Recently in Computers Category

Earlier today I received a package from newegg.com with a brand spankin' new 80GB Intel SSD. Apparently this second generation just got recalled for a rare problem involving bios passwords (which I don't use, so I'm going to ignore it). Because of that recall, everyone stopped shipping them on Friday, but somehow mine got out on Thursday night. Lucky me!

I have also taken this opportunity to install the final RTM build of Windows 7 64bit as well. It is standard procedure to only change one thing at a time if you're trying to test it's impact on system performance, but I'm not a product reviewer, so I'll leave all of the hard core benchmarking to anandtech.com

The SSD itself is tiny, the size of a notebook hard drive, has no moving parts and gives of little to no heat. All of this means that it's a little disconcerting to be booting your computer and hearing absolutely nothing, especially after we've all gotten so used to the sound of a thrashing hard drive over the past 25 years. Last night in preparation, I had copied the windows install files (per a web tutorial, there's a little more to it than that) onto a usb keychain for faster install, so I plugged that in as well, told it to boot from USB and away I went. Installation was fast, though I've heard that the W7 install is fast anyway, so I have little to compare it to. Once I got to the desktop, it was just a matter of the rare driver it hadn't found, and then applications.

Since the SSD I got is only 80GB I've decided to use my old 150GB Velociraptor as a Lightroom catalog, preview cache, and Photoshop scratch disk. That said, with 12GB of ram, Photoshop rarely if ever goes to it's scratch. I had wanted to try the LR catalog on the SSD, but while the catalog itself is only a couple gigabytes, the preview cache on my old drive was almost 20GB. Not enough room on the SSD to be giving 20GB to preview images. I have tried to do some research but haven't found a way to put the catalog on one drive and the previews on the other. It seems that Lightroom just keeps them in the same folder. If anyone has a way around this, please let me know.

Ok, so here's my opinion. It's quick. Very quick. All those people who talk about launching 3 apps at once and them all loading as if you had launched only one at a time are not lying. It's just very very snappy. That said, I can't be sure if that agility is the SSD or the brand new install of an operating system. This is a seriously fast system, so it's not like Vista x64 was running slowly before, but so far this is much much smoother.

There is talk around the net about how these drives slow down over time, which people I trust have shown to be true, but in real world usage you'll never hit the worst case scenario, which is still better than a traditional hard drive. It's the incredibly low latency which makes it feel fast. All of those little 4k file reads and writes that happen almost instantaneously. On top of that, Windows 7 includes support for a new ATA command called TRIM which helps out this problem immensely. Intel is supposed to be releasing an updated drive firmware to turn on support for TRIM in the next couple months. In the meantime, I think I'll be fine. I wish is was bigger, but I don't want to spend almost $500 for the 160GB drive, the $229 I paid for 80 was hard enough to swallow. Other than that, I'm very happy so far. Now if only I could afford one for my laptop...

So I waited at my place all day for UPS to deliver the two fans that will complete my machine and let me close up the side and make all of the wires pretty, but alas it was on a truck for delivery from 4am this morning and yet at 8PM they claimed they couldn't deliver due to the weather.  Sounds like a "Dog ate my homework" to me.

Anyway. In The Girl Next Door one of the characters says "Make sure the juice is worth the squeeze".  I did get a chance to actually USE the computer since the last post and so far so yummy. Seriously, it's delightful. For example, in photoshop (which launches in half the time), if you were using a healing brush to remove a hair across someones face, on my old machine the computer would take a second or so to calculate before refreshing.  Now it's instantaneous. When I lift the pen off the tablet, it's done.  Super.  It's like drawing on paper instead of a computer, it's become that much more transparent. The same goes for most of the filters that I use, much improvement. I plan to do some real shooting tomorrow, so we'll see how it holds up with that kind of abuse. So far I'm very happy with the upgrade. Definitely worth the squeeze.

Here's the result from a raw file I took a couple weeks ago:

Sorry for the lack of posts the past few days.  I, along with my lovely assistant HA, spent them doing computer stuff and getting my new i7 machine built. I thought I'd share a couple of photos and some observations of the process for those that are interested.

I'm still installing everything and testing and whatnot, but at first glance, this thing is FAST. I've overclocked the processor from it's nominal speed of 2.66GHz up to 3.6GHz. So basically it's faster than the $1000 high-end processor at stock speeds. I could go higher, in fact it seemed stable at 3.8 and even 4.0, but I decided I'd rather back off and give it some room to breathe. I ran prime95 for a while on it and with all 8 cores (4 real cores, each split in 2 by hyper-threading) the temperatures max out a little below 80 degrees.  That's hot, but absolute worst case scenario and there were no crashes or blue screens or anything like that.  And this is with 12GB of ram installed.  Had to reseat the heatsink and reapply thermal paste a couple of times to get the right amount and the right placement, as this is still a black art, people come up with completely contradictory advise on the online forums at anandtech.com and others.

With the case all closed up, the fan on the power supply really speeds up to try to deal with the heat buildup. It's a small case and I'm installing 2 more fans when they come tomorrow. One 92mm to push air into the front and over the hard drives, and another 120mm in the back to expel the air by the cpu cooler.  Also, I think I can lower the CPU voltage a bit and still keep it stable.  I'll play with that this week.

I've got three hard drives in there right now. A little WD Velociraptor as a boot drive and a couple of Seagate 1.5TB drives in a raid 1 array for storage. All of them are mounted in elastic bands as you can see in the photo.  The Antec Solo case I used comes with the bands stock, the only one I know of. It's a silent pc dorky person trick to keep the drive vibrations from amplifying through the case.

Last night and today I moved my images from my old arrays to the new one by mounting one drive of each of the old arrays in my eSATA dock.  Very handy and relatively quick (still took hours, it is a TRILLION bytes afterall.  That's 1,000,000,000,000 bytes).  I had a bit of a scare when one of the drives died while transferring.  Just locked up and won't do much but click now. Luckily I had the other drive from the raid pair, and was able to get everything off of that one. Both were the 1TB seagate drives which have a firmware issue.  Looking up there serial numbers on the Seagate site showed that they both have the problem.  I had no idea, very scary timebomb.  This is to say, "Go back up your images, right now!"

So now it's time to use it for a while and see how it drives.  By the way, anyone who was thinking of building their own machine based on my previous posts and just got scared reading this, I was overclocking and doing fancy things to squeeze performance out of the system. A stock system would have none of that craziness and would still be very fast. More to come.
 

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've been eyeing parts to build a new computer for myself.  Not that my Q6600 based machine has anything wrong with it, but when you're staring at Photoshop all the time and waiting for your computer to save 500MB PSD files, every little bit counts.  Plus technology makes me happy and building new computers is fun.  And for some reason lately, I haven't been having enough fun.  So on Monday I broke down and clicked 'submit' on my order at Newegg.com

Here's the plan in list form. Some of the parts of the new machine are going to scrounged from stuff I've already got, and a few parts are going to swapped from my current box.  Those parts that I've already got are in italics:

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Intel i7 920 processor
This is the low-end i7, but it's supposed to beat the pants off of anything else out there.  Especially overclocked which I intend to do.  I'm aiming for 3.6 or 3.8GHz.

Asus P6T WS Professional Motherboard
I probably could have gone with just the P6T deluxe, but I like the look of the board and I figure that the workstation bios revisions might be a little more stable.

OCZ 6GB DDR3 Platinum kit (x2 = 12GB)
I'm going to fill all 6 slots with this stuff for a total of 12GB of RAM. I think that should do me ok <evil grin>. I chose this memory based on reviews on newegg and it's lower cost than the alternatives. Hothardware.com had an i7 RAM round-up today and this stuff won, so I think I chose wisely.

WD Velociraptor 150GB boot drive
I'm stealing this from my current machine. Was going to get an Intel SSD, but the competition in this space is going to heat up in the next few weeks, so I figured I'd watch and see where it shakes out.  Plus there was an article claiming that these things slow down over time. Intel refutes their claims, but it gave me a moments pause.  Plus, this thing is damn fast anyway.

Seagate 1.5TB storage drives (x2) in RAID 1 array
I've currently got 4 1TB drives in 2 RAID 1 arrays. I have a little under 1TB of photos currently on my machine, and I wanted to simplify my setup for heat and complexity reasons.  I was waiting for the 2TB WD drives, but they're expensive and I've already got one of the 1.5 for backup so I bought another and will gang the two up and transfer everything over.  Then use the old 1TB drives for backup with my eSATA dock using the 2 eSATA ports on the motherboard.

ATI Radeon 3850 Video Card
Not the fastest card out there, but certainly no slouch.  More than enough to run CS4 OpenGL stuff fine.  I can't remember the manufacturer on it though.  Oh and it's fanless, so it makes no noise.

Antec Solo case
Small, with rubber bands to mount the hard drives in.  This little case is great.  I had replaced it to get a much bigger Lian-Li case that can handle 7 hard drives, but I like the small one better.

Seasonic 480W power supply
I like Seasonic power.  Quiet, stable.  I've never had trouble with them and I've used them in the last few builds I've done in the past 4 years or so.

Thermalright Ultra120 Extreme 1366 heatsink
The stock Intel cooler is fine for normal speeds, but I plan to overclock this puppy.  I've got a similar cooler in my current box and they still rate really well, and should be much quieter than the Vigor Monsoon I recommended last time.

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I've got a nice Samsung SATA DVD-RW drive that I will probably install, though I'm going to try something fun and install Windows from a USB drive.  Or rather from an 8GB SanDisk Extreme 3 card in an Ultra-DMA adapter.  I've already transfered it over and booted from it, seems to work.  I found the instructions on google.

Oh and speaking of that, I'm going to try a little experiment and not install Vista x64, but rather trying using Server 2008 as a workstation. I saw an article about it a while ago and figured I'd give it a shot. My favorite OSs were NT4.0 and Win 2000 so this goes back to those bare-bone days.  Basically, it's the same kernel and underpinnings as Vista, but with less services and crap on top.  Responsiveness and even benchmarks show it to be faster than Vista.  Maybe it'll be a waste of time, but it sounds kind of fun.  I don't use this desktop for anything but Firefox, PhotoShop and Lightroom anyway.

I'm going to build it out and stress test this weekend.  I'll let you know how it goes.  Oh and as for price, keeping in mind that I had a few of the parts already, I spent less than $1000.