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IMO, It just doesn't look as attractive as an iPod.. only Apple can make hardware so sexy, and they (Dell) had to come up with something different to be "original". Unfortunately the iPod probably ranks as the world's sexiest MP3 player, and Dell can only settle for place 2, at best. And the way the thing looks, it didn't make it into the top-10 list.

No amount of kernel tweaking is going to improve 2D acceleration of XFree86 drivers you are using..

To see how Linux compares to Win2k at cranking out the raw frames, even though the Nvidia driver used it rather old now: Quake 3 Linux vs Windows

If your GUI is slow in Linux, it's the fault of the toolkit and the drivers (probably drivers)

All we need now are 1.8" Hard Drives with SATA interfaces! And Nano-ITX cases with suitable power supplies.

Here you go! :-)

That's really cool that it's working for you. However, 6 to 10 MB/s is rather slow. I get 20MB/s with my Adaptec 1200a with two mirrored drives and that's considered poor performance.

The theoretical speed for 33mhz/32bit PCI is 132MB/s so an ATA/133 disk should be getting nearly full speed (depending on read/write method - some file systems are obviously faster than others).

The 3Ware 8 and 12 channel SATA RAID controllers are 66mhz/64bit PCI which yields speeds of 528MB/s. If you were to RAID 5 a set of eight ATA133 disks you should be able to get speeds in the hundreds of megabytes per second.

Looking at the graph on this page you'll see that the lowest reported speed is still twice as fast as yours. And the high end speeds with no redundancy are nearly 80MB/s.

Companies such as ID Software, who are responsible for titles like Quake3 and Unreal Tournament 2003, are not ready to jump onto the 64-bit bandwagon.

Two big mistakes ... but I guess if it's not running on Microsoft(tm) Windows(tm) it does not exist, even if 64bit Windows(tm) is not available yet.

Midway through the article we see this. What's this, chopped liver?

"Not yet available: software for 64 bits

Although AMD has published a list with many details on the Athlon-64 support, there are few software publishers who plan over the medium term to offer applications for true 64-bit operation.

In video the Divx encoder for MPEG-4 will be available shortly in a final version for 64-bit. Game producers in general are also hesitant: although according to AMD, producers like Epic, Valve, Crytek and SCI offer games based on 64-bit code. Companies such as ID Software, who are responsible for titles like Quake3 and Unreal Tournament 2003, are not ready to jump onto the 64-bit bandwagon.

In what timeframe Microsoft will be able to bundle its final version of Windows XP 64 with systems is currently unknown. However, we can assume that an operating system will be ready before summer 2004. The pre-alpha version of Windows XP 64 that we use came with only a few drivers integrated."

Tom's hardware has got another article, called The Intel v. AMD Performance War: You Lose , about the more cynical, money-making sides of the launch. Perhaps it's a bit conspiratory, but certainly worth a read, as it raises many valid points.

HardOCP
Tom's hardware
Ace's Hardware
As you would expect, no chip is dominate. though the more interesting thing for me than the nip and tuck between $800 CPUs, is the Athlon64 3200+ performs right there with the 3.2C in mosts lets. Not bad considering it retails for more than $100 less.

Here's a mfr link and a write-up at Tom's Hardware. Here's a website detailing one person's experiences with it.

Here's a mfr link and a write-up at Tom's Hardware. Here's a website detailing one person's experiences with it.

Don't knock it, even if its operating at 1/3 the cpu bus, an extra 2MB of level 3 cache will give a significant boost to things like video games and many other interactive cpu intensive applications.

"...the top-model Xeon MP with a 2-MB L3 cache and 2.8 GHz costs $3692. "
...
"Our benchmark tests, which exactly reproduce workstation usage with appropriate applications, show that the additional L3 cache hardly adds any speed. Popular 3D software, such as 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D and Lightwave, show no improvement in performance."
...
"To anyone faced with the choice of the dual Xeon 3.06 with or without the L3 cache, we would recommend the version without the additional cache. The additional cost is not justified."

Perhaps I'm confused here, but I remember TomsHardware doing an article on the new Barton processors with double the cache (512k) didnt produce really noticable performance increases in most 'high end user' applications (gaming/video encoding.

Could Intel be planning a compiler that would utilize this cache??

If it performs anything like this, then I'd say its useless and hardly worth the premium price its sure to cost.

With September 22nd drawing nigher, what the hell is Intel thinking?

... with 1MB of L3. The results weren't that exciting.

See Don't Touch that Radio Button, You're on Billboard Detection for a freely accessible version of this story. It sounds like the system can detect leakage from car radio antennas, although some people are skeptical of its accuracy.

I'd rather Apple do it right, than be first. Microsoft's BT keyboard is reputed to suck.

Hint: If you have to use MS's BT adaptor, you might as well not make it BT. What were they thinking? "Oooh! My foot! What a great target! Allow me to shoot it, a lot of times."

I saw 3-4x performance gains on Redhat 8.0, Xeon 2.8GHz, 4GB ECC.

3-4x compared to what? That's a simple question... care to answer it?

My server was a nice Altus 130 with dual Athlon 2600MP and 4 Gb of ram, and a nice, EDA vendor supported Red Hat 7.2. Now, I happen to know that the Athlon CPUs tends to get starved since the CPU-Memory bus isn't quick enough to keep it up for some things, like verilog simulations, or on various benchmark reports that you can find at various sites. That's why even my old Sun Blade 1000s with only 600 Mhz CPUs was able to keep up. The Suns have a better memory bus. A P4 with the 800 Mhz bus would do better that the Athlons, and let the greater CPU power show. The 533 Mhz bus wasn't really different that the Athlon.

This was VerilogXL, NCVerilog and Design Compiler.

We run Modelsim and VCS. So? I might believe NCVerilog would be Modelsim, but VCS?

Your FUD doesn't hold water "anonymous coward".

There is FUD flying alright, but its mainly anti-Sun FUD coming from you. Well, that might be a little harsh. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume that you are ignorant and unfamiliar with your vendors plans and supported tools. Since I'm in a charitable mood I'll help you out.

Why don't you try visiting DeepChip? You will find, if you read carefully, that Linux is far from a universal win, although there are many success stories. Unfortunately many of the success stories sound sort of like yours-- "I have a hot, brand new Linux box that beats some sort of old Sun!! Linux RULES!!" If you cast your net wider to check FPGA sites, and various other ones, the story is about the same.

Here is the Cadence SUPPORTED HARDWARE PLATFORMS MATRIX FOR 32 BIT platforms. You will notice that there are large gaps in the Linux support, and that it is for older releases.

There is also a Cadence SUPPORTED HARDWARE PLATFORMS MATRIX FOR 64-BIT APPLICATIONS, but I wouldn't bother looking for any Linux based tools there for at least a year or two, if ever. Even IBM's AIX doesn't fare so well there.

What about Synopsys? Well, their baseline for building EDA tools on X86 Linux is going to be Red Hat 7.2 (the one that is EOLed) for some time to come, and it will only support binary compatible versions. (I will also note that Synopsys has dropped support for various intermediate Red Hat releases on various tools due to problems, so you might find that 7.0 and 7.3 supported, but not 7.1 or 7.3). On the Itanium Synopsys is going to support Red Hat Enterprise (you know, the cheap one - not.) Although why you would buy an Itanium based system and run Red Hat instead of HP/UX is beyond me. HP/UX is far more mature and has a much larger software base than Linux, but I guess some people will run Linux just to run Linux.

What about Mentor Graphics? Their supported platform release history looks a lot like the other two. There are lots of tools that only run on old Linux releases, and gaps in the releases.

As You can read in the Red Hat Network 2.6.0 Release Notes that they have End Of Lifed Red Hat 6.2-7.0. 7.2 should be EOL about now too.

As you can see, almost all EDA tools from the major EDA vendors are only supported on obsolete, unsupported Linux releases. If you put in a little effort, you will find that many of them are moving to run only on the professional versions o

Whatever happened to the good ole days when people didn't believe everything they heard or read?

I'm just skeptical of an article that says we "heard from a friend of a friend." It's all too speculative, with little evidence of any real wrongdoing. Newel expressed concerns about the drivers that Nvidia was offering. He also said it took three times as long to write the codepath for NVIDIA, implying that they had to account for a lot more problems. If you want to speculate, look at the slides from "shader day."

To qoute: "During the development of that benchmark demo Valve found a lot of issues in current graphic card drivers of unnamed manufacturers:

Camera path-specific occlusion culling
Visual quality tradeoffs e.g. lowered filtering quality, disabling fog
Screen-grab specific image rendering
Lower rendering precision
Algorithmic detection and replacement
Scene-specific handling of z writes
Benchmark-specific drivers that never ship
App-specific and version specific optimizations that are very fragile"

And we know that several of these have been explicitly tied to NVIDIA.

Okay, well, here's the 5900 Ultra winning against the 9800 Pro 256 MB in 3dmark03. It's also faster in Halo, but that's non-surprising, consider Halo was written for NVIDIA hardware (read: Xbox).

Do I care enough about some Tomb Raider game to even bother searching for results when you're so clearly wrong about at least 50% of your points?

Well, no, I don't.

Toms Hardware
FiringSquad
Tech Report
Gamers Depot
Beyond 3d

Valve Half-Life 2 Benchmark Numbers

[AC: n33d n0 k4rm4]

Also, Anandtech and Tom's have had some reviews in the past.

Personally, I've had bad experiences with my onboard Promise in Win2k... worked fine with 40GB IBM, but when I got a 60GB IBM, vague errors started appearing in event viewer. Promise & Gigabyte did not answer any of my emails. IBM said they normally like Promise, but had no suggestions. I gave up and plugged back in to the Intel controller, and haven't had a single problem since then (over 2 years now).

I've also seen vague errors on Linux when using Promise controllers, and they still don't have an open source driver.

HotHardware, where they test pro graphics card with games... cool...

Now, for the ones who want a quite better review of the FireGL X1, QuadroFX 2000, FireGL Z1, compared to 6 others pro boards (including 3DLabs Wildcat VP970), Tom's Hardware has a nice one, dated March, 21st (so not only HW has an all but complete review, it is much late, too) :

Tom's Hardware FireGL X1 vs QuadroFX 2000 Review

Have fun...

> What are you basing that conclusion on, cards from 4 years ago?

FYI:

Hardocp

Tomshardware

A relevant forum discussion

Here is a news bite I found thru Tom's Hardware . It talks about Microsoft using a Linux device to protect its domain. Rather interesting...

• Watercooling is MUCH more efficent than the average stock heatsink. You can beat a cheap watercooling system with a REALLY GOOD heatsink, but...
• Watercooling is much QUIETER. In a normal heatsink, you are cooling a small area with a small fan (on the order of 60x60mm for a good heatsink/fan, but you can use an 80x80mm fan). But with the radiator that cools in a (standard) watercooling setup, you can fit at least one 80mm fan, or even 2. And since the air is designed to pass through it and over it (instead of onto it and off the sides) it's quieter. You can either run your system cold at a decent noise level, or go near silent and get fine temperatures.
• You can cool the water many ways. While most of the time you run it though a radiator, I have seem setups on the 'net that use a bong (Water is sprayed in a tube of air as a mist, it loses it's heat as it falls through the air), groud cooling (one guy buried a welding tank DEEP in his yard. He pumps water in and out, and the earth cools it for him), watercooling (you could make a little heat exchanger that runs cold water from your water pipes next to the water from your PC to cool it down), etc. You have OPTIONS.
• The biggest problem I've seen is usually the cost. This is mostly due to the fact that a LARGE number of watercoolers are overclockers, and they are willing to PAY big cash for a great waterblock and such. So the majority of waterblocks you find cost $50 or more. So if you cool your CPU, Graphics card, and chipser, you could easily spend $150 on the blocks alone if you wanted to. Most watercooling kits (that cool the CPU and graphic card) seem to be around $300. This is due both to the aformentioned situation, and low volume of sales (relative to other options, like a new heatsink).
• Customisation! You think putting a cold cathode in your PC is cool? How 'bout putting an adative in your watercooling water that under blacklights or ultraviolet lights glows a bright color. It looks REALLY cool. Check the forums mentioned below to find some pics of this.

Learn more, it is facinating. Look around the old articles on HardOCP and Overclockers.com and you can find out a ton. Just search google! Also, if you look at like the HardOCP forums under cooling, you can find tons of pics of people's Watercooled PCs.

Tom's Hardware Guide - search "water"

In this inveterview (one day after gamespy's), on the second page, two id members say the reason why John C wasnt there for Q&A meeting the previous day....physically sick

and John Carmack was talking to Gamespy?!

In this inveterview (one day after gamespy's), on the second page, two id members say the reason why John C wasnt there for Q&A meeting the previous day....physically sick

and John Carmack was talking to Gamespy?!

In this inveterview (one day after gamespy's), on the second page, two id members say the reason why John C wasnt there for Q&A meeting the previous day....physically sick

and John Carmack was talking to Gamespy?!

P4's have higher themal dissipation than AMD chips:


P4 3.06 GHz; A New Record: 82 Watts Power Dissipation

These are everywhere in a 2 proc setup(xeon 3.06 x2) in a 1u configuration.

" I want to know how much faster 64-bit native stuff will run vs. 32-bit stuff."

Check it out:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-1 7.html

Start there and read the next couple pages. Native 64-bit runs up to 30% faster.

As far as 64-bit native q3a probably not until the end of the year when a more stable Win-64 build is available. Although there is already a Half-Life2 64-bit build running on Win-64 Alpha, which may lead to some leaked figures earlier.

look at the close up... you may notice the MADE IN MALASIA markings...
Now, maybe that's just the engineering sample, but a tech at Linux Networx told me today that they just got a large shipment of 2GHZ Opterons direct from Singapore...

I saw quite a few of their new clusters ready to ship out. I had to constantly wipe the drool off my face while I watched them assemble 2GHZ dual Opteron boxes with 2GB RAM per processor. Their tech is impressive. They have their Ice Box control units and quite a bit of custom control/monitoring hardware that makes building your own cluster seem less advantageous.
They boast #3 on the worlds fastest super computers, so questions about Linux on the "Enterprise" should be easily resolved.
This Tom's hardware review of Opteron vs. Xeon is quite interesting to give a better feel for comparison to todays speeds.
It will be nice when we have some numbers to compare Itanium II direct 64 bit to Opteron, although it doesn't seem much can save the Itanic IMHO.

Intel's Pentium 4 processor still has a turbo switch, triggered by a thermal sensor on the chip. When the core temperature drops below a specific temperature, your P4 model 2400 will jump from 1.2 GHz to 2.4 GHz. You can affect this thermal sensor by turning your machine's CPU fan on and off. Turn the fan off, and it's in "stealth" mode, passively cooled by the CPU heat sink; turn it on, and it's in "turbo" mode.

At the time this report was filmed, AMD's competing processor didn't have a stealth mode and just gave up its magic smoke when the CPU got too hot.

We all know good power is important. But here i have seen the first test that shows that the power supply is related to flipping random bits in the memory.

That is a mucht better test than tom did: Just put a lot of load on a PSU and see if it dies. If it dies in flames then take a picture of it and put it on the front page. (Since it did not flame like the picture it is a fake)

That is also better than the test of ars-technica: put a scope on the powerline and show the ripple. This looks horrible, but if the power stays in spec there is nothing to worry about.

hire people with decent understanding of the discipline of science - let alone engineering!
Well you cannot go to a computer shop and ask for a scientificly proven PSU, and you cannot engineer one by yourself (well you can, but it is expensive). And these sites want to sell pageviews, not PSUs.

Now i suggest you make a better power comparison in the basement of your high school. So doit and post it here.

Actually many PocketPCs offer better battery life than your average Tungsten.
Palm battery life (minutes)
Tungsten T = 271
Clie NX70V = 235

PocketPC battery life (minutes)
Asus AD600 = 488
Ipaq 3970 = 368
Dell Axim X5 = 284

The addition of the color screens but the use of the same small batteries to maintain the small form factor has really killed battery life in PalmOS devices.

Course you could just get the b&w no-backlit Zire, which lasted nearly 1900 minutes on battery. Just remember to bring your flashlight ;)

Actually many PocketPCs offer better battery life than your average Tungsten.
Palm battery life (minutes)
Tungsten T = 271
Clie NX70V = 235

PocketPC battery life (minutes)
Asus AD600 = 488
Ipaq 3970 = 368
Dell Axim X5 = 284

The addition of the color screens but the use of the same small batteries to maintain the small form factor has really killed battery life in PalmOS devices.

Course you could just get the b&w no-backlit Zire, which lasted nearly 1900 minutes on battery. Just remember to bring your flashlight ;)

agreed, I've been using a Fortron FSP300-60ATV (recommended by Tom's Hardwarein my home server for almost a year, not a single problem so far

Another thing to consider when buying a case.. the PS they put in cases are the CHEAP kind, unless they specify what kind it is, I generally expect to replace it within a year. A few years ago I had one of the dual socket370 BP-6 boards, it refused to boot on the PS I had that came with my case (Enlight none the less). I swapped it to a sparkle 300watt and have had no probs since.

This was also recently covered by Tom's Hardware, and earlier by a few other sites. The sparkle and HEC normally blow away the rest, with their 250w beating the specs for most 300+w, and even being able to hold 300w operation themselves.
just my $.02

Tm

anandtech reviewed 18 units on july 31.

Interesting there is the memory test: they show that stable power gives less memory errors with memtest.

And here is clickable tomshardware:
Toms burns up some power supplies

Just to give you an idea of what the delays will be like, Tom's Hardware did a comparison of processors from a 100MHz Pentium to a 3.06 GHz PIV. [link] The processor-heavy tasks (presumably roughly analogous to the "work units" that would be performed) seem to be somewhere in the vicinity of 50-100x slower on the Pentium 100 than on the PIV. Thus, if you assume that we would require the fastest systems to do 15 seconds of work, a slow system would require between 15 and 25 minutes of processor time. That gap is only going to increase, as the upper bound of processor speed is increasing faster than the lower bound is becoming obsolete.

If we assume that 1 minute is a tolerable wait on a low-end system, a high-end system will require 0.6 seconds per message -- in one day, the spammer will be able to send 144 thousand messages. The delay would not be a deterrent.

I tend to think that trying to find a balance is doomed to failure -- you would only succeed in reducing the utility of e-mail and spam would still continue.

My personal favorite solution: e-mail can have "stamps" attached that can be redeemed by the reciever (If the reciever doesn't redeem the stamp within a few days, then the sender pays nothing). By default, all incoming mail will be rejected if it doesn't have a stamp. Any addresses in a whitelist will be accepted regardless of whether it has a stamp. Thus, mailing lists and personal correspondance cost nothing, and spammers won't be able to afford to stay in business.

Of course, the real trouble is in finding a path in order to get people to start using one of these new systems. A standard has to be agreed upon, and support added to the popular mail clients, before any large number of people would migrate to it. The hard part is not drafting a new standard, it's providing a smooth upgrade path.

see Tom's Hardware Guide for a really good review of this HTPC and three others.

How to Assemble the Ultimate Toolbox

GOes into a lot of detail on the various tools needed for PC repair.

That reminds me of an article I read recently on Tom's Hardware, see the last picture and comments here

Tom's Hardware also has a review of this Zalman heatsink and the Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700 PRO Ultimate Edition.

Tom's Hardware also has a review of this Zalman heatsink and the Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700 PRO Ultimate Edition.

The Canon i850 is a nice printer. It doesn't use much ink, the ink tanks are separate and cheaply priced, and it has excellent photo reproduction and print speed.

It wiped the floor with prety much everything else in the Tom's Hardware end of year printer lineup, so I bought one, and have been impressed.

Tomshardware loved the i850 so I went out and bought one.

It is very quick in black and white (almost laser speeds), quick in colour and can produce photographic quality prints on gloss paper. It is a four colour cartrige system (as good as other 6 colour machines) seperately replaceable. It uses a prism to actually see when its out of ink and I guess you could refill them but as Canon refills are cheap, I haven't bothered. They also seem to last a long time before needing replacement.

I just can't recommend this printer enough.

For a cheap InkJet solution THG recommends the Canon i850.