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I think the requirements are a bit low, if you compare them to http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_ 2007/page21.html.

But then, the content is somewhat different.

What's the lesson?

The lesson is your friend should have overclocked his E6600 to 3.0GHz so that we have a fair comparison. Your anecdotal evidence aside, even if we jump the X2 3200+ EE benchmarks by 26% (assuming a linear increase in performance, which doesn't generally happen) the E6600 is still outperforming your machine handily: see here.

Intel's $266 Q6600 also gets a 5.9: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_ 2007/page39.html#cpu_index

Hah - I can answer both of these.

1. There are PCI-e 1x gigabit NICs and some of 1x video cards around. I think I've seen some 1x RAID cards as well, but I wouldn't swear to it.

I've got a PCI-e 1x gigabit NIC I put into machines without onboard gigabit - performance and CPU usage are both excellent. Gigabit on PCI tends to saturate the PCI bus and have much higher CPU usage - you should always check that any onboard gigabit NIC is PCI-e.

2. Tweaktown did some comparisons of a 7300GT on 1x and 16x - the results show significant differences:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1045/pci_e_x1_gra phics_performance_with_galaxy_geforce_7300gt/index .html

Tom's Hardware have two articles comparing 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x by masking off pins on graphics cards. The performance graphs are very interesting.

Original article - X600XT, X800XT, 6800GT
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/22/sli_is_comi ng/index.html

Newer article - X1900XTX, 8800GTS
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_express _scaling_analysis/

The basic conclusion is that you only need 4x for lower-end resolutions and quality, but if you're pushing high-end cards you really want 16x.

Hah - I can answer both of these.

1. There are PCI-e 1x gigabit NICs and some of 1x video cards around. I think I've seen some 1x RAID cards as well, but I wouldn't swear to it.

I've got a PCI-e 1x gigabit NIC I put into machines without onboard gigabit - performance and CPU usage are both excellent. Gigabit on PCI tends to saturate the PCI bus and have much higher CPU usage - you should always check that any onboard gigabit NIC is PCI-e.

2. Tweaktown did some comparisons of a 7300GT on 1x and 16x - the results show significant differences:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1045/pci_e_x1_gra phics_performance_with_galaxy_geforce_7300gt/index .html

Tom's Hardware have two articles comparing 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x by masking off pins on graphics cards. The performance graphs are very interesting.

Original article - X600XT, X800XT, 6800GT
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/22/sli_is_comi ng/index.html

Newer article - X1900XTX, 8800GTS
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_express _scaling_analysis/

The basic conclusion is that you only need 4x for lower-end resolutions and quality, but if you're pushing high-end cards you really want 16x.

The opteron is actually faster, noticeably faster in fact. Or atleast it's slower equivalent was faster so I can only imagine the 3ghz model is even more powerful. http://www.tomshardware.com/2003/04/22/duel_of_the _titans/page18.html#database_test_mysql_32352__32_ bit_suse_enterprise_8. You're still 100% correct that the test isn't really good with using two proc's from different companies at the same clock speed. They should have first figured out a good matchup in performance before testing engergy usage.

I spent three years as a senior editor at InfoWorld, and I certainly have a lot of criticisms to offer about the tech trade media industry. But I can say, with absolute certainty, that when trade media outlets like InfoWorld disappear you will all be sorry.

It depends. Tech trade media outlets tend to provide three basic services:

1. News related to products and the industry.
2. Product reviews.
3. Editorial content.

Yeah, you heard me right. Is the media industry going to shit? Corporate media is on the blame list, for sure. But first on the list is you. Have you ever written your Congressman? Probably not. But even if you have, it's probably futile to ask that you write to your favorite media outlets and ask -- even beg -- them to cover real news, and not just fluff pieces and fake stories.

I spent 15 years writing letters and comments via both paper letters and the provided online forums (I was fairly active in places like InfoWorld Electric before Sandy trashed the place, on Extreme Tech before management replaced the good forum software with a piece of crap, etc.), trying to let publications know as a Mac and OS/2 user (and more recently as an OS/2 and Linux user) that I did not appreciate the Windows-centric nature of most of their articles, and that I did not like their tendency to review inferior software from a few select large vendors instead of also including smaller (but often more capable) solutions from the freeware and shareware worlds.

I got nowhere, and I eventually got sick of it, so I now have ZERO subscriptions to printed tech media. Zero.

Technology media went to shit in the early 1990's. To hell with them.

Yes, this low-end dual-core is half the price, but not half the performance. Therefor a real bargain.

Note that 9 days ago, the Athlon 64 X2 4000+ was about $100 before AMD's July 9 price cut to $73 (AMD list price).

Tom's Hardware shows the Pentium Dual-Core 2160 outperforming an Athlon 64 X2 4000+ in open-source audio/video encoders and Photoshop. I'd like to find better performance comparisons between these two CPUs, but most of the good sites seem to ignore the Pentium E21xx series in favor of the Core 2 Duo E4xxx series (Allendale, 2MB L2 cache).

Here is another by Tom's hardware, covers benchmarking the 6650 as well, and compares to all the current AMD and Intel chips in a whole wack of different benchmarks.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_ 2007/index.html

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=4 32&pid=2
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel_Core_2_E xtreme_QX6850
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/538/1/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_ 2007/

This two-year-old article begs to differ.

Read it and weep.

IBM'er says Vista's RAM sweet spot is 4GB
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011523

Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=29 17&p=4

"While it's very difficult to benchmark the impact of SuperFetch well, in our usage of Vista if you have enough memory it is a tremendous ally. Honestly SuperFetch is the biggest reason, in our opinion, to move to the x64 version of Vista so you can use even more memory. Although we found that 2GB of memory is still quite passable under Vista, the new sweet spot if you happen to multitask a lot is 4GB - in no small part due to how well SuperFetch utilizes the additional memory. Do keep in mind that you'll need to make sure your motherboard has proper BIOS support for 4GB and also make sure Vista x64 has driver support for all of your peripherals before committing to the move....

How much RAM do you really need for Windows Vista? We recommend a bare minimum of 1GB of memory for all Vista users, 2GB if you're a power user but don't have a lot running at the same time, and 4GB if you hate the sound of swapping to disk...."

Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista /page11.html

"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. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications).

Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.

There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications. Both ATI and Nvidia will offer OpenGL support in upcoming driver releases, but it remains to be seen if and how other graphics vendors or Microsoft may offer it.

We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate solutions to this issue.

There is good news as well: we did not find evidence that Windows Vista's new and fancy AeroGlass interface consumes more energy than Windows XP's 2D desktop. Although our measurements indicate a 1 W increase in power draw at the plug, this is too little of a difference to draw any conclusions. Obviously, the requirements for displaying all elements in 3D, rotating and moving them aren't enough to heat up graphics processors. This might also be a result of Windows Vista's more advanced implementation of ACPI 2.0 (and parts of 3.0), which allows the control of power of system components separately.

Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to our 32

Flood the server room with vegetable oil.

Personally, I've remained unimpressed by current technologies for "faster" drives. For example, look at these benchmarks of Hitachi's 1 TB solution, compared with many other drives. The only significant difference between the 1 TB and the 15K raptor is the access latency time, which is half as much in the Raptor. However, just like in physical memory, latency doesn't seem to matter at all, as you can see in the benchmarks of file reading and writing, system bootup times and all the other benchmarks - the performance difference is insignificant at best. Who cares if your system boots up .9 seconds faster? Page 8 has some nice theoretical and entirely irrelevant differences in performance.

No, the true future of hard drives will be in reliability. Perhaps we'll have hard drives with four platters internally RAID1-ed. The spinning drive thing has it's limits in capacity and speed. I doubt we'll be able to go much further than 10 TB per 3.5-inch drive and I doubt we'll be able to spin a drive much faster than 15k RPM. Hell, a manufacturer could internally RAID-0 a drive for a performance boost...I hope somebody is working on that.

Say your processor overheats and kills the temperature diode(or it just dies due to faulty hardware)...oops now the processor can't know that it's getting too hot and throttle(slow down) itself. Not to say that would be very very bad...especially if you overclock your processor(upping voltage anyone?) which I see many people with C2D are doing. Also if you want to have an automatic fan that speeds up as your processor heats up and your diode is borked, good luck. I was reading about this on Tom's Hardware forums a while ago. I wouldn't call this a 'show stopper' but I certainly would try not to take the heatsink or fan off...

One very important point is that Vista does have much higher RAM requirements than XP, so if you have only enough RAM for XP to run well, Vista won't run well, and you'll have to add more. RAM is cheap, so if you're going to go and buy Vista, it would be silly not to buy some extra RAM at the same time.

With drive sizes of today, and failure rates... For my money its only RAID 6.

Pros:
You can used mismatched drive sizes as long as the largest drive is your parity(s).
You can add drives up to your raid group size.
Using RAID 6 you have diagonal/horizontal parity and can recover from a double disk failure.

Cons:
Without a fancy controller speed can be an issue.

Here is some more info...

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/02/safer_6_for _raid_controllers/
http://www.netapp.com/ftp/netapp-raid-dp.pdf

(I just like the chart in the netapp info.)

I used Tom's hardware's article to create a four disk RAID 5 array on my Windows XP Pro box. It does away with all the hardware limitations that conventional setups have and there's no need to pay for a dedicated controller.

This means that instead of downloading special drivers for the controller I only need to modify three Windows files in the case of a reinstall. I don't have to stick to one brand/model of RAID controller (or to some of the new mainboard chipsets that support RAID 5 as well). Featurewise it does not support RAID level migration. On the other hand it recognizes disks of a RAID setup automatically no matter how they are connected to the computer (e.g. right now I have two connected through the mainboard's SATA and two through a SATA controller, but I could replace the controller/mainboard, replug them and it would still work); this was the feature that made me decide to go for it. The software overhead is not noticeable (3GHz P-IV). Performance is on par with hardware RAID setups. Only things that's a bit annoying is that when for one reason or another the machine reboots without shutting down (power outage/crash) it will 'rebuild' the array when it boots back into Windows, which takes a few hours. While the system is still usable copying files from/to the array will take quite a while.

I've already partitioned the array into four partitions. My play for increasing its size is simply swapping it one by one with bigger HDDs and then creating a new partition with the new unused space. I believe that should work with any RAID 1/5/6 array, be it hardware or software. One might even combine the partitions afterwards using Partition Magic, but I 'm not a big fan of huge partitions. Hope that helps. Anyone else with Software RAID experience? I'd love to see Linux support for it, that would most certainly mean indefinite support (right now I'm stuck with Windows XP, don't know whether Vista supports it, but I'm not really willing to find out anyway seeing as Vista doesn't increase performance/usability at all.) ;)

It's a well known fact that graphics drivers are not running all that well under Vista these days. Microsoft changed the driver model and so it's taking a little while for everyone learn the model. Check out the article on Tom's Hardware.

JOhn

Quote: "VRM 11 Required For 45-nm Processors" "One reason for varying processor support is the voltage regulator circuit of 3-series motherboards. It needs to be VRM 11.0 compliant, which is key when it comes to 45-nm processor support. Let me say that the problem isn't decreasing voltage levels, but strong power fluctuation due to millions of transistors clocking up and down, or switching on and off. Remember that future quad-core processors will be able to dynamically adjust clock speeds for each core individually, and switch cores on and off depending on the workload." "This also means that any 965 motherboard that is VRM 11 compliant can technically support 45-nm processors. VRM 11 says that the circuit is programmed using 8-bit voltage IDs (VID), allowing for 0.00625 V voltage increments. The minimum operating voltage isn't 0.8375 V (as in VRM 10), but goes down all the way to 0.5 V. VRM 11 also comes with the option to share the load across more phases, and the circuit runs so-called dual edge modulation, which means that the controllers send multiple impulses to the transistors while using smaller capacitors. The goal isn't just to provide smaller voltage increments and less voltage for the 45-nm processor generation, but also to provide sufficient power at voltage levels that may switch frequently. This can be done by specifying tight slew rates." http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/05/21/intel_intro s_3-series_chipsets_with_fsb1333_and_ddr3/page4.ht mlTom's Hardware "Intel Intros 3-Series Chipsets with FSB1333 and DDR3"

Here's some benchmarks including db for the gigabyte iram (dram over sata). It would be hard to believe that db access is not i/o bound. Raid'ed atlas' are fast drives, and slugs in comparison. AFA ram duration goes, dram does not suffer the decay issues of flash, but is more expensive. The iram is the cheapest of the ram based sshd's, but not the fastest... something like the Texas Memory Systems Tera-RAMSAN is much faster.

Also see http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_ your_pocket/

according to Tom's Hardware. There is no difference in power consumption between XP and Vista w/ Aero.

Have a look at the CPU chart and especially the F.E.A.R. benchmark - a top of the line C2D has almost double the framerate of a low-end athlon 64, although every CPU is playably smooth http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&m odel1=430&model2=494&chart=169

This is at moderate resolution and max image quality, so it's a pretty representative benchmark of normal play (for someone with a monster card anyway, F.E.A.R. chugs for me).

There are a lot of variables involved when you also consider you can turn down image quality in various ways that you may not even notice when playing, but it's clear that having a better CPU makes some difference. In terms of enjoyment-per-dollar it's impossible to judge - personally I'm having a blast playing the Bookworm Adventures demo on my Pentium 3...

I think that you're overlooking other architectural and production reasons for there being comparably less cache on the Athlon64 dies. My (single-core) Turion64 has 1024 KiB of L2 cache, and came out shorly before AMD shrunk their cache sizes and moved to DDR2 memory.

The issue has two potential causes: one is smaller silicon die space allows AMD to sell more chips to Dell, low-end whitebox builders and enthusiasts, which must also come with the admission that the K8 architecture was never going to hold on to the performance crown after the arrival of Core. The other is that the on-die memory interface with DDR2 memory causes so small a performance gain for having larger L2 cache that it's not even worth the branding pissing contest (and it's also possible that the Turion64 X2 has 256KiB for energy efficiency reasons). If you want to compare the Athlon 64 FX-53 Clawhammer and Athlon 63 3800+ Newcastle -- same generation, clock speed and memory frequency -- at http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html, there is a benefit for having the 1 MiB L2 on the Clawhammer over the Newcastle, albeit a marginal one.

I'll contest that the Pentium D was a Pentium III, but was instead a dual-processor Prestcott Pentium 4 without the HyperThreading capabilities. I'll also contest that your AMD64 3000+ would be a huge amount better for the additional cache. On-die cache was a trick Intel pulled to try and improve the Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Xeon and Itanium perforance, and while it helps performance, I'm not convinced huge L2 cahces are essential.

I'm about to build a machine. According to Tom's Hardware, if you want to build a gaming machine these days, you have to go core 2 duo. AMD is posting a loss because they can't compete right now. Not news.

Notice also that the 8600 GTS is compared against X1950 Pro which is a sub-$200 card currently, lowest price I have seen was $175. And 8600 GT is compared against X1650 XT, which is sub-$150 card. MSRP of 8600 GTS and 8600 GT according to the article is $239 and $199 respectively. Better price wise comparison would be 8600 GTS against X1950XT 256Mb and 8600 GT against X1950 Pro. Also the article does not compare these cards against the NVidia's older generation cards, like 7950GT which is around the same price point than 8600 GTS.

Of course the DX10 technology affects cost, but either way it would be more fair comparison if the cards around the same price point were compared as it would show how much DX9 performance you are sacrificing to have DX10 hardware. As these cards are on the cast of affordable gamer cards, the bang-per-buck performance is what most gamers want to know.

Also comparison against the 8800 GTS card would've been helpful as the 8800 GTS has attained the $300 price point.

Tom's hardware has IMHO better review about these cards. I would suggest that everyone interested about these cards check that review also.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/04/17/geforce_860 0/

I'd take those Tomshardware VGA charts with a grain of salt- their SLI performance listing is still broken.

Here's a useful chart showing the general hierarchy of videocards, also from tomsharware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/04/09/the_best_ga ming_video_cards_for_the_money/page7.html

Tom's hardware has the same feature. In addition to the various benchmarks, they also have a price/performance ratio which is pretty interesting:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html

Tom's Hardware has a great chart system: http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html

I'm sure those will appear on there eventually.

An excerpt from a demo by the Munich-based THG lab: "Not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil - but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components."

NEC has a display based on this: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10/28/a_revolutio n/
Unfortunately, it is roughly $6,000.

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil - but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components....

has been done before. I don't know if I'd ever want to deal with one.

Here is a Tom's Hardware Guide article that shows how to do it: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_t he_fans/index.html By the way, perhaps PCW wrote about this Very-PC oil submerged server on on 4 Apr 2007. "First oil submerged server to go on sale" http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/news/ 2187185/first-oil-submerged-server-sale This article also contains a link to a home enthusiast oil submerged PC.

Ask and ye shall receive: Wall-Sized 3D Displays: The Ultimate Gaming Room

You're so wrong I wish it was funny.

I've seen many 19" (and 20") LCD monitors with a native resolution of 1600x1200.

In fact, here's a great Guide to Choosing the Right 19" LCD Monitor, from 3 years ago that reviews 19" LCD monitors with various aspect ratios.

As for 16:9 LCD monitors, here's another great article.

While I worked at a computer recycling company, we had a contract with a large monitor manufacturer (birds logo) and I had the opportunity to see and test many different types of LCD TVs, monitors, and some LCD displays that were very suitable for both. In short, you might want to avoid the rash sweeping generalizations that characterised your post.

SuperFetch will pre-load applications into main memory according to usage patterns. Using a ReadyBoost-enabled hard drive or USB memory stick, Vista will load the app files onto flash memory. From first access to second access, load times can go down by 75% or more because flash memory and SDRAM have nanosecond access times.

A quick Google search for "Vista superfetch" found Tom's Hardware did a review.

Summary at this link; pages 1-5 show graphs with the results.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vis ta-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page6.html

Page 5 with comparison graphs
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vis ta-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page5.html

SuperFetch will pre-load applications into main memory according to usage patterns. Using a ReadyBoost-enabled hard drive or USB memory stick, Vista will load the app files onto flash memory. From first access to second access, load times can go down by 75% or more because flash memory and SDRAM have nanosecond access times.

A quick Google search for "Vista superfetch" found Tom's Hardware did a review.

Summary at this link; pages 1-5 show graphs with the results.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vis ta-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page6.html

Page 5 with comparison graphs
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vis ta-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page5.html

OK, now don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of MS bloat, but I think we need a reality check here:

1. I run Vista on a laptop with 512MB and IT IS FINE. That isn't to say that I would encourage home users to do anything else while they use Photoshop on such a set up, but if it is OK for me, then it should be OK for the average Joe.

2. The memory usage indicator in the task manager is misleading in Vista. Vista has a feature called "SuperFetch" that attempts to preemptively load data from the HD into RAM. (Here is a good writeup - just ignore the ReadyBoost stuff - http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vis ta-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/). So, if you have 2GB od RAM and the memory usage when idle is 1.11GB (as it is on mine at the moment) that DOES NOT mean that Vista is using 1.11GB of RAM at idle. In fact, this is easily demonstrates in two ways. First, if I open Photoshop, Mathematica, and , say, Visual Studio (for good measure) my physical memory usage does not change from 1.11GB. Second, my laptop uses a different amount of memory when idle. So it looks like Vista will only use SuperFetch when it would not put your memory consumption over 50% (a guess on my part, but my limited data support it), and will then readily free that memory when you actually need it for something.

Anyway, again, I am not arguing that Vista (et. al.) is not bloated, or that SuperFetch isn't stupid (it might be...I'm not sure what I think), or for good measure that Vista's DRM doesn't make it 'defective by design'. I just think it needs saying that it simply is NOT TRUE that your machine with less than 1GB RAM will write in agony if you install Vista. Mine doesn't, and 'evidence' to the contrary gained by looking at the free memory of an idle Vista system is very misleading.

Rejoice!

Or you could get an internal FLASH drive, and its read speed is at 49MB/s (according to http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventiona l_hard_drive_obsoletism/) and then just get a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter

There's a benchmarks test for the 32GB Samsung SSD here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventiona l_hard_drive_obsoletism/index.html

The drive's performance seems to be limited only by it's interface (which in this case was ATA/60, not ATA/100 or SATA3). The most telling difference is the I/O results - it achieved around 2000 operations per second, where the mechanical drives peaked at about 50.

Advantage of not having moving parts: huge.

I'm not sure how the heat conductivity of sterling silver would compare. Being 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper, linear interpolation suggests that it would be pretty good, but I'm not sure of the details. Perhaps alloys scatter phonons more.

Some Vista Vs. XP info:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista /page11.html#conclusion_ko_for_windows_vista

"Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP."