi)

I'm willing to bet that the pizza box would draw 50-100W ie $50-100 a year in electricity, the RasPi should draw less than 5W and (and relative to the pizza) pay for itself in a year.

[preaching to the converted]
What makes the RasPi exciting is its small and cheap and low wattage and a reasonable computer and has decent IO (USB ports, HDMI Ethernet etc) take away any of those and there are alternatives (FX a rooted Pogoplug is as good or better than a RasPi but fails in the IO department, Intel are bringing out a Next Unit of Computing but that is liable to be in the $100 price bracket which is well outside the 'expendable computer' price of the model A (and B).
[/preaching to the converted]

One CRT I did manage to scratch with my fingernail, though.

Speaking of CRTs, I had problems with mine that looked a bit like scratches but ultimately couldn't have been (solely) due to that because they (a) got worse over time and (b) went under the bezel.

To be honest, it was very strange. (I no longer use that monitor, though I still have it).

Does anyone have a clue what might have caused this? See the linked thread. ("Flaavu" is my account there, BTW).

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/password-recovery-gpu,review-32213-6.html

It will take quite some time to crack a decent WPA2/AES passphrase.

Intel appears to be following a Discreete core design while AMD with Fusion is following an All-in-One design. From looking at what AMD has released as to their roadmap, it appears that unlike Intel, the APU will become the math core (fpu) of the chip, with the cpu core becoming even smaller. This appears to be planned for either the 2nd or 3rd generation of the chips

Although we're seeing continual die shrinkage by Intel, I suspect that AMD's integration will result in far better energy savings then what Intel gains from die shrinkage. From a performance stance, the APU already beats Intel's GPU by a large margin and looking at the power consumption graphs from http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/a8-3500m-llano-apu,review-32207-22.html we're already seeing a more stable draw by the fusion design compared to the i3. Yes the Intel design does drop into a far lower power stage but with proper emphasis on the rest of the other system chips, AMD should be able to cut power even further while retaining performance.

You're comparing an applet (a plugin, necessarily limited by the browser) against a native application? really?

If a Java applet can't do it neither can a Flash app, neither can an HTML5 app and so on. In contrast, if a native app presumably written in something like C++ can, then so can Java SE as a standard desktop app.

You're simply not comparing like for like which is dishonest at best.

Besides, your example seems rather suspect anyway, to even achieve a mere 16 bit colour on those streams you're talking about ~366MBps of hard drive write speed would be needed, but even the fastest modern SSDs which would be much faster than an old P3 800mhz is going to support the throughput of cap out at about 220MBps:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/ssd-charts-2010/Streaming-Write-Throughput,2360.html

So you'd need to compress down to around 0.6 of the video's original size and you'd need to do that on ~366mb of data every second in real time.

This is before you even factor in the requirements of audio storage of every single stream at which point the compression of audio must be factored in, and further compression of video would then be required to make room for audio storage, and all this is assuming the system could sustain that write constantly for the period of surveillance with no other writes to said disk causing a delay, and assuming the process can even be handled on a system with only 128mb of RAM meaning there'd quite likely need to be some paging. We've also assumed you're only using 16 bit colour too of course- it could very well be 24 bit.

Even if your example was true and I've missed something, then it's not like Java is in any way the limiting factor here.

If Java can't do it, then it's because your example is likely a fabrication and would seemingly require a breaking of the physical laws of computing to achieve.

On a price performance basis AMDs Phenom IIs have consistenly been a better buy for some time now. To the point it's hard to suggest anyone buying intel at all, unless money is no object. (I don't know why I bought Intel anyway :S). Honest hardware review sites (that aren't far up the ass of vendors) are at the point of recommend AMD CPUs on a price/performance basis.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31857.html

It seems Intel doesn't get even a "honorable mention" until page 3. At $120 price point, Core i3 gets a look in. Oh, they also don't recommend anything above about $160 to quote Tom's: "Best gaming CPU for $190: None".

To add further insult, money saved from AMD motherboards being cheaper (in particular SLI/xfire AMD boards are a good whack cheaper) will let you put money towards more storage, a SSD or a step up in CPU speed.

All I want is something that will run Oblivion and output full 1080 video to a TV.

They do the legwork already. Pick a budget

But then I was dumb enough to buy DELL: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/254961-14-warning-careful-ordering-dell-machines-ssds

Which CPU is actually fastest heavily depends on what you will be using it for. Your list of "regular geek activities" does not narrow it down enough. Also, many applications contain optimizations that target a particular CPU family or architecture. .............
All CPU performance charts: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/processors,6.html [tomshardware.co.uk]
I just picked a few of those at random and they were all topped by the "Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition (Bloomfield 4c) * 3.2 GHz, DDR3-1066, 1 MB L2, 8 MB L3"

Seems if raw performance is what you desire the i7 9xx stuff (with triple channel ddr3) is basically the top of the pile regardless of application category.

Of course. Every PC hardware site worth a penny does regular articles on which CPU is currently the fastest and which will give you the most for your money. As well as comparisons between Intel/AMD. My favorite site for such things is Tom's Hardware, though Google will likely find you many more.

Which CPU is actually fastest heavily depends on what you will be using it for. Your list of "regular geek activities" does not narrow it down enough. Also, many applications contain optimizations that target a particular CPU family or architecture.

CPU articles: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/review/Components,1/CPU,1/

Best (gaming) CPU for the money as of dec 09: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31755.html

All CPU performance charts: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/processors,6.html

Of course. Every PC hardware site worth a penny does regular articles on which CPU is currently the fastest and which will give you the most for your money. As well as comparisons between Intel/AMD. My favorite site for such things is Tom's Hardware, though Google will likely find you many more.

Which CPU is actually fastest heavily depends on what you will be using it for. Your list of "regular geek activities" does not narrow it down enough. Also, many applications contain optimizations that target a particular CPU family or architecture.

CPU articles: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/review/Components,1/CPU,1/

Best (gaming) CPU for the money as of dec 09: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31755.html

All CPU performance charts: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/processors,6.html

Of course. Every PC hardware site worth a penny does regular articles on which CPU is currently the fastest and which will give you the most for your money. As well as comparisons between Intel/AMD. My favorite site for such things is Tom's Hardware, though Google will likely find you many more.

Which CPU is actually fastest heavily depends on what you will be using it for. Your list of "regular geek activities" does not narrow it down enough. Also, many applications contain optimizations that target a particular CPU family or architecture.

CPU articles: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/review/Components,1/CPU,1/

Best (gaming) CPU for the money as of dec 09: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31755.html

All CPU performance charts: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/processors,6.html

You should not defrag an SSD. It won't give a performance boost, and will just contribute to wearing the drive down. Fragmentation is only an issue where access is not truly random, as it is with an SSD.

Example discussion: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-246283_14_0.html

The controller should do a decent enough job of spreading out the data for you.

Just build two commodity servers - obtain reliability through redundancy and you'll get the specs you want without ridiculous cost.

Here are some tips.

• Keep spares of everything, especially fans and PSUs.
• Check out Intel's new 65W quad core chips if you really need quad core.
• Use a simple, fanless motherboard and a CPU heatsink with a good reputation.
• Invest in good fans - like these.
• For power, you just need a standard UPS and possibly a generator - Google wouldn't bother with homebrew internal designs if they only had two servers.

Just build two commodity servers - obtain reliability through redundancy and you'll get the specs you want without ridiculous cost.

Here are some tips.

• Keep spares of everything, especially fans and PSUs.
• Check out Intel's new 65W quad core chips if you really need quad core.
• Use a simple, fanless motherboard and a CPU heatsink with a good reputation.
• Invest in good fans - like these.
• For power, you just need a standard UPS and possibly a generator - Google wouldn't bother with homebrew internal designs if they only had two servers.

Hmmm, I read the article and paid great attention to the benchmarks. 4890 tends to score better.

Here, read the FPS results for yourself all run by Extreme Tech at 1900x1200 (from about 22" to 27" monitors).

card noAA/4xAA

crysis
275 24/19
4890 24/21

far cry 2
275 68/56
4890 79/56

l4d
275 125/105
4890 126/95

COD5 World in Conflict
275 61/40
4890 56/38

Company of Heroes
275 99/84
4890 69/60

Supreme Commander
275 66/64
4890 68/63

Hawx
275 71/43
4890 61/54

Stormrise
275 29/28
4890 47/42

Stalker Clear Sky
275 50/23
4890 48/23

OCUK Price of 275 229.99 GBP inc VAT
4890 209.99 GBP inc VAT

So to say the 275 takes the cake is rather a strange view.

Nvidia and AMD are both very savvy and big organisations. They have products aimed at all market sectors now. From budget gamers to bleeding edge competition sponsored gamers.

TBO, to choose a graphics card today, you have to know which games you play. Cos both Nvidia and AMD have roughly equivilant cards for the performance and the budget. Yup, it's that close a race!

The other factors you have to consider are
Chosen output? (pretty much determined by your optimal flat panel resolution these days!). No point looking at 24" panel resolution results (1900x1200) when all you have is a 19" (1280x1024)

How pretty you like it? Note the two values above. The second value is lower as it uses AA at varying levels. Think of it like putting the roof down on a convertible car. Car looks and feels great, but the performance hit is quite noticable.
Similarly to cars, some ppl can't live without that AA feature turned on (along with AF too!). So when comparing the numbers, find out if those features are essential to you.

NB: DO NOT USE THE ONBOARD GRAPHICS RAM AMOUNT AS AN INDICATOR! The graphics card manufacturers these days have cottoned onto that one. It's a bit like having 16 valves on a ford fiesta 1.1L. it'll improve it but in the end it's still a tiny 1.1 litre engine. Similarly with graphics cards.

Now I'm not espousing Tomshardware, but this page is the only one with a complete hierarchy that i've found that shows a rough relative performance with older cards too, so you can really see whether it's worth an upgrade.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforce-gtx-radeon,review-31515-6.html
Also has some mobile graphics cards listed too, so you can see what portability is costing you performance and price wise!

I remember ads for devices that will hook your PC to a VCR, so you could use is as a 'tape drive'.
Although, that was in the 90s and I can't find any on Google...

Apparently there has even been a D-VHS drive (I neever heard of it before).

Uncle Tom has an ordinary Athlon64 2000 sucking less watts than any Atom, so I'd like to see this myth die. Intel's propaganda machine is working overtime, but anyone who cares to actually run the numbers can see that AMD has had an Atom alternative, even before Atom. For some reason no manufacturer has bothered to implement it, possibly because they're all in on the Atom-hype. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Atom-Athlon-Efficient,review-31253.html

If we look at the tomshardware interview the developer claims

The EFiX is not a pen-drive at all. Inside it, there is a very powerful CPU and several gigabytes of dedicated static RAM. The module has its own code, language and endless functions. So there is absolutely no way that we even thought about using the patch-a-boo approach of "hackintosh".

A coprocessor with "gigabytes of dedicated static RAM" sitting off a USB interface for $155 which magically interacts with the host PC? That's obviously a lie.

I'm going to guess that it's just a softloading EFI, like the Intel reference implementation on uefi.org or a tweaked version of that developed as part of the hackintosh project. It lists precisely the hardware that is either already supported by OS X or for which drivers have already been written by third parties. The software on the USB stick could easily copy files from the install CD to stick, patch with standard hackintosh drivers, then boot the modified install process from the stick.

Add a bit of bullshitting and you can re-sell existing scripts copied to a USB stick for $155.

While none of these are top-of-the-line gaming cards, they aren't $50 bargain basement cards either. Nor are they "2004 level" cards. (The 2400XT was released in July 2007, the GeForce 8600M in May 2007)

Not that it is a great performance indicator but several of the cards you mention are available for under $50.

When the parent says they are "2004 level" cards I presume they mean that the performance compares to a top of the range card released in 2004. A top of the range Nvidia card in 2004 was the 6800GT if you look at the Toms Hardware videocard chart then you can see that a 6800GT out performs a 2400XT.

Just because a card is newer doesn't mean it is faster. The only serious gaming cards available in Macs at the moment are the 8800GS and 8800GT. With the GT only available in the Mac Pro range.

This isn't to say you can't play games on an iMac or MacBook Pro but they aren't gaming machines.

Your comparison of the use of intel graphics in low end Mac machines to Dells is irrelevant. Most of Dell's machines aren't sold for gaming either. They have specific ranges that are targeted at gamers, all of the systems in these ranges come with up to date medium to high power video cards.

You're trolling, of course, but FWIW: these guys seem to indicate that "overpriced" is a misconception (and they're hardly Apple fanboys).

Where in the world would you have to pay $340 for a vista license. Vista is $99 - $219.

The list price (since I quoted list for OS X) of Vista Ultimate is $340. You can pay less, assuming you are OK with getting a hobbled version of Windows. The $130 list price of OS X is completely full-featured. What kind of Windows do you get for that same list price? An "upgrade" all the way to Vista Home Basic, which hardly qualifies as an operating system. In no way does Vista Basic compare with OS X 10.5.

Mac cost of ownership is lower than PC? Bullshit! That is an out and out LIE.
PC's are SIGNIFICANTLY lower in price ACROSS THE BOARD!

And your citation for that?

Here is what the real world has to say:
Network World:
"The results of this TCO astounded me. For my small enterprise, owning a WinTel box for three years costs twice as much as owning a MacTel. When I talked with several of our clients, I found that the burdened cost of ownership per PC - just for support - ranged from $1,300 to $4,000 per year."

Tom's Hardware:
(Sorry no simple quote, just seven pages of proof why Macs are a better value if you don't make stupid purchasing choices.)

And so on; bored now. So show me one study saying that the total cost of ownership of a PC is cheaper than owning a Mac. And note that the references above are hardcore PC publications.

And more to the point of the article...Mac hardware is not available for me to build my own which saves me even MORE money by choosing PC.

And so we return to my original post. Apple doesn't let their OS run on any old hardware, and thus they can deliver a better experience. If that's not for you, then the Mac is not for you... you can go spend your days trying to hack cheapass generic hardware together into a sometimes-stable system while I am doing nothing but enjoying the use of my computer.

I love how you, an obvious anything-but-Mac fanboy goes about calling me a fanboy and a liar (with no proof) while hiding behind AC.

The best heatsink/fan combos were at about 72C, IIRC.

Is that the state of cooling nowadays? I have an old Sempron based system along with a pretty standard fan cooler that you would expect from a few years ago. It idles at around 50C and running full out it's only 56C or so.

Intel's 65nm quadcores are just a bit hot. OTOH they idle much cooler than their stress-test temp (more than 30ÂC lower in the THG test).

AFAIK the latest - 45nm - quads run significantly cooler.

1) Faster reads

Not necessarily. Sustained read speeds are still faster on (most) spinning disks (vs. most SSDs). They do have orders of magnitude better access time resulting in better random read performance, but that wasn't what you said.

To what extent does a typical desktop work load use random vs. sequential cluster reads, especially when it would matter? Consider for a moment that an SSD controller can stripe data across many flash chips, while a conventional drive can address only one platter at once due to head-to-head alignment limitations.

2) Lower power

Not necessarily.

I read that same Slashdot article from a week ago. I gathered from the comments that the faster random read of SSD caused more transactions to be performed per second, and that shortened the battery life as much as anything else.

I expect that 2-disk setups will become the norm: SSD for the OS, and HDD for data - which is what I've been doing in my own systems for the last 2 years (using CF->IDE converters)

Isn't the OS something that can be read sequentially, if you put the kernel, kernel modules, C library, and services in one big squashfs on the hard disk, like a less-extreme version of Puppy Linux's boot process? Then you get the sequential read speed advantage of platters for stuff that'll become resident in RAM anyway.

1) Faster reads

Not necessarily. Sustained read speeds are still faster on (most) spinning disks (vs. most SSDs). They do have orders of magnitude better access time resulting in better random read performance, but that wasn't what you said.

2) Lower power

Not necessarily. A 200GB HDD uses about the same power as a 32GB SSD. While these numbers do not scale linearly with size, you can expect SSDs to consume more power as sizes go up (e.g. due to more complex wear leveling algorithms). These performance numbers of course will increase as the technology matures, but for now it is still only a perceived benefit.

I do agree with your expectation about SSDs in the future, but you don't need half-truths to reach that conclusion :)

However, I don't expect the spinning disk do the dodo just yet; seeing as they're still cheaper per unit of storage, I expect that 2-disk setups will become the norm: SSD for the OS, and HDD for data - which is what I've been doing in my own systems for the last 2 years (using CF->IDE converters)

Does anyone know about the retention rate for these SSDs? I can let an HDD gather dust for ten years, and then still hope to retrieve the data succesfully. Can I expect the same from SSDs?

I also doubt that Microsoft didn't foresee this since companies like ASUS surely talk to Microsoft about their future

true, but also Microsoft sometimes decides that they know better than their "partners". The Atom chip cannot run Vista (except for the most expensive model, which Intel are marketing at a uncompetitive price..). Apparently Intel doesn't care about this because they partnered with MS a while back on Origami and were screwed by them:

Kedia said that Intel is "working with Microsoft", but he has no idea what Microsoft's strategy for MIDs is. "It will be interesting to see which way they will go. But right now, we really don't know."

This story certainly sounds different than what we heard at the UMPC launch. Back then, Microsoft's Origami marketing campaign virtually screwed Intel and device manufacturers when it promised a product that had nothing to do with the products that were coming to market. Today, it looks like Intel has decided to do what it thinks is the best software approach for MIDs this time, regardless of what is available from Microsoft.

Tell you what, Microsoft: You come up with an OS that outperforms XP Pro SP2, has some useful new features, is efficient, compatible, maybe even costs less, and then blow me, and I'll give your new OS a try. How's that sound?

Networking (Pre SP1)
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/2070

Raw CPU Use
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/xp-vs-vista-uk,review-2067-5.html

Gaming Performance (Especially after the Beta Driver Releases in Jan - Check out reviews from June to now - Drivers are faster than XP 99.9% of the time)
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page9.asp

Even Early Drivers (Beta Even) put Vista at only a few FPS behind XP, and this is pure RTM code, no optimizations:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page11.html

DirectX10 REALLY does need Vista
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/14/7060
The GPU scheduler and GPU RAM Virtualization are just two major aspects of what DirectX10 expects to be present, and if you run the DX10 libraries on XP, you will never get these features.

Vista is faster than Mac on own Hardware
(Didn't have link in my folder, but do a search, especially with Leopard and Boot Camp. From casual user reviews of Vista loading faster and being snappier than Leopard and Tiger to reviews that take native compiled applications or games for both Intel based codesets, Vista easily out performs OS X in raw application performance and ESPECIALLY gaming like Quake or WoW or other native apps that run under both OSes.)

Beware of Idiot Reviews
-Most Online and 'tech' reviews are conducted by iditors or people that don't have a clue what they are doing.

The main things you will find is that they use a first day installation of Vista, where Superfetch has had no time nor performed any optimizations on the system to increase applications load times, Vista itself has ran no optimization for prefetch, file placement as there is no data to base it on for the applications or games yet, and especially the intelligent SuperFetch optimiations make a massive difference in gaming where you have a tons of textures and levels being queued into the game.

Another signs of a bad test - They turn of Aero, which on modern Video cards is faster than turned off. They also go out of their way to turn of Search Indexing and other performance assisting tools like Superfetch. (In fact with Aero on and WDDM's scheduling handling the GPU in Vista, even a single game will usually run faster 'inside' a Window instead of Full Screen - something that is the opposite of XP or other OS models.

You can find a ton of reviews that fall into these categories.
Here is a recent one for Example:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=797

The majority of the problem with Vista is just like this article mentions 'perceived reality', and also the 'missed advantages' Vista does offer to everyday users as well as gamers.

Gamer example: run several high end games in a Window at the same time, notice you barely lose FPS in any of the Games even though they are running on the screen at the same time, or even in Flip3D (or a 3rd Party Expose' Mimic utility). Not only would this choke XP, since Vista DOES the GPU scheduling and is not application yield based like you find in OpenGL based OS designs, this is something that is nearly impossible to do on anything outside of Vista. And yes there are people that do this, just find almost any MMO player than has more than one account or playes more than one MMO, and they are usually running

Linux supports more hardware than any other operating system and is virtually virus free.

That some manufacturers make closed hardware that cannot be supported without extreme reverse engineering, if at all, is not Linux's fault. It's yours for buying that stuff. If you can't be bothered to check the HCL then at least quit whining.

It's no secret that Microsoft expends considerable capital to get manufacturers to keep their devices closed. The net benefit to those manufacturers should be that their products don't sell. If they want my money, they're open. I'm not paying for my own chains and neither should you.

Looking at the hardware specs for bioshock, I doubt many low end PCs could run it, or run it well, even with Windows installed.

It's worse than that even - the processor doesn't exist yet either!

Intel had them overclock an existing Core 2 Quad Extreme to perform the "benchmarks".

Check out the article on Toms Hardware Guide:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9770-X48-X38-QX9650,review-29749.html