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This prompted me to take a look at the newer color laser printers available from a cost and quality comparision with inkjets.

Just happened to find a very recent article on Tom's Hardware dealing with this exact issue. Interesting reading.

Oh oh, don't forget Red Bull v. Coffee. Oh, wait, that would be retarded.

HJ

this is offtopic to the article.

ati 9600 is a pretty bad card.

You can probably get a 9700 pro for the same price off of ebay or something (I know as I have just been looking recently) and it is a lot better.

take a look at these results from toms hardware guide:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/ index.html

the 9700 pro scores a lot higher than the 9600 XT in (almost?) every benchmark.

surprisingly it is probably better than even an nvidia 6600 (non GT) card as well, making it a lot cheaper and still better.

What does WinFS stand for? Windows File System or Windows Future Storage.

I've seen both in the media recently:
Future Storage - (example, example , example )
File System - (example, example).

But then when I looked a little more, I found this. Will this end up being something that is constantly being corrected on Slashdot? :)

From this link a good average differential between a processor at load and idle is 40W. If you turn the computer off instead, that's maybe 80W. (Broad average over many computers).

Now Here we see that 2million years of computing time has been used, so (times 40W/hr) that comes to 700,000MWHr.

No the 2000 U.S. consumption of energy was ~21 billion MWHr. (Here, and trust the government to use quadrillions of BTUs as a unit). So to date, SETI has used 0.003% of U.S. annual energy consumption. And that's almost enough energy to power the City of Red Deer, Alberta for 17 months! Someone else can tell us how many libraries of congress you could have read with that much light.

Feel free to check my units and zeros, I've been wrong before, as long as someone can tell the Brits what a quadrillion is.

You've obviously never used a Pentium-based laptop. There is a reason why Apple is going to use the newer, cooler, mobile chips rather than Pentium chips.

Of course, it's really speculation that Apple is going to use those newer chips, but given that the timeframes for the chips' introduction and Apple's switch, it's not a big stretch...

Apple laptops can get warm, though, especially the newer, higher-clockrate ones. They're clearly pushing those G4s pretty hard. Oddly enough, though, there are no stories of Mac users burning themselves on their laptops...

Did everyone miss that? It's here: http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050803/index.h tml

Some people just continue to drink coffee or other caffeinated drinks in the evenings, albeit in lesser amounts, in order to satisfy the urge to do so without fulfilling any particular need for concentration. When this happens you're officially an addict.

More info here

Looks like Samsung is wooing Apple with a price reduction. Samsung also makes mp3 players. Seems like they would hoard the memory for themselves. Maybe they have figured out the sweet spot, in terms of profit, of how much to keep for themselves and how much to sell to the best selling brand.

In a post-keynote briefing to reporters, Intel vice president for the Digital Enterprise Group, Stephen Smith, provided some further details about the new architecture. He said Conroe's core may be given as few as 14 pipelines, as opposed to Pentium 4's current 31. He also said Conroe may, possibly, take on as many as four cores by early 2008, though no formal decision has been reached. When pressed about cache size, Smith indicated a possible 8 Mb cache for Conroe, but again, would not officially confirm.

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2504
http://theinquirer.net/?article=25623
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dX JsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNTAy
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review_print. php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNTA0
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review_print. php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNTAz
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050823_1331 23.html

I wouldn't be surprised if the board treated that oher jumper as another 2.7 and 2.7 fried the chip.

AMDs will fry easier than Intels in many cases. See the Tom's Hardware Guide story about heatsink failures:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20010917/

Quick summary:

INTEL P3: Crash, but survive
INTEL P4: CPU throttles down and then back up when the heatsink is replaced

The 2 AMD chips both went up in smoke, one destroying the motherboard in the process.

I agree that benchmarks are important. I explained in another post that a card with a higher fill rate and more bandwidth isn't always faster.

If you look at an OpenGL game such as this one http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/ vga-charts-06.html the 5900U beats the 9800 Pro by a greater margin than the 9800 Pro beat it in that DirectX benchmark you linked.

The stats _are_ a good indicator of performance in the same family. The performance of the 9700 through the 9800XT scales mostly according to fillrate and memory bandwidth.

If the CPU wars of the last 5-7 years have taught us nothing; it's that you really can't judge a product on stats alone. At some point you have to see it perform. If we went strictly by the Rojak tables, the 5900 Ultra is a clearly superior card to the Radeon 9800 Pro.


Radeon 9800 Pro 128-bits 380 MHz 3040 MTexels/s 256-bits DDR 340MHz 21.76GB/s
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 450 MHz 3600 MTexels/s 256-bits DDR 425 MHz 27.20 GB/s
The 9800 Pro has 1 additional vertex shader pipe, but the raw pixel pushing of the 5900U should be a good 15-20% faster than the Radeon.

Clearly that is not the case in the real world

A modern graphics card has so many complex and intricate features and tradeoffs for performance and power and production, looking at a handful of stats isn't even a good comparison when we're dealing with GPUs of the same family, much less a wide ranging comparison.

If you want to know how something performs, there is no substitute for benchmarks.

One of the earlier posts in the topic points you to http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/ index.html which seems to have what you are asking for. You are right, the submitted article isn't nearly as useful to buyers as the tomshardware article.

On the subject of Video Card RAM, the added onboard memory makes Little to No difference. (See Radeon X600 Pro 256/128 and 6200 TC32/64) As long as your card has at least 128MB onboard, it's not going to choke from memory problems.

On the subject of Video Card RAM, the added onboard memory makes Little to No difference. (See Radeon X600 Pro 256/128 and 6200 TC32/64) As long as your card has at least 128MB onboard, it's not going to choke from memory problems.

* I went to the latest review of VGA cards at Tom's Hardware.

* I chose the top 12 video cards from ATI and nVIDIA

* I created a spreadsheet which calculated the relative rankings of each card across about 30 different tests for a range of games/benchmarks. i.e. the top scoring card in a category got 100% and the remaining 11 cards were expressed as a fraction of the top score.

* I averaged the rankings for the 30 categories

* I used a local hardware search tool to find the current "buy it today" best prices for each of those cards.

* I divided the average ranking by the price to get a bang/buck ratio that can help to compare the cards. i.e. so a card that averaged 90% but costs AUD$600 would have a lower final score than a card that came in at 50% but only cost AUD$200

Unfortunately, the spreadsheet is at work but the 6600GT was a clear winner in terms of bang-for-buck.

All these 12 cards were good, and most of them were the only ones remaining in the extreme tests like high-res DOOMIII with AA sort-of-tests. So, even if a card only came in at 50% average, it was still able to work with all the latest games at reasonable frame rates.

This article does not provide benchmarks, just things like "transistor count" and the number of pixel pipelines. Check out http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/ index.html has the same information and benchmark charts.

I have an Intel D845PEBT2 desktop board that allows up to a 4% overclock in the BIOS. The feature is labelled something like 'Stability Test', but it bumps up the FSB and memory speeds.

I bought it back in late 2002. Here's a link from Tom's just in case you're the skeptical type.

Who writes this stuff? This is very very old news. MSI began this stuff http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030522/

It depends on the game, but the Athlon 64 usually beats the Pentium 4.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-06.html#opengl

The Opteron, high-end cousin of the Athlon 64, is a great chip for servers. We have a Sun V40z, and the guys I work with are always amazed at how fast it is, and we've only got single core processors -- with dual cores, it'll smoke just about anything:

http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/index.jsp

> The ThinkPad X-series uses 1.8" drives to cut down on weight and size.

Specifically the X40 series, the X30 series still use 2.5" drives, which are bigger but have many advantages. They're much faster, bigger, cheaper, and most importantly, there is competition from different manufacturers (Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate, WD, Samsung, Fujitsu, all interchangable). With 1.8" drives you're basically stuck with one manufacturer for a given laptop.

There are only two 1.8" HD manufacturers, Toshiba and Hitachi, and they use incompatible connectors. The Toshiba looks like a shrunken 2.5" drive, while Hitachi uses the same connector from the 2.5" drive mounted on the side of the drive. The IBM X40 uses the Hitachi connector, while Dell uses the Toshiba in the Lattitude X1. I think most ultraportable laptops with 1.8" drives use the Toshiba connector, but as they rarely mention the HD manufacturer, for each model you'd have to find someone who has opened it to find out. Same thing for media players, I'm pretty certain iPods use Toshibas while the Rio Karma has the Hitachi drive. To make matters even more confusing, Hitachi has introduced another incompatible connector for 1.8" drives ("ZIF connector"), which seems to be mainly marketed to media player manufacturers.

Yes, but until my car stereo accepts USB connections, I'll be burning CDs.

Check out the VR3 ( http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000855.php ) or the MP3OnChannel (http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20050324/ ).

I hope their new logo isn't as easily confused with a feminine hygine product.

Meanwhile, Intel's desktop dual core chips seem to offer much more aggressive pricing at this time. AMD's lowest price dual core chip, the X2 4200 is almost twice as expensive as Intel's lowest cost dual core processor. However, an interview with three AMD execs on PCPerspective.com claims that "AMD would eventually have lower priced Athlon X2 processors via the waterfall effect in the future".

Actually, if you read the write-up over at Tom's Hardware, you'll remember that Palladium was Microsoft's "Secure Coding" bit back in 2002 that was officially dropped in 2003. The Intel Trusted Platform is code-named "LaGrange". So yes, Palladium will not be in OS X for x86, though the hardware may make use of Intel's LaGrange technology. These guys just found a way around whatever protections are in the dev kit.

Besides, the case has been out for a long time now. So much for cutting edge info on /. Tom's has a review from 2004/01/15.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20040115/

Here are some alternative reviews and piccies while the site is slashdoted: dutch site, uk site, toms hw, japan.

ok its a google search, but usefull

If you even have to ask youself this, you shouldn't be here you should be here or possibly here

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050728_1520 37.html

Quite simply, nobody comes close to meeting their claimed specs

Tom's tells you that it is more important that the pixel be within 10% of the requested value before it should count as having changed at all - now that's a lie. Your eyes do not notice the pixel being 210 instead of 175 for 4ms, your eyes notice the complete and utter lack of ghosting.

Now, these manufacturers are playing number games here. They don't measure how long it takes to show the requested pixel shade, but rather how long it takes to pass the requested pixel shade. If you look at the oscilloscope, the LCD hits 175 in 4ms, but continues to rise to 210 for several ms past that. It'd be more honest to at least measure how long it takes to peak. The ISO/VESA standard measurement for these values don't reflect the speed (or lack thereof) of the display, either. White-black-white transitions aren't a typical usage pattern by any stretch of the imagination. And unfortunately since faster response rate sells, manufacturers have a lot of motivation to find new ways to fudge the results to give them an edge in the marketplace. Unfortunately LCD performance can't be measured with a single number (or two or three or...)

Now, I own an NEC Multisync LCD1760NX which was rated as a 16ms panel when I bought it. How much faster is that VX924? How much compared to the VP191b? With all these number games, I honestly have no way of knowing. I can assume one thing, though, the VX924 certainly isn't 4x faster, and probably not 2x faster, either.

what would a "real 12ms" be? the fact of the matter is that the response of an lcd is too complicated to sum up in a single metric.

The latest lcd panel is 4ms and is in fact 4ms. Look at this graph produced by THG Showing the pixel intensity changing from 0 to 210 in 4.3ms but since the requested value was 175 they dont count it as 4.3ms instead they wait until the pixel is 178. Now the mfg figured out how to get the pixel to change in 4ms they are damn well going to slap 4ms on the box.

It's not a lie it's just a semantic. Tom's tells you that it is more important that the pixel be within 10% of the requested value before it should count as having changed at all - now that's a lie. Your eyes do not notice the pixel being 210 instead of 175 for 4ms, your eyes notice the complete and utter lack of ghosting.

actually the viewsonic vx924 does in fact eliminate ghosting by responding in about 4-5ms. The tom's article pointed out that it still takes an avg of 16ms for the pixel to be within 10% of the requested color.

I have 3 of these things and I can assure you they are nothing short of amazing. Set the refresh rate to 85hz and compare side by side with a CRT and there is absolutely no ghosting what-so-ever.

Even the tom's article gives some credit here IMO they were way to calm about this monitor! people dont RTFA either, just look at the pictures and go "HA more lies!"

they aren't lies. get a vx924, set the refresh to 85hz and try it out.

Should I just say "yea, unless you want to run OS X", or leave it to someone else to feed your troll ;)

I actually want to take your off-hand witticism seriously, but first I want to make a point which I'm pretty sure you probably understand : If you can't run OS X on the hardware you're talking about, it's useless to someone who wants to run OS X. It doesn't matter how cheap or fast it is, it doesn't run OS X, so it's not relevant to the discussion, unless the discussion is "why you should stop using OS X and use something else". I don't mean to sound harsh or be annoying when I say that, but think about it for a minute- there's something really lame about your post, at least in the context of this thread. The lame thing is that your post is completely off-topic. It adds nothing useful to the discussion as written. Include the words "forget about OS X" and suddenly your post is less lame, somehow, though still slightly off-topic.

Really, if you want to run Linux, and not have the option of OS X, I agree with you completely... although, that's a pretty expensive chip and graphic card, so depending on what other components you put in your system, it's not likely to be less than $2500 anyway, and as such not *much* less expensive... please don't tell me your spending over $1500 on a CPU and graphics card and less than $1000 on everything ( mobo, memory, HD, DVD-R, power supply, case, sound card, keyboard, mouse, etc ) else in the system combined... or if you do, please tell me you didn't skimp on the power supply and motherboard, at least...

again, I don't disagree ( given the whole implicit "don't want to run OS X" thing ) but the 'more likely lower price' thing isn't a sure bet. On the other hand, it is somewhat nice to be able to pick-and-choose your own components, but doing so is rarely about price...

Heck, why build your own. Stuff like this $1999 pre-built system look pretty tempting. Of course, you still have to add in a DVD-RW and a few other goodies, and toss out the Radeon X800 they throw in, but it comes with a gig of RAM, so what the heck. Of course, still no OS X. You know, it's a real shame that M$ had to crush NeXTStep Intel with those anticompetitive OEM licensing agreements, or we might not have this problem.

I also applaud your choice of AMD over Intel, but Tom's found the Intel Pentium 840 Extreme Edition to be a bit better with regard to actual multi-application performance. If you're looking to run a single app, like a game, though, the AMD is clearly the better choice. It's what I'd go with, except for a couple of details. I'm not looking to spend a couple thousand dollars on a high-end machine to run either Linux or Windows. I'm looking to run Linux on my old PII, and looking to avoid Windows as much as possible. If I want to get real work done, most of my tasks aren't too CPU intensive, so my several-years-old flat-panel iMac gets the job done quite nicely. Some day after my kid gets out of college, I'll pick up a machine 20x as powerful as any of these for a couple hundred bucks and slip it into my wallet... and be glad I didn't blow my cash on hardware I didn't need. But I don't want to deal with a sea of viruses and worms, and I don't want to have the system my wife and 3-year-old son use be a custom build job, so I'm not using Windows and I'm not using Linux on that machine. I'm using OS X, and your suggestion is, in that context a useless troll, as well-meaning and humorous as it might otherwise be.

Should I just say "yea, unless you want to run OS X", or leave it to someone else to feed your troll ;)

I actually want to take your off-hand witticism seriously, but first I want to make a point which I'm pretty sure you probably understand : If you can't run OS X on the hardware you're talking about, it's useless to someone who wants to run OS X. It doesn't matter how cheap or fast it is, it doesn't run OS X, so it's not relevant to the discussion, unless the discussion is "why you should stop using OS X and use something else". I don't mean to sound harsh or be annoying when I say that, but think about it for a minute- there's something really lame about your post, at least in the context of this thread. The lame thing is that your post is completely off-topic. It adds nothing useful to the discussion as written. Include the words "forget about OS X" and suddenly your post is less lame, somehow, though still slightly off-topic.

Really, if you want to run Linux, and not have the option of OS X, I agree with you completely... although, that's a pretty expensive chip and graphic card, so depending on what other components you put in your system, it's not likely to be less than $2500 anyway, and as such not *much* less expensive... please don't tell me your spending over $1500 on a CPU and graphics card and less than $1000 on everything ( mobo, memory, HD, DVD-R, power supply, case, sound card, keyboard, mouse, etc ) else in the system combined... or if you do, please tell me you didn't skimp on the power supply and motherboard, at least...

again, I don't disagree ( given the whole implicit "don't want to run OS X" thing ) but the 'more likely lower price' thing isn't a sure bet. On the other hand, it is somewhat nice to be able to pick-and-choose your own components, but doing so is rarely about price...

Heck, why build your own. Stuff like this $1999 pre-built system look pretty tempting. Of course, you still have to add in a DVD-RW and a few other goodies, and toss out the Radeon X800 they throw in, but it comes with a gig of RAM, so what the heck. Of course, still no OS X. You know, it's a real shame that M$ had to crush NeXTStep Intel with those anticompetitive OEM licensing agreements, or we might not have this problem.

I also applaud your choice of AMD over Intel, but Tom's found the Intel Pentium 840 Extreme Edition to be a bit better with regard to actual multi-application performance. If you're looking to run a single app, like a game, though, the AMD is clearly the better choice. It's what I'd go with, except for a couple of details. I'm not looking to spend a couple thousand dollars on a high-end machine to run either Linux or Windows. I'm looking to run Linux on my old PII, and looking to avoid Windows as much as possible. If I want to get real work done, most of my tasks aren't too CPU intensive, so my several-years-old flat-panel iMac gets the job done quite nicely. Some day after my kid gets out of college, I'll pick up a machine 20x as powerful as any of these for a couple hundred bucks and slip it into my wallet... and be glad I didn't blow my cash on hardware I didn't need. But I don't want to deal with a sea of viruses and worms, and I don't want to have the system my wife and 3-year-old son use be a custom build job, so I'm not using Windows and I'm not using Linux on that machine. I'm using OS X, and your suggestion is, in that context a useless troll, as well-meaning and humorous as it might otherwise be.

Picture the idea of a processor that uses less than 30W max (give you a hint, no other current processor comes close),

No other processor, eh? Take a good, long look at those Winchester core power measurements. 33w for a 2.2 GHz processor, full-load, and 27w for a 1.8GHz, full-load. They sip much less than 10w when idle under Cool n Quiet, similar to the Pentium M.

While the PM uses less power, the Athlon 64 is certainly a close second. Now, take into account that the newer revisions of the A64 offer lower power consumption, 64-bit capability, an on-chip memory controller, and SSE3, and you see just how competitive the A64 is.

I believe what you meant to say is: no current Pentium 4 comes close.

and outperforms similarly speced processors without overclocking.

Typically, the PM is not competitve in applications that require strong floating point (and no, games don't typically require as strong of floating point performance as most people think). In all other applications, it is roughly 1:1 with the Athlon 64 in terms of performance per clock, and roughly 1.5:1 with the P4.

And at least according to Tom's Hardware, with overclocking it easily outperforms every processor on the market in most areas.

You can overclock A64 parts to impressive heights, especially with the latest core revisions.

Actual measurements of system power consumption, running a Pentium-M on a Pentium-IV mobo, have been done. That configuration consumes much less than a comparable Pentium IV system.

Not to say there isn't even more room for improvement. But I, for one, am impressed.

Exactly. Maybe the Centrino is slightly more efficient, but it comes down to VCore in the end, and if you're undervolting your XP-M to 1.25V or lower then it's only using up to 25 Watts, according to http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20030507/.

I'm running a dual XP-M system and they're both volted at 1.35 VCore and running at 2400+ speed (1866MHz). Pretty comparable to the Centrino I'd say given the figures I've seen.

They're dirt chip at the moment, as are Socket A motherboards, and you don't need to spend money on the socket converter.

Pentium-M 778 - 1.6 GHz - TDP of 10 watts
Pentium-M 780 - 2.26 GHz - TDP of 27 watts
Celeron 380 - 1.6 Ghz - TDP of 21 watts

Pentium-M 778 - 1.6 GHz - TDP of 10 watts
Pentium-M 780 - 2.26 GHz - TDP of 27 watts
Celeron 380 - 1.6 Ghz - TDP of 21 watts

How is this news? Tom's Hardware had an article on this 2 months ago. In their benchmarks, the Pentium M out-performed the top of the line Athon64s and Pentium 4s in games. Read the article.

Over at Tom's from a few weeks ago. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/index.htm l Redundant yet?


No. The story will not be redundant until next week, when the story is duped on Slashdot.

Toms's Hardware has a great article on Pentium M's performance. It's definitely worth a read.

Over at Tom's from a few weeks ago. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/index.htm l Redundant yet?

Tom's Hardware is currently stress testing power supplies. One of their most recent tests involved a passively cooled power supply.

Due to the cooling concept of no ventilator, very high temperatures of more than 150.8 F (66 C) are produced on the blue lacquered outer surface of the power supply unit.

Ouch!

It's been done, more or less.

About two thirds of the blame for the crazy heat/power situation can be laid squarely at Intel's feet, and most of that blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the stupid, sacrifice-anything-to-get-another-megahertz, power-gobbling Pentium IV.

But things may be changing - the P6's heir, the 'Dothan' Pentium M - offers blistering performance for a small fraction of the power consumption of the Pentium IV.

They clocked up a 770 model Pentium M and it outperformed an extreme edition at lower temps. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/index.htm l tfa if anyone is interested :)