Hardware News- NVidia 8600 and new 1TB Drives
posted in Technology, Hardware |NVidia launched the 8600 graphics boards today (as well as some lower models). These are priced in the $150-$230 range and should provide plenty of performance for the media center machine (I’m pretty sure I’m going to want an 8800-class card for the workstation machine). To me one of the key aspects of the 8-series of cards is they provide full decoding for high-definition video.
I’m a little disappointed that the AnandTech write-up did not include media-benchmarks or noise level measurements. I guess I’ll have to wait for the real boards to hit the market for that info.
I’m tempted to get one of these to upgrade my existing Media Center- it should run fine in the existing machine and then I can move it to the new one once I build it. I’ll probably wait for the new ATI (AMD) series to come out and then make a decision.
Also- PLEASE REVIEW THE DRIVER STABILITY. The only thing I could figure out on that was that its a total mess on the NVidia side with different drivers for XP vs. Vista and different drivers to download for each different board.
Also- Tom’s Hardware reviews the Hitachi 1TB hard-drive. The interesting bit here is that the read performance is very good and is creaping closer to the Raptor. Especially on Vista (where its smarter about moving stuff around for sequential reads) this should help with boot and application start times, although the seek times are still slow (which hurts performance for compilers and databases). Still given advances in RAM caching and memory sizes I bet a compiler is mostly working from RAM now for reads so this isn’t the factor for a developer workstation that it used to be.
My only other concern is that this drive runs very hot- the hottest they have tested yet. The Hitachi drive has 5 platters which is a lot to cram into the 2.5″ form-factor and is probably related to the temperature. The recent research suggests that the temperature doesn’t hurt drive life that much for the first 2 years, but does impact it quite a bit in year 3, just as the Hitachi warranty expires. Seagate has a 1TB drive coming out shortly that should hopefully have a 5-year warranty and that uses 4 platters which should run cooler and in theory might even get better read performance (due to higher density).