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Dude, external PCIe is available in laptop for years, it is called ExpressCard. And suprise, it's even used for external graphics: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vidock-expresscard-graphics,1933.html

WRONG...
The *MICROSOFT RECOMMENDED* Upgrade path from XP to Win 7 is to do a COMPLETELY FRESH INSTALL[1]

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-xp-7-upgrade-vista,6965.html

âoeI can confirm that customers will be able to purchase upgrade media and an upgrade license to move from Windows XP to Windows 7 - however, they will need to do a clean installation of Windows 7,â a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed

Customers, such as a large OEM we won't mention, have been trying to validate flash SSDs for enterprise applications by looping hardcore I/O loads, and they all failed with write errors after only a few months.

In certain situations the increased performance of a SSD removes a bottleneck which would result in increased CPU/memory load. On certain platforms this means these components would spend less time in their lower power states, ie lowered cpu multiplier or core voltage level.

Tasks for task a SSD saves power, possibly more than would be lost by any higher CPU speed steps, but in something like a looping benchmark more work is done in the same time therefore more power draw.

This phenomena Had tom's hardware fooled http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html ("The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flash SSDs Donâ(TM)t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime â" they Reduce It")

They later posted a retraction after some people pointed out this flaw.

I would like to see optimizations in linux to take this into account this effect. Perhaps increasing power saving state thresholds to compensate.

There are a few tricks up the manufacturer's sleeve to make this slightly better than it really is:

1. large block size (120k-200k?) means that even if you write 20 bytes, the disk physically writes a lot more. For logfiles and databases (quite common on desktops too, think of index dbs and sqlite in firefox for storing the search history...) where tiny amounts of data are modified, this can add up rapidly. Something writes to the disk once every second? That's 16.5GB / day, even if you're only changing a single byte over and over.

2. Even if the memory cells do not die, due to the large block size, fragmentation will occur (most of the cells will have a small amount of space used in them). There has been a few articles about this that even devices with advanced wear leveling technology like Intel's exhibit a large performance drop (less than half of the read/write performance of a new drive of the same kind) after a few months of normal usage.

3. According to Tomshardware unnamed OEMs told them that all the SSD drives they tested under simulated server workloads got toasted after a few months of testing. Now, I wouldn't necessary consider this accurate or true, but I'd sure as hell would not use SSDs in a serious environment until this is proven false.

I can't help thinking that this story is related.

"Microsoft Windows is now powering the British Royal Navy's nuclear-armed submarine fleet; giving all new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death."...
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Submarines-Windows-Royal-Navy,6718.html

"Microsoft...bringing whole new meaning to the terms 'crashing your computer' and 'blue screen of death' "

Your distrust of AMD chips is well-founded; some of the older chips didn't cope so well with a failed heatsink/fan: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-6.html Modern AMD chips are fine, though. And why the Sempron bashing? My first PC was a cheapo $500 box I built for games. It had a $90 Sempron 64 that beat the pants off of the netburst Celerons out there in games like Doom 3, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, that kind of thing.

Actually, while Intel CPUs have very low power draw, the current crop of Intel chipsets are comparatively power hungry. When considering system power draw in its entirety, an AMD system will use less power.

Yes, and as the OP was asking for "real-life" benchmarks, here they are. Tom's Hardware benchmarked TrueCrypt thoroughly and found practically no overhead.

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

Yes, you're right. What he probably meant was the overclocking of Coppermine cores, which only required a bus increase from 100 to 133 MHz. A 600 or 650 MHz core was almost a guaranteed overclock to 133 Mhz bus, and hence they werre always sold-out.

Other great Intel overclockers of the time:

Deschutes core (.25 micron) Pentium II at 300 MHz. Since the first "official" Deschutes core release was at 333 MHz, it was a surprise when 300 Mhz versions of the core started appearing. Apparently, a lot of the new Deschutes 300 Mhz cores were marked-down 450 Mhz cores, and evev had the same 225 MHz L2 cache chips!

Celermine 533 or 566 overclocked to 800 or 850 Mhz. Sure, it wasn't as fast as a Pentium III at the same clock speed, but with the chip costing just $100, how could you say no?

I find it odd that your link that supposedly shows Apple sued a school doesn't even mention a school, and also says nothing about Apple suing anybody, [emph mine]
Says nothing about Apple suing anybody? The headline is "Apple sues Big Apple". I don't expect people to read the article, but at least read the headline.

Seriously, yes, I linked to the wrong article. Here's the correct one.

I'm sorry dude, but you are wrong. What was wrong with Vista? Well there were some hardware incompatibility issues that were resolved within the first four months, and for the most part that was strictly NVIDIA, who behaved like a child and got a few other vendors to tell MS "NO! We're NOT going to correct our drivers for the changes you made!" Granted, it was bullshit that MS made those kinds of changes that late in development, but really all they did was boost Intel and ATI sales slightly since OEMs needed "Vista Capable" hardware to go with the new OS they had to use.

Which brings us to the biggest issues with Vista: the hardware requirements. Oh no, it requires a whole 2G of RAM to XP's 1G. Given the price of RAM, this is REALLY a non-issue for people who build their own systems. All it did was irritate OEMs, and you just know it was a marketing guy at MS not one of the engineers who told the OEMs to use the 512 and it'll all be fine. I'll let the class action lawsuit settle that dispute. It was a non issue for myself and the people I know that built a Vista system were gamers, and for the most part the benchmarks for games while using Vista Ultimate x64 and XP SP2 were the pretty much the same.

What's wrong with vista ? Just a story : I laid my hands on a vista sp1 computer just yesterday. Actually, it's my mother's new computer, freshly setup at home by a professionnal (the one doing setups for my father's business). The machine is a core2 2600 Mhz something with 4Gb Ram, NVidia 9xxx video, sh*tloads of disk space, etc. ad nauseam, blue ray reader included (while I'm still faithful to my athlon 900 Mhz, 512 Mb Ram, running adequatly Fedora 9 with all bells and whistles).

Before even trying the computer, I notice in the big cardboard box where the old dell has been dumped the scanner. So I ask, what's wrong with it ? Answer : not vista compatible. A silly, USB, scanner, not compatible ? Oh, better still : it's a HP scanner and the new computer is, well HP. And what's that tiny thing at the bottom ? Oh. The usb webcam. Not compatible ; I should have guessed. I know, those are not expensive when compared to the price of the whole thing. Still, it tastes sour.

Let's try the beast. Well, okay, it's adequate ; nothing really surprising for a compiz user, until you realise you do it with a computer 1/6 the processing power (when only using the bogus MHz metric to compare cpus), and 1/8 the ram.

But, hey, what's that ? Oh, UAE, I heard about you nice to meet you ! ... 500th UAE moment : right, now I'm pissed. Why does that thing blows in my face ? Can't it signal himself only in the taskbar by a "!" icon ? Interrupting my job is silly. Especially when what I'm doing has nothing to see with the application requesting the privileges. MS had it totally backward on this one. Why can't they do a su / sudo copy, that works perfectly since day 1 ?

UAE had me so pissed I decided to shutdown the thing after an half hour. Should be easy, no ? Well, the shutdown process hanged and left me watching the desktop background for minutes. I couldn't believe the thing broke ! It's new, there's nothing but office on it ! I left it while having supper, hoping for the process to somehow recover. Nope. When I came back, 1 hr later, the silly thing was still hanged.

Vista, it's as bad as it's been depicted. Maybe worse.

Okay, glad to see that stuff like UI layout is being modded up. It only is a matter of personal taste but whatever. I personally hate the Office Ribbon, but haven't had to use Office 2007 much so I can't be sure if its bad or not. I have used Vista and played with Windows 7 and I personally like the new UI for Windows Explorer. I think its oodles better than the flat gray color used in Windows XP, 2000, and 95/98.

But who cares about the way the UI looks. That's really a minor thing compared to the issues that were amplified. The first poster here gets modded +5 Insightful for saying "Ars Technia is Wrong" without providing any evidence of the fact.

I'm sorry dude, but you are wrong. What was wrong with Vista? Well there were some hardware incompatibility issues that were resolved within the first four months, and for the most part that was strictly NVIDIA, who behaved like a child and got a few other vendors to tell MS "NO! We're NOT going to correct our drivers for the changes you made!" Granted, it was bullshit that MS made those kinds of changes that late in development, but really all they did was boost Intel and ATI sales slightly since OEMs needed "Vista Capable" hardware to go with the new OS they had to use.

Which brings us to the biggest issues with Vista: the hardware requirements. Oh no, it requires a whole 2G of RAM to XP's 1G. Given the price of RAM, this is REALLY a non-issue for people who build their own systems. All it did was irritate OEMs, and you just know it was a marketing guy at MS not one of the engineers who told the OEMs to use the 512 and it'll all be fine. I'll let the class action lawsuit settle that dispute. It was a non issue for myself and the people I know that built a Vista system were gamers, and for the most part the benchmarks for games while using Vista Ultimate x64 and XP SP2 were the pretty much the same.

The software incompatibilities were only to be expected. For the most part Vista's built in backwards compatibility modes work awesome and now that people have been needing to develop on 64 bit OS its a non issue. From the start this was a given for an architecture change and personally I don't count it against Vista since it was going to happen eventually anyways, but I'll count it against it anyways since everyone else seems to too.

The only other major issue I can think of was the file transfer times. Before SP1, I personally never noticed this issue. Not sure what I was doing different, other than most people seemed to be referencing Windows Server 2003 so these people were using Vista most likely around the office rather than at home. Given how many people that rag on Vista that aren't network admins and mention the transfer times I'm sort of interested to know if it was THAT widespread for home users but couldn't find any quick references. Either way, once SP1 came out I stopped hearing of this issue. Given its MS it was pretty obvious the OS would be flakey until the first SP. I'm not sure why people freaked out over this when XP had a few more issues along similar lines but whatever.

So mod on you MS bashers! I just love how a supposedly intelligent site like Slashdot has this rabid fanaticism about OS choices. The flaming of Apple's OS and the various Linux distros (not to mention the BSD based ones) never ceases to amaze. I guess humans just need something to cling to. With apologies to Terry Pratchett: "Give them a slogan and a uniform, and their hearts and minds will follow."

Did you delete that dll for your mom too? http://www.tomshardware.com/news/avg-antivirus-virus-removal,6587.html

Here's a comparison between the Toledo Athlon X2 4600+, 4400+ and 4200+. You'll note that in most cases the performance boost from 4200->4400 is negligible (~1% or less), while the jump from 4200 (or 4400) to 4600 is typically ~10%, as would be expected from the clock speed boost. Given that the extra cache is expensive (a lot more than an extra 1%, too), I don't blame them for dropping it.

When the Athlon X2s came out (and before the Core 2s came out), I researched all of this and ended up buying a 4200+, noting that the 4400+ was worth basically no extra performance (but cost $100 more at the time), which is why I know this off the top of my head.

A Beowolf cluster of these http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Cray-Supercomputer-Windows,6368.html

Anywhere. The selection of decent mid-range cards at low-end price points (less than $150) is better today than I've ever seen it before.

Take a look at Tom's Hardware's "Best Cards for The Money" for a good overview.

really? people still use the Radeon?

Huh?
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/Half-Life-2-Episode-2,765.html

Here are some benchmarks right over at tomshardware that show that the "SlashDot world" in this case is accurate (amazing!).

No, those benchmarks show that the "SlashDot world" was accurate... two years ago. There's this little thing you might not be aware of called the passage of time. Now, I'm aware that this is a very difficult concept to wrap one's head around, since in that time, there have actually been improvements. I know, it shocked the hell out of me too!

Take results with a grain of salt. He ranks Vista as better than XP on the AMD machine and as nearly equal on the Pentium machine

Sadly, as much as the SlashDot world not like to believe, this is accurate.

Here are some benchmarks right over at tomshardware that show that the "SlashDot world" in this case is accurate (amazing!).

Conclusion: K.O. For Windows Vista? Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance.

This was on a system with 2 GB of RAM, so according to you Vista should have been faster, but it wasn't. So your idea that it's the RAM that's the problem is bollocks.

Anecdotally, a colleague of mine was complaing her brand new lenovo thinkpad with Vista was slow compared to her imac -- she was kind of amazed that the they had the same processor and memory.

But this ISN'T that old, craptastic, power-hungry chipset used by most Atom netbooks. It's a new chipset code-named Poulsbo designed specifically to go with Atom. Quoting a tomshardware.com article:

"The Atom Z500 has a TDP that varies between 0.85 W (for the 800 MHz version without HyperThreading) and 2.64 W (for the 1.86 GHz model with HyperThreading enabled). The SCH consumes approximately 2.3 W in its most evolved version, which brings the SCH + CPU together to under 5 W. By comparison with existing solutions, thatâ(TM)s obviously a big step forward â" the Via Nano, for example, is announced at 25 W for the 1.8 GHz version and a Celeron-M ULV at 5 W at 900 MHz."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-cpu,1947-3.html

In addition, the Atom Z-series/Poulsbo combo supports the C6 idle power state where the CPU saves away its architectural state in a small SRAM which remains powered up while the rest of the CPU shuts off entirely. Idle power for the processor is somewhere from .01W - .1 W (this is from what I remember reading somewhere, but I can't find a link right now). Not sure what the chipset's powercomsumption is like when idle.

The biggest known downside to this chipset is that it supports 1 GB of RAM max.

Price/performance can be a slippery thing but is certainly the most relevant item for anyone on a budget, but performance in what regard? A quick comparison of the cpu charts on Tom's Hardware shows that the newer quad core AMD X4 9950 gives virtually the same FPS performance score on crysis as the dual core 6000+. If you go down the charts point by point, you can easily see where the extra cores come in handy and where they don't. I'm sure a lot of people are mainly interested in gaming performance and I was rather surprised to see the relative lack of FPS improvement in this area for Crysis and other titles.

I read an article a long time ago claiming that people don't really notice a difference until something works about twice as fast as what they're used to. This makes sense from a purely human perspective and gaming enjoyment is certainly human thing. I've found that there isn't really a "wow" unless you simultaneously upgrade the cpu, ram and video card to something rated at roughly twice the power as the old machine. The trick is to wait until the new machine costs the same to build as the old one.

I thought that Intel specifically did that, that if one core were loaded it would overclock that core and downclock the others to get a speed boost...

Yup, I thought I remembered correctly.

Six year old laptops arn't that bad? I'd even say $50 is a good deal if it still worked. Laptops from that time period seem to be ebaying for $100-$300. Six years ago we'd be looking at a pentium 4, 2.2-3ghz, 512mb memory, 20 gig hard drive. That'd run windows xp or ubuntu just fine.

Tomshardware reviewed SS4200-E and it looks significantly better than you describe. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ss4200-e-nas-raid,2076-5.html

This is something I have been researching recently to store my photography, and I found that Toms Hardware has some good reviews and benchmarks using Intel's NAS performance toolkit. This review http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/DS207-synology-nas,2081-5.html shows a comparison of the Synology DS-207 to similar lower priced units. From what I've seen, most of the inexpensive NAS's don't have very good throughput either due to low power cpu's, or slower bus speeds. I would like to have a nice appliance, but for the best price/performance it looks like I'll be building a box with FreeNAS or OpenFiler.

Tom's Hardware reports that hard disks can still be more power efficient than SSDs. The good news is that SSDs are more efficient under load, and their idle power consumption is improving also.

No. Vista Performance != XP Performance. Vista Performance < XP Performance. Just ask Tom's Hardware.

I think if IA-64 ever achieved the kind of volume the x86 market has, it would end up being a fine processor with lots of room for improvement still. It never really stood a chance: it was marketed as a server processor and Microsoft offerer only a half-assed support for it (it's their best interest to keep computers a commodity and they will fight any attempt to differentiate in that space). In addition, by the time it could be a viable high-power desktop workstation for developers or data-crunchers (a space it shines in) there was no Fedora or Ubuntu for it.

Instead, AMD came out with a set of extensions to the crufty x86 and that is what we use today. We would be much better if we started from a clean sheet.

And much, much better, if binary compatibility to x86 wasn't such a big issue.

None of that is true. Microsoft ported NT based kernels to Itanium (and spent vast amounts of time doing so because there are some subtle issues). Still since it was made by Intel it was pretty much guaranteed to get Windows support.

An Opteron 246 had about the same SpecInt as an Itanium 2 even when both were running native code.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/11/05/amd-benchmarks-opteron-against--itanium-xeons-piiis

An Itanium was much slower running x86 binaries. Even the second generation run x86 binaries slowly

http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Itanium-loses-x86-hardware-support/0,339028227,339230300,00.htm

Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.

At that point the fastest Xeon was much faster than 1.5Ghz

Opteron systems were much cheaper

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/57718-28-opteron-kill-itanium

and they tended to win on real world benchmarks

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30FE64linux_3.html

Basically Itanium was a chance for a company with vast resources to start from scratch and it wasn't faster than x86. The Risc chips that NT supported actually had a better performance advantage, at one point up to 2x the SpecInt. And that wasn't enough to get people to bear the pain of switching over.

The fact is you can't judge computer architecture by aesthetic principles. x86 and x64 may look ugly but that is subjective. The thing that counts is performance and x86 has been beating competing architectures on SpecInt for ages.

Amd64 vs Ia64 was particularly dramatic. Intel had a huge financial advantage and at one point desktop Athlon 64s were the fastest processor in the world, beating far more expensive Ia64 server processors. It's the same now with Nehalem -

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-i.html

it beats far more expensive non x86 chips, including ones from Intel.

Actually it wins on FP now, which is something that non x86 chips tended to do well at

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-f.html

It's easy to say that it would be easy to start from a clean sheet, but Intel has tried that, poured money into it got the entire industry (including Microsoft) to announce transition plans from x86 to Ia64 and it still failed. Hell Ia64 isn't even that aesthetically pleasing, the more you look at it the more crufty it is.

Oh sure, no problem. I'm fairly certain that the 8400 should work in a 300W PSU, since a variant of it powers the 9300 IGP version. SFF case kind of makes me shudder but I think those cards should be fine.

As for your nephew, I would suggest getting anything AGP over anything PCI simply because it seems like PCI cards carry a definite price premium because they're not that common anymore. However, as for the 8400 vs 7600, from what I can see the 8400 is actually slower than the 7600. These charts are a good reference for comparing different GPUs since naming schemes don't make any sense these days. I just glanced at the 3DMark06 scores and the 7600 was nearly twice as fast as the 8400. I think the 8600 is basically a die shrunk version of the 7600, and the 8400 is a more cut down version of that, or something.

For gaming graphics on AGP, these cards would be your best bet since as you mentioned nVidia hasn't made any of its 8 series boards on AGP. The 3450 will edge out the 8400 by a little bit so if you're on a budget that's probably your best bet. The 3650 however has three times as many stream processors so it's a bit over three times faster (higher clockspeeds too) so if you're willing to spend the $80 + shipping/tax go for that one. I'm not sure whether the Celeron would be a bottleneck for the 3650 but probably not since at 3.06ghz it sounds like it's a high end Celeron. I wouldn't recommend anything above the 3650 though. You could also look at the 7600GT AGP but the 3650 compared to the 7600 is significantly faster, and it seems like on newegg the 3650 is actually $5 cheaper. Here's a handy comparison between some of your options, although I don't know whether they are PCIe or AGP. I don't think there will be much of a difference at all between AGP 8x and PCIe x16 for those cards in any case.

Good luck with your shopping, and I'm happy to help if you have any more questions. I follow graphics cards a lot more than I should and it's fun for me to do comparisons and stuff.

Oh sure, no problem. I'm fairly certain that the 8400 should work in a 300W PSU, since a variant of it powers the 9300 IGP version. SFF case kind of makes me shudder but I think those cards should be fine.

As for your nephew, I would suggest getting anything AGP over anything PCI simply because it seems like PCI cards carry a definite price premium because they're not that common anymore. However, as for the 8400 vs 7600, from what I can see the 8400 is actually slower than the 7600. These charts are a good reference for comparing different GPUs since naming schemes don't make any sense these days. I just glanced at the 3DMark06 scores and the 7600 was nearly twice as fast as the 8400. I think the 8600 is basically a die shrunk version of the 7600, and the 8400 is a more cut down version of that, or something.

For gaming graphics on AGP, these cards would be your best bet since as you mentioned nVidia hasn't made any of its 8 series boards on AGP. The 3450 will edge out the 8400 by a little bit so if you're on a budget that's probably your best bet. The 3650 however has three times as many stream processors so it's a bit over three times faster (higher clockspeeds too) so if you're willing to spend the $80 + shipping/tax go for that one. I'm not sure whether the Celeron would be a bottleneck for the 3650 but probably not since at 3.06ghz it sounds like it's a high end Celeron. I wouldn't recommend anything above the 3650 though. You could also look at the 7600GT AGP but the 3650 compared to the 7600 is significantly faster, and it seems like on newegg the 3650 is actually $5 cheaper. Here's a handy comparison between some of your options, although I don't know whether they are PCIe or AGP. I don't think there will be much of a difference at all between AGP 8x and PCIe x16 for those cards in any case.

Good luck with your shopping, and I'm happy to help if you have any more questions. I follow graphics cards a lot more than I should and it's fun for me to do comparisons and stuff.

Those speeds are typical for current generation spinning media disks as well.

See, for example, here: Tom's Hardware 1TB disk performance

It really isn't either/or on HDD speed versus capacity. Higher capacity drives are ALSO faster.

Actually there is a row access time which can be quite high, as high as .5ms for MLC which compares with 2.5ms for 15k rpm drives. Add to that the relativly low IOPS for MLC (less than 100 according to this review using the database server IOMeter profile which is 70/30 read write if I remember correctly) and for a server load they lose bigtime to drives considering they get worse performance, have significantly lower MTBF, and have way less GB/$. SLC is a bit harder to quantify as the best units have MUCH higher IOPS per unit than disk so you have to figure out how much capacity you need and how reliable you want it to be as well as how much power budget you have.

Uh, do you have a link to show that for my own understanding? I seem to recall that not only do USB2 devices have a difficult time receiving HD to 1080P but also not all "broadcast HDtv" is transmitted at the same bandwidth either. Not that the difference should be enormous. From what I read, you're referring to digital tv, which is not HD broadcast.

from the reviews I'd seen, etc. was that AMD was slightly slower per clock-cycle than Intel, and that the range of available clock speeds didn't go as high, either.

That's all true. Intel's been beating AMD at that for a while now.

Thing is, that's never the question that you want to be asking when you buy a new computer. Who cares which company has the fastest chip at $1000. The important question is: If I spend $90 on a chip, what's the best I can get? What if I spend $150? Is that better than putting $60 somewhere else? How about $200?

In the $75 - $250 range (the range I personally care about), AMD and Intel are pretty much always trading blows. Here's a good chart for illustration: Crysis CPU Benchmark. Note how, for example, the Intel chip at $187 is slower than the AMD chip at $170.

Psystar is not modifying the OS. Check the details! They are not running a cracked or modified version of OSX on their systems.

SOURCE: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Psystar-Xserve-Apple,5734.html

Basically, it's a piece of software which downloads Apple's official update, applies a patch to break Apple's fix and then upgrades a user's Leopard installation.

15 fps in Crysis? What could you get for a comparably priced (ie $2000+) laptop or desktop PC?

I know the Very High Quality setting in the http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4870-x2,2073-18.htmlrecent Video Card rundown at Toms Hardware was seeing in excess of 30. So how does the Mac really stack up for gaming?

Shh. Remember apple runs "fast" and is "glorious for multimedia!" somehow we skipped Linux and AMD, but hey, want to pay 2x as much for half the performance?

What? Are you actually suggesting that AMD's processors perform better than Intel's offerings? As a company AMD may have its strengths, but they cannot even remotely compete against Intel's Core 2, let alone Core i7.

As for OS X versus Linux, the majority of multimedia encoding and decoding operations occur in userspace, so the Linux kernel has no speed advantage to offer there. Where the two operating systems do differentiate themselves is with their multimedia APIs and codecs; as a user of both Linux and OS X, it saddens me that OS X is so far ahead in this regard.

While AMD uses the least energy, a number of articles I've read indicate (e.g. this Tom's Hardware article shows a win for Intel about a year and a half ago, even before Intel's move to 45 nm) that if you factor in performance to get perf-per-watt, the Intel and AMD lines are much more similar. Granted, when neither chip is doing anything, AMD wins, but when placed under load Intel's slightly greater power usage seems to be offset by doing more actual *work*. I run Folding@Home to keep my machine busy doing something useful, alongside some video encoding, so for me, and anyone else with fairly high CPU loads, Intel is probably a better deal.

"I haven't trusted any vendor on pricewatch to deliver a product remotely resembling what I ordered, at the same price as on the website, in anything less than 2-3 weeks... for over 5 years. Used to use pricewatch religiously, until I started hitting something like a 20% failure rate on receiving my products..."

Your lack of trust or your run of bad luck is not up to debate. Point is you can currently purchase 1 terabyte drives for 8.7 cents a gigabyte. And while newegg is selling DVD-Rs at 4 cents a gigabyte (100 DVD-Rs for $18 shipped) you have to figure it takes nearly 5 minutes for a modern 20x DVD-R drive to burn 4.3 gigabytes. Add another minute to swap DVD's and you can see it would take hours to burn just 100 gigabytes.... 100 gig / 4.3 gigabytes = 24 dvds x 6 minutes/dvd = 144 minutes.

Based on these results of a dozen USB2 external hard drives we'll assume a slow USB2 rate of 25 mB/sec, or 1.5 gB/min, taking 66 minutes to transfer 100 gigabytes.

So you have 144 minutes vs 66 minutes, and don't forget 100gb on DVDs means swapping discs every 5 minutes for over 2 hours. Sounds like a fun way to waste 2 hours to save $4.38 cents ($8.70 for 100gb on a 1tb drive vs $4.32 for 24 DVD-Rs).

DVDs may be sufficient for less than 10gB of data, but if you're using it for weekly backups a few external hard drives would be much easier.

On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?

This link might be of use to you in that regard.

Echoes of Intel...

I have to agree with you here, mostly. Most of the tests make very little sense, and expecting W7 to be a rewrite is just stupid. Watching some of the W7-related PDC 2008 videos, I never got the impression that improving performance was their major priority, except perhaps for some tweaks for netbooks. Instead, most of the focus appears to be on other areas such as improved usability and power consumption. Not to mention that the M3 is a pre-beta build.

However, the OS can certainly have a significant impact on something like video encoding: differences in the scheduler or system calls/APIs can do that. Here's a somewhat outdated Vista vs XP benchmark. The xvid and h.264 encoders are around 20% slower in Vista, and the impact is similar in some other cases, such as with WinRAR or UT2004. Differences of just a few percent can usually be ignored, but I find these significant. If somewhere between the release of Vista and W7 the maximum differences are lowered to around 5% compared to XP, whether with a service pack, new drivers or optimizations, I'd consider that good enough and possibly switch. After all, going from Win98 to XP also caused a drop in framerates, but was well worth it.

I wouldn't really expect any applications to run faster on Windows 7 unless the hardware was upgraded.

If that were true, then there shouldn't have been performance differences between XP and Vista, but there were. These differences continued on into the Vista SP 1 and XP SP3 upgrades.

Theoretically, there is a maximum "speed" that any application can run at. This is based upon the raw speed of the CPU, Memory, disks, graphics, and other subsystems, used in the most efficient manner. While no OS can ever achieve that, it is the function of the OS to maximize system performance.

System performance will always be a moving target, not just because of hardware changes or hardware options, but also because what is the best performance for a server differs from what is the best performance for a workstation.

As for the "Apple fanboys," they do have reason to poke fun. With each release of OS X, there have been performance improvements over the previous release; 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5. This has been improvements on the same physical hardware.

It appears that Microsoft has chosen to focus their work on improving the UI's responsiveness, or adding new bells and whistles, while not dealing with the performance issues that individual applications run into. While UI responsiveness can be helpful, if the application doesn't finish any faster, the UI being able to show you that it is still busy, doesn't make that much 'real' difference.

That's the aim of ZFS.

It provides a CRC check for EVERY sector written to on the disk, and confirms it is identical to the original copy. If it detects an inconsistency on write (or read), it will redirect the sector somewhere else.

It also allows you to 'scrub' the disk so that every sector is read and the CRC is verified. If there is an inconsistency, and the drive isn't RAIDed, it will show unrecoverable errors and which files will need to be restored from backup. If, however, you have RAIDed drives and it can self-repair, it will do so but still warn you that one (or more) of the disks showed Read errors.

As per: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/RAID-5-Doomed-2009,6525.html , as hard drives increase in size, they get less and less appealing for high reliable storage. One sector in every 100,000,000,000,000 bits read will show an unrecoverable read error. If you're not going back and verifying every sector (I set mine up weekly), then expect errors to show.

If noise is that big an issue, try getting rid of the fans entirely and submerging the heat producing parts of you computer in an oil bath.

and i particularly enjoy responding to 'is that a mac'? questions with 'better!' and show em the compiz desktop eye candy.

Compiz is behind Quartz in speed and quality. See DRI2 or run a 3D game and check how your whole UI slows down. It wouldn't happen on Quartz since it uses 2D GPU features instead 3D. But yes, the 3D candy is impressive for the untrained eye. I think it's the same with any other desktop technology like fonts, windows server, color calibration, resolution independence.. linux has it, but it's lagging in quality.

( a fun game is to go to the mac store and spec one up to how you'd like your generic pc to be, then be horrified at the running total! )

Tom's Hardware on mac prices is still the most detailed analysis: The Apple Mac Cost Misconception : Macs and Their Prices. Short story: not expensive, but buy upgrades in macsales instead Apple.

With the mac book backlash. The lack of mini updates and other stuff is there stuff going on at apple that we don't know about. Pystar laptop plans blow apple away? Mac OS 10.6 for all? A real desktop system? with a super high end mac pro in the works mac pro now at $2500 and up? and apple wants to get pystar out of the way so they can have a real desktop?

Also if apple buy Pystar and lets them make clones apple will forced to Support them? or at least that there os update will not mess the systems up.

Does Pystar have a case and apple wants to not have it go to court I hope they don't just take the money and run. Leveing us with a $700+ mini that has weak video gefore 8400m with out it's own ram + no firewire and a 2.5 hd will not work there. And a mac pro that starts at $2500+ with ddr3 ecc 1600.

a GeForce 9300 based desktop Looks like a nice desktop chip that apple can use a in the mini tower
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-nforce-730i,2044.html

With on board video and 1 x16 with 2 x1 pci-e slots useing the other 2 pci-e lanes for wifi and firewire.

So you can have a desktop staring at $600+ with on board video with add in video cards on top of that.

Well, there goes my plan for cooling with mineral oil!

What? Benchmarks don't lie. I can't find the ones for the 900mhz Celeron, but look at this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Atom-Efficient,1981-15.html

It's way slower than a 1.2ghz Celeron, which makes it seem like you're full of BS. Also, there's been a tremendous amount of positive hype behind the Atom, and I'm sure Intel makes a pretty decent margin on these chips since they aren't very expensive to make.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyperos-dram-hard-drive-block,1186.html