February 2008 Hardware Roundup 67
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."
WARNING: Link is GNAA (Score:3, Informative)
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Well, I didn't know what that was.. seeing as I'm on Linux, I decided to click it to find out. Good fun =)
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I should add that it loaded in another tab, so I couldn't see it.. and I had MPD playing (blocking other sound devices), so I didn't hear anything either.. all I saw was the screen moving around. I downloaded the source with wget and took a look, and I'm fairly sure I can now guess what I would have seen if I hadn't loaded it in another tab =P
Aikon-
Unfortunately (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop this. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stop this. (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't like it, get an ad-blocker, stop visiting those sites, or visit the printer friendly link.
It's 21 pages in 1:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/01/hardware_news_roundup_january_2008/print.html [tomshardware.com]
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However, does
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NICE!!! (Score:1)
Just the opposite, I'm afraid. (Score:5, Informative)
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But what're the hard facts on Latency? (Score:2)
I understand the technical details on w
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Example: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/11/1216257 [slashdot.org]
SOME PEOPLE LIKE ...quiet ... COMPUTERS (Score:2)
Thanks, but no. (Score:4, Funny)
Traditional? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who needs a reason?
Um, I didn't say that....
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Summary if you don't want to go through it all (Score:5, Informative)
- overpriced power supplies
- and 6 new DDR3 modules at varying frequencies
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Nonsensical splurge (Score:2)
I put together a system last week for $1200 that runs Oblivion + Qarl's Texture Pack 3 @ >60 FPS. Quite frankly, anything more would be a hideously excessive waste of money.
Hell, I feel guilty about buying a $100 power supply with LED's.
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Oh I don't know. I'm in the market for a new case and I've noticed that there's no good guide for what to look for in a good case.
SPCR [silentpcreview.com] has one. Ofcourse it's dedicated to silence, but they also keep an eye on other useful features, like cable management. Conclusion: get an Antec, preferably a P182 or a P150/Solo.
As for the PSU's A good PSU will save you a LOT of heartache.
The things I recently learned about this are: A 300W PSU is plenty for most people, the Seasonic S12 line of PSUs are among the quietest and very reliable, Antec PSUs are not so reliable, and keep an eye on the efficiency of your PSU.
Same with a good MB, but a PSU affects more components.
But a motherboard is more complex. A PSU simply has to work and not fail. Anyway, here,
Depressing (Score:1)
Re:Depressing (Score:5, Insightful)
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seriously though your "second rate" hardware is now and will be perfectly capable of performing well for a few years to come (assuming you actually bought decent hardware), so just enjoy it and care not about the new stuff until you have a need to get new stuff again, its that simple!
Since we're all here (Score:2, Insightful)
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Because of OS X. The hardware doesn't even enter into the equation.
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I spend most (95%) of my time in applications. Photoshop, Illustrator, etcetera. Those will run fine on either OS.
I obviously don't want to take the performance hit from Vista, and XP32 is limited to 2 gigs of ram which sounds suboptimal. I've heard nothing good about XP64. How much ram can OS X support for a professional workstation? And, again, anyone know of a good hardware or buying guide sorted by intended use?
The "performance hit" from Vista might not be a problem with the impending release of Service Pack 1 and the supposed workstation-class driver quality of Quadro and FireGL video cards.
The Mac Pro is a nice option IF your needs are not met by a single quad-core processor and 8GB of dual-channel 800MHz ECC DDR2 memory. Unfortunately (IMO), Apple doesn't offer a decent single-processor workstation option that doesn't use FB-DIMMs.
Other replies have suggested three good sites with "system guides" (Tech R
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How to build a PC [techreport.com]
Christmas 2007 system guide [techreport.com]
Note that most hardware sites are geared toward gaming. As you're a graphic designer, your requirements are probably
0) color accuracy (don't know anything about this, really)
1) gobs of memory
2) gobs of storage
3) fast CPU
Then there's software limitations, which are out of the purview of most hardware sites. 32-bit Windows is limited to about 3 GB of
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1. Get some really nice display(s)
2. Appropiate video card to drive those display(s)
3. A lot of ram (4-8GB+)
4. A motherboard that will support the above, preferably with some room to expand atleast the ram in the future
5. A reasonable higher end CPU, faster is better of course, but the bang-for-the-buck ratio isn't that great here
6. Fill in the details such as optical drive, harddrive(s), c
21 Pages?!?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Today I visited them again, just to see if things have improved, and I gave up at by the 3rd page. It's ridiculous.
only one am2+ nvidia board and where is sb700 for. (Score:3, Insightful)
Big and bulky (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Big and bulky (Score:4, Informative)
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Add an 802.11n USB dongle out the back (or traditional wired 100 Mb/s Ethernet), and you're golden.
Linux 2.6.23, alsa, xorg 7.1 with DRI, openchrome, xine --with-xvmc, and mythtv and you can render 1080i at anywhere from 40% (most streams) to (rarely) 95% (some particularly badly coded ones with lost of motion).
I just finished natively building (i.e. compiling from the source
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Now, this won't come cheap: $350 for the mobo, $80 for the RAM, $250 for the hard disk, $150 for the DVD-ROM, and $150 for the case, give and take. Budget $1000.
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The appleTV is limited to 160GB hard disk (can it be expanded easily, or is it limited to a 2-1/2" drive?), and can only render 720p.(Though, I will be the first to admit that I am not going to get into the 720p/1080i battle here since the future is all 1080p or better anyway. Still, anything that can do 1080i can usually do 720p).
But, I'm curious, has anyone tried to get beyond these limits (and the DRM associated with Apple), with a linux installation? If so, it might be viable.
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And, I agree that a big, honkin' server spitting out content (wirelessly!) is a great idea -- my first thoughts were for a diskless set top box. But, then I realized that there are times when I want to take my content with me somewhere, and having it (or some of it) in that very box would be convenient -- hence the desire for a big disk there (500 GB is nite, 1TB will be better!)
Yes, external disks and remotely served content and alleviate this, but I'd rather take one box with me ra
Re:Big and bulky (Score:4, Insightful)
Hard Drive [seagate.com] DVD ROM [panasonic.com] Case [silverstonetek.com]
Other software:
0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure
1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils
2. Install gcc
3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience
4. Other software (for building natively and installation):
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2 [kernel.org]
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz [gnu.org]
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2 [gnu.org]
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2 [gnu.org]
http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz [oberhumer.com]
http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz [zlib.net]
http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2 [www]
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2 [gnu.org]
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz [gnu.org]
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html [freedesktop.org]
`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh [freedesktop.org]
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz [sourceforge.net]
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz [sourceforge.net]
http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz [fontconfig.org]
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2 [gnu.org]
http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2 [freedesktop.org]
ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz [xmlsort.org]
ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz [xmlsort.org]
http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2 [freedesktop.org]
http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2 [paldo.org]
http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2 [paldo.org]
http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2 [paldo.org]
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I would think it could do the job of a light server if it isn't rendering HD video.
You could always buy a board to play with for around $350 plus the cost of a RAM stick: my setup is expensive only because of the DVDROM, big hard disk, and fancy case.
Right now, I've trimmed my i
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Only interesting thing in the article (Score:1)