I'm currently using a Samsung ATIV Smart PC (dumbest name ever for a tablet, IMO)... however, if you can live with the smaller screen (which is an advantage, IMO), I'd recommend going with a Thinkpad Tablet 2 instead - same guts, same battery size, but better build quality and not so ridiculously big. Only drawback is that the TPT2 can't power a USB hard drive (the ATIV can) and not all TPT2 come with the active digitizer (i.e. pen input won't work unless you specifically buy a model that comes with the digitizer in the display panel).
Only real reason would be pen apps. There are a ton of awesome Windows only applications for use with an active stylus, such as OneNote (the Android version only has about 2% or the feature set) or PDF Annotator. Also, for working with multiple documents on a tablet, Windows 8 can't be beat (unfortunately).
As for long battery life with full Windows 8, look no further than Atom. I'm typing this on a Clover Trail Atom tablet right now, and I'm seeing 10-14 hours of straight usage out of a single charge every day , usually with quite a bit of video watching included. Considering that this device has a 30Wh battery, we're looking at a total average power draw of 2.5-3W, including the astonishingly bright screen. I highly doubt i3 Haswell devices will be hitting anywhere near those kinds of numbers any time soon, and the new Bay Trail Atoms should improve on Clover Trail's battery life as well. Performance is so so, but I seem to be more memory starved than CPU limited. If only Intel would provide some power sipping Atom SoCs with 8GB of RAM...
Windows 8 on tablets has huge drawbacks as well, though... one of the biggest being connected standy sucking battery life when the device is "off" or rather in standby. It's a bit like the issue with partial wakelocks on Android, but the culprits are much harder to find because there is no equivalent to Better Battery Stats and less OS tools for monitoring battery usage.
Steam is a bad example... when I play PC games, I'm at my PC, with a broadband internet connection (which is the only reason Steam's DRM works halfway decently). Ever had a connection problem with Steam? Issues getting into offline mode? It's incredibly frustrating, and would be completely unacceptable for music, TV or movies especially if you wanted to use them on mobile devices.
" And no, you don't NEED to download a few terabytes per month. I have capped internet here in Australia (150GB / month) and it is plenty, pretty much. There are terabyte plans available - we're getting to the point where caps are academic now, if you have fast enough internet to stream, there's no need to hoard stuff any more."
You're contradicting yourself - and not in a small way. I mostly stream as well, and 150GB would be nowhere near enough - this is only a two-person household, too.
Consider:
1. A TV show episode per day at 2-3GB 2. A movie every few days at 4-8GB 3. Youtube being used a lot (let's say 2GB of data per hour) by both me and the girlfriend, so easily 10-12GB per day 4. Game downloads/updates (Steam/Origin/SC2) 5. Software downloads/updates (even a ROM for my phone, which is downloaded every day, is 0.2GB) for Windows, Linux and so on 6. Music streaming at 320kbps (~140MBytes per hour)
And that's just weekdays - on weekends, you could see that per-day usage double easily. But let's say per-day usage total is, at minimum, 2+4+10 gigs - 16GB. That adds up to about 480GB per month, and that's without ANY kind of hoarding whatsoever.
Basically: Unless you hardly watch any video at all or are satisfied with SD streams, 150 gigs a month won't cut it. At 500-1000GB, maybe we'll be on a level at which 99% of people can actually use all the newfangled HD streaming services that are being advertised by ISPs without worrying about their cap.
That was supposed to say degrees Celsius, not percent. Although 30% isn't that far fetched - at 4.8GHz, my 2500k would surely hit 90C with the Intel boxed cooler, while it only hits about 60C with a high end cooler. 90=>60 is 33% less...
What would happen if you put a bunch of diamonds inside a silver heatsink (i.e. put the diamonds in the mold and pour the silver on top)? Would the "pockets" of increased thermal conductivity help much?
Let me guess: You're using AMD CPUs without proper (or rather not fully functional) thermal sensing and therefore don't see a difference between coolers... if the CPU doesn't actually display the current core temperatures, but rather calculates a theoretical temperature based on the current power usage and a generic heatsink model, you're obviously not going to see a difference unless you install a thermal probe yourself. See here: http://forums.redflagdeals.com/amd-overdrive-cpu-temperature-vs-core-temperatures-1066954/#post13247506
If you're running stock speeds and don't mind your CPU hitting temperatures that may or may not significantly reduce its lifespan, you're completely right - a high-end CPU cooler will be useless for you.
For the rest of us, reducing load temperatures by 20-30% is always a great option... and overclocking the right chip (I'm still on Sandy Bridge for this reason) provides a fantastic performance boost. 60-70C at nearly 5GHz across all cores on air cooling is pretty impressive, IMO. The stock cooler (I'm using the old "Alpenföhn Brocken") would probably be around 80-90C, which is far too high if you're looking to keep the CPU for more than two or three years.
Just wait until he discovers *gasp* Tab Mix Plus and finds out you can map these actions to things like middle-clicking on an empty spot in the tab bar:O
Who the hell posts something like this as an article on a tech site? It's like my grandma's on Slashdot now:S
That's definitely true, but with the drives not showing any signs of abnormally early failure even in the worst-case scenario, I'd say that's a good thing.:)
For an OS drive (page file off, 8+GB of RAM), I don't see any "premium" (i.e. non-cheapo) SSD with 120+GB of capacity failing within 10 years... There are a few forum posts where people have actually tested how much data they could write to SSDs (i.e. permanently writing at max. speed until the drive fails), and the results are pretty good. The few drives that did eventually break just switched to read-only mode... Can't for the life of me find the damned thread though. Maybe someone here knows which one I'm talking about? It was in one of the usual tech forums...
As a cache drive for audio/video or similar "write-multiple-gigabytes-per-minute" applications, well, make sure you've got enough cash in the bank for the replacement drive...
Interestingly enough, the most reliable SSDs I know of are made by Samsung. I have a set of Samsung 830 SSDs (128GB and 256GB sizes) that have been going strong for about twelve months now... The Plextor M5S 128GB is also proving to be quite reliable in my desktop.
Which Samsung SSD are you running that's so unreliable? Sounds like you should just RMA it, tbh.
Did he mention using anything other than typical laptop features? He says he doesn't even really use the touch interface, and I'm assuming he's includin the stylus in that...
So, same tech you can get on cheaper Android (Samsung Note series) and Atom based Win8 tablets... no need for the Pro. If you want the Wacom digitizer in combination with decent CPU power and lackluster battery life, by all means, go for the Surface Pro. Otherwise, you're better off with ARM/Atom (battery life) or something along the lines of a Thinkpad X230T (CPU power)...
I'm not sure I quite understand the appeal of the device.
For the same amount of money, you can get an actual business-rugged laptop with a full-voltage CPU, the same display resolution, a system SSD AND a 1TB spinning disk ("source code, compilers, linkers, IDEs and a complete replication of my work environment on the device." - how the hell did you ever fit that on the 100GB of usable space on the Pro? Surely you're not running anything remotely IO intensive directly from the SD card?), and 10+ hours of real-world battery life.
And it'll even come with a working hinge, allowing you to use it in places where you don't have a flat surface to put it on, unlike the Surface (Pro)...
Yes, it'll be bigger and heavier in most cases, but other than that?
As a German person, working in a German company that uses SAP... I couldn't agree more. It's a broken POS that has the tendency to break other applications (anything VB related) when installed or updated. Can't wait to be rid of that crap.
So troubleshoot at stock speeds, then switch back to your overclock when you've solved the problem. That also has the positive effect of actually showing you whether it's your overclock that's the issue.
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bleh... shouldn't *someone* tell him...
Yeah, that was my first thought too. Especially in a desktop... why not at least RAID1 + nightly scheduled backups to a spinning drive?
Shouldn't tell him he's a fucking asshole and should die a horrible death for not having a backup? Sounds like the kind of thing he'd respond to :D
Maybe throw a chair at him for good measure...
I'm currently using a Samsung ATIV Smart PC (dumbest name ever for a tablet, IMO)... however, if you can live with the smaller screen (which is an advantage, IMO), I'd recommend going with a Thinkpad Tablet 2 instead - same guts, same battery size, but better build quality and not so ridiculously big. Only drawback is that the TPT2 can't power a USB hard drive (the ATIV can) and not all TPT2 come with the active digitizer (i.e. pen input won't work unless you specifically buy a model that comes with the digitizer in the display panel).
Only real reason would be pen apps. There are a ton of awesome Windows only applications for use with an active stylus, such as OneNote (the Android version only has about 2% or the feature set) or PDF Annotator. Also, for working with multiple documents on a tablet, Windows 8 can't be beat (unfortunately).
As for long battery life with full Windows 8, look no further than Atom. I'm typing this on a Clover Trail Atom tablet right now, and I'm seeing 10-14 hours of straight usage out of a single charge every day , usually with quite a bit of video watching included. Considering that this device has a 30Wh battery, we're looking at a total average power draw of 2.5-3W, including the astonishingly bright screen. I highly doubt i3 Haswell devices will be hitting anywhere near those kinds of numbers any time soon, and the new Bay Trail Atoms should improve on Clover Trail's battery life as well. Performance is so so, but I seem to be more memory starved than CPU limited. If only Intel would provide some power sipping Atom SoCs with 8GB of RAM...
Windows 8 on tablets has huge drawbacks as well, though... one of the biggest being connected standy sucking battery life when the device is "off" or rather in standby. It's a bit like the issue with partial wakelocks on Android, but the culprits are much harder to find because there is no equivalent to Better Battery Stats and less OS tools for monitoring battery usage.
Steam is a bad example... when I play PC games, I'm at my PC, with a broadband internet connection (which is the only reason Steam's DRM works halfway decently). Ever had a connection problem with Steam? Issues getting into offline mode? It's incredibly frustrating, and would be completely unacceptable for music, TV or movies especially if you wanted to use them on mobile devices.
" And no, you don't NEED to download a few terabytes per month. I have capped internet here in Australia (150GB / month) and it is plenty, pretty much. There are terabyte plans available - we're getting to the point where caps are academic now, if you have fast enough internet to stream, there's no need to hoard stuff any more."
You're contradicting yourself - and not in a small way. I mostly stream as well, and 150GB would be nowhere near enough - this is only a two-person household, too.
Consider:
1. A TV show episode per day at 2-3GB
2. A movie every few days at 4-8GB
3. Youtube being used a lot (let's say 2GB of data per hour) by both me and the girlfriend, so easily 10-12GB per day
4. Game downloads/updates (Steam/Origin/SC2)
5. Software downloads/updates (even a ROM for my phone, which is downloaded every day, is 0.2GB) for Windows, Linux and so on
6. Music streaming at 320kbps (~140MBytes per hour)
And that's just weekdays - on weekends, you could see that per-day usage double easily. But let's say per-day usage total is, at minimum, 2+4+10 gigs - 16GB. That adds up to about 480GB per month, and that's without ANY kind of hoarding whatsoever.
Basically: Unless you hardly watch any video at all or are satisfied with SD streams, 150 gigs a month won't cut it. At 500-1000GB, maybe we'll be on a level at which 99% of people can actually use all the newfangled HD streaming services that are being advertised by ISPs without worrying about their cap.
That was supposed to say degrees Celsius, not percent. Although 30% isn't that far fetched - at 4.8GHz, my 2500k would surely hit 90C with the Intel boxed cooler, while it only hits about 60C with a high end cooler. 90=>60 is 33% less...
What would happen if you put a bunch of diamonds inside a silver heatsink (i.e. put the diamonds in the mold and pour the silver on top)? Would the "pockets" of increased thermal conductivity help much?
Let me guess: You're using AMD CPUs without proper (or rather not fully functional) thermal sensing and therefore don't see a difference between coolers... if the CPU doesn't actually display the current core temperatures, but rather calculates a theoretical temperature based on the current power usage and a generic heatsink model, you're obviously not going to see a difference unless you install a thermal probe yourself. See here: http://forums.redflagdeals.com/amd-overdrive-cpu-temperature-vs-core-temperatures-1066954/#post13247506
If you're running stock speeds and don't mind your CPU hitting temperatures that may or may not significantly reduce its lifespan, you're completely right - a high-end CPU cooler will be useless for you.
For the rest of us, reducing load temperatures by 20-30% is always a great option... and overclocking the right chip (I'm still on Sandy Bridge for this reason) provides a fantastic performance boost. 60-70C at nearly 5GHz across all cores on air cooling is pretty impressive, IMO. The stock cooler (I'm using the old "Alpenföhn Brocken") would probably be around 80-90C, which is far too high if you're looking to keep the CPU for more than two or three years.
Just wait until he discovers *gasp* Tab Mix Plus and finds out you can map these actions to things like middle-clicking on an empty spot in the tab bar :O
Who the hell posts something like this as an article on a tech site? It's like my grandma's on Slashdot now :S
Fuck this, I'm heading over to Reddit.
Found it: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm
It's a bit out of date, but basically: Stay the hell away from OCZ and certain Intel drives, and you'll be fine in nearly all cases.
That's definitely true, but with the drives not showing any signs of abnormally early failure even in the worst-case scenario, I'd say that's a good thing. :)
For an OS drive (page file off, 8+GB of RAM), I don't see any "premium" (i.e. non-cheapo) SSD with 120+GB of capacity failing within 10 years... There are a few forum posts where people have actually tested how much data they could write to SSDs (i.e. permanently writing at max. speed until the drive fails), and the results are pretty good. The few drives that did eventually break just switched to read-only mode... Can't for the life of me find the damned thread though. Maybe someone here knows which one I'm talking about? It was in one of the usual tech forums...
As a cache drive for audio/video or similar "write-multiple-gigabytes-per-minute" applications, well, make sure you've got enough cash in the bank for the replacement drive...
It's the only viable solution I've seen so far:
http://www.scottevest.com/
I've been wanting to get one for months, but TBH I'm a bit afraid it'll cost me twice as much here in Germany (with shipping and taxes)...
This, but with an active digitizer. I'm in engineering myself, but I can't imagine medicine requiring much more on this front...
Interestingly enough, the most reliable SSDs I know of are made by Samsung. I have a set of Samsung 830 SSDs (128GB and 256GB sizes) that have been going strong for about twelve months now... The Plextor M5S 128GB is also proving to be quite reliable in my desktop.
Which Samsung SSD are you running that's so unreliable? Sounds like you should just RMA it, tbh.
Did he mention using anything other than typical laptop features? He says he doesn't even really use the touch interface, and I'm assuming he's includin the stylus in that...
So, same tech you can get on cheaper Android (Samsung Note series) and Atom based Win8 tablets... no need for the Pro. If you want the Wacom digitizer in combination with decent CPU power and lackluster battery life, by all means, go for the Surface Pro. Otherwise, you're better off with ARM/Atom (battery life) or something along the lines of a Thinkpad X230T (CPU power)...
So it's simply the size that makes the Pro better? Wouldn't this be solved by going for something MBA11-sized? Surely that's not too big...?
Doesn't the click-on "cover" piss you off to no end? I was annoyed as hell the few times I've used one...
I'm not sure I quite understand the appeal of the device.
For the same amount of money, you can get an actual business-rugged laptop with a full-voltage CPU, the same display resolution, a system SSD AND a 1TB spinning disk ("source code, compilers, linkers, IDEs and a complete replication of my work environment on the device." - how the hell did you ever fit that on the 100GB of usable space on the Pro? Surely you're not running anything remotely IO intensive directly from the SD card?), and 10+ hours of real-world battery life.
And it'll even come with a working hinge, allowing you to use it in places where you don't have a flat surface to put it on, unlike the Surface (Pro)...
Yes, it'll be bigger and heavier in most cases, but other than that?
Ah, but the Chromebook would have given you portability and better battery life...
As a German person, working in a German company that uses SAP... I couldn't agree more. It's a broken POS that has the tendency to break other applications (anything VB related) when installed or updated. Can't wait to be rid of that crap.
So troubleshoot at stock speeds, then switch back to your overclock when you've solved the problem. That also has the positive effect of actually showing you whether it's your overclock that's the issue.
If you have the cash to spare, go for it. I feel I get much more bang for my buck (and am able to stay much more up to date) if I upgrade bit by bit.
USB graphics cards exist. Thunderbolt fits the "supercharged" pattern ;)