Rated: 100% (3 votes)
Loading ...Give us 5 1/4″ HDD’s
l3v1ck
For years now there have been two standard drive sizes in desktop PC’s, 3 1/2″ and 5 1/4″. For as long as I can remember hard drives have always been sold in the 3 1/2″ variety.
The question is why?
In terms of performance the outer areas of a platter on any hard drive give the best performance, because more data is going past the drive head per revolution. So logically if a drive platter was larger, you’d get better peformance.
Then there’s capacity. Quite simply, the larger the platter the more data you can fit on. Not only that, 5 1/4″ drive bays are also deeper than 3 1/2″ bays, so hard drives made for them could fit more platters in a single drive.
Last but not least we have the issue of space. Most tower cases have the 3 1/2″ drive cages just about level with where the graphics card fits into the case. In the modern era of ever larger graphics cards, fitting them into an existing case is becoming more problematic as the hard drives get in the way. If however, you got rid of the 3 1/2″ drive cage and fitted the hard drives in spare 5 1/4″ bays, there would be plenty of room for larger graphics cards. Granted, some people would say that older cases might not have enough airflow for these high powered cards anyway, but I disagree. Providing you cave good case fans and maybe a graphics card that vent directly out of the case, I can’t see there being too much of an issue.
So why don’t hard drives offered in 5 1/4″ sizes? I’m assuming there must be a technical reason for it as it seems to be such an obvious thing to do. Any ideas?
Rated: 100% (6 votes)
Loading ...The great chipset rip off.
l3v1ck
Is it just me or is SLi/Crossfire just a way to increase motherboard prices?
example: Back in the day, I had a choice between two motherboards by the same manufacturer, one had an nForce 4 SLi chipset, the other had the nForce 4 Ultra chipset. The only difference between the boards (apart from overvolting options for the northbridge) was the extra PCIe lanes and x16 slot for SLi. Unlike today’s chipsets, they were both capable of running the system at the latest HTT (FSB) speeds. I went for the Ultra chipset and was still able to overclock my Athlon 64 to the same values that were common in CPC at the time.
Nowadays you get boards with two, three or sometimes even four x16 PCIe slots. Sure you can run SLi/Crossfire, but who does? Not many people by the results of recent polls on the issue, and those that do often don’t get the performance boost they’re looking for (see CPC issue 58).
So why do people pay out for these high-end motherboards when they won’t use the headline features? Simple, over the last few years chipset manufactures have decided to force overclockers to use high-end boards, the price of which has gone up well above inflation. A few years ago a high-end motherboard was just over £100. Now they’re well over £200. They’ve done this by unnecessarily reducing the features on non-premium chipsets. If you want the best overclocking options and the most recently supported FSB, you have to buy a motherboard with a premium chipset. The manufacturers know that if they took a much cheaper mid range chipset and gave you a good overclocking BIOS, 95% of computer enthusiasts wouldn’t shell out for the high end boards anymore.
There are a few motherboard manufacturers out there that have done their best to help customers. Some have taken the P31 chipset from Intel and got it to run at P35 FSB levels, but if you use a CPU with a fast FSB, there isn’t much headroom left for overclocking. If these budget and premium chipsets are made using the same manufacturing process, there’s no reason not to run them all at the latest FSB speeds other than them just no wanting to. Sure, they could save a few pounds in production costs per chip in silicon if it only had (say for example) 20 PCIe channels, but then they’d lose a lot more in the drop in price they could charge for it.
No I know people will say “But look at all the cooling you get with premium boards, there’s heat pipes and fans galore”. True, but a lot of them are over engineered. All we need are good basic heatsinks on the Northbridge and VRM’s (for stable overclocks) and we’d be laughing. I guess we just have to hope that some motherboard manufactures will see the gap in the market for budget chipsets with good cooling and BIOS’s for overclocking, then fill that gap with a product that lots of people will want to buy.
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...SSD’s: Taking pagefile in the right direction.
l3v1ck
Just a quick one tonight. For quite a while now people have recommended switching the pagefile used by Windows onto a hard drive other than the one Windows is installed on. The idea behind this is that this speeds up performance as the main hard drive isn’t trying to do two things at once. I’ve seen various sizes recommended for pagefile sizes (which you can change), usually along the lines of “one and a half time the amount of RAM you have” or ” no more than two gigs.”
With the recent announcements from Samsung, Micron and Intel that they’ve developed new NAND chips that can write data at up to 200 MB/sec, I can see a new way forward that should help speed things up even more. Until now SSD’s have been quite expensive, mainly due to the cost of large amounts of storage on NAND. But what if they started to sell very small 3.5″ SSD’s that could easily be added to a standard PC case. All you’d need is two to four GB with a SATA2 interface and you’ve got a perfect drive specifically to be used for the pagefile. The cost should be affordable due to the low amount of NAND storage required compared to existing SSD’s.
True, initially the costs would probably be just as high as increasing the amount of RAM in your PC (which would give even more performance), but there’s always the option of including an eSATA port on the drive, which means it could be sold as a portable hard drive that could compete against USB memory sticks (Obviously not against full sized portable hard drives). With the abundance of SATA ports in PC’s these days, there wouldn’t be any issues with wasting ports for such a small amount of storage either.
I suppose the idea is similar to Ready Boost, but I think this would be more effective. How do you feel about this as a concept? Would you buy into it if the price was low enough?
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...The fantasy world of upgradable laptops
l3v1ck
Over the last few weeks I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at new laptops on the internet. Not that my current one is quite ready for the bin you understand, but just so I’m well informed when I do take the plunge.
I’ve soon come to realise that I’m just not a big fan of change however. The vast majority of new laptops out there don’t meet my needs at all, not because there’s anything wrong which them, but just because I don’t like them.
I use my current laptop for playing games, listening to music, watching DVD’s and browsing the internet. Mostly this is done in my spare time while I work offshore. (Two weeks can be a long time when the on board recreation facilities are limited to non-existent.)
Maybe I should say why my current (£1000 at the time of purchase) laptop is ideally suited for this?
The screen is a 15″ 1400 x 1050 TFT (matt finish). This is perfect for several reasons:
1) The high resolution is excellent for browsing the web without having to scroll too much. I can view a good portion of most web pages in one go. Also games running at that resolution look very crisp.
2) As I have a lot of older games that don’t support wide screen resolutions, the tradition screen ratio makes more sense. OK, the black bars are slightly wider than they would be on a wide screen TFT when watching DVD’, but that really isn’t an issue for me.
3) The laptop is used in a well lit office environment. As such the matt finish on the TFT doesn’t reflect light sources behind me at all, something that my colleagues with their modern S-TFT’s have to suffer.
The Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics chip maybe poor by today’s standards, but it can still run Far Cry at high settings at the screens native resolution. I opted for an 80 gig hard drive when I bought it three and a half years ago and I still haven’t filled it, there’s still over 25 gig of space left. The DVD-RW still works perfectly as does the on board networking, both of which are used on a regular basis. Unfortunately nearly four years of being thrown around in helicopter baggage holds etc is taking it’s toll, only two of the four USB ports still work.
So why am I having issues finding a replacement that I like?
Simple. Most new laptop have features that would actually make my life less pleasant. Wide screen now seems to be the default format which means there will be display issues when I try to run older games. Also many new screens sacrifice the number of vertical pixels to achieve their wide screen status, often they are limited to 900 pixels which is less than I have now. There goes my happy web browsing experience.
Anything above integrated graphics should wipe the floor with my old laptop these days, but getting a mid range GPU isn’t anywhere as cheap as it was three years ago. True, even a low end modern GPU would be an improvement, but I got a mid range GPU laptop for £1000 back then so why can’t I now? After all hardware prices have generally been coming down.
The solution to my problem is very simple yet quite literally impossible. Upgrade the laptop! And by upgrade I don’t just mean add a new hard drive, RAM and DVD-ROM which is pretty much the limit with most (if not all) laptops, but a full motherboard upgrade with a new dual core CPU and high end graphics chip in the same chassis so I can keep my old fashioned standard ratio matt TFT.
Alas, I’m living in a fantasy world. Due to the lack of standard laptop motherboard and case layouts, such a thing just isn’t possible. If only laptops were designed the same way that desktops are, then we’d all be able to truly customise them, choosing the features that we want and discarding the ones we don’t. Maybe it will happen sometime in the future, but I doubt it will be any time soon. Trying to convince manufacturers to adopt a single layout standard for all the ports would be almost impossible. Some progress has been made in the last few years with the introduction of MXM (mobile PCI Express Module). It’s now possible for manufacturers to insert different GPU’s into a single motherboard, where as five years ago they would have had to design each board around a single GPU. But there’s still a long way to go, the dream of a fully upgradable laptop is a long way off indeed.
Rated: 100% (5 votes)
Loading ...MP3 hifi seperates, a gap in the market? Part 2
l3v1ck
I was recently bored at work so I picked up an old copy of Stuff magazine (March edition). Low and behold a possible solution to the hifi problem was there on page 25. Introducing the Creative Xdock. An iPod docking station with a built in X-Fi chip. While it’s not a hifi separate that has the capacity to hold an entire music collection of uncompressed audio, it will make regular MP3’s sound a whole lot better when played through your hifi. It’s even wireless, supports 5.1 sound and comes with a remote control.
So what’s the catch? Well the biggest catch straight away is the price. Creative’s UK website lists the price as £202.97. To me this seems like an outrageous amount for what is effectively a docking station with an X-Fi thrown in. The basic X-Fi sound card can be had for less than £30 (Overclockers UK), as can various iPod docking stations that come with remotes (Argos). So where does the other £143 in the price tag come from. Ok, let’s say £40 for the general style and build quality that Creative is known for, but to me this product is twice the price it should be.
So will it sell? The Xdock has the potential to be a very popular bit of kit, lots of people have iPods and nearly every one has a hifi. But while Creative market the Xdock at such an outrageous price, I doubt it will sell very well. I’m not surprised I haven’t heard any mention of it before now, people take one look at the price and pass it by. If it was less than £100 I might seriously consider buying one, but until then I’ll just regard it as a useful item that I just can’t justify buying.
So then, how many of you are interested in the Xdock, and how many won’t be put off by the price?
For more information please visit: http://uk.europe.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=209&subcategory=668&product=16185
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
Loading ...Why do people think lemon goes with fish?
l3v1ck
Ok, when you go to your local chippy, you know vinegar is the best choice for your nicely battered bit of Haddock. We all agree on that, you, me and everyone else on the planet. Where I find myself in the minority though is when I order fish in pubs and restaurants. It doesn’t really matter what kind of fish or how it’s cooked, all pubs and restaurants serve fish with a wedge of lemon on top. The question I have is why? Obviously someone somewhere seems to think that fish tastes nice when it’s be soaked with lemon. Not me. I find the lemon ruins the flavour of the fish (and the sauce if it comes with some) and I can’t understand how anyone’s taste buds would like such a combination of flavours.
So which of you like lemon with fish (and why?) and which of you (like me) can’t understand why chefs keep on ruining our food with a fruit that belongs in drinks with ice?
Rated: 92% (5 votes)
Loading ...I want to pummel Nazi’s and spammers
l3v1ck
Being a Yorkshire man I very rarely get emotional, and it’s even rarer for me to get very emotional. So what is it about SPAM that makes me want to be as violent towards spammers as I wanted to be towards Nazi’s the first time I watched The Pianist? The obvious answer is that I find it so annoying having to sift through my inbox trying to find the real emails from the spam ones. Yes I have various spam filters in place (both on my PC and at my ISP’s end of things) but you’re always going to get a few SPAM emails getting through. Up until about a month ago I though all the SPAM in my life would be email related, however since the CPC readers blogs went online I very quickly learned about automated blog spamming. I now get several SPAM comments a day on my blogs, all of which try to advertise either car parts or porn. The problem here is that the CPC blog site emails me to approve a comment before it is displayed, unfortunately I have to read all these emails to check that there are no genuine comments before I mark them all as SPAM. This is what makes me angry. The fact that I have to manually intervene, where as with normal emails I can set up white lists and spam filters. What annoys me more is that there is an obvious link to all these spam comments that could easily be used by a spam filter to make my life easier again. In the case of the SPAM targeted at the CPC blogs, all the spam links to .cn domains, something that could easily be blocked with out affecting the vast majority of forum users.
Why are people allowed to get away with sending out this SPAM? Easy, they’re hard to catch (they live in different countries etc) and the punishment is never a deterrent. So I’d like to see spammers treated with the same contempt as Nazi’s, after all both groups try/tried to ruin millions of lives every day.
Rated: 100% (5 votes)
Loading ...MP3 hifi seperates, a gap in the market?
l3v1ck
Is it just me or is there a massive gap in the market when it comes to playing MP3’s in your home. Ok, you can plug any hand held MP3 player (eg iPod) into the auxiliary port on a hifi, put how good is the sound quality? In my experience, not good. So what dedicated hifi MP3 players are out there? Well as it turns out, not many. If you pick up a copy of What Hi*Fi Sound & Vision and flick to the product guide at the back, there are only five products in the Recorders section, and only three of those have hard drives. The Acoustic Solutions Sp150, the Cambridge Audio Azur 640H and the Yamaha CDR-HD1500. The Azur 640H and the Yamaha are both £600, so that rules them out and the SP150 only has a 40gb hard drive which is no use to anyone who wants to store a full music collection as MP3’s.
So as I see it there’s a gap in the market here for a sub £250 separate here, and to my mind there are two obvious companies that could profit from this. First of all is Apple. They could easily integrate their excellent user interface onto the front of a separate size box and fit a standard 500gb hard drive inside. The second is Creative Labs. Although their controls and user interface isn’t as good as Apple’s, they do have an ace up their sleeve. The X-fi. All they need to do is fit a 500gb drive and a low end X-fi (which only cost around £25 by themselves) into a separate size case and you’d have top quality sounding MP3’s in the home without having to run things through a PC. Of course with that kind of drive capacity available, people may elect not to compress their music at all, fully quality music is within easy reach.
If such hifi separates existed (especially if there was space for consumers to add a second hard drive) then I could see CD’s effectively becoming nothing more than a backup in case the music on the hard drive was ever lost. I know I’d buy a product like that. If you’re having a party the last thing you want to do is spend half the night looking for the next CD you want to play.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...PC World apology
l3v1ck
Hmmm…. I might owe PC World an apology.
Last weekend my parents Samsung SyncMaster TFT started to act up. A bit of Googling revealed that the symptoms were terminal and they’d have to get it replaced under warranty. To save them from not having a working PC I said they could borrow my TFT as I could use mylaptop. Sounds simple enough but I use a DVD-D connection on my TFT and their old GeForce 4 only has a D-Sub connector. “Not a problem” I though, I’ll just nip down to PC World and buy a converter, after all I’ve used DVI-D to D-Sub converters at work, so going from D-Sub to DVI-D shouldn’t be a problem. Anyway I nipped down there and they only had DVI-D male to D-Sub female, the opposite of what I needed. At this point I started my mental rant (not out load) about how useless PC World are and set off for Maplin who did stock the converter I wanted. Anyway fast forward a few hours and I arrived at my parents with my TFT and tried setting it up. Nothing! You can’t send a D-Sub signal to a DVI-D port even with a converter. Now I know why PC World don’t stock them, they’re useless (hence my need for a silent apology). If I didn’t feel stupid enough about that, when I looked at my TFT when I got home I found a D-Sub port that I’ve never used. I’d missed it as I left my DVI-D cable plugged in while transporting it as I used the converter at the PC end. Doh! I could have used a bog standard VGA cable all along. How stupid do I feel now! Thankfully we’ve found a temporary work around for their TFT (thanks to Google). When this problem occurs with the SyncMaster, you have to pull the power plug for about five minutes and it work for a short time when you plug it back in again.
It should be replaced under warranty, but needless to say I won’t ever be buying a Samsung TFT again. I’ll be sticking to good old ViewSonic in the future.
Rated: 70% (2 votes)
Loading ...l3v1ck joins Facebook.
l3v1ck
Well after months of pressure from friends I’ve finally joined facebook. I was resisting a bit as I don’t like the idea that strangers (friends of friends) can post stuff on your profile, but I’ve been through and tweaked as many security settings as I can find.
My Facebook profile isn’t for every Tom, Dick and Harry, but if any of the regulars on these forums want in, send me a PM.