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February 2008 Hardware Roundup
Tom's Hardware has a nice roundup of some of the new shiny hardware for February '08. Everything from a screaming fast 2 GHz DDR3 to liquid cooled cases and back again. "Unlike previous Zalman cases that used a heat pipe assembly, the LQ1000 has a traditional water pump and flexible hose for connecting the case's sinks to CPU and graphics coolers. A passively-cooled finned side panel and fan-assisted rear radiator remove heat, while a lighted flow indicator shows the bottom-mounted pump in action."
By the time you've clicked through all 21 pages, it will be March already.
Please stop linking to "articles" on the page-o-ads tomshardware site and making them money. They have a hardware roundup every month; there's no need to link to them just to improve their ad revenue stream.
I'm waiting for the swimsuit edition.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
More Twoson than Cupertino
- a bunch of novelty cases
- overpriced power supplies
- and 6 new DDR3 modules at varying frequencies
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
It's a link to last measure. Don't click it, just a heads up.
Since the hardware experts are all here and you're all complaining about Tom's Hardware's advertisements and novelty/enthusiast equipment, can anyone recommend a good hardware review site, especially for (comparative) beginners? I'm a graphic designer and could use some advice on buying a new computer that's more detailed than, "buy the mac that fits in your budget." And even if the best advice really is to buy that mac, I'd be a lot more comfortable paying it's thousand dollar price tag if I knew why.
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall.
Wow! 21 pages with 50% ads. Now I remember why I stopped reading Tom's Hardware years ago.
If you buy second-rate to begin with, though, then you can enjoy it for years before it turns third-rate. A much better investment, and usually a lot cheaper.
only one am2+ nvidia board and where is sb700 for the AMD chipset boards?
Is it just me, or is everything in that article big and bulky? It's all RAM that's been made faster by adding cooling fins the size of bricks to them and other hardware made for running a server. I realize that all these hardware sites pander to the extreme gaming crowd, but where is the sleek and small?
Instead of the case larger than some bookshelves, where is the one designed to run silent and unnoticed by my TV or under my desk? Instead of the super ram and massive hard drive racks, where is the clever wireless network storage solution that will move media around my house? Instead of the computer case with a big fat LCD screen built into the front, where is the sleek standalone screen that that can wirelessly connect to the server in the basement and display pictures when not in use?
I don't think anyone is surprised to discover that by making everything twice as big, loud and hot you can get the most blazing performance. How about showing me something that impresses me instead?
I'm not sure who told you that DDR3 RAM was low latency, but the statement is dead wrong. If you RTFA, you'll see that the new 2+GHz DDR3 has a CAS 10 latency!! While it's true that it's clocked more than double a typical DDR2 module @ 800mhz, these DDR2 modules are typically CAS 4 or 5, and timings can sometimes be tightened even further. The throughput of DDR3 memory is certainly boosted greatly over DDR2, but no matter how you measure it, memory latency has not seen the same improvement.
The only way you're going to see latency cause large effects on performance is if you turn off the cache on your processor, or run some kind of program that always results in cache misses (which isn't at all realistic). The whole point of cache is to mask the effects of latency. For example, if you have a cache with a 98% hit rate (meaning that only 2% of all memory accesses need to wait on memory, which is fairly realistic for today's processors), then if you doubled your memory latency, your performance (average latency seen by the CPU) would only increase by 17%. If you could cut the latency in half, then your performance would only increase by 9%. In reality, there isn't that much variance between different latencies on similar types of memory. (I've assumed that the cache is 10 times faster than memory, which is pretty conservative).
Applying Amdahl's law here, if you want to reduce memory latency, you really want to increase your cache's hit rate or speed, for example by getting a processor with a larger cache or lower cache latency.