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one of the main problems would be the timing for the system and the heat!!!!!!! 4 PIII cores running 2x2 would not only generate somewhere around 200 watts of heat, and would require a 300 to 400 Watt psu for a bare minimum configuration

Don't take this as a disagreement, I do indeed think heat dissipation would (and already does) make one of the biggest problems. However, according to the P-III 1.13-1.40 spec sheet, the .13 micron P-III/1400 only dissipates 32.2W, for a total of 128.8W over four cores. That includes the cache as well.

For comparison, the Athlon XP 2600+ gives off 68.3W, the P4 3.06 sucks 82W, and Intel's next Itanium, the Madison, will nicely heat your computer room at a whopping 130W.


My opinion: Itanium does the job, and if people would spend the time it would take to learn a new archecture, it would be a nice, fast chip to start from.

I agree with you that, technologically, the Itanium looks rather impressive. However, even taking into consideration that it (well, at least the upcoming Madison core) does 6ops/clock compared to the P4's 2ops/clock, that still leaves it short for raw power at only 1.5Ghz (since, by the time Intel starts shipping in quantity, the P4 will certainly have passed 4.5Ghz). I understand that clock speed doesn't mean everything, but clock speed times throughput per clock *does* give a pretty good indication of its upper limit.


somebody give me theirs.. I'm broke again :(

Okay... A quick tip for getting properly-mounted Athlon heat sinks, without risking damage to the chip... Buy a motherboard combo. I suppose this doesn't apply if you just upgrade an existing CPU, but if you need a new motherboard, get them at the same time, from the same place. That way, not only will you not risk a crushed chip, but if it dies of heat within a few days, just send it back and get a free replacement. :-)

This is the first review I've seen of the new SATA drives that made mention of this.

Usualy when a power supply blows its because of an overcharged capacator. Toms hardware had a review of a few dozen power supplies a few months back, he found that aparently alot of manufactures are overrating their supplies max wattage. Some of the blowouts he described sound pretty similar to what you mentioned (loud pop). Might want to see if your dead power supply was on his bad list.

The downside is that for code that isn't SMP/HT-aware, performance can actually degrade. Tom's Hardware ran tests of hyperthreading on the 3.06GHz P-4, and in almost every case, it performed better with hyperthreading disabled.

Tom's Hardware has a decent review of the new Logitech MX series of mice (MX300, MX500, MX700). About as in-depth as you can get with something as simple as a mouse, I think.

Tom's Hardware has a decent review of the new Logitech MX series of mice (MX300, MX500, MX700). About as in-depth as you can get with something as simple as a mouse, I think.

Here's another site that discusses water cooling your system.

--sexygal

My little iMac can encode MPEG4 video in realtime. Show me an x86 that can do that. Or, shut up about x86 performance.

What resolution? What framerate? Sound? Input source? Codec? What iMac, at what clock speed?

So you want to see a PC encoding mpeg4 in realtime? Here you go. PAL DV, which is pretty much the highest resolution source you'll deal with in consumer video editing, and an Athlon 850, released over 2.5 years ago, has no trouble doing it.

I'm glad your mac finally caught up. Next time do some research, you'll avoid looking like a moron. 94% of experts agree that not looking like a fucking fool is the key to success in life, so take their advice!

As long as you're getting into flame wars with everyone else, can I challenge your .sig?

My little iMac can encode MPEG4 video in realtime. Show me an x86 that can do that. Or, shut up about x86 performance.

My natural response is: you must be on some sort of drugs. My factual response goes as follows -

Here's a page of benchmarks under OSX of MPEG4 Encoding. Looks like 15 frames/sec is a good time. What do you consider real time?

In the meantime, here's a set of benchmarks from Toms Hardware Guide. It shows speeds of up to 48 frames per second. So, if by realtime you meant film, (24ish frames) or NTSC (30ish), er... this would be much faster than real time. Heck, a p4 1.4 can nearly keep up with film in real time.

So... what the hell?

Oh yes, I have to stay on topic. You're right about corporations not existing to serve the public good. They exist to make money. That's the whole point of a company.

As far as "Congress shall make no law...", it doesn't seem like you've got the spirit of the ammendment - it simply *can't* be legal for all forms of speech to be protected. If it was, corporations could advertise falsely, lie about product spec, and do all sorts of other nasty things, and then say, 'but hey, it's speech!'

If you insist on interpreting the constitution that literally, perhaps you should write up a new ammendment that can be taken as dogma. But until you do, and it's ratified, we just have to stick with the way we've been doing things.

Hahah, oh yeah, drives that can transfer 90 megs in a second are clunkers right ....

Gigabyte offers mobos that support two bios copies. It's there to provide BIOS failover (not that I've ever, ever had a problem with BIOS failing), but perhaps it could be adapted to allow dual-boot bios between Palladium and non-Palladium OSs. Tom's hardware explains Gigabyte Dual Bios

I hate to break it to you, but AMD is not doing so well. Just 6 months ago, Toms hardware pretty much declared the Athlon dead ("Our extensive tests give the impression that the Athlon design is already a bit outdated and is now reaching its limits."). It took a kludge for them to get up to the 2800, and judging by how long it is taking, they are having problems producing at quantity.

Last I checked, the Athlon XP 2800 was pretty on-par with the P4 2.8 GHz even beating it out on many common benchmarks

And last I checked, the XP 2800 still wasn't in stores (check pricewatch if you don't believe me), and Intel has had a 3 GHz chip with HT on the market for 6 weeks.

The prohibitive cost of P4's, especially the higher end ones, has pretty much kept AMD processors as the choice for home system builders.

If you compare the prices of the highest speed Athlon on pricewatch vs the equivalent performing P4 (in this case, the Athlon 2600 and the 2.6 GHx P4), you might notice that the P4 is actually about $10 cheaper.

I wasn't surprised when the AMD Athlon pulled out ahead of the Pentium 4, then fell very far behind.

Did I miss something? When did AMD fall "far behind"? Last I checked, the Athlon XP 2800 was pretty on-par with the P4 2.8 GHz even beating it out on many common benchmarks, for example... (Athlon XP 2800 is 550Mhz SLOWER than the P4. That was a whole computer 3 years ago!)

The prohibitive cost of P4's, especially the higher end ones, has pretty much kept AMD processors as the choice for home system builders. Any new super high GHz P4's aren't really in the picture for many people.

Granted, tough times for the industry have hit AMD hard and their development schedule has suffered. For the most part their delays have not been due to poor scaling of the processor core but to financial or manufacturing issues. The previous transition from Athlon to Athlon MP and XP was pretty seamless.

Also, both AMD and Intel have gone through multiple core revisions as the P4 and Athlon step up speed and performance. This pretty much takes revision history as evidence of poor foresight out of the equation also.

The Athlon was not engineered to ramp up well over 1 GHz.

What? That's exactly what it was designed for! The first Athlon, I believe, was either 500 or 600 MHz. This was the first generation which quickly gave way to 700-1000Mhz versions. With the introduction of copper interconnects and manufacturing processes for smaller transistors/dies the Athlon did pretty darn well up to speeds past 1.5GHz with regular introductions of new chips.

For a company that, up until the Athlon, was pretty much a laughable CPU designer it's a nice feat to keep up with Intel over a range of 1.5GHz on the same basic layout. Need I point out that this same speed range was encompassed by BOTH the P3 AND P4 while the Athlon remained pretty much the same? Perhaps you meant to say 2GHz? Well, time will tell on that one but partnerships with the right companies, like IBM and the introduction of the Hammer line will hopefully make the argument a moot point.

[archos video jukebox]

I see this alot nowadays - people saying that AMD have "lost their edge", or "been taking it easy for a while" ... that is simply not true. An AMD Athlon XP 2800+ _will_ beat an Intel Pentium IV at 2.8 GHz in most benchmarks (and the 3.06 GHz P4 in quite a few - see the latest ones at THG or AT if you don't trust me), just as it is supposed to. And you can still practically get two Athlons (not 2800+'s mind you) for the same price as one high-end Pentium IV. Surely no-one here thinks that a single P4, HT or no HT, stands a chance against a true SMP system (given apps that take advantage of both CPU's)?

Furthermore, there's no app or game available on this earth, and there probably won't be for at least two years to come, where the speed difference between an AXP/2800+ and a P4/3GHz is big enough to really mean anything to anyone other than the fanatical overclocking crowd, who will spend any amount of money just to have the fastest stuff on the market, only to use it for stuff like playing Counter-Strike, which uses perhaps 20% of the total CPU and graphics card capacity. Well, if you're into that sort of stuff, sure. Get a P4 and enjoy having the fastest CPU there is .. until the next model P4/AXP is out, that is.

For the rest of us, who base our computer purchases on common sense, for speed, stability and price, the obvious choice is still the Athlon XP.

Besides, the Pentium IV still has a pretty fucked up design. See this page if you don't know what I'm talking about. I always laugh at people who whine that Windows is poorly designed, only to praise Intel CPU's in the next breath.

Anyone care to disagree? Remember, modding me down is so much easier than posting an intelligent reply.

Tom's hardware overclocked a p4 to 4.1GHz and it was stable. check it out here

Your post was fun, but let me doubt AMD has ANYTHING dissipating anything near to that system.

check Intel's dissipation
then check AMD's

AMD is better per Watt right now. New P4s get very heatsy.

Your post was fun, but let me doubt AMD has ANYTHING dissipating anything near to that system.

check Intel's dissipation
then check AMD's

AMD is better per Watt right now. New P4s get very heatsy.

the most obvious omission to this list was intel's 512-bit entry into the high-end graphics card market, the "i0ta", aka the i920. Preliminary benchmarks on their prototype with UNOPTIMIZED drivers allegedly yielded over 250 fps in quake3 @ 1600x1200 32-bit color, as indicated by the now-infamous memo leaked about 2 months ago.

according to the memo, the chip cost less than $50 / 100 units. the release has been pushed back from q4 2002 to q3 2003 due to recent lay-offs.

of course, by then ati will already have surpassed them in terms of price and performance.

Framebuffers are (finally) starting to use IEEE754/854 floats instead of ints. 4 Channels (RGBA) *32Bits/Flaot = 128 Bits.

These pictures show the difference between 32-bit and higher precision. Notice the lack of banding in the high precisions car images.

Floating Point Precision Color

Cheers

--
"Question Authority!"
"Says who?!"
- Anonymous

While I tend to be an nVidia fan, I would have to go with Blaskowicz (see previous comment) on this one. For now, ATI simply has a technically superior chipset.

And as far as Doom III goes, the argument just doesn't hold up. Straight from John Carmacks's mouth at Quakecon 2002: "All of the Doom III game demos that you saw in the Doom theater were done on the ATI Radeon 9700."

$180 on pricewatch? how about $188 for a real card that will actually be supported for a while (the ATI does driver support about as well as trailer trash do child support).

lookie here, the 9500 lost in every single test vs the 4400, and even the 9700 lost a few.

ATI sucks for support. For a couple of months you couldn't play BF1942 with your 9700's because they're so unsupported. Also ATI's looks like crap and drops more frames.

nfiniteFX anyone? nfiniteFX (which is going to be prevelent in DoomIII) isn't on ATI cards and never will be. This feature provides true-to-life textures and was first featured in the GeForce3 (Don't buy a Geforce4MX, they don't have this feature and they don't have the FPS of the GeForce3)

This short gain by ATI isn't like 3dfx. 3dfx released the voodoos 4 and 5 when the geforce 2's were out, at 1/3 the price.. total slaughter. Well that and 3dfx was so mismanaged even Enron cringed.

Flamebait ??
Looks like /. editors partied too much on new years !!
There should be a section called as archives (who knows, it might already be there) for stale news like this.
The card has been out for months. Tom's Hardware reviewed it in August !!
ATi Radeon 9700 PRO - Pretender To The Throne

First, you can't get a decent Geforce4 Ti for ~$100. Maybe a Geforce4MX, but that is a severly crippled GF4, so much so that even John Carmack said not to get one. A Geforce4 4200 (which is the lowest Geforce 4 is about $150.

So you don't "need" a 9700 that costs $300. How about the ATI 9500, which is the slow brother of the 9700? Much cheaper, a bit crippled, but performs on par or even better than the GF 4600, let alone the 4200. And only about $180. WITH DirectX 9 support, anti-alias glory with anisotropic filtering, all at a playable rate.

This isn't just how that the 9700 is faster (duh!) than the 4x00 series from Nvidia, but also how the whole 9x00 family is faster than Nvidia, budget and highend (I don't count the bastardized 9000). This family is all derived from the tech of the 9700.

but don't take my opinion for it, check it out for yourself.

Tech Report on 9500

Anandtech on 9500

Tom's Hardware on 9500

First I heard about this was on Tom's Hardware months ago:
ATi Radeon 9700 PRO - Pretender To The Throne

In case there were any doubts from the title of the article, the Conclusion page says this:
The King is dead! Long live the King! How's this for a plot-twist? The challenger Radeon - a real "Performeron" - has actually done it and usurped the throne from the former king! ATi has earned itself not only the performance crown in gaming environments, but also that of the technology leader!

First I heard about this was on Tom's Hardware months ago:
ATi Radeon 9700 PRO - Pretender To The Throne

In case there were any doubts from the title of the article, the Conclusion page says this:
The King is dead! Long live the King! How's this for a plot-twist? The challenger Radeon - a real "Performeron" - has actually done it and usurped the throne from the former king! ATi has earned itself not only the performance crown in gaming environments, but also that of the technology leader!

I'd rather get a smaller computer if space is the issue.

Can anyone explain to me why so many people buy full tower cases, and then only fill 2-3 bays? I mean, hell, even at home, I don't think I have a machine that has more than 4 bays full. [game machine has a CD-R/DVD/2xHD, and a server with a CD-ROM and 3 hard drives].

Oh, I forgot to link to the P4 3.6Ghz benchmarks done at Toms hardware. This shows a decent example of differances between processors at various Mhz ratings.

Point to Point connections rather than master/slave setups, hot-swap and the new connectors make these drives usable in servers

What I'm left wondering about is how the controllers work. The big downside to IDE versus SCSI is that IDE requires more CPU time to get the same amount of work done. I would expect a P2P type connection to take a lot of load off the CPU. Especially if we're looking at up to 16 devices on the same bus.

This benchmark over at Tom's would seem to suggest that at least in their test setup that there aren't any CPU utilization benefits. This is critical stuff for servers, or any real kind of RAID configuration.

Does anyone have any further info on this? Would SATA become more efficient had more drives been involved perhaps?

All the benchmarks I've seen thus far were focused on throughput and bus speed, which is only a small portion of the story.

Tom's Hardware also did a review of a Serial ATA drive. A link is provided here.

Benchmarks were funny.

It was only based on this slashdot article qouting a tom's hardware article.
Guess I should have checked with you first to see if this was correct first, sorry.

...as long as you, like in every water cooling design, use distilled water.

Has close to zero micro Siemens conductivity, so there will be no sparks, explosions, people getting killed, etc.

Have a look at this or this for some info on conductivity.

The only real danger in a homegrown water cooling setup is that when it fails, it fries your cpu/gpu in their own juices. Sorry, couldn't resist. But if one is so stupid as not to have either a software shut-down solution or better yet a hardware temperature-driven switch, well, then maybe one shouldn't have messed with this stuff in the first place.

Actually, that's the old P&D and DFP formats-DVI goes up to 1920x1080 (1080i HDTV resolution)

Tom's Hardware Guide just did a review of 17" LCD panels in its Display guide section. Jump to the conclusion page and you'll find a single 17" LCD that they looked at with the DVI input - the "Belinea 10 17 20". Unfortunately, it's not all that great; the brightness leaves a lot to be desired, and it has serious trailing issues. It does cost only around $650, though. At least solutions in that price range do exist, though they're lacking in quality. Good luck finding a good one.

For a preliminary suggestion, you could try the Micro PC, which appears to barely fit your requirements for power, and is small enough to be carried gingerly onboard in a padded case. A Powerbook might also be a good solution, but that is up to your OS needs... If you didn't need windows you should already own one anyway.

But remember, whatever you get, it will be part of your image as a consultant. If you are a real techie, a custom-built box will impress. If you are an artistic type, you need a Powerbook or a Vaio, or another attractive, polished but original ultralight. If you are a pointy-haired executive who has greatly overestimated his needs, a half-sized mini vaio would be very sleek and sexy. Network guys seem to be able to get away with any type of box, the uglier the better.

What are the needs that you are attempting to satisfy? What specs would satisfy those needs? If you don't tell us that, any advice you get here will be worthless.

-C

Yes but is that sustained or peak? Is the benchmark artifical or simulating real conditions?

Methinks 20 is closer than 80MB/sec, and maybe even 10...depending on whats actually being done.

Yes but is that sustained or peak? Is the benchmark artifical or simulating real conditions?

Methinks 20 is closer than 80MB/sec, and maybe even 10...depending on whats actually being done.

This "review" claims Western Digital's IDE drive outperforms SCSI.

Don't bother looking for evidence to back up the claim, because there isn't any. The only time SCSI is even mentioned is in the title and the summary.

Oh, and by the way, Western Digital uses the quote "'Outperforms SCSI Drives' - Toms Hardware" on the retail box of the product.

Still, the actual Rambus technology leaves no room for complaint: RDRAM offers a large bandwidth of up to 4.2 GB/s and offers the best performance, particularly when used together with the Intel Pentium 4. ...
Here, you should keep in mind that the Intel Pentium 4 has a maximum bandwidth of 4.2 GB/s. In the near future, this will reach well over the 3 GHz limit. Only Rambus memory in the form of PC4200 (533 MHz) is capable of taking full advantage of this bandwidth. By using DDR SDRAM, such as DDR266 or DDR333, the bandwidth remains restricted to 2.1 GB/s and 2.7 GB/s, respectively.

So might your Athlon, son... So might your Athlon.

XScale has some design advantages other than power consumption over the good old ARM chips of the past. Tom's Hardware has a pretty good article about the processor as it relates to some of the PDAs it's popped up in. Tom makes a point that the software needs to be optimized for the processor to really take advantage of it & I really have no idea if that's been done for this product.

I still have to ask why anyone would run one of these things. Put Linux on it & I might not wonder so hard. Personally, I'm a lot more intrigued by the Transmeta Astro.

The Cappucino TX-3 has had similar or even better specs for quite a while now, and its pretty similar in size:

-Intel 815 motherboard
-1.2 Ghz Intel Pentium III processor
-512MB 144-pin PC133 RAM
-30 GB internal hard drive
-Your choice of 24x CD-ROM, 8x DVD-ROM, or 8x/8x/24x/8x DVD/CD-RW combo drive
-Built-in 10/100 base-T ethernet (RJ45)
-Internal 56K V.90 modem
-Four USB ports (USB 1.1)
-Two FireWire ports (IEEE 1394)
-No operating system installed.
-All standard I/O ports built-in
-Dimensions: 6" x 5.75" x 2.25"
-Manufacturer Warranty: 1 year

Also, CappucinoPC have the Mocha P4 machine which is slightly bigger and has specs rivaling current fully loaded computers.

Check out these links:

Cappucino TX-3 at Thinkgeek
Mocha P4 at Cappucinopc.com
A review of what appears to be the Mocha at Tomshardware

I guess Nvidia was on to something with the term "Cinematic Gaming."
My friend once asked something that made me laugh and then think. He asked, while I was watching Jerry Springer and he was playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, "When did television get so bad, and video games get so good?"
I mean look at this!
I don't know about you, but I don't want to just WATCH Tom Hanks in saving private ryan, I want to BE Tom Hanks in saving private ryan - only without the dying part.

Firewire certainly is up to snuff for video editing. With a 400MB/s bus speed, the limitation is with the drive itself.

Actually, its only about 3.61 times faster than a GeForce2 mx.

Tom's hardware VGA chart

One of the outcomes of the cycle you mentioned. faster==better, but since no one has much money the new generation of machines must also be cheaper...

All is not so simple though, since you would also be astonished at how *slow* can a cheap P4 2.0 run. They skim on all hardware, crippling the machine (like using GeForce2 MX or slow hard drive or crappy motherboard). tomshardware.com had an interesting discussion on the cutting edge systems...

So you want "Linux for game cube". You didn't specify "Nintendo" or capitalize "GameCube". Thus, any generic "game cube" is OK.

First of all, a "game cube" with a similar architecture to Nintendo's, the Power Macintosh G4 Cube, can run Yellow Dog Linux.

This roughly cube-shaped gaming PC and this even smaller PC can probably run Mandrake.

Now, if you're looking for Linux on a Nintendo GameCube console, you're out of luck: that's the only one that can boot only from a completely proprietary storage medium. There's currently no way to get homebrew code to run on the thing. If it could boot off one of the ports on the bottom (like the GBA can), the situation would be somewhat different.

Tom's Hardware Guide has their list up, too. Nothing spectacular, but looks like some neat ideas if you're stuck.

It was apparently shown at Comdex

http://www6.tomshardware.com/business/02q4/021121/ comdex_day_3-06.html

Transmeta uses a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) technology. How long I did not see in a brief glance, but according to this article they have used 128 and 256. They do this as a way of encoding parallelism. Graphics processing also tends to have a lot of implicit parallelism which long instruction words help with. Both dedicated game consoles (eg the playstation) and graphics cards migrate to longer words much faster than general purpose computers. Years ago the 64 in Nintendo-64 was because it was a 64-bit computer. These days 128 and 256 bits are commonplace, and at least one 512-bit GPU exists.