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Wahoo P4 Stratagem System Review
Ian Bell writes "Buddhacon reviews the P4 stratagem system from Wahoo Computers. Could this be the most powerful home system on the market? With just about every option available including an overclocked Intel 2.9GHz CPU, Radeon 9700PRO, 1GB of memory and all the cooling features you can think of you would think a system like this would blow the competition away. Just goes to show that sometimes a fine tuned V6 can beat an over the top V8."
I think the thing has reach nirvana. Or at least is very close.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
But how will it heat my house in the winter?
sorry, I'll stick with an AMD
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
I would take one in a second. AMD or Intel wouldn't make a lick of difference to me.
~S
Does anyone else think this sounds like Latin crossed with web-dotcom-buzzwords?
Christ people, this is starting to sicken me. I've got an iMac 333 G3, a couple P2 333 and an old P1 90. Unless you're doing something like heavy graphics editing, what the hell would you ever need something this powerful for? And over over six grand?
People, stop trying to build the fastest box imaginable, and thing serious. Use what you need for the job. Save money. Reuse old machines. Don't spend six grand on something you'll never need (well, you will, but probably when it costs more like a thousand bucks). If you can justify having this much power, okay, but otherwise, stop wasting time and money, and killing perfectly usable old boxen.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
It looks really nice, but at $6535.00 (I'll assume that's USD) isn't it a bit overpriced for a system that'll be only adequate in 6 months/1 year?
Yes, it's an extremely sweet machine but certainly not value for money.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Amazing. That's just about the same specs that Maximum PC put in their Dream Machine 2002.
Of course, that was dead tree form, and 2 months ago, so Slashdot is amazed by this computer because it's advertised online.
All these componants are available, and have been for a while. If you want to make one of these, go for it. Grab a ThermalTake case or a VapoChill, an Intel board and 1GB of PC1066 with a 2.8/2.whatever, and go to town. Overclock your 9700 pro.
It's not special. It's just special to slashdot.
Or, if you prefer:
Old and busted... New hotness.
sig?
regardless, you can build the same system with dual pentiums and 2 gigs of ram for less...
Well, in my case, it ends up being for games.
I can get an average of 40fps at 1024x768 in ut2k3 with everything turned on, and that makes me happy, and I'm running a fairly old system.
MSI k7tTurbo2 (kt133a Chipset)
512MB SDRAM (pc133)
Geforce3 ti200
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
I'd like the alienware Area51 laptop more
up to 3 GHz p4, even if it IS a desktop P4 and not a laptop one... that's what AC adaptors are for
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
but then I have to calculate the cost of savings by going with AMD, vs a P4 and divide that into the supposed heat savings, and I'll probably end up not giving a damn by the end of the calculations....
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Who, in their right mind, would buy one of these for $6536? You could easily build a faster system for 1/3 the price. It seems like a company that just doesn't know how to build computers. It comes with water cooling, but could only be overclock to 2.9GHz before it started becoming unstable. What? Why does it have a Zip drive if it comes with a CD and DVD burner? Why RAID-0 WD1200JB hard drives, and not a Cheetah 15k.3 for a boot drive? And most importantly, they don't seem to know how to ship a computer:
"Due to inadequate mounting procedures, the Radeon 9700's core was ripped from the card during shipping."
Equivalent watercooling System: $300
Enermax 550W Quiet Power Supply: $180
Case Fans: $20 (They're using panaflo L1A's for everything, an excellent choice for a watercooled system, but yes they really are this cheap)
Babybus: $40
Pentium4 3.0ghz
2x HDD Cooler: $25
Top of the line Granite Bay Motherboard: $200 (includes intel 10/100/1000 ethernet)
2x Sticks of 512mb Insane DDR of a brand of your choice : $400
Radeon 9700 pro : $270
Sound Blaster Live! Audigy Platnium : $200 (To anyone considering this -- DO NOT BUY IT -- go with terratek if you truly care about sound!)
2x WD1200JB Hard Drives: $280
Plextor CD-RW + HP DVD+RW Drives : $450
Zip Disk + Floppy: $35
Hardware Modem: $50
WinXP Pro: $170
Total: $3662
That is a FREEGING HUGE PRICE DIFFERENCE. Your paying about $3000 for the case plus them putting it together. I mean, I know that there are people willing to pay quite a premium for a well built system they don't have the time to research -- but jesus chrirst $3000 is nuts. This article is just more free advertising for some random company.
OK so you can put together a very nice 2.4GHz system for $1k, or a decent 2.8GHz system for $1.5k, or this for how much? Why was this even /.ed?
Ok, was it just me, or did the "forum links" on the side bar read like a troll's wetdream?
Orgasms from around the world by dang
- International Music by dang
- From Russia, with lots of tongue by twitch
- Whoa, girls come here!? by twitch
- Kung Fu Stick fighting, episode 3! by Kernobi
- Man To Get 3 Years in Prison for Pretending to be Will Smith by Kernobi
- Eew! Urine skincare products by Kernobi
- What is a girls favorite sexual position? by Kernobi
- Girlfriends and video games do they mix? by Kernobi
- OMG look at these boobs by Kernobi
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I disagree with your viewpoint. I'm one of those people that upgrades (or rather buy new) their machines as soon as something faster comes round. Why do I do it, as my old machine is obviously fast enough for any normal purpose? Well, a couple of reasons: 1) Games! I play a lot of graphics intensive games that can really use all the oomph you can wring out of the hardware. Call me shallow, and I shall ignore you! ;-)
2) I recycle my old machine to neighbours, friends and charity. Two weeks ago, I gave away my XP2400+/512Mb/180Gb/GnuLinux system to a local organisation that works with handicapped children.
3) I like to build machines from parts I get from all over the place. I usually lead the local stores in performance by at least half a year. Again, I know this is a weird thing but I enjoy that.
Anyway, while I don't *need* to upgrade, I frequently do: about every three months.
Ciao!
!ERR: Signature not found.
Nuff it! 64 Bit would anyday kick 32 bit crappy P4 2.9 Ghz!
Just hook the water up to your radiator and you can use that to stay warm at night :)
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Heh. If you are in fact referring to this I was under the impression my coworkers and I had the market cornered on the so called "meh" good to see others picking up the slack.
I mean come on guys this has been out there for a while and at this cost? Please and editor would be nice on occasion.
And in the 1970's, they thought that digital watches were the coolest thing. Sure, this machine almost fast enough to divx my library of DVDs before I die, but that's not real computing. What I'm waiting for is a machine powerful enough to calculate the DNA sequences for artificial life. Now that's hard work. Another 20 years or so of Moore's law, and we'll be there. Then I can just scan and clone myself, with a few improvements.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Jesus, it's just a box. Only the very lamest of fanboys get excited over the newest incremental increase in x86 computing hardware capacity.
Seriously, it's like you all forget that in a few weeks time, something that is a few percentage points faster will be available. Simply knowing of the newest releases from the hardware manufacturers hardly qualifies you as being "elite". It's boring, commodity x86 hardware. YAWN. What a fucking lame story, and it made the front page.
Like, 89.5879472940295873409045687723094587345 fps dude!
Before people say that this is different because it's a desktop (unmodified), do I need to point out that the average user won't need this much power? The people that buy this will be rich techies, or businesses. Alot of techies prefer dual CPU stuff for the value, so this has no real market. Too new, too expensive.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Hey, good one jackass!
Who needs fast boxen, no one! I'm sure _everything_ in the world runs fine and great on your nice 333 G3 and p2 333, right? Nooooot a single slowdown ever. Nothing, period. Nada?.
Pleaaaase.
"Most powerful home system"? 3.06GHz P4s are available, I don't understand why this system has a 2.8 overclocked to 2.9?
-Berj
I think it's absolutely STUPID to say that a P2 333 is 'fast enough' for home use. Granted, 3GHz might be overkill at the moment *only* because of how expensive it is, but there are definitely reasons to have a fast machine.
Hell, even if you disregard every single cool application that either runs better or needs a fast machine to run, it's worth getting a fast machine simply for how responsive it is.
-Berj
Oh, no, you're missing the point entirely. I use my old P-120 for computing, of course.
This thing is mood lighting for my living room!
Sheesh, i overclocked my 1.8 p4 to that without watercooling even. antek server case, and thermaltake dragon cpu fan. While I understand the built in tempreture sensors in a P4 chip that prevent overheating, what is there to stop you from frying your nice radeon 9700 and haveing a first class door stop? correct me if i'm wrong but isn't the latest ddr fastaer anyways? throw in the fact that this thing is useing a PCI card for a raid controller (i don't care if the motherboard has gigabit, get one with a raid controller, like the nice ABIT) the only articles i'd want to see would either be on what the heck these "duel bios" motherboard are all about, and why the heck hasn't their been more fanfair over abits "legacy free" motherboards (screw ps2 and serial and the endless irq conflicts)
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
I pretty agree with you but, where do you find old boxes ? The whole computer market is overclocked overheated and overmoneyed ! I got my AMD 550MHz since three years now, and wouldn't give it away, but even that is too much for the use I have : wife's reading and sending mail, sister surfing on the Internet, myself got not enough time to really appreciat the power. But now there are 2GHz and more, cool yeah, but does it really enhance working speed ?? It allows you to faster kill in Quake3 (or alike), but that's pretty all it does !
n-e
Really, I swear!
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
"Just goes to show that sometimes a fine tuned V6 can beat an over the top V8."
Huh? The V8 of the Koenigsegg CC tops the V12 of a McLaren F1. That is no news.
the reason I would buy the thing is because my penis is small. That machine will make others believe otherwise. Plus it has an AWESOME DVD burner, in blue no less!
Paint.NET, a Free Image Editor, with Source Code Available!
Wahoo Stratagem reviews YOU!
Well, your 550 is pretty fine, IMHO. But instead of getting a older box, make it silent :o) That's the problem with old boxes : a lot of noise. (I am really happy with my AMD 700, especially when I wonder whether it's running)
You probably don't do much of the following:
:(
1) Games
2) MS Office files
These are two things and force us to upgrade.
(You probably argue Office 97 running just fine...until you need to read somebody else's document, which mostly likely in Office XP format)
nobody is allowed to post anymore after this post
I just gave my 1.5GHz Athlon XP to my brother and installed FreeBSD on my old 200MHz Pentium. Hey, I'm doing more than fine with this setup! All the necessary applications are there and 'cause I'm console freak, everything's lightning fast.
I've got Links/Lynx, Pine/Mutt/Elm, Vim/Emacs, and today I'll install some console based MP3 player. What else do I need? Nothing really.
I've got HP APOLLO 700 with 21" monitor! It costed more than $5000 back in early 1990!
Why are people remotely excited about this?
I figured that some poster had managed to sucker the editors into putting an ad up, but apparently people are really into this.
Can anyone tell me why people *care* about this? There's nothing particularly significant about this computer. It's not on the level of people introducing case windows for the first time, nor is it a never-before-done hardware hack. Some guy tossed a bunch of stuff that's already been done into a case, and is selling it for a *lot* of money. Big whoop.
This doesn't have unparalleled performance, since Sun sells systems that can smoke this thing.
It doesn't let home users do anything they couldn't do before, since no software requires this, and in two years it's going to be a middling system.
It's just another currently high-end x86 system. You can get things like this from a *ton* of vendors, with overclocking even.
May we never see th
Most people don't need a Porsche either, but I sure as hell enjoy mine.
Consider this a "luxery PC" and the market for these items is generally small, but profitable.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
I think it's absolutely STUPID to say that a P2 333 is 'fast enough' for home use.
All depends on what you're using, doesn't it?
XP is pretty awful on something like that, but Linux is more than happy on a system of that caliber.
May we never see th
That's the problem with old boxes : a lot of noise.
I gotta disagree. Fans tend to get noisier over time, but as long as you're PIII/K6 era or before, you have far less heat generated than an Athlon or a P4. Which means you can run quieter fans.
I know someone with a 486 and no fans.
May we never see th
...jeez, I'm in the wrong line of work.
piece of ass. shitty overclock, too, espeically for expensive water cooling. i recently built my intel box for roughly $1400: P4 2.4B @ ~3ghz MCX-4000 & 80mm 84cfm Tornado (best P4 aircooling) Epox 4PEA+ (excellent board) 9700 Pro w/ TV-out (only $250 on pricewatch) 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200 DDR Samsung 955DF 19" Monitor (flat) Logitech MX 700 Cordless Optical mouse (sweeet) Antec PlusView 1000 AMG clear side panel ATX case all this doesnt include my 12x CD-RW, 200gb WD drive, and my keyboard and home made rounded cables :) but its a very sweet system for $1400 and very comparable to this $6k POS (i call it a POS cuz thats what u get if your paying $6k).
this wahoo may have twice the ram (RDRAM no less) but the way i see it thats not saying much when it comes to just playing some goddamn games and not oggling and the memory benchmarks. i dont know about you but when i build a PC for performance i build it as a sweet gaming machine not to crunch numbers.
i always tell friends never to buy a desktop PC unless its something like Alienware (they dont usually cost $6k) but to build their own or have me or antoher friend help them because they learn so much, rather than have all the hard (and fun) work done for you.
I go to college in a small town, and thus I pay my college bills by working for Best Buy. We carry Alienware systems (well, carry is the wrong word, since they're ordered through our store but there are no pre-built systems kicking around). As I walk by our demo unit, I often ponder the market for systems like Alienware, Falcon Northwest, and these Wahoo Fellas. These guys are all using standard component parts, (in the case of Alienware, readily available cases from Chieftec and standard off-the-shelf boards components). In the case of companies like Wahoo and Falcon Northwest, they even tell you the actual Mobo, RAM, Hard disk, etc. manufacturers. So honestly, where is their market?
Retail Boxed PCs have the ignorant consumer who knows the brand name. Screwdriver shops have the slightly more informed consumer looking to save a buck or get more standardized parts (or the geek who doesn't feel like spending his day off building a PC). But these companies seem to charge an extreme premium for their products, given that most screwdriver shops would sell you the exact same parts and assemble them in the same manner (maybe not this watercooling business, but I know of a couple shops that would probably do that). The best I can figure is heavily spoiled 14 year-old boys who know that the Radeon 9700 is good because they saw it on PlanetQuake, but you can't build a computer company on the whims of 14 year-old boys (can you?!?). So seriously, I'd like some input here. Does anyone own, for example, an Alienware or similar system? Do you know someone who owns one? What was the motivation for the purchase? Since it's the only item I can really quantify that they might offer beyond the local shop, do these "premium" PC companies have tech support that's really that much better (or honestly, necessary) than the screwdriver shop that'll sell you the same PC, built with the same parts, for $500 less?
Just don't try to compile XFree86 on it too often :P
I'll stick with my 225MHz Packard
I've been building a new server on a 150Mhz 486 p54C Overdrive with 64mB RAM, it chugs along quite nicely compiling Apache et al.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
To me unless you're running some type of server, are into heavy graphics/animation/movie making or are a porn movie addict this power is beyond pointless. Yea, yea, what about the little Quake, etc...players who demand the power. Well to me with the online capabilities of XBox and PS2's why run the crap on computers when one of those boxes are thousands less than this Wahoo job. Doesn't make sense to me.
found it funny that the pics on wahoo's site of the custom lianli case look pretty much like mine :) Except of course mine is better and I have the personal pride invested in it that comes with creating something yourself. I never can understand it when a techie buys an OEM. Why would you not want to put together your own system? (rhetorical question)
Some case pics
MooCow
Or can I get 3 x more bang for the buck by buying a Dell multi-processor server and stuffing in some fancy video/audio thingies? Or is it the paint that is so expensive?
er, better make that for case pics
MooCow
why do we always get this idiotic V6, V8 and turbo crap? A V6 of x displacement will be broadly equivalent in power and torque output to a V8 of the same displacement - the car engine/CPU analogy NEVER FUCKING WORKS.
So stop it.
That was classic intercourse!
...it might just be me, but I swear the first page says it has a 2.8 P4 overclocked to 2.9, but the last pages says a 2.53 and no mention of overclocking.
I would hate to pay $6500 and be slighted 370 mhz of performance...
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
even more pertinent is the fact that you'll be able to build something faster for $1500 in 3 months time. It's a total waste of everyone's time.
That was classic intercourse!
They're both friends of my younger brother. Other than the fact that they're 18, you're right - they're boys whose parents have too much money. They go for the PC's like Alienware because they heard that Alienware makes the best computers for gaming, but they really don't know jack/shit about what makes a computer good for gaming.
Coincidentally, most of the kids in this same crowd also have Honda Civics and the like with just about every sort of "racing mod" (their word) imaginable except the ones that would improve a car's performance or handling very much - $400 performance clutches w/ aluminum flywheels on a car that still has the original 1.2L engine and the like.
my 2 word rebute...
doom 3
Professional journalist? Why the fuck can't you spell LUXURY then? Useless, lying twat.
That was classic intercourse!
...a beowulf cluster of these?
Sorry...it had to be said...
It doesn't matter if this computer is a good deal or a bad one, if the components are well chosen or not, if the construction quality is amazing or if the whole thing just looks cheesy, the real question is this: how is this news?
Someone throws standard retail components into a custom-designed case, sells it for way more than it's worth, and somehow we care?
Computers are not cars, there is no art to tweaking them at the hardware level. Put prefabricated components together in the right way, and you have a computer. There are many hardware sites dedicated to this; let this kind of article be posted there.
This whole case-modding culture is a joke if you think about it. It's the computer equivalent of bored rich kids paying someone to put the world's largest spoiler on a civic.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
V6 engines normally outperform a V8 with the same size - the V6 has less rotary momentum to worry about, and so has a faster rev increase. V8s have a higher rotary momentum (more pistons), and so will be slower to rev.
Just a little side-piece...
Hey, I have a great idea. How about you not telling us what we should spend our money on.
I'm not trying to be harsh, but every time an article is posted about a faster chip, bigger hard drive, or overclocking, you mofos come out of the woodwork and tell us we are stupid. It just gets really old.
I personally have a K6-500 that I use as a file server. I have used it to surf the internet, but with new software (Mozilla, KDE, WinXP, etc...) it really bogs. I could probably use an older version of Windows or KDE and swap out Mozilla for lynx, but I don't want to. I want to use the latest, bug ridden software. And I want to have a fast computer.
Stop telling us that our hobbies sicken you. Stop telling us where our money is best spent. Let us have our fun.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
cd linux*
make xconfig
make dep
make bzImage
Try doing that on one of them pokey computers and then realizing you forgot to include the module for your sound card after you reboot the new kernel. Back to the drawing board. Of course, a $200 microtel pc from Walmart would probably do the trick, but if these kids wanna inflate the economy, I ain't stopping them.
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
I find spending a couple of hours with PhotoShop provides much clearer proof for the doubters.
that's ONE word and ONE number
That was classic intercourse!
Oh great.
Striped array with no parity is exactly what I want to use on consumer grade IDE HDs. </sarcasm>
For that price, I'd expect RAID5.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Fine tuned V6?, my arse. This carbuncle sounds just like a typical massive Yank V8 with every last bell and whistle, chrome plated headers etc etc.
A fine tuned V6 is the Alpha, and a fine tuned straight 4 is the StrongArm, and a wizzy single cylinder is the 40MHz 8051 or PIC.
This abomination will contribute significantly to global warming on its own!
my 2 word rebute...
doom 3
when Doom3 finally goes Gold, this System will be outperformed by $999 boxes from Walmart...
Why hasn't this dipshit been moderated back to hell where he belongs?
who are you asking, God?
I can get an average of about 50fps at 1024x768 32-bit colour with everything up full on my PC with 256mb (ECC DDR) and a GeForce 2mx on Linux. Looking at the difference in memory speed there, it goes to show that your quicker graphics card makes a huge difference. When my PC starts to feel slow though, I'll spend about £120 and throw in another AMD 1600+ MP chip. Who needs overclocking (or central heating) ;-)
Follow me
Just goes to show that sometimes a fine tuned V6 can beat an over the top V8."
you dont know cars very well mr cowboyneal...
take your 6cyl rice burner any day.. and I know of a nice 1965 Chevy Comaro that will beat it to death easily with it's not-over-the-top V8.
the lowly 6 bangers CANNOT be blown as hard as a big-block V8 or accept anywhere near the NOS boost that a big-ole V8 can take. (add a 200hp boost to that tiny aluminum Honda V8... and let's do a simple quarter mile. Ok then add just a tiny 25psi boost to the intake with a blower.... how about both!)
you can tweak the hell out of a V6 but you cannot ever beat a V8 in the same way... a V8 espically a nice big iron block can take way more stress, can be overbored much farther (then the stress holding abilities drop) AND there are V8's out there that are fricking nuts...
The camaro I talk about doesnt have a silly 350 in it... it's been retroed to have a >450CI Hemi in it. blueprinted and balanced with only carberauters on it... no silly fuel injection.
Crotch rockets look slow next to it. plus I have yet to see a ricer EVER get the front wheels off the ground (I know I know... front wheel drive)
heavy graphics editing doesnt even need this... Hell, non linear video editing doesnt need this.
I edit on a Dual P-III 866 and a 10 minute short with lots of work in it take less than 20 minutes to render (Dv video source Dv video out or mpeg2) The AVID's at work use Pentium-II 550's single processor and they are the top of the line PROFESSIONAL video editing stations not toys.
The only thing I can think of that explains why people are building ultra-fast machines is that they are preparing for either the next Windows release or the next Gnome or KDE release.
(Yes, I am bitter that Gnome and KDE are as slow as the Microsoft operating systems on their own. time to stop or remove "features" and start making it faster.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
what the hell would you ever need something this powerful for?
"I'll take trolls that got modded up for $100, Alex."
<sarcasm>
Oh, I don't know... I swear, these people buying these new-fangled computer things are out of their mindes. They've obviously never seen the kick ass integer benchmarks of my abacus.
</sarcasm>
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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.
my p233 ran with 2 fans at 5v, silently, for quite a while. now they're back at 12v, but just because it's stuffed into a motherboard (i.e. cardboard) box, and space is tight, so i figure i shouldnt skimp on cooling :P
:)
anyways, while a 233 surely is not sufficient for a modern desktop, an athlon 1600 or so sure is, and they're about $60. not sure why people need the biggest baddest stuff, well ok maybe i am sure. ego boost
makes you wonder whether people that buy this stuff are just rich and dont give a crap, or they actually have save up for a while to afford it. if the latter, then man...poor fools....
No, I don't wanna get an older box ? Sorry if my message sounded alike. I'm rather looking forward to get a more powerfull one, techno is evolving fast yes, but that's no reason to stay in the stoneage :o) (nice smily, haven't seen it before)
With the noise I have to agree, but I don't think the Pentium is loads better :|
P.S.: What does this IMHO mean ?? Could some tell me ?
n-e
20 minutes!!!! geez, who wants to wait 20 minutes for anything? i suppose waiting 20 minutes for a cd to burn is okay too, right (especially when you have to burn 10)? with video editing, only real time is fast enough.
I was doing a custom PC and didn't trust myself to do a cut for an LCD. Wahoo said they'd do it at a premium, so I sent it off. This lower hole is the result. They were polite and professional but seemingly inacapable of cutting a square. Blah.
So why are people always concerned about FPS? Like "oooh I get 121 fps on Q3 but j00 only get 94 so my box is much better" etc.
Anything above 20 is purely cosmetic. Zelda 64 ran at about 25 fps, and it's infinitely more interesting, creative, stimulating and fun than yet-another-first-person-shooter.
Good games matter. Not FPS.
> I think it's absolutely STUPID to say that a P2 333 is 'fast enough' for home use.
Yeah, so do I. I remember writing essays, doing graphics and sound work, and playing superb games on my 12 MHz Amiga 1200. P2 333 is overkill.
Seriously, get a fucking grip, and don't call something "stupid" just because you've never used anything except Pee Cees. For the vast majority
of businesses and home users in the world, who type up a few letters, browse a few sites and play solitaire, that kind of speed is more than enough.
No, this is a long way from the best system I have ever seen. I'm going to be harsh and say why...
What's with the shitty toggle switch "baybus" fan controllers? The site reports that the fans don't even start on the lowest speed. That isn't good engineering, and they shouldn't really ship a product like that. I would expect all the fans to be intelligently controlled by a microprocessor independant of the motherboard. This would include fan failure detection, CPU throttling etc.
They've put a live drive behind a door... erm, isn't that a little stupid? Now you're going to have to leave the door open all the time, or hack a hole in it, or not use the live drive.. oh well/
Raid 0 with no proper backup? I don't think so. I've seen far too many people lose data on raid 0 now to ever use it. At this kind of price, it would be nice to see two very fast and small scsi drives raided for a boot drive. Then larger IDE drives for data. But still no raid 0.
There seems to be some confusion about SCSI and IDE. People suddenly thought that IDE drives were better, especially in RAIDs... and it's plain wrong. SCSI is more reliable (the drives are built far better), it is faster, the bus is quicker. When you are doing things like photo or video editing, then having a fast page file and scratch disk is very important. SCSI has lower access and seek times, and the difference notices a hell of a lot.
The paint job looks pretty shite as well.
I just don't believe they are charging that much for this system. It's not amazing or anything.
Something that beats it? Go to The Overclocking Store and take a look at their Advance Micronics systems. Refigerator based cooling, complete systems, which are better configured and specced. You get an LCD and bluetooth mouse and keyboard for less than the system in the slashdot story. But...
"Stupid" would be saying its not fast enough without giving a reason why.
Most people browse the web and check their email. Its only fairly recently that even our office computers have got faster than 333mhz. We still run one on a P133 and up to a few months ago another P133 was hosting a database and some software (running NT) and it was fast enough.
no sig.
i mean my new PC included an 1800xp and gf4 4200 abit kd7 and ddr266 for £400 and i get nearly 10000 3d marks, all current games run exceptionally well
now this sucker costs $6500 and can manage 15000 marks. so thats $6000 for a 50% increase in speed? wow that economy for you...
I used to think so, too, but some people disagree and say the can see and feel the difference between 20, 40 and 60 fps. I'm not sure anymore. Oh and I won't comment on how Zelda 64 supposedly is "infinitely more interesting" than yet another FPS. De gustibus non est disputandum!
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
That's great, but, you see, we normal people can't afford to do that. ;)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Why did I buy alienware? Summer before last my computer began to break down - CD burner and monitor both died about a week apart, and the main hard drive started misbehaving - and since it was a 4 year old box I started looking at my replacement options...
I originally looked at purchasing parts and assembling a system piecemeal. I discovered that living where I did (middle of nowhere town in NEw Brunswick, Canada) I'd have to have everything shipped - most of it from the states. After I totaled up the cost of shipping and customs duties for the parts, and then factored in the time required for me to assemble it, I realized it would be about the same cost as buying what I wanted, pre=assembled and warrentied, from Alienware (w/free shipping). Free shipping really helped - as well as the fact that when my nice big Alienware box crossed the border the customs official informed me that as an international student residing temporarily in Canada I wasn't required to pay duty (something I wouldn't have discovered if I had made a bunch of small purchases not requiring me to speak on the phone with customs).
As for what they offer as added value, the support people that I talked to when I had problems with my box were first-rate. The ONLY help desk people I've ever spoken with who didn't treat me like a moron and actually listened to me.
In July O7, I got a mac pro. There's no punchline. Just endless joy and wonder.
Boxen
Uh oh, watch out, here come the boxes/boxen nazis!
In My Humble Opinion
Obviously you're not a gamer. Hell, I'm not a gamer and my slowest machine has dual Celerys @ 500. All the machines older than that have found new homes at non-geek friends houses and charities. I used to keep that crap around, but what's the point? If I wanted a room filled up with 20MB hard drives and 256K ISA video cards I'd call up Microsoft and tell them I was a school looking for a donation.
Anyway, nobody who had more brains than money would buy the machine being reviewed. Of course, that doesn't mean they have to "justify having that much power." "Because I want it," is more justification than is required.
this is *YOU* http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slash dot.html
14 years old... they right! phhhh
slashdot sux grow up move to commercial unix
linux pshhhi... ohh well, trolls.
-JAPAN: ol yor beys ar bilong tu as! -AH!
With the growing capabilities of clustering even workstations no one really needs one single ultra powered workstation. The bragging value may be high but its not worth the money. No computer have ever got a nerd laid to my knowledge.
A friend of mine bought a high end state-of-the art system for about 5000$ and now its worth nothing, only two years later. The only thing worth anything is the monitor, the rest is now history.
when software comes that requires this kind of CPU power in a single workstation (Windows 2010?) the computers will jump up in spead rather fast. until then the people paying 6000$ for something they dont really need or have use for are as fooled as those who buys Porches.
PS. Atleast a Porche draws chicks, computers dont. DS
HTTP/1.1 400
My naturally aspirated inline 4 will kick the shee-ite out of most V8s.
I agree with many of the comments so far. This really isn't anything special. There are plenty of vendors out there that sell better systems for less money.
This box is nothing more than an overstuffed behmoth. If you want to see some really cool systems, look to the [H]ard|Forum and you'll be blown away at what a bunch of [H]ardcore [H]ardware geeks can do in their garages.
And if you really want someone else to build it for you, look around, there are much better deals out there.
but Linux is more than happy on a system of that caliber.
...As long as you don't go *anything* more graphical than ASCII.
By posting this story, frequent Apple story poster Cowboy Neal is attempting to make the current Power Macs seem like a good value.
A Beowulf Cluster of These
they aren't referring to the performance
rather, the debt
$6500!!!!!
Now, solitaire won't frame anymore and I can keep my beer cool right inside my cabinet so I don't have to make frequent trips to the fridge while playing!!
With a name like Stanley Feinbaum, it's no wonder you had to buy a Porsche.
...
I can SEE 20 frames per second.. individually, that's below the point my eye needs to create the illusion of motion. (incidentally, I frequently notice shuddering on film)
I stop noticing fps improvements at ~70fps
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist. I have no tolerance for bad journalism!
For a professional journalist, your Internet presence seems a little vapid.
While we could start an argument about normalcy, I think you *can* afford it.
It is just about priorities. Drive a smaller car, don't go to fancy restaurants so often, save on your energy and grocery bills.
That's how I do it, and I build pc's for other people, with a 10% markup. That helps too!
I think this story is classifiable as advertising... like many "stories" on slashdot lately....
Actually, the Thoroughbred core versions of the XP processors are *much* cooler than the Palomino. I have two 1700+ chips, one with each core, in identical (tiny) aluminum cases. The Palomino runs far hotter than the Tbred. Oddly, much hotter than seems to be accounted for by the 64 vs 49 watt power consumption they are respectively rated. The Palomino, btw, has now been upgraded with faster (and louder!) fans but the box still runs much hotter.
Bottom line, a Tbred is only useful for heating a small room. For a whole house, specify 'Palomino core'.
Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
..it will be obsolete within 6 months.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Hell, non linear video editing doesnt need this.
I suppose if one is willing to wait an infinite amount of time, any processor is perfectly sufficient. Personally, however, I'm of the "playing around" variety and like to put things together and then see what they look like: I currently have a Athlon 1800+ and having recently gotten a MiniDV camera I was blown away by how overwhelmingly intensive it is. I'll be upgrading shortly.
I shouldn't even credit this whole line of questions with a response though: "Who needs it?" questions are not only ridiculously dumb, they're overwhelmingly redundant-> Every bloody piece of hardware yields a wanker spouting off about "who needs it?". Two years later they're using the hardware they were bitching about when they find it in the discount bin, still crying "Who needs it?" to whatever the latest hardware is. I have a wanker I know who continually assures me that no one ever needs more than a 386/33 -> We should pit him up against Mr. 333Mhz Mac guy (what a WASTE of cycles! Who needs 333Mhz?)
I can see the difference between 25 and 50 fps, but a game running at 25 fps (or even 15 fps) doesn't bother me much, as long as the framerate stays constant. What bothers me more is when a game runs at 100 fps most of the time, then slows down to 3 when there is lots of action on screen, then speeds up again.
Christ almighty, read that site banner:
Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.
Joe average, the guy you are describing, has no idea where to find Slashdot. I certainly don't read this site so that I can see what passes for "good enough" in non-technical circles.
I want to know about:
- the latest and greatest
- cool uses for existing technology
- technology used in ways that it was never intended
- things that have never been done before
Stop acting as if this is a site dedicated to the least common denominator. It's not, and if it ever becomes so, as you suggest, I'll go somewhere else. If you're looking for the former, go read C|net.For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
That system would be the equivalent of a finely tuned, blown, bored, stroked, balanced, ported and polished V8. If it were a V6, it wouldn't have the biggest (fastest) CPU in there.... it'd have a smaller, leaner CPU, kinda like a Transmeta.
Just my $.02315927584, or roughly thereabouts.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Tom's hardware overclocked a p4 to 4.1GHz and it was stable. check it out here
If you calculate the whole thing using an old Pentium 90 chip you can probably save yourself millions.
Hmmm, maybe they just forgot to upgrade the accountant PC's over at Enron and WorldCom...
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
But, spend the same amount of money on a "lump of iron" (which are mostly aluminum now, anyway) V8 and it will blow the doors off of the little 4 cylinder.
Case in point, if a 4 cylinder turbo is so much better than a V6, V8, V10, etc, then why don't you see Indy cars, Top Fuel dragsters, or exotic super cars running them?
Internal combustion engines are essentially glorified air pumps. The more air it can pump the more power it can make. So, it follows that the larger the displacement, or the higher the intake charge density, or the faster you spin it, the more powerful the engine has a potential to be.
Four cylinders, no matter how "advanced" are still limited by physics and metallurgy. You can only make the cylinders so big, or boost it so high, or rev it so far before it breaks. By adding more cylinders you gain several advantages:
So, basically, the turbo fours aren't really all that advanced from a basic design sense. They are simply using lots and lots of gadgets to overcome inherent limitations. There is no substitute for displacement.
Consider this a "luxery PC" and the market for these items is generally small, but profitable.
.sig begged for it.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist. I have no tolerance for bad journalism!
Luxury, perhaps? Yeah, it's picking nits but the
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I watch DVD's on linux.. I'm a criminal!
You use Linux... You're a dirty, smelly GNU/hippie.
This is a six thousand dollar waste of money. And it just goes to show that the reviewers aren't all that bright giving it a 8 out of 10, and also thinking that you'd be able to notice a difference if it was overclocked further to 3.0 Ghz from 2.9 The only use for this machine is, and as it was benchmarked for, is Unreal tournament and other games where "kids" want THE fastest machine around to give them an advantage over the guy they are trying to kill with a slower machine. But I don't know any "kids" you can drop 6 grand on a PC.
I mean, if all out performance isn't an issue (and I'm sure no one around here really cares about that....), I'm guessing it's hard to beat the old Cyrix processors (at least watts/clock speed)? I've seen space heaters that dissipated less heat. And you should be able to pick up several of them really cheap. ;-)
Hand picked Intel Pentium 4 "Northwood" 2.53 GHz processor
"Hey Bob, this one looks good!"
"No, it has a scratch here, keep looking, we need the best!"
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
We should make sure, when comparing engines, that we talk about engines that are submitted to the same intake pressure (normal atmospheric or otherwise). A F1 car from around 20 years ago could produce 1000HP from a 1.6 liter v6. Of course they were running ~80 PSI :) A modern day F1 car can produce ~900 HP per liter out of a normally aspirated 3 liter V10. More important than cylinders is volume. An engines efficiency should be based on HP/ liter. So that would put a modern F1 car at 300HP/liter, the HONDA S2000 at 120HP/liter and a ford mustang GT at 56HP/liter (all normally aspirated)
Agree totally. It amuses me when I see people going gah-gah over some spiffy new overpriced PC that will cost half as much and and be concidered an "entry-level" system in 6 months.
OTOH, I have bought 2 SMP machines in the last 18 months. I knew they weren't the fastest (P3 v P4) but they chug along much more robustly, and will probably be of more value in later years.
for inexpensive alternatives? I'm looking for a new INEXPENSIVE system for CAD and animation (Softimage XSI)at home, but I'd also like it to be useful as a media station. Trouble is, not much money, so I'm looking at a fairly slow system once I allocate money for a decent graphics card such as a Quadro 4. I'd like to gamble on a Radeon 9700 AIW instead, but I can't afford a workstation with AGP 8x. Any suggestions? I don't really have the time or space or inclination to build one myself.
Well, 6 grand *is* a bit of overkill considering you can build something that is about 90% as fast for right about $1000.
... but can it do that and run 4x FSAA at the same time?
But really, its all about image quality. Sure your 2 year old computer will run Unreal Tournament just fine at a framerate thats fast enough that you can't tell the difference if it were higher
It just cracks me up that this overpriced machine is already behind the technology curve. The motherboard they chose does not support the new 8x AGP standard, so for that reason they are not getting full use of their Radeon 9700 card. (It will sync to 4x AGP.)
And too bad they didn't choose the 3.06 Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading -- yet another new feature this machine of yesterday does not support.
And what about Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives? A year from now, when pretty much every drive sold is SATA, the owner of this dinosaur will be sorry they didn't have the foresight to include support for this technology.
Several other posters seem enamored with the DVD+RW drive that is included, but a better choice would be the new Sony drive that supports DVD+RW, DVD+R as well as DVD-RW and DVD-R. (Yes, those dashes and plus signs mean different things folks!)
I could build a more modern machine that supports all of the important technologies listed above for half the price, without all the punk-ass neon light shit.
watch out, apple might come at you about this patent infringment!
You are correct, the WRX is a very impressive little car, thanks in no small part to its all-wheel drive and the fact that it really is a little (and very light) car. Not to mention, when was the last time you saw someone on the street driving a WRC (race) spec WRX? That's like me justifying my argument by comparing a stock Honda to a Porsche 911 GT3 RS prepped for 24 hours at Le Mans.
I also agree that Lotus does produce exotic (and pretty) cars. However, the Elise isn't exactly a rocket ship. Zero to 62 in 5.1 seconds, while good, isn't astonishing. And 156hp? Your point was what, exactly? Oh, and how much did it cost again? Personally, I am more impressed by the Esprit. But, it also happens to be powered by a twin turbo V8.....
And unless my memory fails me, isn't a Hayabusa a MOTORCYCLE?!?! Let's see it has, a 1300cc (1.3L) engine and it weighs what, 480lbs? In other words, it has nearly as big an engine as and weighs roughly 75% less than your previously mentioned Elise. Isn't bringing that into a discussion about cars kind of like me saying that, if I strap my ass to a artillery shell, I can do 0-60 in about 1ms and top out at over 3000mph?
Now, as far as the gas comment goes, I would rather buy a little more gasoline, spend less per horsepower on the car, and have a car that is fast and doesn't look (and sound) like I have seen The Fast and the Furious one too many times....
Sorry Hoss, but you're not even close on this one.
The amount of _torque_ an engine puts out is (to grossly simplify) a function of its displacement.
The amount of _power_ produced is torque over time, so it is a function of displacement times engine RPM.
At no time does cylinder count enter into this. Two given engines, one a V12 and the other an I4, of the same displacement and turning the same RPM should, all else being equal, produce equal power levels.
Where the real world starts intruding is when you start increasing displacement. Ignoring forced induction for a second, you increase displacement by adding bore diameter, stroke length, or additional cylinders.
As you increase bore diameter and/or stroke length, you tend to increase the inertial loads on the con rods, and these loads increase as a function of a power of engine RPM. Given that there is a fixed strength amount for reasonable materials used in non-racing engines, increasing displacement by going to a bigger bore or a longer stroke means reducing maximum RPM potential.
For a big diesel where redline is often less than 3000 RPM, this isn't an issue, so you take advantage of the natural balance of the I6 and make the bores and strokes as big as you like.
But on passenger car engines, and especially in racing engines, adding displacment while retaining RPM capacity means adding cylinders.
Once you start doing that, the primary constraint becomes packaging - all else being equal, a 4 litre I8 will be twice as long as a 2 litre I4, but a 4 litre V8 is only slightly longer (but wider) than a 2 litre I4.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
It CAN be taken too far though...
For example my "money pit" 25MHz Mac...
I can't stop buying more parts for it, and you can't even run a GUI browser on it (under Debian)...
The only thing it's good for is running Links and bidding on more old Mac parts on eBay!
A machine with 100 times the processing power is starting to sound pretty good...
lr
This sure seems like an ad to me. It's definetly not "news for nerds" or even "stuff that matters".
Is Slashdot selling out quietly?
I must be getting old - I have not once looked at my computer and thought "if only that were made of blue jello" and then acted upon that though.
I guess I am interested more in performance and couldn't give a crap how it looks... although I do think the W series Sony Vaios are purdy.
I assume that is for gaming and such - otherwise, just make a nice little cluster. you could make a sweet one of athlon xp 2100s - 5 of them for $1600 or so. I suppose distributed computing doesn't have much purpose if you just want to play Unreal Tournament though.
I'm gonna go dip my computer in chocolate and bacon fat now because I want to have a cool looking computer like all the kids these days.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
First the perf myth is dispelled, watch for the management myth to go down.
Sun has been living with an outdated out-of-band management scheme based on serial ports which requires technially stupid solutions like hooking system RS232 to an external terminal server to dumb-down than dumb-up the interface for remote LAN-based access.
There are all sorts of much more powerful out-of-band management solutions in the Intel world (intelligent, independently powered cpu modules with network connection for much more robust in and out-of-band mgmt AND powerful default baseboard mgmt). Sun manages to perpetuate the management myth due to ignorance and wishful thinking - and needs to, since they've obviouly lost the price perf and even raw perf crown a while ago...
Stock prices are rising! The recession is over! Capitalism is alive and well!
I am HAPPY that this company is selling these computers at such a high price. It simply means one more reason for people to buy items from me... You wanna buy a motherboard? Hey, man! I can get you a good price on an AMD cpu! Need Intel inside? No problem!!!
[[ I drive a Volvo 240. ]]
Ummmm.....maybe it is just me, but this is also from the very website you quoted:
Power: 302.0 kw / 405.0 bhp @ 6000 rpm Torque: 542.33 nm / 400.0 ft lbs @ 4800 rpm (And that's without a turbo and intercooler.)
And I am guessing that, if you compared power and torque curves, the torque and power start to build a lot earlier with the Z06, making it much easier to drive day to day and potentially faster off the line.
And assuming that your figure of 0 to 60 in 4.3 for the WRX is correct, then the Z06 bests it at 3.9 seconds. (in a heavier car, with only two wheels pulling, thereby negating some of the difference between gravel and pavement)
So, here again, assuming all else equal (including All-wheel drive), the bigger displacement car would embarrass it.
Your neighbourhood computer store will sell you a system assembled to your specifications for a reasonable price, and service it if it breaks. It'd cost more than Chuu's example, but not much.
Obviously not played UT2K3 then? Or even JKII? My current games machine is a 1.2Ghz Athlon on an Asus m/b with 256Mb DDR ram, and a GeForce 256 DDR and UT2K3 is just about playable at 800x600, but with most of the prettiness turned off. Now obviously, I don't need half of the junk in that $6K box (the flashing lights for example - how many extra FPS do I get for blue glow in the dark lighting?) but I do need more rendering power - and more ram, and then of course, to feed my shiny new 9700pro, I need an 8x AGP port, and a faster CPU, so better get a new m/b too! This will all probably need more power, and generate more heat, so more fans, bigger or more PSU's...
:)
Serious gaming doesn't happen on a Playstation - they may have optimised architecture for video gaming, but this cripples them for everything else - and you need masses of storage, and a general purpose OS for serious multiplayer games.
iMacs are fine machines, but I would be unhappy about the lack of upgrade options.
Games aside, you make some very valid points though - I recently retired my Slackware 3.6 box that I've had on my network for 6 years (internet/mail/news gateway) - and then only as it had no PCI slots - and I needed one for my ISDN ta when I finally threw out the modem I was using for Internet access.. It gathered dust in the corner with no monitor or keyboard for those 6 years. My games machine on the other hand has had almost all parts upgraded at some point though - online gaming is incredibly competitive in certain circles, and players who can afford to avail themselves of the latest kit will always have an advantage. Besides - I'd hate to think I'd spent £40 on a game but my ancient video hardware makes it look like Quake in software mode
The people who do not understand why this system is so expensive have not had experience selling to people with lots of money. That sounds a little strange so let me give you an example (a strange one but it works). A few years back I used to raise and show rabbits (pedigreed fancy rabbits, look up the American Netherland Dwarf Rabbit Club or American Rabbit Breeders Association for more info). We would occasionally sell stock at some of the shows. One of the places we sold lots of rabbits was the State Fair. While watching the crowd go buy and talking to people interested in buying, I ran across some horse people (there was a very large Quarter Horse show at this fair). I had some pet quality stock there that I would have sold at a flea market for $10 to $20. For the fair the price was slightly higher, say $20 to $30. The horse people remarked that my rabbits were a lot cheaper than the guy whom they had just spoken to. I explained that we do not try to make money off of stock just to cover feed costs, I also pointed out that the stock I had was from more prestigious blood lines. They bought the most expensive and lower quality animals. Their reason? They said they didn't want a cheap rabbit, they wanted and expensive one. The price tag is a prestige item more than what they are buying. That is why this company will make money. People with money don't really care $6k to someone willing to pay $6k for a computer is peanuts.
Last time I looked the P4 3.06 GHz HyperThreading boxes with 9700pro were sold even before Xmas for a price of 3000 Euro at most, I remember one offer with 1999.- Euro here in Germany (3.06 GHz/512MB/9700pro/120 GB HD/DVD).
;)
Now please tell me why I should be excited about lower end system with double the price tag...
my p2 400 displays pr0n with the greatest of ease.
semantics are everything!
That is, the parent said: "And, like it or not, displacement is often the cheapest, simplest, and most reliable way to make more power."
That is a very important point.
I had a very long post prepared, but apparently slashdot ate it when I typed in my password wrong, so this is going in AC. I'm gonna forget my arguments and just post this:
http://www.redlineoil.com//images/dynores.jpg
That's a dyno of an LS1 V8, the engine used in corvettes, camaros, and firebird trans-ams. At a normal driving rpm of like 2500, you get 300 ft-lb and nearly 150hp to the wheels. That simply does not happen in fancy 4-bangers. Something like a WRX isn't spooled enough to make good torque at that rpm, and a naturally aspirated VTEC, like an RSX typeS, makes 142 ft-lb but at 6000rpm. Much the same in the S2000, a very "peaky" car. That's why displacement cannot be beat for normal driving and for a great seat-of-the-pants feeling of power. That's also the reason corvettes get nearly 30mpg, because on the highway you can use very high gearing and run the engine at very low rpm. IMO this helps extend engine life too.
I find that in most cases, these comparisons end up with highly modded or foreign spec 4-cylinders being compared to bone stock domestic V8s. That should say a lot right there.
The bottom line is that nobody needs this, and that the price is ridiculously high for the extra benefits you receive. It's been this way since the beginning of the industry.
The truth is that for every one intelligent computer enthusiast I know (the kind that write software and actually know how things work), there are about five people that care only about raw speed. The car analogy works here, in that it's not about what your computer is good for. It's about having more than everyone else. I'd attribute it to some kind of insecurity, be it Freudian in nature or something else entirely.
On the bright side of things, the premiums that fools pay for hardware such as this drives the prices down on the more sensible, middle-of-the-road components that most of us buy. So don't complain too loud.
And talk about a slow news day...
Pretty cool but the V6/V8 comment is stupid and doesn't even apply...BTW, what would a finally tuned V8 do to a V6....that's right leave it in the dust.
BTW, I drive a V6 so I can't really talk. Unfortunately they couldn't fit a V8 in my car.
Please note that you are comparing a US spec Z06 to a WRX that is far and away from the one sold in the US!
US WRX has 227hp and 215ft-lb torque.
Just a bit of a difference, once you factor in the same laws and emissions that chevy has to follow with the Z06 eh?
If this thing had a bunch of nicities that made it more pleasurable to use, or was bundled with something that did something surprising or innovative, then you could call it a luxury PC. But as far as I see it, this is a "sports coupe PC" and not a very exciting one either. Why the fuck do they need water cooling for a 2.8GHz->2.9GHz overclock? It doesn't come with an HDTV capable video card, nor a Composite/S-VHS interface. I don't see a nice monitor in the bundle. No built in microphone bundled with voice recognition software. And a fucking Audigy. That's the crappiest prosumer sound card in existence. Not even a friggin cupholder. Oh, but cold cathode lights. Now we are living in style.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
After I posted that, I was wondering if anyone would catch that one, so I'm sincerely impressed.
You are absolutely correct and I concede the point. I also worded the statement poorly and would also have had to include the caveat without sacrificing structural strength by offseting the common crank throws. In other words, I didn't account for the difference between even and odd fire V6's, V10's, and V12's. An easy modern example of this would be to compare the crank from a Ford V10 (even fire) to that of a Chrysler V10 (odd fire).
Wow, 3 pages of specs. It's almost like reading a brochure.
Tell you what, next time you need a place to donate your 6 month old PC, I'd be happy to accept it, OK? Let's be friends....
Yeah, but this isn't a Porsche - it's a tricked out '57 Chevy Coupe with fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror. If you really want to drive that kind of clown car, I got true symapthy for you.
I'd think of the Apple line as a Porsche.
That is all.
Just goes to show that sometimes a fine tuned V6 can beat an over the top V8
;)
I know the story emphasizes "sometimes", but it sure isn't true to the trend of a GM 260 versus a GM 350 engine. The difference between those two engines is one is for granny in her monte carlo and the other is for someone to use to pull hell of a cross and pull the cross down and still have enough power to burn up a barn(no offense to Amish people).
Ok, you didn't say V8...I still like saying those couple lines
I was looking for video cards and seen this system last night.
Costs $2209 and even if you add more drive and such to make the machines the same its gonna cost a whole heckofa lot less.
It scores 17793 on 3DMark2001, which beats that supposed fastest system hands down....
http://www.ocsystem.com/migwarovinpe.html
Hah, my roommate is definitely one of those kids. He paid big bucks to get a top-of-the-line Alienware computer, but for the first six months of using it, somehow he managed to have his CPU underclocked - the bus was set to 100 mhz instead of the 133 his Athlon is meant to use, but the multiplier was unchanged, meaning his 1.4 ghz cpu was running at about 1 ghz. Ooops.
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
The problem with this lame argument is that a 50 year old Porsche is still a joy to own, whereas this machine won't be worth anything in ten years time.
Journalists don't need to spell... that's what they have editors for.
I can actually tell the difference between 120 and 125 fps in Q3A (you move completely different depending on your framerate). But maybe I play it too much...
If I'm gona spend that much, the box better come with dual SCSI 320, 15000 RPM drives.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Straight-aways are for fast cars. Curves are for fast drivers.
I had to reread the hed a bunch of times because I would get to the end and think, "mmmmmmmm, fish tacos," and forget what I was reading about.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Such a goddamn waste of money. I built a computer that has an Athlon 2700+ (which I plan overclocking), Raid 0 with 2 western digitals as well, 1 gig ram as well, Ati 9700 all in wonder, etc, etc, FOR LESS THAN 1/3 THE COST. I know mine goes a LITTLE slower, but damn, that thing doesn't even have hyperthreading... How old is that review?
And then the money you made on the last 30 systems you built, gets given to a charity... which is a wonderful idea, but 1x XP2400 with the specs you mentioned is the equivalent in cost to about 6x Celerons... now which do you think would be more useful to said charity?
Personally, unless you have a grand plan along the lines of giving that charity 5x more PCs or something, you're wasting money, despite whether you can technically 'afford it', I hate to think of all the handicapped children vying to use 1 PC...
-VolVE
I'm running galeon, pan, sawfish, and a buncha rxvts along with xmms right now. xmixer. gkrellm. sawfish's pager. Solid dragging in sawfish. And that's on a slower system (PII/266 instead of PII/333).
It runs fine, and there are gtk2 apps with antialiased text in there. Granted, I'm not using E's "reflection" plugin or anything like that, and it wasn't too long ago that mozilla ran too slowly on a system like this, but it's fine now.
May we never see th
Not quite, there are two distinct revisions of Tbreds.
The Thoroughbred B certainly does run cooler.
The Thoroughbred A (the XP 2200+ only) runs hotter (I have one, and it ran very hot - it can be overclocked surprisingly well and remains stable, as long as very good air cooling is used, but overclocked to the max it runs extremely hot, much hotter than Palominos).
First off, AGP 8x give NO improvement. The increased bandwidth is far more than the card or system is capable of utilizing.
Also, IDE hard drives will NEVER fill a serial ATA or even an ATA100. Right now they burst, that's BURST, above the 66mbit mark. If you wanted to criticize the choice of hard drive you would have suggested an Ultra160 SCSI controller and 15k rpm SCSI drive, not serial IDE since any fool knows hard drives above the 120gb mark come with a controller card in the box.
As far as HT is concerned, it will definitely help if you're into Photoshop, but fact is most games are not multithreaded and will be the last to benefit from HT of all the programs you'll find on the market. Games are notoriously slow to adapt new technology. By the time games start to use threads efficiently, you'll want a Pentium 5 12ghz that supports HT3 and a geforce7.
You might be right about being able to build a better system for less, but you seem to be a bit too hung up on the buzzwords to know what you're talking about.
If I wanted a room filled up with 20MB hard drives...
I just threw out a P 133 computer with a 2 gig HD. MB was bad. It wasn't even worth it to hunt down my screwdriver to remove the HD, not with prices rapidly approaching a buck a gig.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
I have nothing to add here. But I am a subaru fanboy. I admit it. I might as well come clean right now. I test drove one to see if it lived up to the hype and I got out of the car thinking "what part of my life do I need to change to get one of these?" Now I have a WRX and I love it love it love it. It is really fast. The turbo lag is a drag (as a poster mentioned). If you lose boost on the turbo (below about 3000rpm) you feel like you're driving a taurus. But over that it just rocks. It won't win a drag race with a camero. But get on a road with turn and it is as advertised. For a car that normal people can afford, you really can't have more fun. (and if you live in Colorado you have AWD, ABS and the thrill of making SUV drives question their purchase choices)
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
hah...actually...its more the other way around. anything using Xwindows is slow as balls. however, windows xp, when configured properly, is quite responsive and runs quite well on a pentium ii 333. i should know, as i'm typing this on one right now. granted the extra ram and decent (for its day) video card don't hurt, but it really is enough for home use. i can easily burn cds at 16X or above, watch dvds while doing other things, etc. if you plan on using it for games, look elsewhere, but don't knock the old systems built from spare parts :).
You clearly missed the point -- if you are going to spend over 6 grand on a machine, you would expect it to support the latest technologies. Sure, 8x AGP doesn't buy you anything today, but its TOMORROW we are trying to prepare for. Gee, wouldn't you feel pretty stupid if you bought a $6k computer that wasn't able to support the latest peripherals and accessories next year. Yes, this means Serial ATA, this means 8x AGP, this means Hyperthreading, yes this means compatibility with both DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW.
I forgot to mention an important fact in the 1.3.67 announcement. In order to
get a fully working kernel, you have to follow the steps below:
- Walk around your computer widdershins 3 times, chanting "Linus is
overworked, and he makes lousy patches, but we love him anyway". Get
your spuouse to do this too for extra effect. Children are optional.
- Apply the patch included in this mail
- Call your system "Super-67", and don't forget to unapply the patch
before you later applying the official 1.3.68 patch.
- reboot
-- Linus Torvalds, announcing another kernel patch
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...