Tech Tok

There’s a story on AppleInsider about the IBM PowerPC 980, which is very interesting. Particularly is the mention of a 980 being 40% faster than the sames-peed G5. Together with a starting speed of around 3 GHz and a faster bus (probably keeping with Apple’s 1/2 the CPU speed, so 1.5 GHz), this should make for a pretty fast machine.

I found particularly interesting the mention of a “crossbar switch” in the CPU. The first time I heard of that was in very high-end SGI machines back in the early 1990’s. I have no idea what it is, but it just kind of startled me when I saw it. I guess everything ends up in on the desktop at some point..

Btw, there is another article over on Mac Rumors with a bit more info on the 980

I didn’t know this until today — Panther allows you to synchonize your Address Book with your “Contacts” in Exchange!

iSync copying all my Address Book items to my Contacts folder

All you have to do is to set up your preferences..

Cool, eh? It doesn’t seem to sync your iCal with your Exchange schedule, though. Oh well.

Reid has been hounding me to post something about what I have learned about building a PC. :-)

The first thing I will say is that there is no perfect PC out there. There are many ways to go (SFF for the perfect LAN box or a big tower for big air and expansion/watercooling, etc.).

The first place to start is the case. I would love to have a SFF (Small Form Factor) system but for the time being I have opted to go for mid to high tower cases. The SFF is great for multi-media systems or for LAN party boxes. The Shuttle series of SFF PC’s currently have my vote for the #1 SFF box. Shuttle SFF’s are cool because you can pop in a Rage 9800XT or a 9800 Pro AIW with a P4 or Athon XP/64 and have a sweet gaming/TV box. The newer Shuttles also have SATA! Very sweet. The tradeoff is that the power supply is rather weak and that you really should not overclock due to the moderate CPU/system cooling. If you want expandability then go for a mid to high tower case. Don’t be cheap with the case!!!. Get a case with a minimum of two fans (front/rear). The more fans the better. I have seen cases with two front, two rear, two side (blows air down onto the mb/vid card), one top. The front fans should blow over your main hard drives. The amazing thing is that even with all these fans the cases are super quiet. Aluminum cases are all the rage now. Aluminum is light, provides a good route for heat extraction, and looks damn good when done right. Look for cases with thumbscrews throughout - a tool less case is a big plus. Some cases come with doors to cover the front external drive bays. I like the front door if my drives don’t match my case (yes, I have thought of painting them) otherwise get a case that matches the colour of your drives (or drives that match your case)

Don’t forget about the power supply! Toms Hardware has run two articles on power supplies (1 & 2). I went with Antec and Vantec for my systems as they were available in my area.

Processor fans are a big pain in the ass! I am currently using the stock Intel fan on my P4 2.53 system. I have had no complaints as the system is very quiet. I went with a Thermaltake fan on my 2.4C overclocked system. I came with a manual speed adjustment control which I like (most of the time). The sucker does get loud when I crank it to 6,000 rpm. It appears that Swiftech are the current cream of the crop as far as air cooling is concerned.

Hard drives - I love the current state of hard drives!!!!! So cheap and soooo big. 7200 RPM PATA drives with 8MB cache are very quick. Get a couple and RAID them if you can. I don’t have a RAID setup on my 2.53 system but the drives are plenty fast (fast enough to record weekly Enterprise episodes without breaking a sweat). There is always something faster it seems and that is without a doubt SATA 7200 drives with 8MB cache (the WD Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drives are cool but they are really tiny so what’s the point (and they are not much faster)). RAID them if you can (I use RAID 0(ya ya, everything is backed up)). SATA RAID blows away my PATA single drive system as far as load times are concerned.

Video card - ATI is the king at the moment. Try and get a 3rd party Radeon 9500 Pro or a 9700 Pro if you can. The 9600 Pro/9600XT are also good options. The 9800 Pro 128 MB is a great card. Don’t waste your money on the 9800 Pro 256 MB. The 9800XT is the current king of the hill. A great card but not much of a difference between it and the 9800 Pro. Keep in mind that AGP is nearing the end of its life so you don’t want to sink too much into a new vid card at the moment. The best video card ever made has to be the 9800 AIW Pro. It has it all.

What OS? The only OS you should consider is Mac OS X. No, wait, Windows XP Professional. (whoops)

Motherboard - MSI/ABIT/ASUS/DFI/GIGABYTE - stick with the main brands - current chipsets to look for are the 865/875 for Intel - nForce2 400 for Athlon XP (ya, I know about the other one but they dropped the ball after the 266A chipset). Check the feature set (SATA/RAID/Surround onboard audio) I am too tired to list the Athlon 64/FX mobo’s.

Processor Intel - P4 2.4C and overclock the shit out of it!!!!!!! AMD - Athlon XP “Barton” 2500+ and up. If you have the coin then go for the P4 EE (if you are completely insane!!!) or the Athlon FX series (a better choice).

Memory - If you don’t plan on overclocking then get some good mainstream memory. If you want to overclock then the sky is the limit. DDR 500 + is what you want on the Intel side of things. I am running 2×512MB OCZ PC4000 Dual Channel Kit Gold. Corsair is another manufacture to look at for high performance memory.

Get a CD-RW and a DVD drive (a DVD burner if you need it). It is useful to have both for CD duplication on the fly as well as have both your favorite DVD movie and favorite game CD ready to go at a moments notice.

Networking – after switching over to Gigabit Ethernet I cannot go back. Many motherboards now ship with Gigabit Ethernet onboard. Look for the Intel CSA Gigabit Ethernet controller.

That’s it, I am off to bed.

I’m in the middle of the Great Hardware Purchase of 2003. It’s the end of the year and for people on contract, it’s time to take advantage of the tax breaks on hardware depreciation. If i was really stingy, I would wait until after Christmas to get hardware at Boxing Day prices, but oh well.

Originally, I was just going to buy new power supplies for my existing dusty, old cases, but Iain pointed out that getting a new case with new power supply and fans already installed would be more cost-effective. So, I bought a new case.

Oh, all the pictures in this can be clicked on to see bigger versions, okay?

It’s a pretty nice case, an Antec SLK3700AMB. Iain likes the Antec brand and thought its cooling fans were nice I think.

Once you have the case, next up is the motherboard! I chose the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe.

Here you can see the box and all the goodies it came with. It has Serial ATA, FireWire, Dolby sound, and is nice and fast.

Just look at all those connectors! Wow.

You can see the Serial ATA (S-ATA) connectors at the bottom left of the left hand picture, and there are the goold old Ultra ATA 133 (or is it ATA Ultra 133?) old-fashioned Parallel ATA (P-ATA) connectors at the bottom of the right picture.

Here we have the DVD burner and 160 Gig hard drive.

And of course the CPU. This is my very first CPU over a GHz. I’m very excited to see what it can do.

The video card is “only” a Radeon 9200, which for this first PC should be fine. This will be our “Media Machine” PC you see, not a gaming box. I will write more about building and — more importantly — installing and configuring this machine in a later article.

This will also be the first machine in the house with DDR RAM. Not one to go for half-measuers, I’ve gotten DDR433 RAM. I only really need DDR333 RAM, but one was $108 and the other was $109 so I splurged. Ye Gods, RAM has gotten dirt cheap, even for really, really, really *fast* RAM.

Well, that’s it for now. I won’t be able to post digital pics for a while (unless someone comes for a visit (hint, hint). Our digital camera is being sent “back to the shop” for a $100 repair that will heopfully allow it to use the flash and handle bright exposures again.

Saft is a very cool utility for Mac users. It gives Safari a bunch of capabilities previously only seen in Camino, plus some that eve Camino doesn’t have.

The Camino feature it adds is that of using keywords in the location area to search websites for specific strings. For instance, you can type “vt icq” to seach Version Tracker for ICQ utilities. Way cool.

The bonus feature is full-screen browsing. Woah! Way nice! Just hit shift-cmmand-F and you’re completely surfing. No menu bar, no window widgets — just pure browser, baby.

It’s nice the way it installs, because it’s easy to uninstall if you have any problems with it. It all ends up in a folder under “/Library/Application Support”, so you can just toss the folder and you’re back to living without it..

Check it out!