Yeah, I doubt it too, but I'm just curious how much of an impact it will have, since the G1 is more oriented to consumers than Linux by itself normally is.
I suspect you're right but for a different reason. I don't think the Net Apps browser marketshare survey is likely to take into account the server market, where Linux dominates. Although I guess if we're talking about desktop OS, that doesn't count. I wonder how much the Android G1 raised Linux's browser market share?
Hah, for a second I thought YoLD meant Ye Olde Meme but I guess that works too. I'm still waiting for my profit check in the mail though. Maybe 2009 will be the year of the profit check?
Ah, I didn't know about that. Might want to reply to the guy who asked the question since he's the one buying. I just assumed that AGP versions worked the same as PCI-e. I guess he probably wants to do more research on AGP issues then.
If the response from anyone here is "I went to university and it was useless, I didn't learn anything", then it wasn't the university's fault, it was yours. You did it wrong and wasted your and every faculty member's time. And perhaps a fair amount of money.
That seems to be how my CS classes are going to work too. I'm a first year, and our first CS class we essentially "learned" Scheme on the first day and then the rest has been actual CS. Learning a language isn't really Computer Science, although you can learn "programming" on your own and through learning languages. It seems like that's often good enough for many cases, but learning C and openGL isn't going to make you great at programming a game engine. I was going to say that it isn't going to make you John Carmack, but then I found that he dropped out of college too. However, I think the industry is too different these days for more John Carmacks and the like, it's one thing learning an API as it's developed and starting from very limited resources so you know how to optimize well because you have to, and another to have all the APIs there and virtually unlimited resources.
Plaguing... you say that like it's a bad thing. All joking aside, I think CS is a very different beast from systems administration. Even the theory the GP talks about (knowing partitions) isn't strictly necessary for a CS education unless you go into operating systems. I guess in practice a lot of CS majors will have some sysadmin skills too, but yeah, there isn't much in CS itself that would apply to actual system administration. That said, I'm only a first year majoring in EECS, so I don't know whether there's more of the sort of stuff GP is talking about but from the courses I've looked at there isn't really anything of that nature, except maybe the OS course.
No problem, like I said I spend too much time looking at graphics cards and I don't buy a whole lot of them (well, I've bought a grand total of one) so glad that my time spent fiddling around on sites like Tom's Hardware hasn't completely gone to waste.
Oh and the 915G is the chipset which includes the GMA 900, and I think 945G includes GMA 950. Both are not very good. http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/915g/index.htm
But it's a confusing distinction to make. I don't know which chipsets include the X3100 or X4500 but those at least provide decent DX9 performance.
Oh sure, no problem. I'm fairly certain that the 8400 should work in a 300W PSU, since a variant of it powers the 9300 IGP version. SFF case kind of makes me shudder but I think those cards should be fine.
As for your nephew, I would suggest getting anything AGP over anything PCI simply because it seems like PCI cards carry a definite price premium because they're not that common anymore. However, as for the 8400 vs 7600, from what I can see the 8400 is actually slower than the 7600. These charts are a good reference for comparing different GPUs since naming schemes don't make any sense these days. I just glanced at the 3DMark06 scores and the 7600 was nearly twice as fast as the 8400. I think the 8600 is basically a die shrunk version of the 7600, and the 8400 is a more cut down version of that, or something.
For gaming graphics on AGP, these cards would be your best bet since as you mentioned nVidia hasn't made any of its 8 series boards on AGP. The 3450 will edge out the 8400 by a little bit so if you're on a budget that's probably your best bet. The 3650 however has three times as many stream processors so it's a bit over three times faster (higher clockspeeds too) so if you're willing to spend the $80 + shipping/tax go for that one. I'm not sure whether the Celeron would be a bottleneck for the 3650 but probably not since at 3.06ghz it sounds like it's a high end Celeron. I wouldn't recommend anything above the 3650 though. You could also look at the 7600GT AGP but the 3650 compared to the 7600 is significantly faster, and it seems like on newegg the 3650 is actually $5 cheaper. Here's a handy comparison between some of your options, although I don't know whether they are PCIe or AGP. I don't think there will be much of a difference at all between AGP 8x and PCIe x16 for those cards in any case.
Good luck with your shopping, and I'm happy to help if you have any more questions. I follow graphics cards a lot more than I should and it's fun for me to do comparisons and stuff.
I have used it on other people's laptops with the 945G and 1GB RAM and it was not a pleasant experience. The only alternative was to use XP on their ancient, virus-ridden PIII machine that originally ran 98, so it was still the better choice. Above all else, Vista is RAM hungry, which is actually kind of a good thing since DDR2 is so cheap these days. I guess most people who would buy laptops and care about Aero performance wouldn't get a laptop with the 945G but when you compare performance of the Flip3D switch between a real GPU and the 945/915G class GPUs, it's clearly apparent that the Intel solution is far from adequate. To be fair, the older nVidia and ATi IGPs with similar performance (Radeon 9000, Geforce 6100/6150) also struggle with Aero, but those haven't been sold as recently for the most part.
Here you go: PCI 8400
Or ATI 2400, not as good as the 3450 on power consumption but still has the UVD chip. ATI's UVD has been generally found to be better than nVidia's but I would probably chose the 8400 over the 2400 since it's a newer generation and I believe a smaller process, so lower power consumption.
I guess the 6200 will probably be better than the 915 chip (is that GMA 900?) but barely. My parents' laptop has the GMA 900 and it's about the same as the Radeon 9200 I installed in their desktop. What I meant was while the 6200 might accelerate video decoding, it doesn't have the dedicated chip that the newer Geforces and Radeons have that make video decoding use hardly any CPU or GPU at all. From what I can gather the 6200 will accelerate the video decoding, but not very much. Wikipedia says that it only works on SD content, so I guess it might work for his purposes but he'd really be better served with the PCI 8400 or HD 2400. He might not want HD video now, but if you're still upgrading that computer now the chances are that before he's done with that PC he'll begin to wonder why his HD videos play crappily on his new monitor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureVideo#Generation_1_PureVideo
The latest series of IGPs from AMD and nVidia are actually really good, but they're fairly recent and a lot of slightly old laptops don't have them. My tablet PC that I got in May has the craptastic Geforce 6150, although about two months later they updated their models to have the HD 3200, which really pissed me off.
Well, to be honest that Geforce 6200 is barely better than the Intel GMA 950. I didn't know they even sold those anymore. I'm certain that it doesn't do any video decoding though. I would think you would want either a Radeon 3450 or Geforce 8400 for some basic video decoding, and actually quite capable gaming for the price (both of those should be around $30-50 if I recall correctly). Barely use any power either. Buying really old tech isn't always the way to go.
Well, that 945G might run Aero, but probably not well. Also, the RAM thing is a bit sensitive, less than 2GB is really not a good idea with Vista. It works, but when you see it on a system with slightly better GPU and 2GB RAM it's a noticeable improvement.
Umm... no? DirectX did that too, it's just that I think the software renderer hasn't been updated in forever so the performance is basically worthless. I remember when I did DirectX8 stuff you could choose hardware or software rendering, but the software was basically worthless. The point of a graphics API is to make it so that you don't have to deal with hardware-specific issues.
I've only ridden on BART but from what I hear it's the only good public transportation here. Everything else is supposedly crap. And the high speed rail, while cool, is probably not going to be finished for a decade or so at the earliest.
Hmm, nice calculations. I agree it's going to ake a while for flash to overtake SSD, and hopefully eventually we'll get dual/hybrid drives with maybe 32GB or 64GB of fast flash for OS and key programs and maybe 1TB for media and mass storage, which would be awesome. That is something I would love to have in a laptop, and hopefully in most cases the HDD wouldn't even need to spin up unless you're playing a movie or something, and you can even have it use the flash as a giant cache and the OS could copy the movie to the flash to take advantage of HDDs sequential access advantage and then not have to worry about the HDD for a while.
Sure, but my point was that the sweet spot in terms of price per gigabyte is a bit higher than 80GB as these days hard drives of that size aren't used much anymore - most computers you buy will have at least 160GB or so, and Zunes and iPods discontinued their 80GB models for the 120GB one. The economies of scale that are in favor of hard drives don't really work out at that point. And sure, 64GB SSDs will probably hit $40 in a year or so, but by then the equivalently priced hard drive will be 160GB or so. SSDs are advancing much faster than hard drives though, so at some point they will overtake hard drives in terms of price per gigabyte, but hard drive tech isn't completely stagnant and it's going to be a while yet before SSDs can compete on a similar price level.
Well at 80GB hard drive prices don't scale as well because hardly anyone makes 80GB hard drives anymore. Your comparison is a bit unfairly slanted, because while 64GB might have been fine 3 or 4 years ago, these days Windows takes up 11GB by itself, and in the age of HD movie downloading and double-digit GB games 64GB doesn't quite cut it. However, if you're going for more of an ultraportable type device you can probably get by with 64GB easily I suppose, and add on with an external HDD.
Hmm, well it is its own IM network but I guess you can access it through third party clients. Of course if you do you don't get it in game, which is kind of pointless. But if it works for you, great. I love it personally, although I don't really use it anymore.
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Yeah, I doubt it too, but I'm just curious how much of an impact it will have, since the G1 is more oriented to consumers than Linux by itself normally is.
I suspect you're right but for a different reason. I don't think the Net Apps browser marketshare survey is likely to take into account the server market, where Linux dominates. Although I guess if we're talking about desktop OS, that doesn't count. I wonder how much the Android G1 raised Linux's browser market share?
Hah, for a second I thought YoLD meant Ye Olde Meme but I guess that works too. I'm still waiting for my profit check in the mail though. Maybe 2009 will be the year of the profit check?
Ah, I didn't know about that. Might want to reply to the guy who asked the question since he's the one buying. I just assumed that AGP versions worked the same as PCI-e. I guess he probably wants to do more research on AGP issues then.
I agree completely. Nice post.
That seems to be how my CS classes are going to work too. I'm a first year, and our first CS class we essentially "learned" Scheme on the first day and then the rest has been actual CS. Learning a language isn't really Computer Science, although you can learn "programming" on your own and through learning languages. It seems like that's often good enough for many cases, but learning C and openGL isn't going to make you great at programming a game engine. I was going to say that it isn't going to make you John Carmack, but then I found that he dropped out of college too. However, I think the industry is too different these days for more John Carmacks and the like, it's one thing learning an API as it's developed and starting from very limited resources so you know how to optimize well because you have to, and another to have all the APIs there and virtually unlimited resources.
Plaguing... you say that like it's a bad thing. All joking aside, I think CS is a very different beast from systems administration. Even the theory the GP talks about (knowing partitions) isn't strictly necessary for a CS education unless you go into operating systems. I guess in practice a lot of CS majors will have some sysadmin skills too, but yeah, there isn't much in CS itself that would apply to actual system administration. That said, I'm only a first year majoring in EECS, so I don't know whether there's more of the sort of stuff GP is talking about but from the courses I've looked at there isn't really anything of that nature, except maybe the OS course.
No problem, like I said I spend too much time looking at graphics cards and I don't buy a whole lot of them (well, I've bought a grand total of one) so glad that my time spent fiddling around on sites like Tom's Hardware hasn't completely gone to waste.
Oh and the 915G is the chipset which includes the GMA 900, and I think 945G includes GMA 950. Both are not very good. http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/915g/index.htm But it's a confusing distinction to make. I don't know which chipsets include the X3100 or X4500 but those at least provide decent DX9 performance.
Oh sure, no problem. I'm fairly certain that the 8400 should work in a 300W PSU, since a variant of it powers the 9300 IGP version. SFF case kind of makes me shudder but I think those cards should be fine.
As for your nephew, I would suggest getting anything AGP over anything PCI simply because it seems like PCI cards carry a definite price premium because they're not that common anymore. However, as for the 8400 vs 7600, from what I can see the 8400 is actually slower than the 7600. These charts are a good reference for comparing different GPUs since naming schemes don't make any sense these days. I just glanced at the 3DMark06 scores and the 7600 was nearly twice as fast as the 8400. I think the 8600 is basically a die shrunk version of the 7600, and the 8400 is a more cut down version of that, or something.
For gaming graphics on AGP, these cards would be your best bet since as you mentioned nVidia hasn't made any of its 8 series boards on AGP. The 3450 will edge out the 8400 by a little bit so if you're on a budget that's probably your best bet. The 3650 however has three times as many stream processors so it's a bit over three times faster (higher clockspeeds too) so if you're willing to spend the $80 + shipping/tax go for that one. I'm not sure whether the Celeron would be a bottleneck for the 3650 but probably not since at 3.06ghz it sounds like it's a high end Celeron. I wouldn't recommend anything above the 3650 though. You could also look at the 7600GT AGP but the 3650 compared to the 7600 is significantly faster, and it seems like on newegg the 3650 is actually $5 cheaper. Here's a handy comparison between some of your options, although I don't know whether they are PCIe or AGP. I don't think there will be much of a difference at all between AGP 8x and PCIe x16 for those cards in any case.
Good luck with your shopping, and I'm happy to help if you have any more questions. I follow graphics cards a lot more than I should and it's fun for me to do comparisons and stuff.
That's probably running one of the newer Intel IGPs though, either X3100 or X4500.
I have used it on other people's laptops with the 945G and 1GB RAM and it was not a pleasant experience. The only alternative was to use XP on their ancient, virus-ridden PIII machine that originally ran 98, so it was still the better choice. Above all else, Vista is RAM hungry, which is actually kind of a good thing since DDR2 is so cheap these days. I guess most people who would buy laptops and care about Aero performance wouldn't get a laptop with the 945G but when you compare performance of the Flip3D switch between a real GPU and the 945/915G class GPUs, it's clearly apparent that the Intel solution is far from adequate. To be fair, the older nVidia and ATi IGPs with similar performance (Radeon 9000, Geforce 6100/6150) also struggle with Aero, but those haven't been sold as recently for the most part.
Here you go: PCI 8400
Or ATI 2400, not as good as the 3450 on power consumption but still has the UVD chip. ATI's UVD has been generally found to be better than nVidia's but I would probably chose the 8400 over the 2400 since it's a newer generation and I believe a smaller process, so lower power consumption.
I guess the 6200 will probably be better than the 915 chip (is that GMA 900?) but barely. My parents' laptop has the GMA 900 and it's about the same as the Radeon 9200 I installed in their desktop. What I meant was while the 6200 might accelerate video decoding, it doesn't have the dedicated chip that the newer Geforces and Radeons have that make video decoding use hardly any CPU or GPU at all. From what I can gather the 6200 will accelerate the video decoding, but not very much. Wikipedia says that it only works on SD content, so I guess it might work for his purposes but he'd really be better served with the PCI 8400 or HD 2400. He might not want HD video now, but if you're still upgrading that computer now the chances are that before he's done with that PC he'll begin to wonder why his HD videos play crappily on his new monitor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureVideo#Generation_1_PureVideo
The latest series of IGPs from AMD and nVidia are actually really good, but they're fairly recent and a lot of slightly old laptops don't have them. My tablet PC that I got in May has the craptastic Geforce 6150, although about two months later they updated their models to have the HD 3200, which really pissed me off.
Well, to be honest that Geforce 6200 is barely better than the Intel GMA 950. I didn't know they even sold those anymore. I'm certain that it doesn't do any video decoding though. I would think you would want either a Radeon 3450 or Geforce 8400 for some basic video decoding, and actually quite capable gaming for the price (both of those should be around $30-50 if I recall correctly). Barely use any power either. Buying really old tech isn't always the way to go.
DirectX has software rendering too...
Well, that 945G might run Aero, but probably not well. Also, the RAM thing is a bit sensitive, less than 2GB is really not a good idea with Vista. It works, but when you see it on a system with slightly better GPU and 2GB RAM it's a noticeable improvement.
Umm... no? DirectX did that too, it's just that I think the software renderer hasn't been updated in forever so the performance is basically worthless. I remember when I did DirectX8 stuff you could choose hardware or software rendering, but the software was basically worthless. The point of a graphics API is to make it so that you don't have to deal with hardware-specific issues.
I've only ridden on BART but from what I hear it's the only good public transportation here. Everything else is supposedly crap. And the high speed rail, while cool, is probably not going to be finished for a decade or so at the earliest.
Huh? Was that post tongue in cheek, and the mods are just crazy, or am I missing something?
3 years sounds about right. Pretty cool stuff.
Hmm, nice calculations. I agree it's going to ake a while for flash to overtake SSD, and hopefully eventually we'll get dual/hybrid drives with maybe 32GB or 64GB of fast flash for OS and key programs and maybe 1TB for media and mass storage, which would be awesome. That is something I would love to have in a laptop, and hopefully in most cases the HDD wouldn't even need to spin up unless you're playing a movie or something, and you can even have it use the flash as a giant cache and the OS could copy the movie to the flash to take advantage of HDDs sequential access advantage and then not have to worry about the HDD for a while.
Sure, but my point was that the sweet spot in terms of price per gigabyte is a bit higher than 80GB as these days hard drives of that size aren't used much anymore - most computers you buy will have at least 160GB or so, and Zunes and iPods discontinued their 80GB models for the 120GB one. The economies of scale that are in favor of hard drives don't really work out at that point. And sure, 64GB SSDs will probably hit $40 in a year or so, but by then the equivalently priced hard drive will be 160GB or so. SSDs are advancing much faster than hard drives though, so at some point they will overtake hard drives in terms of price per gigabyte, but hard drive tech isn't completely stagnant and it's going to be a while yet before SSDs can compete on a similar price level.
Well at 80GB hard drive prices don't scale as well because hardly anyone makes 80GB hard drives anymore. Your comparison is a bit unfairly slanted, because while 64GB might have been fine 3 or 4 years ago, these days Windows takes up 11GB by itself, and in the age of HD movie downloading and double-digit GB games 64GB doesn't quite cut it. However, if you're going for more of an ultraportable type device you can probably get by with 64GB easily I suppose, and add on with an external HDD.
Hmm, well it is its own IM network but I guess you can access it through third party clients. Of course if you do you don't get it in game, which is kind of pointless. But if it works for you, great. I love it personally, although I don't really use it anymore.