Posts by Leo Waldock

WD VelociRaptor 300GB HDD vs SSD

SSDs

I used the Crucial SSD as it was what I had to hand - I don't have a sample of the OCZ despite asking but when I get one you'll read about it.

I've reviewed the Intel SSD and expect it to go up very soon and then you'll see how a proper SSD performs ...

In an ideal world we would have majored on VelociRaptor vs Raptor but the fact of the matter is that Raptor is now rather old and didn't compare especially well to the Hitachi 7K1000 which is indeed a peach and offers superb value for money.

Alienware Area-51 m15x gaming laptop

Audio

It's Realtek audio - to the best of my knowledge there's no such thing as Intel audio

Nvidia GeForce GTX 280

clarification about the test system

Yes the Crysis figures look weird and yes that probably says more about Crysis than it does about the GTX 280.

I tested with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 32-bit and Crysis was a fresh installation patched to v1.21

have patience ...

HD 4850 and 4870 are coming in a few days time

AMD CPU shoot-out: Phenom X3 and X4

and the official word from AMD on the TB fix

'You (won't) be slowing the B3 Phenom’s performance, since the BIOS switching ‘knows’ that B3 does not have the TLB and therefore does not affect performance and bypasses the TLB BIOS settings.'

Apologies for causing confusion in the first place but the figures stand.

Adrian, I quite agree that POV-Ray is a bit old and crusty - does Revit or similar have a built in benchmark that is repeatable and transparent to the world at large?

TLB - Flame off

I rebuilt the test system with the Phenom X4 9850 and re-ran the tests with the TLB fix disabled.

It made no difference to the test results or to overclocking so the only logical conclusion is that the TLB fix does not apply with B3 processors. Clearly it would be unnecessary.

Ref the 'disables L3 cache' point - does anyone know if this is the effect of the TLB fix? I've heard this supposition a number of times but have never had a clear statement from AMD about the problem. It also doesn't explain why AMD pulled the launch of the Phenom 9700 and ploughed ahead with the 9500 and 9600.

Three AMD cores Ok - not so for Intel

Roger Thomas points out that Microsoft says that its 'power of two' rule for CPU cores is

'... specific to Intel processors and do not affect AMD processors.'

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/950182/en-us

He's right, I missed it. It doesn't change my views on Phenom. Sorry.

LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray HD DVD combo drive

dual layer Blu-ray writing

Ross and Jonathon have pointed out that the LG spec refers to BD-RE DL 50GB media.

http://uk.lge.com/products/model/detail/bluray_ggwh20l.jhtml

All I can say is 'bugger' as the bumph that came with the drive didn't make any mention of it. Sorry. My bad. I should have got some dual layer media and tried it out.

That redresses some of my uncertainty with the LG but the cost of media is still an issue and you'll still struggle to backup a 500GB, 750GB or 1TB drive in 50GB chunks.

@Chris - dual layer Blu-ray

To get this absolutely clear can you confirm that you use dual layer Blu-ray writeable 50GB media in this drive? I didn't have any dual layer Blu-ray media and as the spec doesn't include that feature I didn't get any in.

Any info you have on speed, hassle factor and cost would be illuminating.

Lenovo ThinkCentre A61e green PC

Fan boys

Splodman you're right - the fan is in the photo and it is so quiet that I never even heard it running in a very - that's VERY - quiet office.

Western Digital uncages ferocious VelociRaptor data hunting drive

HDD temps and failures

It's a common assumption that a cool hard drive is a good thing and a hot drive is a bad thing but Google Labs disagrees.

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Google uses desktop hardware to power its indexing system and has a LOT of hard drives. Analysis of over 100,000 drives shows no obvious correlation between operating conditions and failure rates. Some drives are duff from the start, some fail rapidly, most are good for two years and then they start to die at a steady rate of eight percent per annum.

The glaring hole in the paper is that Google deliberately hides the makes of the drives in question so we're no closer to the answer about Hitacho, WD, Seagate or Samsung and their relative suckage.

Alienware Area 51 ALX CrossFireX gaming PC

@Ash - Crysis

Ash my Crysis figures are from a save game early on. It's just after the beach section as you head up a path to the extraction point. Lots of foliage, bright sunlight, sky, sun and guys shooting at you. It plays well on most PCs with a decent CPU and graphics unlike the later stages that hammer almost every PC under the sun.

I load the saved game and play through a section with FRAPs running and those are the figures in the test results.

Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset

Not so

Fusion is very clearly offered as air OR water cooling and on Intel chipped boards it keeps the chipset perfectly cool with air rather than water as the medium.

The Asus Maximus Extreme is a water cooled board so if Asus had chosen it could have made this model a Striker II Ultra Extreme.

Four 1TB hard drives on test

Pricing

Believe it or not I did scout around for prices on the drives - I never use list prices as they mean nothing and I tend to shy away from stockists that list prices as 'stock in 2 days' or 'coming soon'.

'Today only' prices are great but impossible to anticipate by their nature.

I had little doubt that the 1TB Samsung would come down in price as even the best drive in the world won't sell if it carries a significant premium. I tilted in favour of the Samsung at the thick end of £200 and that feeling only strengthens as the price drops.

If you need massive performance and opt for RAID - presumably RAID 0 -you're increasing the chances of a drive failure as you rely on both drives and also the RAID controller. This hurts MTBF.

Mesh Ultimate Q8 Tri-SLI gaming PC

Crysis and graphics

A number of points: If you want to run SLI or Tri-SLI (Or CrossFireX for that matter) then you're getting towards the territory where 32-bit Windows and 4GB of RAM is a limitation. I wouldn't say that 64-bit is a necessity at this point because most of us tend to play games in isolation with a minimum of background activity and multitasking.

Sticking the Mesh on the scales - it's heavy. Does it matter exactly how heavy? Heavy enough to make you go 'Gawd!'.

Multiple 8800 GTX cards are indeed packed very close together and I am sure it increases the noise level. Ordinarily a single 8800 GTX is incredibly quiet but these three cards made a steady muted roar. No doubt the new angled fan on the G92 8800 GTX has been introduced for this very reason.

You can play Crysis on a single graphics card. I have an HD 3850 in my own PC and play on Medium quality settings at 1,920x1,200 in DirectX 9. The problem comes when you bump up the quality settings and especially is you want everything on Max in DirectX 10.

Acer Aspire 2920 budget laptop

CPU

Joe

I got the CPU spec from running CPU-Z and have just checked with Acer which confirms that I was correct in my review.

@ Ken and @Craig

I know what you mean Ken. It used to be the case in reviews that a lazy reviewer would say that you would buy a new PC for yourself and 'then give your old PC to the kids'. The problem is that kids put quite a load on laptops and PCs as they have a gazillion windows open and thrash the thing with Flash animations and music galore. The fact is that most of us adults are able to work with an oldish PC while kids need dual cores and all that good stuff.

The question is, will we pay for it.

As for the battery Craig I've read reviews of the 2920 that refer to significantly better life however I can only report what I saw myself.

Shuttle XPC Glamour SN68PTG6

You're correct about the PSU

I don't have the SN68PTG6 here any longer so I checked with Shuttle and the word is that it's a 300W unit from the Shuttle "SilentX" series with a 20-pin ATX and 4-pin ATX 12V connector.

My error - well spotted.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 dual-GPU graphics card

Astronomical indeed

Yes!

I use a number of displays for testing including 19 and 24 inch TFTs but I also have a Taxan EV2285 CRT with a max resolution of 2048 x1536 which of course uses an analogue connection but it sure does look pretty.

@ Alastair and Brian

Nvidia fan? oh please. Most high-end power supplies have a bunch of six-pin PCIe connectors but eight-pins are rarer than a rare thing. If you can provide a couple of make and model numbers that are appropriate to overclock the X2 then I'll eat my words.

Brian and Bus bandwidth: in principle you are correct with a great big 'However'

I don't know how much bandwidth a PCIe graphics card requires. I know the speed of PCIe 1.1 and 2.0 and how many lanes the various PCIe slots provide but I don't know how much bandwidth, say, a GeForce 8800GT requires. The Intel P35 chipset only supplies four lanes of PCIe 1.1 to the second graphics slot which is one quarter of the main slot and one eighth of the bandwidth of the PCIe Gen 2.0 slots you'll find on the latest crop of motherboards but even so it seems to be adequate in most cases.

Turning that the other way round a pair of HD 3870 cards in a single x16 slot a la X2 is the equivalent of eight lanes of PCIe per chip provided the bridge chip and drivers do their jobs correctly, in which case I doubt the graphics slot will be the bottleneck in performance.

Asus EN8800GT/HTDP/1G 1GB graphics card

@ Andre

I tested the Asus 1GB with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 32-bit Edition with 2GB of system RAM.

As it happens I have subsequently tested a pair of PowerColor HD 2900 XT cards with 1GB of memory on each card using both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista and found no difference in 3DMark06 and Crysis.

I'm happy to accept that we're moving towards 64-bit OS and 4GB or more RAM for gaming PCs but I don't feel that we're there yet.

AMD Phenom 9500 processor

feedback

Rik

ref it's and its, I did indeed get it wrong. As for Intel vs AMD I'm hard-pressed to think of any reason not to go down the Q6600 route and the small matter of £35 wouldn't make much difference.

Ian

The wheels fell off the AMD wagon when Intel came back fighting with Core 2 and Athlon 64 was at the end of its development. There's a big gotcha to watch out for with Intel which is the fact that all the processers use the LGA775 socket but you need the right chipset. For instance P35 supports 1,333MHz FSB but may or may not support 1,600MHz and has dubious CrossFire support and you can bet that P45 will also look great at launch and will then quickly look a bit old.

Matt

Don't your suggestions apply to Zeon and Opteron rather than the desktop?

Nvidia nForce 780i SLI chipset

well yes

a 680i SLI board with triple graphics slots would do the job - you just won't get the same huge number of PCIe lanes and neither will you get PCIe Gen 2.0

Nvidia G92-based GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB

Woolly thinking on my part

"The new GeForce 8800 GTS uses the G92 chip TO CUT COSTS and... er... that’s about the lot really..."

In this para 'costs'=production cost for the manufacturer

"Nvidia's new GeForce 8800 GTS delivers a very small level of extra performance over and above the 8800 GT yet it COSTS SIGNIFICANTLY MORE."

Here 'it costs significantly more' should be 'is priced significantly higher than the GT' i.e. the punter pays more.

In fairness to Nvidia the new GTS is good value compared to existing models of GTS but I reckon the GT is more appealing.

the problem is ....

...measuring sound levels roughly is fairly easy provided you have a meter. Measuring sound properly is far more tricky and involves, as you say, a quiet room and ideally an anechoic chamber.

That provides a noise level for the sound card in an unnatural environment which isn't much help although it might be of academic interest. To add to the hassle I, like most reviewers, test processors, motherboards, memory and graphics cards on a test bench and not built into a PC case and none of us use our PCs that way.

The upshot is that I can only offer a subjective opinion about noise levels in a quiet office but having said that both the G80 and G92 GTS cards are very, very quiet.

Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard

HDMI

Yes the HDMI output supports HDCP and the audio is OK but I'm horribly aware that is a subjective answer so if you want me to give a more definitive answer in future reviews I could use some help:

Has anyone built a Media Centre PC with Blu-ray or HD-DVD drives or is it on the 'would be nice to do' list?

If you do watch HD movies from your PC what sort of display do you use - big TFT or a TV?

Is HDCP a major factor or something to bear in mind for the day that DRM hits hard?

what sort of audio set-up do you connect to your PC for movies and what is the preferred connection?

How slow is the CPU in your Media Centre PC? I assume you want near-silent cooling so is a UVD essential or just handy?

Intel 'Penryn' Core 2 Extreme QX9650

UK pricing

It's nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with cynicism and jaded experience.

Give it a week or two and we'll see whether my estimates are right or wrong.

Sony VGN-TZ11XN/B laptop

Did you buy your own?

Were these personal purchases or company kit?

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.67GHz desktop processor

Thermal Analysis Tool

I'm not taking the numbers as holy writ however I only ran the tool as I could feel the expelled air was cooler on E6750 than with E6700.

Had i said 'I think it runs cooler' I would fully expect readers to ask how much cooler. This may not be a full answer but I hope it's better than nothing.

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 & MSI P35 Diamond mobo

You're right!

MSI is 'having issues' with its UK website so here's a link to P35 boards on the global site

HP TouchSmart IQ770 PC

Weighty matters

I reckon it's deliberate that the IQ770 weighs so much as it avoids any hint of screen shake if you're prodding at the touch screen. I can see that in some homes where you might have three or four IQ770s scattered here and there that the weight might be an irrelevance. If you don't intend to move it around then I am sure you could select a machine that is better suited to a specific purpose and which costs less.

My view is that the IQ770 is multipurpose and therefore can fulfil a number of functions in a number of locations.

Kids got their friends round? park it in their room so they can watch a movie

Cooking? put it in the kitchen to look up recipes

Email? On the coffee table

My problem is that the IQ770 is effectively a laptop with a 19 inch touch screen but it doesn't have the portable nature of a laptop.

Screen angle

Tim

In the review I mentioned the screen mount but didn't spell out the fact that it's a pivoted joint so you can have the screen at almost any viewing or writing angle that you fancy.

I didn't much like the IQ770 but the angle of the screen is absolutely fine.

Leo

Gigabyte Odin GT 800W power supply unit

Content free?

In normal operation the Odin is effectively silent thanks to the huge fan turning at a very slow pace. When it's loaded ... well we don't know because, as you saw in the review, the load didn't reach 50% even with a Quad core CPU and HD 2900 XT. I could have used an Intel V8 test bed but it's crystal clear that the Odin is aimed at the gaming market so no doubt it would have been pointed out that the V8 is a server/workstation.

At start-up the fan runs at full tilt for a couple of seconds and makes a heck of a racket and then slows right down to a crawl. I have no doubt it could cool a small volcano.

As for efficiency, I gave the figures of 328W and 355W so the efficiency is over 90% when the PSU is barely working for its living at less than half its rated power. The only way to properly test the Odin is to hook it up to a test rig such as the one owned by Enermax. As it's the only Odin in the UK I doubt Gigabyte would have been impressed if I had let a competitor blow it to pieces to see how well it delivers 700+ Watts when we all agree that no-one needs such an outrageous amount of power.

Which is what I said in the review.

As for reading like a Press release well you're welcome to your opinion but I've never seen the word 'gimmick' used in one yet.

As for naff monitoring software I quite agree. Motherboard manufacturers seem obsessed with the latest new idea when very often what we want is something elegant and workmanlike which probably explains at least part of the success of the iPod.

PowerColor ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card

A fuller explanation

I appreciate that my comment about the 2600 XT being a disappointment sounds a bit contradictory but I stand by it, and here's why.

AMD has known the specification and performance of the 8600GT and GTS for ages and it could choose to put as many or as few stream processors into the 2600 chip as it liked, and of course it could set the price at any point that it chose too.

The performance and pricing of the 2600 XT is, therefore, a carefully considered decision that AMD should aim to beat the number two chip (the 8600 GT) by a tiny margin.

That's probably a sane, practical and wise prove but nonetheless it disappoints me.

Evesham Zieo N500-HD 17in laptop

We'll be coming back to this one ...

We want to look more closely at the Robson/Turbo Memory technology as it needs to learn which apps are used most frequently to improve caching so we'll be coming back to this laptop.

I'll also re-run the performance tests on battery and when I do I'll make sure I restart the Evesham a few times to remove the question mark over sticky settings.

Leo

C of E blasts 'sacrilegious' Sony shoot-'em-up

Do games cause violence? really?

Skipping over the question of whether or not Sony should pay The Church, the original kerfuffle surrounded the fact that Manchester has something of a gun problem. The Bish considered that Sony was unwise to use the Cathderal as a location as Fall of Man would stir those yoof who had previously been peaceful into joining their violent contemporaries.

Clearly drugs and gangs play no part in the current violence, oh no.

This argument only holds water if games cause gamers to commit violent acts so do they?

I say no and cite Japan as an example where console and PC games have been massively popular for many, many years yet the levels of violent crime are very low. We'll assume that Yakuza are not overly influenced by Sonic the Hedgehog.

Meanwhile in the US where guns are available to every Tom, Dick and Harry, it seems that a strongly worded song lyric is enough to prompt a killing spree yet no-one has blamed the cartoon violence in The Simpsons or Tom and Jerry as justification for hitting a stranger over the head with an impossibly large mallet.

PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card

Quality and speed

Frantisek, HardOCP has done a bit of a demolition job on the 2900XT partly with regard to the different AA filters including the different tents.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM0MSw1LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

They have included a number of screengrabs to illustrate the quality of AMD versus Nvidia and frankly they are pretty much identical in most respects however when it comes to AA the AMD card images look blurred. I have no intention of taking issue with HardOCP - in the main they do excellent work - however I have been in this situation way back in the days of Radeon 9800.

This was a time when AA was quite novel and I simply wanted to illustrate what it could do so. I used Microsoft Train Simulator as an example because the train tracks suffer from horrible jaggies as they converge towards the horizon. Enabling AA smoothed the image considerably so I set about taking screen grabs to illustrate the success.

In the images the rails looked good with AA but the trees that line the track looked like green lollipops with no distinguishing features and the grabs with AA therefore looked terrible. Much like the images on HardOCP..

Of course I was looking at stills from a moving image and was effectively missing the point. As you drive past a tree you can't see the leaves and branches. Stand under a tree in Oblivion and you get the benefit of all sorts of eye candy.

Ever since I have been very wary of taking screen grabs as they often show visual information that is out of context.

As for the most recent comment, yes it would have been 'fair' to run a pair of Ultras in SLI however I only had one Ultra - does anyone have two? - and simply wanted to illustrate how £500 of AMD hardware compared with £500 of Nvidia hardware.

ref Numbers, numbers

Frantisek makes a good point about the R600 range but I'm not sure how much it bears on the 2900XT. I take the view that gamers might spend £249 on a 2900XT but the man in the street has no need to spend anything like as much to get decent movie playback. And they would want a quiet graphics card while they were about it, which sounds like a cue for a 2400 or 2600.

Of course image quality matters in games and both the 2900 XT and the 8800 Ultra look superb in Oblivion and Half-Life 2 but the real test will come when we can get our hands on DX10 games.

Oranges to satsumas

We didn't have an 8800 GTS to hand, although we tested the Sparkle late last year, however we did have an Ultra, and considering the pricing we felt it made perfect sense to compare an Ultra with HD 2900XT in CrossFire.

Let's face it, AMD would have dearly liked the HD 2900XT to beat Ultra. The fact that it falls a long way sort is a bit of a mystery.

Sony Vaio SZ4 slimline laptop

Clarification on battery testing

I left the battery switch on Normal/Performance mode, rather than Stamina. According to Sony's figures you'll get about half an hour more life in Stamina mode,

The battery run down test simply loops PCMark05 so it really is continuous use. Some battery tests attempt to simulate real world usage by leaving typing a Word document with pauses between each keystroke, just like a real person would. This allows the chipset and processor to work more intelligently and use gating to reduce battery drain.

The problem is that there is no such thing as 'typical' usage and even in these comments you'll see that there are two distinct camps. Vista seems to hurt battery life, although SP1 may help. A full Centrino will definitely deliver better battery life, and Santa Rosa will likely build on that. We were disappointed not to see two hours of battery life and if that translates into 7 or 8 hours for the previous commentator then so much the better. Once we've cracked batteries that can handle trans-Atlantic flights it's time to work on trans-Pacific followed by one that can manage a flight to Australia. Heck, most laptops won't make it through check-in and onto the plane.

EVGA 680i LT SLI nForce-based motherboard

We did, we just kept the results to ourselves as they were a bit dull

We tried a quick and dirty manual overclock of the FSB with both EVGA boards and got nowhere which is a bit grim when both the Abit 650i SLI and Asus 680i SLI yielded an easy overclock.

Also, the performance charts were already plenty confused so adding any more lines seemed like a bad idea.

A few extra points:

1- I (that's Leo rather than The Reg) won't entertain overclocking unless it is 100percent stable and reliable with a minimal risk of fritzing hardware, so I stay clear of voltage changes if humanly possible.

2- The 680i LT has very little in its favour if you discount nTune. I feel that the test results show that you CAN discount nTune in which case you can forget about the LT and plump for a 650i SLI.

3- Perhaps it's coincidence but if you go here

http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce_600i.html

there's no 'further information' on the 650i SLI

buy now while stocks last

MSI NX8600GTS graphics card

Yup, it's a typo alright

Sorry about that chaps. The review was written in a tearing hurry over the weekend but even so it was a daft mistake.

Hopefully Scott will correct is ASAP

Leo Waldock