Technology for Mortals

This is a VERY cool new motherboard from DFI. It features a P45 chipset motherboard along with an NVIDIA Ion motherboard and Intel Atom CPU on a single board with an integrated gigabit Ethernet switch. It comes with a USB and audio KVM switch as well. The system allows you to shut down or suspend your high performance P45 system and leave the NVIDIA ION chipset and Intel Atom CPU running in low power mode. The video quoted 30 watts which isn’t all that low power unfortunately.

Only downside to this that I can see is the $399 list price. Hopefully more motherboard makers will build a product like this and get the price to come down. What I want is a P55 chipset motherboard and the next generation PineTrail-D Atom system as the second system.

A while back (summer of 2003), I spent my days off working at a small computer shop in the middle of nowhere. We were deep in rural South Carolina. As in, “can’t get cell phone reception” and “literally a one stop light town.” The shop itself was so small that it occupied a spare bedroom and the living room of the owner’s house, and I was the only employee. Before I started working there, I had always assumed that the “big companies” like Dell, Compaq, and so on were rip-offs. I had always assumed (and I may note, it had always been true until sometime early this decade) that building your own PC was cheaper than buying a true OEM machine. Well, by the end of that summer (believe me, our customers were not “high end” or even “mid-range”), I realized that the white box market was dead for the most part on the low end. The OEMs were selling a full machine (including a copy of Windows and shipping/handling) for less money than the parts would cost us. Ever since then, when someone has asked me if they should custom build a PC or buy an OEM PC, I tell them to go with the OEM model unless they have very specific needs that can’t be met.

Well, I have always considered my own needs very specific, so I never looked at OEM stuff before. For example, when I built my current PC almost three years ago, very few people ran dual monitors and that was a “must have” for me. In addition, I knew I wanted two RAID 1’s, and most OEMs were using motherboards without built-in RAID support. So I did it myself. Now, I am getting ready to replace this machine (technically, I will be turning the current machine into a server, and building a new desktop PC). After all was said and done, my parts list came in at just under $1,500. I could trim the price a bit, by dropping the thumb drive for ReadyBoost (I personally like ReadyBoost, I think it is an excellent idea), getting rid of the extra drive for backup purposes (not a good idea to drop it), halfing the RAM to 6 GB (do I really need 12?), reusing an existing case/PSU (instead of getting the Lian-Li/Seasonic combo I wanted), and so on. But I really don’t want to do that. I spec’ed it a certain way for a reason.

Remembering my PC shop experiences, I decided to see if the “big boys” could spank white box on the high end and well as the low end. I was stunned with what I saw. I looked at the “workstation” class PCs, since that is what I am building. First of all, what the OEMs had to offer was a lot of last year’s tech. On top of that, things that I thought would be common, were either not possible or extremely expensive (like RAIDs). And upgrades were unbelievably pricey. Basically, there is no way that the OEMs can beat a self-built system on this score.

Now, I do understand part of it. IT departments value consistency in the supply chain more than the best value; being able to swap a user’s drive into a replacement box and troubleshoot the hardware later will get a high-salaried engineer back to work a lot quicker than trying to solve the problem on their live box. Ditto for being able to just blast an image onto a machine. At the same time, I am baffled as to how the OEMs can think that they can charge what they charge for, say, a RAM increase, when every customer has a CDW or Newegg account. And of course, they may be willing to concede a lot of the market with the belief that most people looking on the high end are enthusiasts who always want a cutting edge, custom system that no OEM could profitably make. All the same, I was quite shocked to see just how bad the prices were on their high end kit.

J.Ja

After much thought and consultation with a friend, I beleive that my persistently high hard drive failure rate on personal PCs (I average a drive failure every 6 – 9 months for the last 10 years, regardless of brand, model, etc.) may actually be caused by heat. So, I need suggestions on a case that provides lots of room for my hard drives to “breath”. My current case is pretty good about cooling, but the drives are still packed in tight, and my failure rate is a bit high (but lower than my normal history). Any suggestions (that do not involve pricey drive coolers) is appreicated! Must hold ATX MB, 4 internal hard drives, 1 – 2 5.25″ drives, and 1 3.5″ floppy drive (you never know when they come in handy).

J.Ja

$18 (after $20 rebate) NVIDIA 8600GT graphics card with dual DVI
http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx

I don’t think this blog entry requires much explanation.  Even without the rebate, it’s a great deal.  You can order up to 3 of these and get a maximum of $60 rebate.  For anyone with an older graphics card, this will breath new life into the computer with a reasonably fast, quiet, and cool temperature graphics card.

As I’ve previously explained, an Intel G45 motherboard and Intel Conroe-L “Celeron” processor makes the ideal computer system as oppose to an NVIDIA Ion system.  Now I’ll give you the full configuration list of parts for building a great HTPC system for under $600.

Blu-ray and NAS storage capable Home Theater PC (HTPC)

At $595, this is an unheard of price for an awesome HTPC system that you can hook up to your HDTV television set via HDMI cable.  Not only can you play Blu-ray movies, surf the web, and watch Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and every other website, you can also do some casual PC gaming on your living room TV.  A good Blu-ray player without any recording and storage capacity will cost you this much money and Blu-ray players typically have very annoying one-minute startup times but this computer can sleep and wake in a few seconds for instant-on gratification.  You can also add 4 more hard drives to this chassis and have this double as a super fast gigabit network attached storage (NAS) server and the RAID 5 controller in the motherboard makes fault tolerant storage feasible.

To make sure this is compatible with your HDTV set, you need an HDTV with HDMI inputs with either 1280×720, 1366×768, or 1920×1080 native resolution (preferably the latter which is usually called “Full HD 1080P”).  A nice 42″ LCD 1080P HDTV these days can be had for under $1000.  You don’t need to worry about sound because HDMI covers both video and audio so it’s nice and simple with only one cable and connector to worry about.  Also make sure you don’t make the mistake of buying hundred dollar HDMI monster cables.

Lastly, if you’re going to buy an OEM copy of Windows Premium Edition, wait till fall for Windows 7 and it should be available for around $120.  I would also suspect that vendors will soon be offering free Windows 7 coupons for those who purchase Windows Vista.

Update 5/17/2009 – Note that the Blu-ray optical drive comes with an OEM copy of PowerDVD.  The OEM copy is limited to stereo audio which is fine if you’re plugging this HTPC directly into your HDTV which typically only supports stereo anyways.  If you’re going to plug this into a 5.1 or 7.1 receiver, then you’re going to need to upgrade to the full retail version of PowerDVD.

Also note that this type of system will idle around 40 watts or less and peak at well under 90 watts.  The 330 watt power supply makes it somewhat difficult to achieve very low power states because the power consumption is too low to be in the optimum range of this power supply which is one of the smaller PSUs you can find.  But if you load in 4 more energy efficient hard drives, we might expect the idle power consumption to remain below 55 watts which is extremely reasonable for a 6 TB storage device (using RAID-5).

Intel and Asus are trying to get community feedback on what people want in a PC and one of the more popular ideas floated is a “Future proof PC”.  I’ve been trying to tell people for nearly two decades that there is no such thing as “future proof” in the computer industry and the sooner they strike that idea from their head the better off they are.  This rule applies equally to the consumer and the IT industry.

Why am I so adamant about this?  Because I’ve seen people shoot themselves in the foot over and over again and while most of them learn, it’s an expensive lesson.  It’s the same old story and I’ve seen people ignore my warnings and buy that $5,000 to $10,000 PC because they think it’s future proof for 5 to 10 years.  The reality is that it’s almost always an inferior piece of junk compared to any $2000 new PC with dust balls and gunk inside the computer within 2 years.

I see companies fork out $50,000 for a server with two empty sockets so that they have “upgradeability” when they could have bought an equally fast server for $20,000 without the upgradeability.  Less than 2 years later when they’re out of capacity, it costs them another $20,000 to upgrade but they could just as easily buy a brand new $20,000 computer that’s faster than the upgraded computer.  Oh but the IT guy will argue that the new PC requires a migration and the other computer is a drop-in replacement.  The problem with this argument is that you can just as easily align your major software upgrades with new servers which is much simpler and safer to do than an in-place software upgrade on the production server.  If anything bad happens on the production server during an in-place software upgrade (which is quite common), you’re toast.  If anything bad happens on the new server, you got plenty of time to iron it out while your production server is humming along.  When you get everything right, just flip the production server over with a few DNS changes and you’re done.

But dtoid, the gamer who posted the suggestion on the future proof computer, is talking about an upgradeable PC.  The problem with this idea is that by the time you upgrade the motherboard, GPU, memory, and CPU to get the necessary improvements, you’ve only managed to keep a nasty gunky keyboard and ATX chassis.  Had you kept all the parts intact, you would have a nice hand-me-down computer to give away or sell on EBay.  The worst example of dumb upgrades I can remember is people who spend $250 on a CPU socket adapter so that they could put a new CPU in an old motherboard when a new motherboard is better and cheaper.

Buying a new computer generally isn’t that much more expensive than an upgrade because the only extra money you’re spending is the chassis, power supply, and optical drive which is hardly more than $200.  Besides, getting a fresh install of Windows is half of the new PC experience.

This is a computer build list for a good office computer with solid graphics performance.  This computer has very low power consumption with NVIDIA passively cooled 9500 GT graphics adapter and Intel dual-core 45nm processor.  The nice thing about this set-up is that it has two digital display outputs and one analog display output so you can hook up multiple monitors.

This system could be considered an entry-level gaming computer with decent gaming performance for 22″ LCD displays or less.  It can also be converted to a great HTPC computer with bigger multiple hard drives and a Blu-ray optical drive.  When the AMD/ATI Radeon 4600 series comes out, those will be a great substitute as well.

In an effort to build the cheapest computer I can build that plays Blu-ray DVD movies, I put the NVIDIA 7150 chipset with Intel Allendale dual-core 2.93 GHz (overclocked) test bed to work.  I’ve already been having some problems with this inexpensive embedded NVIDIA chipset but I wanted to put it to the most challenging video load it can handle.

To start off, I put in a Pioneer BDC-S02BK Blu-ray ROM drive in the computer and put it to the test using PowerDVD 8.0 trial edition.  The result was an absolute failure and I couldn’t even get the drive to recognize “The Other Boleyn Girl” 2008 Blu-ray edition that I rented from Netflix.  The drive would recognize HQV Blu-ray edition test disk but the frame rate was just awful and at times it was like watching a 5 fps slide show and the CPU hit near 100% for both CPU cores on the Intel Allendale 2.93 GHz processor.  Mid way through, PowerDVD 8 crashed and took about 5 minutes to terminate the process.

So I went to Fry’s and picked up a Lite-on BD-ROM drive for $110 and that came with an OEM edition of PowerDVD 7 which only permits 2-channel audio but that was fine for me since I’m only hooking the computer up to my DLP HDTV.  I put the disk in and “The Other Boleyn Girl” worked with PowerDVD 7 but it was still jerky at times and the CPU hit 90+ percent again.

At this point since this motherboard and embedded GPU is absolutely worthless for Blu-ray, I’m going to try and pick up an AMD Radeon HD 3450 PCI-Express graphics card with full H.264 and VC-1 acceleration for $37.  I’m going to switch to an inexpensive Intel G33 chipset motherboard because I want the S3 sleep state to work so that the computer can have instant on capability.

The NVIDIA 7150 motherboard is crashing whenever it wakes from S3 sleep state and I don’t know if it’s a bad implementation by XFX or if all NVDIA 7150 chipset motherboards have this problem.  Since I can’t get any support on this from NVIDIA or XFX after repeated queries, I’m going to assume the worst until I get my hands on another 7150 to test and suspend my recommendation of this chipset for now even if you’re not using it for Blu-ray playback.