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Good grief. MS offers ALL security patches to EVERYONE, including pirates, and also offers many other patches such as stability and performance updates to everyone as well.

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"There seems to be a myth that Microsoft limits security updates to genuine Windows users," wrote Microsoft's Paul Cooke, who works in Windows Client Enterprise Security. "Let me be clear: all security updates go to all users."
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From http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-pirate-bootleg-security-patches,7666.html

I can't remember the last time Intel had poor yields ( or were admitting to it)
but this has been an issue for pretty much everyone else for years, particularly AMD.

This is utter nonsense. Intel has chip shortages *almost* every year. They are WORSE than AMD and others in this regard.

September 2005
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/manufacturers-report-intel-chipset-shortage,1410.html

May 2008
http://www.slashgear.com/intel-atom-demand-prompts-chipset-shortages-0111422/

Sep 2009
http://en.newspeg.com/Intel-G31-chipset-shortages-to-get-worse-in-4Q09-as-Intel-cuts-back-supply-43419056.html

So...you expect MS to pony up bandwidth to support users that didn't pay for their operating systems?

IMHO, MS has no obligation to support pirates.

Yes they should get some flak for writing an insecure OS. But it's the actual pirates themselves that, knowing full well MS isn't going to do jack shit to support them, decide to install an unpatchable OS in the first place.

Whether I expect it or not is irrelevant. MS *is* releasing security patches without worrying about WGA. They correctly realise that running an unpatched Windows is bad for everybody, and if you get exploited it degrades the experience for everybody, even their paying customers. They'll block you through Windows Update, but if you leave Automatic Updates on, then your pirated copy of Windows will still download/update security updates, including new versions of MSIE and security patches. I don't know whether it'll also update service packs, but as service packs are usually mostly security fixes/changes, my guess would be that those will update as well. It's something I can't test, as the copy of Windows on my games laptop is legitimate.

Don't get me wrong - I think Indilinux looks to have a good future, and I am glad that they supported their users. I just can't really praise them for not finishing the product before they started selling it.

The real problem here was about "time to market" - companies were hustling to get to a lower price point before their competitors, and build their reputation in a new market. In that race, it happens again and again that corners get cut. No surprise really, and I don't think it will ever change.

As for the best bang for the buck, I find it harder to make as definitive a statement as you have. In any case, I don't think I could add anything to the (fairly nuanced) words of tomshardware or anandtech.

Thank you. The brands/models were the critical piece of information.

You're probably aware that SSD's have been in the server space, at a very different price point, for a few years now, without any extraordinary reliability debacles. To some extent, this is a case of getting what you pay for. I did a moderate amount of research on SSD drives, relying especially on the independent review sites, and quickly eliminated all of the brands you described.

As is frequent in fairly new markets, there are a few smaller and less well-run companies trying to dive in, and their first customers get to beta test their v0.* and v1.* offerings.

The prevailing wisdom seemed to me (and to people like i.e. Torvalds) that Intel was far and away the top of the heap in terms of performance and reliability, and some drives based on a newer Samsung controller (i.e. OCZ Summit) were a perhaps credible alternative. Other brands were clearly struggling to even be in the game, with frequent firmware updates and outright debacles (i.e. Indilinux, Micron) and we're in the process of shaking out who will make it and who will not.

I have only fielded a few consumer-grade SSDs over about the same amount of time as you, but going with Intel's G1 and G2 MLC products has so far yielded zero failures.

If you are already in the market for an SSD, and you are ready to spend premium money for premium performance, you should go the whole distance and go with Intel, the current market leader. See also the latest news on these models.

Wow... Google much? http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246283-32-defrag

MSI Wind Nettop with an Intel Atom 330 dual core processor. You choose the RAM, HDD and Optical drive.

Perfect for a home server. Even SOHO, it's a great system.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/msi-nettop-dual-core-intel,6846.html

I have two monitor-less servers, one has 2 X 500G drives in it while the other has 4. The one with 4 drives takes about 160 watts of power while the other with 2 takes about 80 watts of power.

All this means is that your two systems are pretty different. A typical 3.5" hard-drive uses less than 10 watts, not anywhere close to the 40 watts your example would seem to imply.

Phone System PBX Project

I had to build such a full-fledged system but one that had to be dependable, reliable, small, quiet, unobtrusive, long lasting, cool running, low-power, well performing, be built of standard parts, and be able to accept one PCI or PCIe expansion card for the telephone TDM interface for incoming FXO lines.

I'm in the process of setting up a phone system PBX with up to 4-incoming telephone lines and a phone menu system to provide basic business information (e.g. hours, address, directions, information, etc.) for a friend's business and also offer the standard features such as voice mail, faxing, internal analog extensions, VoIP capability for future expansion, customization, etc. built on Linux using Elastix that is based on Asterisk PBX.

Wishlist - PBX PC - Intel Atom 330, 1GB DDR2 667, OCZ Agility 30GB SSD, 120mm Fan, Apex Mini-ITX - $316.94 USD

Form Factor - Mini-ITX

I checked out my favorite hardware review site AnandTech and read a number of articles about the new Mini-ITX form factor motherboards that came out to get an introduction to the form factor and expectations.

AnandTech.com - Two New Ions: ASUS AT3N7A-I and ASRock Ion 330

TomsHardware.com - Does Intel's Dual-Core Atom Improve Efficiency?

I read the articles with a lot of interest but when I looked at the prices of these Ion based motherboard with well performing graphics chips I found that I wasn't interested in paying so much for a feature that would not be used very much in a server type PBX system. Also some of these systems didn't have any PCI expansion slots so they were no good for my PBX type project.

Processor - Intel Atom 330

So I turned to look at other Mini-ITX based offerings and came across the good 'ol Intel Atom motherboards. I found the Intel Atom 230, 270 based boards to be a little low performing in many of the benchmark results that I saw but that the dual core Intel Atom 330 chip was doing quite well for only a few dollars more and very little increase in power. I looked at the offerings at my favorite retailer, Newegg and saw a nice list of choices.

Motherboards, Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo - Mini ITX

I started my process of filtering so I ignored low powered systems that came with VIA C7 chips and the Intel Atom 230 chips. I came up with these three choices.

Foxconn 45CSX Intel Atom 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $69.99 USD

Intel BOXD945GCLF2D Intel Atom processor 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $79.99 USD

ASUS AT3GC-I Intel Atom 330 479 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $89.99

Motherboard - Intel D945GCLF2

Out of these choices, I wasn't too thrilled with a Foxconn built motherboard because I had no experience with this company for any hardware. I wasn't so sure that the extra money spent on the Asus motherboard is really going to offer anything at all, so the choice went down to Intel because I wanted reliability for a system that was being built for someone else. I read a few good review of the Intel motherboard below.

Wolfdale E7500, G31 mobo (Gigabyte), 1TB green WD HDD, single 1 GB stick, 80+ PSU.
  I have used this article as a guideline.
The Wolfdale is very low-power in idle state but delivers oomph when you need it (e.g. HD streaming to HTPC or video-recoding or re-sizing thumbnails in my Gallery).
SUSE/Apache for few years, then when auto-updates broke the system few times in a row, WHS/IIS6.

The Mac Mini's power supply maxes out at 85W but it uses much, much less than that. I just used my Kill-A-Watt to verify that my 1.25 GHz G4 uses less than 20W when logged in and looking at localhost in Safari. The Intels are comparable.

I have an original Mini that has been serving apache (with php and mysql), ssh, afp, and other things 24/7/365 since a month after it was released--coming up on 4 years now--with OS X. AFAIK they take Linux just fine and that shouldn't make much (if any) difference in the power usage. Original G4s can be had for ~$200 used, used Intels are around $400, and of course new ones start at $600.

More info:
http://www.dssw.co.uk/sleepcentre/threads/mac_mini_power_consumption.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/apple-mac-mini,978-7.html
http://www.macintouch.com/macmini05.html#jan25
and these guys: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3468

Some more links:
Sheeva Plug review/picture: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/marvell-sheevaplug-plug-computing-linux,7104.html
Where to buy the Sheeva Plug: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit-us.aspx
Installing Debian on the Sheeva Plug: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/

How expensive are they?

If you're looking at hundreds of thousands of writes a day to your database, you really only need somewhere between 10 and 100 IO/second (there are 86,400 seconds in a day). Most hard drives handle that somewhat decently, especially if you use a good RAID configuration.

Looking at 100,000,000 updates a day (1,158 writes/second)? Intel's X25-M is rated at more than 4 times that

Iometer* Queue Depth 32
Random 4 KB Write:
80 GB - Up to 6.6 K IOPS
160 GB - Up to 8.6 K IOPS

Let's compare that to a 15k.2 Seagate Savvio harddrive. Oh, right, they don't list their IOPS ratings. Let's look at what they do have though:

Not including controller overhead (msec):
Single track, typical: 0.2 (read) 0.42 (write)
Average, typical: 2.9 (read) 3.3 (write)

Intel lists these figures:

Latency Specification:
- Read: 65 micro seconds
- Write: 85 micro seconds

In other words, for a single track, the Intel drive will be almost 5 times as quick to start the write, and on average the Intel drive will be 38 times faster.

Or looking at it in another way, the absolute best case scenario where we simply ignore actually writing something, the Seagate drive can achieve 205,714,286 write operations per day (86,400 seconds/0.42 milliseconds). The Intel drive will hit 1.016.470.588.

While I can't find anyone benchmarking Intel's SSD offerings directly against the Savvio, I can find a mix of tests. From Tom's Hardware we see that SAS drives tops out at about 400 IOPS for any given task.

Using Tom's Hardware for a comparison, their review of the X25-M had it bottoming out at around 900 IPOS, making it perform 225% better at its worst, compared to the SAS drive's best.

Prices:
Newegg.com doesn't have the Savvio, so I'm using Google instead:
Seagate Savvio 15k.2 146 GB edition: US$ 226.44 or US$1.55/GB
Intel X25-M 160 GB edition: US$ 439 or US$ 2.74/GB

Considering the performance advantage of at least 225%, you'd have to spend at least US$ 509.49 just to get the same kind of performance as you'd get from the US$ 439 drive from Intel. And that's just their mainstream edition. AND we're talking SSD's worst case scenario vs. SAS's best case scenario. Realistically we're talking much greater advantages for the SSD.

And you keep talking about "commodity SSDs" but refer to datacenters. A commodity harddrive is a 7.200 RPM 8 MB SATA drive, and they aren't suitable for a datacenter either. Duh! So why the fixation of comparing commodity hardware from one technology to enterprise hardware from another? Stop buying commodity hardware for your datacenter needs.

Sorry, the FACT that SSD has had write performance problems, wear leveling, and write endurance issues is by no means 10 year old information.

And yet you haven't caught on to the fact, that this isn't that big of a problem. Anandtech wrote an excellent paper on write performance problems, and his benchmarks are based on used drives (the drive has to perform deletes before writing), and he got these performances:

4KB Random Write Speed
Intel X25-E 31.7 MB/s
Intel X25-M 23.1 MB/s
Western Digital VelociRaptor 1.63 MB/s

The VelociRaptor i

How expensive are they?

If you're looking at hundreds of thousands of writes a day to your database, you really only need somewhere between 10 and 100 IO/second (there are 86,400 seconds in a day). Most hard drives handle that somewhat decently, especially if you use a good RAID configuration.

Looking at 100,000,000 updates a day (1,158 writes/second)? Intel's X25-M is rated at more than 4 times that

Iometer* Queue Depth 32
Random 4 KB Write:
80 GB - Up to 6.6 K IOPS
160 GB - Up to 8.6 K IOPS

Let's compare that to a 15k.2 Seagate Savvio harddrive. Oh, right, they don't list their IOPS ratings. Let's look at what they do have though:

Not including controller overhead (msec):
Single track, typical: 0.2 (read) 0.42 (write)
Average, typical: 2.9 (read) 3.3 (write)

Intel lists these figures:

Latency Specification:
- Read: 65 micro seconds
- Write: 85 micro seconds

In other words, for a single track, the Intel drive will be almost 5 times as quick to start the write, and on average the Intel drive will be 38 times faster.

Or looking at it in another way, the absolute best case scenario where we simply ignore actually writing something, the Seagate drive can achieve 205,714,286 write operations per day (86,400 seconds/0.42 milliseconds). The Intel drive will hit 1.016.470.588.

While I can't find anyone benchmarking Intel's SSD offerings directly against the Savvio, I can find a mix of tests. From Tom's Hardware we see that SAS drives tops out at about 400 IOPS for any given task.

Using Tom's Hardware for a comparison, their review of the X25-M had it bottoming out at around 900 IPOS, making it perform 225% better at its worst, compared to the SAS drive's best.

Prices:
Newegg.com doesn't have the Savvio, so I'm using Google instead:
Seagate Savvio 15k.2 146 GB edition: US$ 226.44 or US$1.55/GB
Intel X25-M 160 GB edition: US$ 439 or US$ 2.74/GB

Considering the performance advantage of at least 225%, you'd have to spend at least US$ 509.49 just to get the same kind of performance as you'd get from the US$ 439 drive from Intel. And that's just their mainstream edition. AND we're talking SSD's worst case scenario vs. SAS's best case scenario. Realistically we're talking much greater advantages for the SSD.

And you keep talking about "commodity SSDs" but refer to datacenters. A commodity harddrive is a 7.200 RPM 8 MB SATA drive, and they aren't suitable for a datacenter either. Duh! So why the fixation of comparing commodity hardware from one technology to enterprise hardware from another? Stop buying commodity hardware for your datacenter needs.

Sorry, the FACT that SSD has had write performance problems, wear leveling, and write endurance issues is by no means 10 year old information.

And yet you haven't caught on to the fact, that this isn't that big of a problem. Anandtech wrote an excellent paper on write performance problems, and his benchmarks are based on used drives (the drive has to perform deletes before writing), and he got these performances:

4KB Random Write Speed
Intel X25-E 31.7 MB/s
Intel X25-M 23.1 MB/s
Western Digital VelociRaptor 1.63 MB/s

The VelociRaptor i

[Citation Needed]

Here's a few links to the contrary:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-hard-drives,4347.html
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/02/20/googles-hard-disk-study-shows-temperature-is-not-as-important-as-once-thought/

Not a super good photo, looks kind of like an eSATA connector...?

Here, by the way, is the combined SATA connector: image. I've seen these with two cables or a single cable in, and without the gap so they can take a SAS or SATA drive. Here's the SAS and SATA drive connectors: image.

Yes... but unless you are doing this professionally, or going way out of the way to build a full blown test rig and load bank yourself, the gear required to fully test a PSU anywhere near max load is not worth it to the average person, a spot check with a DMM on the bench or in the PC (if the PC is working) is a good tradeoff, and if there is any question, try replacing the PSU.

Versus buying a $100,000 Sunmoon or Chroma tester. Or bench Oscilloscope + DC Load generator + Variable AC output gear (for varying input voltages to the PSU under testing). To be honest, all this sort of gear is pretty cool, and would let you even get an idea about how clean the output signal is from the PSU, it's just overkill to do that much testing as end-user for PCs.

On the other hand... no geeky technology enthusiast should really be without a Fluke DMM or similar piece of gear in their bag of tricks with at least ability to measure emf, current, resistance, and (maybe) LCR, over the years i've found it indispensable.. measuring electrical characteristics is useful for many things, not just for PSU testing.

I won't knock the little ATX test products, but they're really no better than a DMM and a big resistor.

The video of Balmer getting out of breath was worth it.

Balmer, you really need to get some exercise!

It looks for real and you can get a free version of Windows 7 Ultimate if you host a party!

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gpu-graphics-chipset,8821.html They have explicitly stated they have no intention of leaving the chipset business.

Easily done on a home PC, and with no gain or benefit for that user. OP wants a gaming machine, and you want to spout off on things that won't benefit him.

"CPU can have an impact" is a bit of an understatement. According to Tom's Hardware's Far Cry 2 benchmark a $280 core i7 920 will spank a pair of comparably priced 2.5Ghz Opterons ($360 for the pair) to the tune of almost 30 additional frames per second. The opteron isn't on that chart, mind you, but you can ballpark it pretty reasonably among the comparably clocked Phenom chips.

I'm glad that you've realized the folly of claiming that a slow CPU isn't going to make a difference, but I'd encourage you to go check benchmarks on RAM speed and x8 vs x16 GPUs on games (the latter might be harder to find as it's been a while since mid-range boards likely to be used for gaming have dropped speed on second/both PCI-E slots). It's not but a few frames per second - maybe 10 or 12 in aggregate between the RAM and GPU bandwidth- but that's quite a bit when it costs nothing more and the original poster wants a gaming machine.

FYI: calling people "kid" on the internet doesn't bolster your argument one bit. It just makes you look rude.

Cards don't really cost $500 anymore unless you really need the most expensive card out there with meager gains over the $200 cards. The 4800-series ATI cards are all under $200 with 1GB of memory on-board. The 5000-series aren't even up that high and they just hit the market and are quite literally double what the 4800-series had to offer. But you really won't see much use out of those since nothing is really using DX11. At most you'd see higher frames in games. Nvidia's top end cards barely out-perform their lower priced brethren. Nothing a simple bit of overclocking can't fix, though If their drivers don't break, that is. Which has been all the more common these days. For the last few months Nvidia's drivers have been breaking on random things, have bugs that go unfixed for several driver revisions, and you see a new driver set almost once a week. ATI's cards will outperform every Nvidia card at almost any price point. And their drivers do not crash nearly as often. Nvidia's drivers crashing, features not working (AA and AF bug), and seeing "beta" drivers and WHQL drivers very often but making very little progress made me switch from my 8800GT to a nice 4870 1GB. If I could change my laptop's chip, I would because the laptop drivers from Nvidia are worse than their desktop drivers. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2404.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5870,2422.html

Cards don't really cost $500 anymore unless you really need the most expensive card out there with meager gains over the $200 cards. The 4800-series ATI cards are all under $200 with 1GB of memory on-board. The 5000-series aren't even up that high and they just hit the market and are quite literally double what the 4800-series had to offer. But you really won't see much use out of those since nothing is really using DX11. At most you'd see higher frames in games. Nvidia's top end cards barely out-perform their lower priced brethren. Nothing a simple bit of overclocking can't fix, though If their drivers don't break, that is. Which has been all the more common these days. For the last few months Nvidia's drivers have been breaking on random things, have bugs that go unfixed for several driver revisions, and you see a new driver set almost once a week. ATI's cards will outperform every Nvidia card at almost any price point. And their drivers do not crash nearly as often. Nvidia's drivers crashing, features not working (AA and AF bug), and seeing "beta" drivers and WHQL drivers very often but making very little progress made me switch from my 8800GT to a nice 4870 1GB. If I could change my laptop's chip, I would because the laptop drivers from Nvidia are worse than their desktop drivers. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2404.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5870,2422.html

Entire lineup of Intel chips support VT? Not at all. My 4 month old P7450 doesn't include it (strangely all the P series before it did include it), and neither does a large portion of the T series Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs. AMD on the other hand, doesn't appear to remove the virtualisation feature from lower models in product lines that originally had it in all models to justify the price tiers (raw CPU power is becoming less and less significant to average users these days). Here is a list of some of Intel chips that tries to warn which ones do and do not support it.

Keep the disk spinning at 15K but add heads with their own actuator and everything.

Has been done some time ago (so no 15k/min), see: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-harddrive,8279.html

Unfortunately, Vista's got BSoDs again.

It's not obsolete as you thought it was. You should be careful about making remarks about IE8 for the same reasons.

• Microsoft's first consumer OS that wasn't explicitly single-threaded was WinXP, which shipped in 2001 alongside OSX. Apple and Microsoft had been shipping OS's before this that were multi-threaded, but mainly for servers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system). OSX's multithreaded roots go back to the 80s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP
• Secondly, the major benefit here is intelligent system-wide thread management with thread-pools. You can do thread-pooling per application on Windows, but that is only beneficial on large applications and will likely harm smaller applications. System-wide thread-pooling minimizes any penalties while also allowing the OS to schedule the tasks on cores so that you don't blow up the system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_pool_pattern

Windows 7 finally has a half intelligent thread scheduler, but it's nothing like this. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i5,2410-8.html

Lots and lots of tests and bechmarks. Looking good.

Intel 'Lynnfield' Core i5 750 and Core i7 870 Performance Testing Introduction :: TweakTown
Intel Core i5 and Core i7: Lynnfield CPUs reviewed - Intel, Core i5, Core i-750, Core i7, Core i7-860, Core i7-870, Lynnfield, Bloomfield, AMD Phenom II X4 - PC Games Hardware
Core i5 750 - Core i7 860 and 870 processor review
HEXUS.net - Review :: Intel Lynnfield Core i5 750, Core i7 860 and Core i7 870 CPU review: bombarding the mid-range : Page - 1/12
Legion Hardware
Intel Core i5 750 & i7 870 Review - Page 1 - The Next Nehalem-based CPU lineup
PC Perspective - Intel Lynnfield Core i7-870 and Core i5-750 Processor Review
Introduction - Intel Lynnfield Core i5 and Core i7 Processors | [H]ard|OCP
In Theory: How Does Lynnfield's On-Die PCI Express Affect Gaming? : Introduction - Review Tom's Hardware
AnandTech: Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger[/QUOTE]
Intel Core i5 750 Core i7 870 Review - Overclockers Club
Techgage - Intel Core i7-870 & i5-750 - Nehalem for the Mainstream
Core i5-750 and Core i7-870 Processors Review | Hardware Secrets
Intel Core i5 750 Processor Review - TechSpot News
Intel Core i5 And Core i7: Intel?s Mainstream Magnum Opus : Introduction - Review Tom's Hardware
Intel Lynnfield Core i5-750 & Core i7-870 Processor Review
Intel's Core i5-750 and Core i7-870 processors - The Tech Report - Page 1
bit-tech.net | Review - Intel Core i5 and Core i7 Lynnfield review
bit-tech.net | Feature - Intel Lynnfield: Details and Architecture
Intel Core i5, Core i7 800 Processors and P55 Express - HotHardware
Intel Core i5-750 Processor BX80605I5750 | Intel Core i5-750,BX80605I5750,Lynnfield,LGA1156,CPU,Proocessor, Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield LGA1156 CPU Benchmark Performance Test Processor Review | Benchmark Reviews Performance Tests
Intel Core i7 870/Core i5 750/P55 Express chipset Review :: Introduction :: Motherboards.org

Lots and lots of tests and bechmarks. Looking good.

Intel 'Lynnfield' Core i5 750 and Core i7 870 Performance Testing Introduction :: TweakTown
Intel Core i5 and Core i7: Lynnfield CPUs reviewed - Intel, Core i5, Core i-750, Core i7, Core i7-860, Core i7-870, Lynnfield, Bloomfield, AMD Phenom II X4 - PC Games Hardware
Core i5 750 - Core i7 860 and 870 processor review
HEXUS.net - Review :: Intel Lynnfield Core i5 750, Core i7 860 and Core i7 870 CPU review: bombarding the mid-range : Page - 1/12
Legion Hardware
Intel Core i5 750 & i7 870 Review - Page 1 - The Next Nehalem-based CPU lineup
PC Perspective - Intel Lynnfield Core i7-870 and Core i5-750 Processor Review
Introduction - Intel Lynnfield Core i5 and Core i7 Processors | [H]ard|OCP
In Theory: How Does Lynnfield's On-Die PCI Express Affect Gaming? : Introduction - Review Tom's Hardware
AnandTech: Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger[/QUOTE]
Intel Core i5 750 Core i7 870 Review - Overclockers Club
Techgage - Intel Core i7-870 & i5-750 - Nehalem for the Mainstream
Core i5-750 and Core i7-870 Processors Review | Hardware Secrets
Intel Core i5 750 Processor Review - TechSpot News
Intel Core i5 And Core i7: Intel?s Mainstream Magnum Opus : Introduction - Review Tom's Hardware
Intel Lynnfield Core i5-750 & Core i7-870 Processor Review
Intel's Core i5-750 and Core i7-870 processors - The Tech Report - Page 1
bit-tech.net | Review - Intel Core i5 and Core i7 Lynnfield review
bit-tech.net | Feature - Intel Lynnfield: Details and Architecture
Intel Core i5, Core i7 800 Processors and P55 Express - HotHardware
Intel Core i5-750 Processor BX80605I5750 | Intel Core i5-750,BX80605I5750,Lynnfield,LGA1156,CPU,Proocessor, Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield LGA1156 CPU Benchmark Performance Test Processor Review | Benchmark Reviews Performance Tests
Intel Core i7 870/Core i5 750/P55 Express chipset Review :: Introduction :: Motherboards.org

statistics please?

I've got one here that shows Seagate as the #1 reliable manufacture of drives:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/245312-32-seagate-western-digital-reliability

"... lack of anti-exploitation technologies..."

Uh, you mean like firewalls? Sandboxing? Library Randomization? Protected memory and Execute Disable? Encrypted virtual memory? System heap library checksums? The ability to actually run user accounts as non-admins? FileVault? Disabling root by default? Download screening? Antiphishing technology? Browser page isolation? Minimal outward facing ports and services? Parental Controls?

Those anti-exploitation technologies?

If you read the interview, you would see that he specifically refers to ASLR and the NX bit, at least. OS X apparently only has a very limited version of those, at least compared to Vista (and some Linux builds). Quote:

For the record, Leopard has neither of these features, at least implemented effectively. In the exploit I won Pwn2Own with, I knew right where my shellcode was located and I knew it would execute on the heap for me.

But hey, if you want to believe lists of features rather than the opinion of a professional security expert who was demonstrably able to hack an OS X machine in two minutes and win a high-profile hacking contest, then go ahead.

"...he works for a security consulting firm and uses a Mac himself."

And not Windows and not Linux. Guess that says it all.

Yes, it does, because he said Mac was safer. Less secure — much easier to hack — but safer, because nobody bothers to hack it. Which is exactly my point. I was responding to the great-grandparent, who claimed Windows is easier to hack than Mac, and that obscurity isn't the major reason Macs are safer. The security expert I cited believes exactly the opposite to be the case, that Macs are easier to hack and obscurity is the major reason they're safer. No one disputes that they're safer.

2. Linux exploits (Linux market share is to Macs as Mac market share is to Windows)

What are some examples of widely-exploited Linux bugs? (Of course there are isolated exploits, but the same is true for Mac. And of course there are very severe security vulnerabilities all the time, but that doesn't mean they're exploited in practice. And of course Linux machines are compromised on a regular basis, but that might be due to weak passwords and such.)

3. Mac apps. People still write apps for the Mac, why not viruses?

Apps have to compete with each other. If a particular niche is filled on Windows but not Mac, then a new Windows-only app will have to compete with the existing apps. A new Mac app won't, so it will get a much larger slice of a smaller pie. On the other hand, twenty different viruses can recruit your computer into twenty different botnets with no problem, as any Windows user should be able to attest. (How often does a virus scan on an infested computer turn up only one virus?)

Besides, the number of apps for Mac is tiny compared to Windows.

4. There are plenty of viruses for the classic Mac OS.

Such as? I'm not doubting you, but I've never heard that claimed before.

5. There are tens of millions of Mac users. Even though Windows has hundreds of millions, tens of millions is still a large and lucrative group to attack.

It's a matter of cost and benefit. If it's three times the effort to write Windows exploits and you get twenty times the victims, there's just no reason to write viruses for Macs. Hackers are usually motivated by money, pure and simple.

Anyway, I don't have any credentials in hacking. So I'll rely on Charlie Miller, who's a professional hacker (security expert). He demonstrated that he knows something about Mac exploits by cracking a Mac in two minutes flat a while back and winning pwn2own. In an interview, he said (emphasis added):

Between Mac and PC, I'd say that Macs are less secure for the reasons we've discussed here (lack of anti-exploitation technologies) but are more safe because there simply isn't much malware out there. For now, I'd still recommend Macs for typical users as the odds of something targeting them are so low that they might go years without seeing any malware, even though if an attacker cared to target them it would be easier for them.

He's far from a Microsoft shill; he works for a security consulting firm and uses a Mac himself.

Toms Hardware says it's nearly identical

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-comparison,2007-7.html
 
Biggest difference is that the $160 Nvidia card has 120mb less ram for nextgen games with lots of high res textures; whereas a 1GB 4870 is $20 cheaper, and runs at 250 watts, whereas the Nvidia card consumes 360 watts, which is a lot of heat to exhaust out of a midsize case.

In other news, ATI is selling their 4870 series cards for $130 on newegg, which are twice as fast as an Nvidia 9800GTS which is the same price (at least on Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and any other game that matters). ATI is blowing Nvidia out of the water in terms of performance per dollar and will continue to do so through at least the middle of next year. See here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/benchmarks,62.html

Yeah, I'd be making outrageous statements too if I were Nvidia.

Even when it comes to GPGPU (General Purpose computing on the GPU), ATI's hardware is much better than NVIDIA's. However, the programming interfaces for ATI suck big times, whereas NVIDIA's CUDA is much more comfortable to code for, and it has an extensive range of documentation and examples that provide developers with all they need to improve their NVIDIA GPGPU programming. It also has much more aggressive marketing.

As a sad result, NVIDIA is often the platform of choice for GPU usage for HPC, despite it having inferior hardware. And I doubt OpenCL is going to fix this, since it basically standardizes the low-level API, keeping NVIDIA with its superior high-level API.

Here's the L4D comparo, sorry for the wrong link:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/Left4Dead,1455.html

The 9800GT and 8800GT are both in the 40-60fps while the 4870 (single processor) is in the 106fps range. It's a pretty staggering difference.

In other news, ATI is selling their 4870 series cards for $130 on newegg, which are twice as fast as an Nvidia 9800GTS which is the same price (at least on Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and any other game that matters). ATI is blowing Nvidia out of the water in terms of performance per dollar and will continue to do so through at least the middle of next year. See here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/benchmarks,62.html

Yeah, I'd be making outrageous statements too if I were Nvidia.

Don't worry the Feet has got you covered. I don't know if you will read this, as the article is a couple of days old now, but it really is an interesting read. I shall put a bit of it here for you, but if you RTFL you'll find it pretty good.

Here is what Carmack said on OpenGL 3 "During the Longs Peak design phase, we ran into disagreement over what features to remove from the API...The disagreements happened because of different market needs...We discovered we couldn't do one API to serve all.." he say that the CAD guys are hamstringing OpenGL to keep their older apps running, even though the API needs a rewrite.

Which to me kinda points out the problem of comparing OpenGL to DirectX. Since MSFT is really the only one with final say that can put their foot down when needed, and the manufacturers will either have to go along or the other guy will have "DirectX Version X" cards before them. With OpenGL being literally designed by committee that just can't happen, and it looks like the CAD guys are willing to give gamers the finger to keep their expensive software going without a rewrite. sad, really, as I had hopes in the 90s that OpenGL would overtake DirectX and then you could buy just one game and run it anywhere-Windows, Linux, or Mac, but it looks like DirectX will get to stay king thanks to CAD using OpenGL.

This was also revisited by the blue pill author Joanna Rutkowska in a later (less technical) article on Tomshardware (found via Slashdot).

Time for a trade-in? nVidia has released a low-power 9600GT that doesn't even need the PCI-E power connector anymore.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/inno3D-GTS-9600GT,7165.html

The difference with this card in comparison to the GeForce 9600GT is that it uses a G94-350/359 55nm GPU and has the ability to switch into "idle" mode. Additionally, a new PCB design now allows for phase switching, no longer has a 6-pin power connector, and runs a 1.0v core at ultra low voltage. In 3D mode, the card's power consumption can be reduced down to 40 percent, and 60 percent in normal idle mode.

The sweet spot is still the ATI 4670 IMHO

Quote from the Slashdot summary: "Asus claims to have run its new boards with engineering samples of the Core i5-750 at a 77 percent overclock, boosting speeds from 2.66 GHz to 4.7 GHz."

Translation: "Intel's fastest processors are not fast enough. Intel's processors are so slow that even a 77% increase in speed is worth sacrificing stability and risking hardware failure."

Oh well, things will be better when we get the 22 nanometer parts.

Question: Is Intel deliberately creating confusion when the company uses the concept of 2 multiple times, as in "Core 2 Duo"? Or, is Intel marketing unaware they are creating confusion? Wikipedia quote: "There is also some confusion with Core 2 Duo and Centrino Duo."

Here's a benchmark summary of interface testing. It does not include the current Seagate 7200.4 drives:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2.5-hard-drive-charts/Interface-Performance,682.html

Obviously, hard drives are capable of utilizing far more than 1/4 of SATA 2's theoretical bandwidth.

You can't turn fsync into a complete noop just by putting a cache in the middle. A fsync call on the OS side that forces that write out to cache will block if the BBWC is full for example, and if the underlying device can't write fast enough without its own cache being turned on you'll still be in trouble.

While the cache in the middle will improve the situation by coalescing writes into the form the SSD can handle efficiently, the published SSD write IOPS numbers are still quite inflated relative to what you'll actually see. What I was trying to suggest is that the performance gap isn't nearly as large as suggested by the article of TFA once you start building real-world systems around them. After all, regular discs benefit from the write combining to lower seeks you get out of a BBWC, too, even more than the SSDs do.

The other funny thing you discover if you benchmark enough of these things is that a regular hard drive confined to only use as much space as a SSD provides is quite a bit faster too. When you limit a 500GB SATA drive to only use 64GB (a standard bit of short stroking), there's a big improvement in sequential and seek speeds there. If you want to be fair, you should only compare your hard drive's IOPS when it's configured to only provide as much space as the SSD you're comparing against.

With SSDs and the reduced issue of plater spin up, I can imagine servers that stand-by and wake up if there is any activity on a specified port

SSDs don't actually consume much less power than platter-based drives, but they're far more expensive. The spin-up/down is mitigated if there's good caching on the controller, and I think that's the key here -- caching. You can have a couple of terabytes on a server, but the drives aren't called until something is requested which *isn't* on the controller's buffer.

I should point out though that power consumption of HDs are insignificant compared to the rest of the system. If you want to avoid the spin-up issue, just never spin them down. An idle, spinning HD normally won't consume much over 1W -- that's one *single* watt. How does that compare to the CPU power draw?

Here's that article on Tom's Hardware where they revised their SSD power consumption tests, though it's a year old now.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-graphics-desktop-multicore-cpu,7643.html In Windows Vista, a single application could hold a system-wide lock on the GDI, basically creating a bottleneck, especially if there are other applications waiting in line to access the graphics stack. While such a design decision may have been okay in the past, it's been re-engineered for Windows 7. "This work also resulted in better rendering performance of concurrent GDI applications on multi-core CPUs. Multi-core Windows PCs benefit from these changes as more than one application can now be rendering at the same time," Chitre said, adding that the improvements worked to reduce response time issues. "Without the Windows 7 GDI concurrency, the rendering throughput of these applications is effectively limited to the performance of a single CPU core. Since only a single application can acquire the global exclusive lock while the others are waiting, this scenario doesn't benefit from multiple CPU cores. This demonstrates that GDI applications in Windows 7 are now much less dependent on one another."

I'm not sure what you were doing wrong there, but the veteran testers at Tom's Hardware found that TrueCrypt whole disk encryption reduced battery life just by 1% for AES.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/truecrypt-security-hdd,2125-11.html

Battery Runtime Test Passed

Our MobileMark 07 testing was conducted with a Dell Latitude D610 and a 9-cell battery. It resulted in a 1% runtime decrease for AES and 3% for AES-Twofish-Serpent. The same percentage decreases should also apply to smaller batteries.

Here is a link to the full text (I hope it works!) http://www.tomshardware.com/review_print.php?p1=2356

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/167040-46-registry-login-script#t612376

or

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23744-changing-permissions-registry-key.html#post230094

might be of interests to you

The Fusion-io ioDrive Duo could, but connected directly into a PCI-E slot rather than SATA, but it is definitely possible to make a drive that will.

Intel's X25-M seems to perform 200 MB/s constant throughput. Granted that's "only" 2/3rds of the 3 Gbps that SATA 2 delievers, but the quote was "nearly saturate".

And if we're already at 2/3rds, that's a fairly compelling argument to upgrading. On laptops it can become an issue much quicker, as you usually only have 1 eSATA port, and port multipliers do not increase bandwidth. Hooking two X25-Ms onto a single eSATA 2 port can saturate it while doing non-random transfers easily but still have room left over on eSATA 3.

But if we're merely talking SSD in general, we can always point to Fusion-io ioDrive which bottoms out at 429 MB/s.

Intel's X25-M seems to perform 200 MB/s constant throughput. Granted that's "only" 2/3rds of the 3 Gbps that SATA 2 delievers, but the quote was "nearly saturate".

And if we're already at 2/3rds, that's a fairly compelling argument to upgrading. On laptops it can become an issue much quicker, as you usually only have 1 eSATA port, and port multipliers do not increase bandwidth. Hooking two X25-Ms onto a single eSATA 2 port can saturate it while doing non-random transfers easily but still have room left over on eSATA 3.

But if we're merely talking SSD in general, we can always point to Fusion-io ioDrive which bottoms out at 429 MB/s.

I may sound like a troll with this post, and my apologies for it. But I've lost all respect for Cliff B., ever since he used the lame-o "piracy" excuse for not porting - PORTING, mind you, not "developing from scratch" - Gears of War 2 to PC. It's a cop-out, and to me it shows a lack of understanding of the issue and ways around it.

After all, Stardock doesn't have any problems developing for PC; they don't DRM their titles beyond what's being implemented with the new GOO platform; and despite the rocky launch of Demigod mired by users connecting with warezed copies, they seem to have made it a fairly successful title.