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I can attest to that, Nickname is a major AMD/ATI fanboy but he’s a closet Intel/Nvidia consumer.
AMD has the cheaper processors and motherboards, there’s no question about that, but when it comes to performance per MHz and performance per dollar Intel wins every time in every category except ultra-low power. In ULP AMD wins for now until Intel releases the new Atom next year with a 50% increase in clock-for-clock performance and out-of-order execution.
JShank said:
BTW Mitch whats your opinion on the 6970 vs the 6990
IMO, a single 6970 is all the GPU you need. If you really want that much power, you’re much better off with a pair of 6970s than a single 6990. You’ll pay the same but get more performance for it. Dual GPUs are ALWAYS clocked lower than their single GPU counterparts and the overall card runs warmer. Not only that, but when they’re seperate you’ll get them to overclock better and if one fails you can ship just the single bad card off instead of not having a video card at all.
Don’t get me wrong AMD makes a great processor and I’d recommend them for most lower and mid-lower systems but they’ve been getting dominated in the high-end market for years. The new Sandy Bridge Core i5 wipes the floor with the Phenom II x6 and are priced nearly the same. AMD’s architecture is starting to show signs of weakness and if Intel were to ever price their CPUs competitively AMD wouldn’t stand a chance. Intel is consistently getting 15-17% faster clock-for-clock with each new generation and AMD just can’t compete with that. AMD is pulling an ATI and just throwing more MHz and cores at the problem hoping it’ll go away but no amount of bandaids is going to help in either of the markets they’re in. Intel processors are getting faster and cheaper, Nvidia’s GTX500 series matches ATI’s newest cards in both price and performance, and AMD’s response is to fire the CEO for keeping the company out of debt. AMD’s future has a fairly ominous storm cloud hovering over it and if they don’t get their act together soon they’re going to end up out of business.
On that note, check out the GTX570 and GTX590. They’re priced the same as the 6970 and 6990 and get considerably better performance in some games. But not in others. Check the benchmarks for the games you’re most interested in and buy accordingly. Personally, at the same price and similar power usage and noise levels, I’d pick the Nvidia card every time just from a driver and lifetime warranty standpoint but that’s just me. My 5770 GPU crashes almost every day due to sucky drivers and it’s a major turnoff
MajorMajorMajor said:
World of Tanks sucks *edited*.
Not if you platoon up with a bunch of friends on teamspeak. Having half your team on TS is actually quite fun.
idk how many peeps used to watch the outer limits but this is probably the best remake of the intro ever.
Profits. Overclocking allows people to buy cheaper processors and modify them to perform like their expensive counterparts. When I bought my Q6600 there were two Core2 Q series processors out and the only difference between the $280 and $1100 models was .266GHz. Behind the scenes the low-end had a multiplier of 18 and the high-end had 20 but in essenence all you had to do was overclock the FSB from 133MHz to 145MHz and you just saved yourself $800. In the past, the money you just saved was money Intel wasn’t getting. Now it is. Intel’s standard line of Sandy Bridge processors switch from overclocking to “turbo boost”. It overclocks the CPU but also disables cores so you’re essentially not getting any extra power at all. They have an overclockable series that costs more and gives a little more flexibility with the “turbo boost” settings but overclocking as we know it is no longer an option on Intel processors and likely never will be again.
I called this, btw, as soon as I heard that Intel was locking their core i7 processors to intel-only chipsets. They called it a design imperative, I called it profit-driven. AMD managed to put the memory controller on the CPU without locking out 3rd party chipset manufacturers, there’s no reason Intel couldn’t have done the same.
Were I to build a new computer today it would be a last-gen Bloomfield Core i7 but I’m happy with my 4 year old Q6600 and will be for the foreseeable future. I’m also extremely fond of my oldschool nVidia nforce chipset motherboard, you just can’t get those like you used to. You know I can actually rebuild RAID arrays while windows is running? When my RAID5 dropped a drive I was able to rebuild the entire array while playing L4D2 from the array that was being rebuilt. It was awesome. Intel’s RAID controllers are, well, horrible on the best of days. You can’t even build a mirror without wiping both drives. Terrible.
AMD can make the fastest processor on the planet but until they adopt triple channel DDR they’ll always have 33% lower memory performance than Intel chips. Dual channel DDR3 is a bad dream that AMD seems unwilling to wake up from. I guess it’s easier to simply keep increasing RAM speed but upgrading to tri-channel would provide an instant 50% increase in memory performance using the exact same RAM sticks. It just seems foolish to keep pretending it’s not something their customers would be interested in.
But yeah, AMD’s lineup is looking better than Intel’s new lineup. The new Intel series is a complete and total sellout to their business partners and with the new overclocking lockouts I can’t imagine anyone would be interested in owning one.
Lemm said:
Sony is complaining
They’ve been doing that alot lately. $5 says they already have a team looking into suing Amazon.
No but considering how seemless they’ve integrated it into office I’ll bet money it’s integrated into WMP once this type of thing takes off.
That’s been one of Nintendo’s biggest problems the last few years. That and having actually good titles. They have plenty of good ones but they’re usually released so far apart you almost have to have another console/handheld just to hold you over.
Can’t wait for developers to start pushing it. The GPU on the 3DS is actually a little bit better than that of the PSP and if the CPU is what it’s rumored to be it would be much greater than that of the Wii. Hell the chip it’s based on is even multicore capable and can clock up to 2GHz
Here’s a tech demo of the GPU the 3DS has:
http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/nintendo-3ds-gpu-tech-demo?size=hd
a waffle said:
I have no idea, I just know if I need to use a switch I contact Stephan.
The club owns one that’s just as good as the one Stephen gives us (well almost). Sometimes Stephen has trouble getting us enough switches, especially during the warmer months. You might want to make sure the one we own hasn’t walked off, we may need it in the not so distant future.
WD bought a small SSD manufacturer with a solid product line, made a few changes, and released their line as the Siliconedge Blue and SiliconDrive lines.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/30/western-digital-enters-ssd-market-via-65m-siliconsystems-acquis
Basically instead of R&D’ing their way into the market they said FU to the product lifecycle and bought their way to a surprisingly decent first-release product. True to the WD Blue series it cost a little more and was a little slower than the top-tier competitors but that’s par for the course with WD. Regardless of who made it, I’d rather have a WD branded hard drive any day.
Ephraim said:
Wait, I thought Red Cross was one of the few charities that actually got the money to the people in Haiti. Of course, I think they also messed up the 9/11 fund…
Yeah they did fine on Haiti but that’s about the only disaster relief in the last 10 years they didn’t botch.
I think that since it’s entirely donation-driven and since proceeds are entirely going to disaster relief you’ll be able to get away with a whole lot more than you otherwise would in terms of university and state rules. It’d be a cold day in hell before anyone hassled you about it. This also opens up advertising venues otherwise unavailable, like local restaurants, retailers, and possibly the local high school. They’re MUCH more likely to let you hang a flyer on their doors if it’s for something like this.
Western Digital has publicly stated that they have no intention of committing to any part of the SSD market until technology quits shifting around every 6 months. The hybrid drives are likely where it’s going to settle for the reasons you stated. They cost so much less to produce and give a good measure of the benefits.
WD had one production run of SSDs. They sold out fast and have had really good reviews. If I had to recommend an SSD brand, it would have been them. Barring that, I would rather buy a Seagate hybrid SSD than one from Crucial or OCZ.
Does it have to be Red Cross? They have an extremely poor track record of actually giving funds where they’re supposed to go.
Nickname said:
I know you aren’t basing your whole argument about SSDs due to the fact that you used a dell mini with a slow SSD… I mean thats the same logic as comparing a 5 yr old 7200rpm drive to a new one from today. Besides having the same technology, they are monumentally different. I will admit though that you do have to closely research a SSD or you will get boned. All SSDs are not created equal, or even close for that matter. Considering with a standard drive you pretty much know what you are getting if you get a 250gb 7200rpm drive, you would think that most 128gb SSDs would be the same to one another. They aren’t; so if you are basing your arguments on that then… well… ok i give up right now.
That was the last I used, it wasn’t the only one. There were also 3 of those minis, all were just as slow. Now it could have been that dell used cheap SSDs in their computers (OMG WTF??!) but I think that whole generation of 2.5″ SSD was pretty much that terrible. A number of students came in with computers that were “slow” and it ended up being an SSD problem. There’s really nothing we could do but explain they wasted their money.
The consumer market offerings are definately better, I’ll grant you that, but the offerings of PC retailers are, or at least were, cheap and terrible. This has definately skewed my opinion of the technology and it’s going to take a couple years for me to get over that bad start.
Nickname said:
I will argue with the “aren’t really all that useful” and the whole pcie x8 thing; yeah the pcie x8 bus is faster but since no current drives are hitting the threshold of the sata2 bus (let alone sata3), there isn’t really a good reason to spend more for the pcie based SSD.
The 3Gbit SATA2 bus has a serial speed of 375MB/sec, depending on the controller quality. In terms of the 3Gbit, yes, the current generation of drives is at the limit of the bus but since no SSD has been released on the 6Gbit standard idk if that’s a real limit or a self imposed one. PCIe x4 SSDs often hit SATA 6Gbit speeds and PCIe x8 SSDs almost universally exceed it, although it’s usually cheaper to get 2 SATA2 SSDs and RAID them than it is to get a PCIe SSD.
Nickname said:
Oh yeah and IO performance (result of access time), where you are going to get 10000+ I/O’s per second vs maybe 200 on a good standard drive. Yeah, that is a huge deal, and in certain situations is a huge benefit
Well that’s the thing, most SSDs slow down considerably after several mintues of sustained access. You don’t see if often but every now and then a benchmarker will run the IO test for an hour and while it normally maintains 10000 IOs/sec it almost always drops down to around 2000 after 30 minutes or so. Mechanical drives drop as well but not by 80%
But yeah you’re right, the random access is place where SSDs really shine. An interesting note though, most access tests only have a queue depth of 3 or 4. In SSDs this is fine but it also eliminates several key queuing features in mechanical drives and IMO skews the results. Most mechanical drives will re-order read/write operations to create a more fluid motion with the drive head and thus decrease the access time, without this it’s almost like taking a step back to the 1990s in terms of disk access speed. SSDs also benefit from this technology because they can access many sectors of NAND at once, which is why they intentionally lower it from the mechanical drive test default of 32, but in a real world environment mechanical drives will perform faster than they do in that type of synthetic test. Slower, yes, but better than the 2MB/sec random seek that most benchmarks claim.
In terms of actual read/write speed, I contend that $400 worth of high-end mechanical drives in RAID0, with a real controller, will perform similar to that of a $400 SSD. That’s like 6 drives. You know I’m right
Nickname said:
I thought that you not mentioning their benefits and only their downfalls was being too biased, but that is par for the course with you I suppose…
When there’s a negative side to be portrayed you can count on me to show it
I was just trying to show that SSDs aren’t as rosey as the hype leads you to believe. They definately have some good uses but with that said they certainly aren’t for everyone. With most people all you have to do to convince them to start looking into facts themselves is punch one or two small holes in their perceived reality. I’m good at raining on others’ parades
Nickname said:
MasterP said:
Nickname said:
wut? ill take it for $5
lol
There will be so many strings attached it won’t be worth the hassle.
$5 is cheaper than $40
Hey man it’s your money.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you though. I’m going to inb4 this harder than I did your last rosewill purchase.
Classic MasterP vs. Nickname tech argument, Round 1. FIGHT!
Nickname said:
you clearly know nothing about the advantages of a SSD… or the capabilities of one vs a standard hard drive for that matter.
The last SSD I used was in a dell and was slower than the 5400 RPM drive in my HP mini.
I said they were fast, expensive, that the SATA bus is slower than the PCIe x8, that they’re small, and relative to the 10-12x higher price tag aren’t really all that useful. I think you’d be hard pressed to argue with any of those statements.
To comfortably house Windows7 you need a 32GB drive but then you’ll probably have to put all your games on another drive. If that other drive isn’t an SSD, what’s the point? All you’ve really done is decrease your boot time, gaming performance won’t have increased at all. With most modern games being 6-12GB even a 128GB SSD is pushing it on a gaming computer.
When you consider that the newer high-cache spinning drives have 120-140MB/sec read/write I can’t really imagine needing a SSD except to brag. I don’t mind it taking 40 seconds to load windows or 20-30 seconds to load a game level.
As to SSD technology, until they break the 20V write requirement current semiconductors have we aren’t going to see any real improvement to the technology, just more logical steps. You’ll notice manufacturers are choosing to use many 4GB and 8GB NAND chips rather than a single 64GB chip. SSDs only perform faster because they’re essentially giant RAID0 arrays. In fact many of the 1st gen and early 2nd gen SSD controllers actually used RAID0 natively to increase performance. Were they to use or access a single NAND chip at a time, as mechanical drives access one platter at a time, the performance would be abysmal, even by 1990s standards.
As far as reliability, let’s say you bought a typical 128GB SSD. Most use 16x8GB NANDs. If any of those 16 chips fails, the entire drive fails. Now correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t that more potential points of failure than a mechanical drive has moving parts?
Unfortunately, SSD technology may be stuck in place for a while. The leading research on it was being conducted in Tokyo. They just reduced the drive voltage from 3V down to 1V and the write voltage from 20V down to 6V. This decreases access time significantly and frees up more power so they can use up to 110 NAND chips in parallel to achieve write speeds of 9.5 GB/sec. Were they to adapt this and use several large NANDs, as opposed to many small NANDs, the speed would still be equal to or higher than existing SSDs but the cost would plummet. This is the type of needed improvement I referred to above.
Nickname said:
wut? ill take it for $5
lol
There will be so many strings attached it won’t be worth the hassle.
