- It appears that "solid state harddrives" are now reaching useful sizes 
and sane pricing levels. (E.g., when I first looked at this it was 



- nVidia's latest and greatest is the GeForce 200 series. The 260 is 
expensive, but not extortionate. The 280 is several times the price. 
However, every benchmark I've seen shows the 280 as about 20% at best. 
Given that it's far more than 20% more expensive, that doesn't seem like 
great value for money. I'm considering buying a 260. (My GeForce 7900GT 
is slowly dying...)

- It seems that AMD's CPU designs still trail Intel by a wide margin in 
terms of performance. I think AMD might give you more performance for 
your money, but if you want the fastest CPU it's not going to be an AMD 
product. And Intel's offerings mostly seem to be a reasonable price. 
(Obviously anything that says "Extreme" on it is 400% more expensive but 
only about 6% faster.)

- For ages every Intel CPU going has used the same socket. It seems 
there's a new one just come out, and currently motherboards for it are 
absurdly expensive. (Like, the motherboard costs more than the CPU!) I 
think I might wait for the prices to return to sanity - as inevitably 
they will - and then make a purchase. (Curiosly, the CPUs themselves 
aren't *that* expensive, considering they're brand new.)

- I've been looking at watercooling. Just to find out how expensive it 


waterblocks seem to be the expensive part - especially for GPUs.)



even more amazing is that you can spend *hundreds* of pounds on 
31337-gamer PSUs if you wish.


hundred pounds if you want something ridiculously over-styled. Of 
course, all the expensive cases are aluminium rather than steel. (I was 
recently very surprised to learn that hyper-expensive aluminium is 
actually *less* thermally conductive than plain ordinary copper. So... 
why don't they just make cases out of copper??)

Every time I turn out to a clan meeting, everybody brings along their 
uber-gaming rig. You know the kind of thing - insanely over-styled 
casing with big transparent windows, fans that light up, internal case 
lighting, elaborate watercooling systems with polished chrome fans, 
multiple graphics cards the size of a car, high-capacity HDs in 
front-loading hot-swap drive bays, etc etc. And then there's my PC... 
which is just a PC.

I could almost go for the insane look... :-P

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:

> Every time I turn out to a clan meeting, everybody brings along their 
> uber-gaming rig. You know the kind of thing - insanely over-styled 
> casing with big transparent windows, fans that light up, internal case 
> lighting, elaborate watercooling systems with polished chrome fans, 
> multiple graphics cards the size of a car, high-capacity HDs in 
> front-loading hot-swap drive bays, etc etc. And then there's my PC... 
> which is just a PC.

Paint it black and put yellow racing stripes on it. Black paint is 10% 
faster, and yellow racing stripes give it a 50% speed boost. You could 
get another 20% buy cramming the case full of high-intensity blue LEDs.

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

Mike Raiford wrote:

> Paint it black and put yellow racing stripes on it. Black paint is 10% 
> faster, and yellow racing stripes give it a 50% speed boost.

LOL!

Hey, do you remember the old PCs that used to have a "turbo button" on 
the front? Why the **** would you ever turn that off?! o_O

> You could 
> get another 20% buy cramming the case full of high-intensity blue LEDs.

No need; the case fans already have two blue LEDs that light up the room 
sufficiently for photopic vision. :-P

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Mike Raiford wrote:
> 
>> Paint it black and put yellow racing stripes on it. Black paint is 10% 
>> faster, and yellow racing stripes give it a 50% speed boost.
> 
> LOL!
> 
> Hey, do you remember the old PCs that used to have a "turbo button" on 
> the front? Why the **** would you ever turn that off?! o_O
> 

Old Games. Programmers used to rely on the fact that the processor ran 
at a brisk 4mhz, 12+mhz caused the game to run too fast to be playable.

>> You could get another 20% buy cramming the case full of high-intensity 
>> blue LEDs.
> 
> No need; the case fans already have two blue LEDs that light up the room 
> sufficiently for photopic vision. :-P

No, you must cram it full of LEDs! Not only does it need to be bright to 
get the speed gain, but it has to be blindingly bright. Because 
Blindingly bright = Blindingly fast, you see.

for an extra  15%  add a few fans with a flashing multi-color light 
show. You know the kind ...

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

>> Hey, do you remember the old PCs that used to have a "turbo button" on 
>> the front? Why the **** would you ever turn that off?! o_O
> 
> Old Games. Programmers used to rely on the fact that the processor ran 
> at a brisk 4mhz, 12+mhz caused the game to run too fast to be playable.

WTF? Why would they - oh, wait... CSS malfunctions if you play it on a 
dual-core CPU. (Something to do with directly accessing the CPU's 
realtime timer - which, obviously, is different on each core!)

> No, you must cram it full of LEDs! Not only does it need to be bright to 
> get the speed gain, but it has to be blindingly bright. Because 
> Blindingly bright = Blindingly fast, you see.
> 
> for an extra  15%  add a few fans with a flashing multi-color light 
> show. You know the kind ...

But of course, for Ultimate Speed you must use ultraviolet, together 
with components containing inks that will respond to it...

(Seriously, you can buy cooling fluid that costs extra because it 
floureses under UV. WTF?)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
>>> Hey, do you remember the old PCs that used to have a "turbo button" 
>>> on the front? Why the **** would you ever turn that off?! o_O
>>
>> Old Games. Programmers used to rely on the fact that the processor ran 
>> at a brisk 4mhz, 12+mhz caused the game to run too fast to be playable.
> 
> WTF? Why would they - oh, wait... CSS malfunctions if you play it on a 
> dual-core CPU. (Something to do with directly accessing the CPU's 
> realtime timer - which, obviously, is different on each core!)
> 

Well, way back in the dark ages, they didn't really expect the CPU clock 
speed to change, so their timings were based on how fast the processor 
executes instructions. Of course, when faster systems started coming 
out, they had to change their timing strategy.

CSS failing on a dual-core is probably due more to race conditions, or 
other synchronization issues.

> 
> But of course, for Ultimate Speed you must use ultraviolet, together 
> with components containing inks that will respond to it...
> 
> (Seriously, you can buy cooling fluid that costs extra because it 
> floureses under UV. WTF?)

You could use your computer to light up your 1960s vintage velvet posters


-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

>> WTF? Why would they - oh, wait... CSS malfunctions if you play it on a 
>> dual-core CPU. (Something to do with directly accessing the CPU's 
>> realtime timer - which, obviously, is different on each core!)
> 
> Well, way back in the dark ages, they didn't really expect the CPU clock 
> speed to change, so their timings were based on how fast the processor 
> executes instructions. Of course, when faster systems started coming 
> out, they had to change their timing strategy.

Heh. Delay loops FTW! :-/

> CSS failing on a dual-core is probably due more to race conditions, or 
> other synchronization issues.

Well, it doesn't actually "fail", it just runs irregularly. As in, you 
get an even higher framerate than normal, but it looks visually jerky. 
(Or it did. They've fixed it now.) You used to have to manually set the 
processor affinity to fix it.

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Woo! I just found a Sun server that costs more than my house! :-D

(OTOH, it *does* have 64 quad-core SPARC-64 VII processors in it...)

Looks like it's bigger than my entire server rack too. Cute.



At the other end of the scale, it appears that Sun now sell ordinary 
desktop systems capable of running normal desktop software. They look 
pretty, and they're not *especially* expensive either. (Like, a few 
hundred pounds for an Intel Core 2 Quad system.)



Also... Somebody pointed out a website where you can select and 
configure your own PC. It's not a very *good* site (e.g., you can't see 
the prices for individual components, only the final unit, you can't 
select all that many options, many things aren't documented very much, 
etc.) But it's strangely addictive trying out various combinations of 
components.

Sometimes you just want to see how much stuff you can cram into the box 
without going over budget. And other times you just have to select the 
biggest, baddest mutha you can, just to see what the hell the price tag 
comes out at.


FREAKING NICE PC. ;-)

Post a reply to this message

> Every time I turn out to a clan meeting, everybody brings along their 
> uber-gaming rig. You know the kind of thing - insanely over-styled 
> casing with big transparent windows, fans that light up, internal case 
> lighting, elaborate watercooling systems with polished chrome fans, 
> multiple graphics cards the size of a car, high-capacity HDs in 
> front-loading hot-swap drive bays, etc etc.

I don't understand the appeal of churning out lots of money to turn a 
hammer into a kitsch object.

But then again, computer to a layman is nothing but a gateway to games, 
music and video -- with some office software used to spellcheck emails 
to justify the price as opposed to a mere games console.  Beautiful 
keyboard, mouse, monitor and casing are far more important than whatever 
is on the inside -- the computer itself...

Post a reply to this message

Invisible escreveu:
> Mike Raiford wrote:
>> You could get another 20% buy cramming the case full of high-intensity 
>> blue LEDs.
> 
> No need; the case fans already have two blue LEDs that light up the room 
> sufficiently for photopic vision. :-P

I thought the blue leds were for cooling. ;)

Post a reply to this message