My indicator for stability is that the machine has been running 24/7 at full tilt (encoding video via Handbrake) for about a week now... I've never seen an unstable system do that:)
Is the crashing system prime-stable? If not, it's just overclocked too far, or not getting enough voltage... or the motherboard is having problems coping... or the power supply isn't up to snuff... there's lots of possible causes.
I'll reply to this in a year or so with the amount of crashes I've had...;)
There's not much fiddling about these days. If you're buying Intel stuff new, you really don't have much choice other than to get an unlocked multiplier - and setting a multiplier isn't exactly rocket science. If you stick to the basics (either undervolt at stock frequency or crank up the frequency at stock voltage), it should take about 10 minutes including reboots and stress testing.
AMD on the other hand might be a bit more complicated - I know I never got a stable overclock back during my Socket939 days (X2-3800+, crappy MSI board with a Northbridge fan that died after a year). I wonder if it's similarly easy there now... anyone care to chime in?
Even with older Intel systems it's not too fiddly - overclocked a Pentium Dual Core (cut down Core2Duo) based system from 2.6 to 3.4GHz a few days ago, that only took about 15 minutes. Crank FSB by 10 MHz, see if it boots, run Prime95 for 60 seconds and see where the temps plateau out... reboot, repeat. Eventually the board stopped booting (270MHz FSB) - would no longer find a boot device, so backed off to 260MHz, ran Prime95 for 10 minutes, temps under 50C with stock cooling - done.
Of course, you can try to get past the FSB block by lowering ratios for RAM speed and PCIe clock (although I'm not sure which clock ratio would correspond to my missing boot device problem), but when you stick to the basics and don't try to push the envelope all too far, overclocking really is pretty simple. And 15 minutes (including that last 10 minute run of Prime95) for a 30% performance boost (I mostly use the machine for encoding video so that I don't tie up my laptop for hours on end) is pretty decent...
True, audio quality in cinemas is often abysmal - when I'm dragged to a movie here in Germany, I make sure I've got earplugs with me... funnily enough, we have the opposite EQ problem here: The sound is pretty much all upper midrange... so much that it's painful. Nevertheless, I'd assume that bad audio in a cinema not the norm...
As for picture quality: Must be lucky, because I haven't actually had any issues. Where exactly are you located?
The thing is, if you're into a nice high-def picture and surround sound, the cinema offers better quality than your old CRT.
When compared to a decent home cinema with a nice big screen and surround sound, that difference more or less ceases to exist, with the added benefit of no annoying moviegoers, kids, cellphone users or 3D (unless you really want it and get it yourself).
Of course, I'm quite satisfied with a regular sized SDTV, just like you - the only problem is that most don't have VGA ports... HDTV makes hooking up the laptop much easier, as I don't need an S-Video port. Also, the CRT is getting kind of dark so I'm looking at a replacement... and the power savings more than justify 250€ for an entry level HDTV. Or maybe I should just turn my work room into the home cinema and put in a 2560x1440 ~30" display for both work *and* movies... an awesome sound system would already be in place... hmmm. Decisions, decisions...
I've typed on many a netbook (owned a few myself - EeePCs, Toshiba NB100, Acer Aspire One), and they were all pretty bad. The ASUS EeePCs were the most acceptable of the bunch (my old 1000H was OK - not great but at least it didn't miss keys every now and then), but still nothing compared to a real keyboard - my frame of reference is a Thinkpad R61 or, for undersized keyboards (because it's a bit unfair to compare to full-sized), an X41T, so it's really no wonder everything else is inadequate.
Plastic vs. magnesium alloys, or brushed aluminum, in comparison to oxygen-free vs. more oxygen-freeer?
With laptops, you're talking about creaking palmrests, paint coming off after half a year, clunky keyboards that make a ton of noise and don't register keypresses, and devices that break after a 3-foot fall. When you get a device that doesn't start to exhibit these symptoms after a year or so, it usually turns out to be a high-end Thinkpad, Elitebook, MacBook Pro, or Dell Precision Series... either that or the damned thing was just placed on a desk and used as a desktop for 12 months.
As for the percentages you posted - completely irrelevant. The percentages are listed by company - I'd never buy a Lenovo Ideapad because they're crap, or a Thinkpad EDGE, but a Thinkpad X220? T420? W520? ANY TIME. And this trend is ALSO accounted for on page 5 of the PDF from the report Gizmodo linked to (WTF are you linking to Gizmodo for anyway? At least link to the source instead of the two sentences that Gizmodo seems to think make up an article)... the high end (in laptop-speak this usually means either gaming laptops or business laptops) devices fail quite a bit less often than low-end devices.
Oh, and did you see who created this report? A provider of laptop insurance... if you read further through their PDF, you'll see that the data is all from clients who insured their devices through this company. When you have insurance for a device, you take less care of it than when you don't... not to mention limiting the data to 30,000 laptops that were insured at a certain single insurance company is a relatively small sample.
" Good products? Good quality? Good support? Fuck no. They've never had any of that."
Sorry, but you're talking out of your ass. Put an Apple device next to 10 other devices of the same type that cost the same amount, and the Apple device will nearly always come out on top - ESPECIALLY if the person doing the testing isn't an IT nerd.
A MacBookPro or MacBookAir looks slicker and feels more solid than the Windows (or OS-less) equivalent... better made, often better (or at least more consistent) battery life, better input devices in a lot of cases, and often a simpler, nicer user experience.
As for quality: The Windows equivalents which offer the same or better build quality are usually at least as expensive, if not much more so. Run of the mill consumer laptops are atrocious - Dell Inspiron, Acer, ASUS, Lenovo Ideapads and pseudo-Thinkpads (EDGE and so on) and the like... it's only when you start getting into high end business devices that you'll see build quality that feels on par with a MacBookPro. I wouldn't trade my Thinkpads for a MacBookPro, but then again they cost significantly more...
Switch over to the tablet/smartphone arena, and it's similar - the iPhone/iPad devices feel solid and have a nice heft, and lack the plasticky construction found on many/most other devices (OK, the plastic often helps reduce impact damage). The user experience is usually superior right from the first swipe... it's only when you hit a "This won't work without a jailbreak" roadblock that the alternative OS's take the lead again.
And support... Apple's may not be absolutely stellar (although in many cases, it is... at least from what I've heard), but have you tried getting a repair or exchange from Acer/ASUS/$LaptopMaker lately? It's hard to provide service that bad...
There are exceptions to the points I've listed, of course - I'm typing this on a Thinkpad because I hate touchpads, and have a fully customized Android phone in my pocket... but to be honest - if I didn't (want to) spend 40 hours making each device usable (Windows: Dual boot XP/7, drivers, all sorts of helper apps like Dexpot, Winsplit Revolution, 7-Taskbar Tweaker, Allsnap and so on... Android: CyanogenMod7, custom kernel with all sorts of patches, custom lockscreen, custom launcher, custom dialer, hell... custom pretty much everything) before actually using it, I'd probably prefer Apple products too.
That's pretty cheap, but isn't 2Mbps of upload bandwidth a little thin for most VPS applications? Pretty much rules out anything you normally wouldn't do on a local machine anyway, doesn't it?
There are a few cards out there that have relatively low power consumption. The 8800GT idles at about 50W and uses about 110W under load... mid-range ATi cards like the 6670 or 6750 use 12-16W idle and less than 90W (70W in the case of the 6670!) under full load.
My next card will probably be either a 6750 or one of the midrange 7 series cards (provided there's one that uses significantly less than 100W under full load)... should cut my power consumption nicely (currently running an 8800GT).
For an RPG or RTS game, 30FPS minimum (not average) is absolutely no problem. Looks completely smooth.
For shooters, of course, anything under 60 is pretty much unplayable... but that's not because of stutter or lack of smoothness, but because it induces mouselag.
But do the actual models and animations used in the games really still need that much more improvement? I hit my peak graphics desire some time around CS:Source and UT2004...
New gameplay tweaks and styles are the only things that have kept me playing games... the graphics have looked great for ages.
So you're talking about the "operating frequency", i.e. 1 GHz on a 1st-gen Snapdragon? Because my Snapdragon spends about 5% of its time at 1GHz, and the rest clocked down to 250MHz...
"Cheap 5$ apps like Co-Pilot gives you some GPS functionality, directions etc. (Co-Pilot takes a while to get find the satellite and calculate current position, after that it is not too bad)."
Copilot is one of the "premium" navigation apps on Android - roughly on the same level as Navigon or Aura... it's only recently that they dropped the price of their US app so low. And getting a GPS fix is no faster or slower in any Android app...
Interesting that a low price would cause you to think it's somehow inferior...
Re:Overlocking was only ever a dick waving contest
on
Is Overclocking Over?
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· Score: 1
Which games do you know of that are CPU bound at 100FPS? There aren't very many... if you're getting crappy gaming performance, you'd be better off overclocking your GPU.
"IMHO games to be more visually appealing need to ditch the idea of polygons altogether and be comprised of voxels or truly curved surfaces and implement at least some elements of ray-traced lighting and material properties."
Quick question: Why do games NEED to be visually more appealing? Hell, I played through Modern Warfare 3 last weekend on a big monitor with surround sound and a big subwoofer, and was astonished at how immersive the experience was... the graphics are good enough to convey character emotions and the intensity of the story - so why would you need better graphics?
Where do you draw the line between, say, an action game and a war simulation?
But overclocking would speed up that compile time significantly. Video encoding and the like that also benefits immensely... Depends on what you're doing, really - if your video is currently taking 30 seconds to encode, a 5 second improvement might not be that big a deal. If it's taking 30 hours to encode, shaving 5 hours off of that is pretty awesome...:)
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My indicator for stability is that the machine has been running 24/7 at full tilt (encoding video via Handbrake) for about a week now... I've never seen an unstable system do that :)
Is the crashing system prime-stable? If not, it's just overclocked too far, or not getting enough voltage... or the motherboard is having problems coping... or the power supply isn't up to snuff... there's lots of possible causes.
I'll reply to this in a year or so with the amount of crashes I've had... ;)
Given that you can cool an i3 more or less passively, why would you want to underclock? Power saving? Get a refurbished laptop board...
H264 high profile without GPU acceleration (Handbrake) is similar. 30% overclock => multiple hours won, at least on last-gen (~IntelCore2) hardware.
There's not much fiddling about these days. If you're buying Intel stuff new, you really don't have much choice other than to get an unlocked multiplier - and setting a multiplier isn't exactly rocket science. If you stick to the basics (either undervolt at stock frequency or crank up the frequency at stock voltage), it should take about 10 minutes including reboots and stress testing.
AMD on the other hand might be a bit more complicated - I know I never got a stable overclock back during my Socket939 days (X2-3800+, crappy MSI board with a Northbridge fan that died after a year). I wonder if it's similarly easy there now... anyone care to chime in?
Even with older Intel systems it's not too fiddly - overclocked a Pentium Dual Core (cut down Core2Duo) based system from 2.6 to 3.4GHz a few days ago, that only took about 15 minutes. Crank FSB by 10 MHz, see if it boots, run Prime95 for 60 seconds and see where the temps plateau out... reboot, repeat. Eventually the board stopped booting (270MHz FSB) - would no longer find a boot device, so backed off to 260MHz, ran Prime95 for 10 minutes, temps under 50C with stock cooling - done.
Of course, you can try to get past the FSB block by lowering ratios for RAM speed and PCIe clock (although I'm not sure which clock ratio would correspond to my missing boot device problem), but when you stick to the basics and don't try to push the envelope all too far, overclocking really is pretty simple. And 15 minutes (including that last 10 minute run of Prime95) for a 30% performance boost (I mostly use the machine for encoding video so that I don't tie up my laptop for hours on end) is pretty decent...
Who the hell overclocks without Prime95 (or Furmark) and a temp monitor? :)
Depends. Is the rest of the parking lot full? Or are there empty spaces right next to the disabled spots?
True, audio quality in cinemas is often abysmal - when I'm dragged to a movie here in Germany, I make sure I've got earplugs with me... funnily enough, we have the opposite EQ problem here: The sound is pretty much all upper midrange... so much that it's painful. Nevertheless, I'd assume that bad audio in a cinema not the norm...
As for picture quality: Must be lucky, because I haven't actually had any issues. Where exactly are you located?
The thing is, if you're into a nice high-def picture and surround sound, the cinema offers better quality than your old CRT.
When compared to a decent home cinema with a nice big screen and surround sound, that difference more or less ceases to exist, with the added benefit of no annoying moviegoers, kids, cellphone users or 3D (unless you really want it and get it yourself).
Of course, I'm quite satisfied with a regular sized SDTV, just like you - the only problem is that most don't have VGA ports... HDTV makes hooking up the laptop much easier, as I don't need an S-Video port. Also, the CRT is getting kind of dark so I'm looking at a replacement... and the power savings more than justify 250€ for an entry level HDTV. Or maybe I should just turn my work room into the home cinema and put in a 2560x1440 ~30" display for both work *and* movies... an awesome sound system would already be in place... hmmm. Decisions, decisions...
Maybe not ditched, but at least offer a 2D viewing at the same time as an alternative.
Don't be - same res on 7" gives you the same amount of "screen area" in a package that should fit in a decent sized jacket pocket.
I've typed on many a netbook (owned a few myself - EeePCs, Toshiba NB100, Acer Aspire One), and they were all pretty bad. The ASUS EeePCs were the most acceptable of the bunch (my old 1000H was OK - not great but at least it didn't miss keys every now and then), but still nothing compared to a real keyboard - my frame of reference is a Thinkpad R61 or, for undersized keyboards (because it's a bit unfair to compare to full-sized), an X41T, so it's really no wonder everything else is inadequate.
Are you really comparing laptops to audio cables?
Plastic vs. magnesium alloys, or brushed aluminum, in comparison to oxygen-free vs. more oxygen-freeer?
With laptops, you're talking about creaking palmrests, paint coming off after half a year, clunky keyboards that make a ton of noise and don't register keypresses, and devices that break after a 3-foot fall. When you get a device that doesn't start to exhibit these symptoms after a year or so, it usually turns out to be a high-end Thinkpad, Elitebook, MacBook Pro, or Dell Precision Series... either that or the damned thing was just placed on a desk and used as a desktop for 12 months.
As for the percentages you posted - completely irrelevant. The percentages are listed by company - I'd never buy a Lenovo Ideapad because they're crap, or a Thinkpad EDGE, but a Thinkpad X220? T420? W520? ANY TIME. And this trend is ALSO accounted for on page 5 of the PDF from the report Gizmodo linked to (WTF are you linking to Gizmodo for anyway? At least link to the source instead of the two sentences that Gizmodo seems to think make up an article)... the high end (in laptop-speak this usually means either gaming laptops or business laptops) devices fail quite a bit less often than low-end devices.
Oh, and did you see who created this report? A provider of laptop insurance... if you read further through their PDF, you'll see that the data is all from clients who insured their devices through this company. When you have insurance for a device, you take less care of it than when you don't... not to mention limiting the data to 30,000 laptops that were insured at a certain single insurance company is a relatively small sample.
" Good products? Good quality? Good support? Fuck no. They've never had any of that."
Sorry, but you're talking out of your ass. Put an Apple device next to 10 other devices of the same type that cost the same amount, and the Apple device will nearly always come out on top - ESPECIALLY if the person doing the testing isn't an IT nerd.
A MacBookPro or MacBookAir looks slicker and feels more solid than the Windows (or OS-less) equivalent... better made, often better (or at least more consistent) battery life, better input devices in a lot of cases, and often a simpler, nicer user experience.
As for quality: The Windows equivalents which offer the same or better build quality are usually at least as expensive, if not much more so. Run of the mill consumer laptops are atrocious - Dell Inspiron, Acer, ASUS, Lenovo Ideapads and pseudo-Thinkpads (EDGE and so on) and the like... it's only when you start getting into high end business devices that you'll see build quality that feels on par with a MacBookPro. I wouldn't trade my Thinkpads for a MacBookPro, but then again they cost significantly more...
Switch over to the tablet/smartphone arena, and it's similar - the iPhone/iPad devices feel solid and have a nice heft, and lack the plasticky construction found on many/most other devices (OK, the plastic often helps reduce impact damage). The user experience is usually superior right from the first swipe... it's only when you hit a "This won't work without a jailbreak" roadblock that the alternative OS's take the lead again.
And support... Apple's may not be absolutely stellar (although in many cases, it is... at least from what I've heard), but have you tried getting a repair or exchange from Acer/ASUS/$LaptopMaker lately? It's hard to provide service that bad...
There are exceptions to the points I've listed, of course - I'm typing this on a Thinkpad because I hate touchpads, and have a fully customized Android phone in my pocket... but to be honest - if I didn't (want to) spend 40 hours making each device usable (Windows: Dual boot XP/7, drivers, all sorts of helper apps like Dexpot, Winsplit Revolution, 7-Taskbar Tweaker, Allsnap and so on... Android: CyanogenMod7, custom kernel with all sorts of patches, custom lockscreen, custom launcher, custom dialer, hell... custom pretty much everything) before actually using it, I'd probably prefer Apple products too.
It'll prevent kids forgetting their $subject book every few days... and cause less back pain. Not much more though.
That's pretty cheap, but isn't 2Mbps of upload bandwidth a little thin for most VPS applications? Pretty much rules out anything you normally wouldn't do on a local machine anyway, doesn't it?
There are a few cards out there that have relatively low power consumption. The 8800GT idles at about 50W and uses about 110W under load... mid-range ATi cards like the 6670 or 6750 use 12-16W idle and less than 90W (70W in the case of the 6670!) under full load.
My next card will probably be either a 6750 or one of the midrange 7 series cards (provided there's one that uses significantly less than 100W under full load)... should cut my power consumption nicely (currently running an 8800GT).
For an RPG or RTS game, 30FPS minimum (not average) is absolutely no problem. Looks completely smooth.
For shooters, of course, anything under 60 is pretty much unplayable... but that's not because of stutter or lack of smoothness, but because it induces mouselag.
Resolution, sure... gimme gimme gimme!
But do the actual models and animations used in the games really still need that much more improvement? I hit my peak graphics desire some time around CS:Source and UT2004...
New gameplay tweaks and styles are the only things that have kept me playing games... the graphics have looked great for ages.
So you're talking about the "operating frequency", i.e. 1 GHz on a 1st-gen Snapdragon? Because my Snapdragon spends about 5% of its time at 1GHz, and the rest clocked down to 250MHz...
"Cheap 5$ apps like Co-Pilot gives you some GPS functionality, directions etc. (Co-Pilot takes a while to get find the satellite and calculate current position, after that it is not too bad)."
Copilot is one of the "premium" navigation apps on Android - roughly on the same level as Navigon or Aura... it's only recently that they dropped the price of their US app so low. And getting a GPS fix is no faster or slower in any Android app...
Interesting that a low price would cause you to think it's somehow inferior...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio
Not the same thing as a video DVD.
50% is pretty rare these days, but 20-30% isn't all too uncommon...
Which games do you know of that are CPU bound at 100FPS? There aren't very many... if you're getting crappy gaming performance, you'd be better off overclocking your GPU.
"IMHO games to be more visually appealing need to ditch the idea of polygons altogether and be comprised of voxels or truly curved surfaces and implement at least some elements of ray-traced lighting and material properties."
Quick question: Why do games NEED to be visually more appealing? Hell, I played through Modern Warfare 3 last weekend on a big monitor with surround sound and a big subwoofer, and was astonished at how immersive the experience was... the graphics are good enough to convey character emotions and the intensity of the story - so why would you need better graphics?
Where do you draw the line between, say, an action game and a war simulation?
But overclocking would speed up that compile time significantly. Video encoding and the like that also benefits immensely... Depends on what you're doing, really - if your video is currently taking 30 seconds to encode, a 5 second improvement might not be that big a deal. If it's taking 30 hours to encode, shaving 5 hours off of that is pretty awesome... :)