Alex Hopmann’s Blog

As I’ve been scoping out components for the new computers I’m building this summer I had been assuming that I would be using NVidia 8800/8600 video cards for the machines. The video card industry has been a story of incredibly progress over the past decade with NVidia and ATI leapfrogging each other just about every year. These guys have been leaving Moore’s law (which predicts 2x improvements every 18 months for CPUs) in the dust with roughly 2x performance improvements every 12 months for over a decade. The ability to apply parallelism to GPU operations has enabled them to beat the progress in CPUs where just adding more parallel execution has rarely improved raw performance.

For the past few months since the introduction of the GF8800 NVidia has been well ahead of ATI in raw performance, but the latest news is that ATI will be introducing their new generation based on the R600 chips within a couple of weeks. I’ll be looking forward to the comparison reviews and will certainly wait until the new mid-range NVidia and ATI boards are all out. For my “workstation” computer I’m looking for a fairly beefy card in the $300-$400 range that can do great 3d graphics and high-performance WPF on my 30″ LCD, and for the media center my goal is to get a nice card in the $200 range that is quiet and has enough performance to decoded HDDVD on a 24″ LCD.

When the reviews come out I hope that they provide a bit more focus on driver quality. As high-end accelerated graphics has moved beyond 3d games (where one game takes over the full screen experience and 100% of the GPU resources) to media center experiences and driving core UI in Windows (the Aero glass UI in Vista), the importance of quality video drivers has become way more important. So far most of the review sites like AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware tend to focus on just performance benchmarks. Lately they have added some noise stats which is welcome, but it would be great to have these guys come up with a good way to rank driver stability. Like I said- if you are running Vista, having quality video drivers can make the difference between multiple crashes a day vs. a great experience and for a media center box its just horrible when your TV stutters or even worse loses a program you were trying to record because of some failure.

I’d easily buy a video card from a company that put the effort into making solid drivers. Ok, maybe I wouldn’t buy a card that was half as fast, but this is probably #1 on my priority list, and the reviews barely mention it at all. What makes this situation worse is that the way the reviews are done influence the way the product gets built, so this cycle encourages the vendors to ship buggy but fast drivers early on to get the best benchmarks and so the revewiers are actually hurting consumers by not focusing on this.

Several posts from Mac people have complained about the Vista virtualization license rules that basically say you can’t do it unless you have the Ultimate or Business SKUs. Now, I think this is a lame business strategy on Microsoft’s part, but is it unfair as has been alleged?

If its really unfair, how about Apple lets us run MacOS virtualized inside Windows. I challenge Apple to say that they are fine with this. I’d even be fine if they only went half-way and only allowed it if there underlying hardware was a Mac (but I’m still going to call that a 50% cop-out compared to the “Apples to Apples” scenario of buying a retail copy of MacOS and installing it on a VM on a arbitrary PC.

I’m pretty conflicted on what to do for hard-drives for my new workstation this summer.

One thought is to use the Raptor for the system drive. The Raptors are relatively small expensive drives (about $240 for 150GB) that run at 10000 RPM (instead of 7200 or 5600) with fast controllers. It should result in faster boots, application launches, and general performance. Of course I want to balance that against system reliability. From one point of view there is no more painful experience than upgrading your boot drive and/or the drive that contains your “Program Files”. Getting everything back into shape could take days and considering what my time is worth that is certainly worth a few extra hundred dollars.

Tom’s Hardware wrote a comparison of the Raptor vs. RAID arrays for workstation performance. This article is useful for some data but the analysis seems really poor to me and it appears to me from the title (”Cheap RAID ravages WD Raptor”) that it was written by someone trying to prove a pre-conceived point. First of all they use striping-RAID which I wouldn’t touch anymore- the greatly decreased reliability is just too much of a problem since a failure one either drive fails the whole thing. Still, contrary to the “ravages” claim, a single Raptor still beat the RAID array of slower drives by about 50% on key synthetic tests and two Raptors demolished them.

Still the performance advantage only translates to a 21.3 second boot time vs. 23.4 seconds or about a 10% difference in the real-world performance. This is nice enough to be worth considering despite the extra size, but another factor comes in- the 150GB is just too small.

My current workstation machine is using 235GB of 280GB on its boot drive. Program Files is 60 GB and the Windows directory is 8 GB. So this should fit in theory, but of course I’ve got a lot of crap on there that I would probably put somewhere else given better planning. Windows applications are just used to putting their stuff in the normal places on C and every time you try to point them somewhere else, you suffer some strange issues.

I’ll also point out that this disk is not the initial disk I got with this system. I bought an upgrade drive which came with some software that let you transfer your boot disk to the new drive. The transfer worked. Sort-of. But things have never been quite the same. Icons are messed up, program associations are messed up, and its something I’d like to avoid ever doing in the future. This makes getting a huge boot drive seem pretty attractive- even if I sacrifice 10% off various performance, never having to worry about having enough space for all that stuff sounds like a good trade.

I’m also tempted to set the boot drive (whichever one I pick) up as a mirrored array so I don’t have any downtime from the system drive going down. In theory a mirrored array gives you better read performance (important for boot) since sectors can be read from either drive (but unlike a striped array you don’t gain any write performance since each sector needs to be written to both drives).

With all these factors my current thought is to go with two 500GB drives in a mirror array for the boot and one bigger drive (1TB or a 750GB I have sitting around) for the data disk. 500GB should be plenty of room for Program Files, Windows and tons of temporary files, and the price per GB is best in that size range ($.25/GB for 400GB, $.30/GB for 500GB, $.40/GB for 1TB).

The irony is that in the end I wind up with a similar recommendation to that Tom’s article, although with different reasoning and specifics….

When I first placed my order for my Canon TX1 on Amazon they listed the release date as March 31st. About a week later that changed to May 31st and the wait is really gnawing at me. Dell lists the camera as shipping in 1-2 weeks but I’ve seen them be totally full of it on those estimates before. There are some online forums where some people suggested that it would start shipping next week, but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

I ordered 2 spare batteries for $20 each from some online cheap battery place and a slow 8GB memory card for $60. I figure with 8GB of memory I’ll usually be running out of batteries long before I run out of storage space. The I calculated that I probably need memory that runs at about 4MB/second to shoot continuous video so I’ll probably have to get another faster memory card later, but they aren’t out yet (and look like they will be 4x the price of the existing memory cards). I’m also a little skeptical about whether the cheap batteries are any good- its one of those things where they cost 1/3 the price of the official ones, and they might be crap or they might be 100% the same item with just different printing on the label. I’ll post back here once I found out how it all works.

The Zalman home theater PC cases look like reasonable options for both computers. I’m not especially fond of the tower form factor so I’m fine with a horizontal machine for the workstation PC also. The Zalman HD160XT is kind of cool but costs more than $500 and I don’t really need the little 7″ LCD touch-screen. The other two options are the HD160 and the HD135. The space I have for the Media Center box is about 7.5″ high (and I need to leave some space for cooling) but either of these boxes should fit- the bigger one is 6.2″ high, the smaller one is an inch shorter but can still take full height video cards and 5(!!!) internal hard drives. The 160 is a bit less than $300 at newegg, although since I don’t feel a need for more fancy stuff on the front of the case the smaller one (which isn’t available yet) might be the right choice.

These have a reputation for being very quiet. If there was a smaller version with only room for a Micro-ATX motherboard and maybe not as many drives, that might be ideal, but maybe that just isn’t going to happen.

I also wonder if the BTX form-factor is dead. This was a big announcement from Intel about a year ago about a new case design but there are almost none available.

In scoping out a future media center box, I’m curious if USB 2.0 based video tuners give as good results as PCI cards? In theory the bandwidth should be there but do they really work as well? It could certainly help keep the size of the box down and system flexibility up to have something like that be outside the main enclosure. Also- are there any good USB tuners that can do 2 simultaneous inputs?

Overall this seems like a step backwards. I’ve got 4 “unknown” devices on my MacBook at the moment and its really hard to tell what they are supposed to be (which makes it hard to go searching for the right drivers).

Also on Thursday at Ignite I tried to put in a USB key. It couldn’t find the drivers. For a USB key!!! I had to manually point the search path to c:\windows and then it worked fine, but a novice would have been totally lost. I also have a standard Microsoft optical mouse at home that for some reason always pops up driver install messages and can’t find its drivers on the Internet or otherwise.

You would think this stuff would be the bread and butter basics of an OS, but it does show some of how we got off track with Vista. I think what most people really want out of their OS is to just work rock solid with the latest hardware and somehow we (and I’ll include myself in the blame) got too focused on changing the world. Changing the world can be a great thing, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be intertwined with the OS release itself.

Bloc Party has a new single out and I went to look for it on EMusic. All their mainstream albums are no longer available on there. Not cool!

I’m working on building a few new computers over the summer and will try to chronicle some of the planning process here. Ideally I want to build a new PC for my car (to act as a music player replacing my existing HD player that has been broken for 2 years), a new main desktop for my office and a new Media Center. For the desktop (which will actually go under the desk or maybe in a cabinet) and Media Center I’m planning to wait for the 45nm new Intel chips to come out so it will be at least a few months.

For the media center I’ve got a few goals-

• Nice form-factor case. My existing Dell in a traditional large size Dell box doesn’t fit where I need it. Any of the somewhat small-form-factor or media-equipment cases should work. I don’t care about fancy media displays on the front of the case, I’d ideally like the minimum size and easy to hide out of the way.
• Quiet. Its going in my bedroom so as quiet as possible is a high priority.
• Decent graphics performance. I probably don’t need top of the line, but I’ve got a 24″ LCD hooked up so I need something that can drive high resolution at HD-DVD quality. And that isn’t loud and fits in my case. I’m hoping one of the new NVidia 8600s that are rumored to be coming out in a few weeks might fit the bill. The NVidia 7600 I have now is not quite fast enough to do HD-DVD without flaws.
• I’m assuming that 2GB RAM should be plenty. I’m not planning on running virtualization, but it does need to be able to handle recording two shows at once, playing back locally and remoting to 1-2 X-Box 360s.
• I expect a quad-core 2.66ghz should do the trick on the CPU front. See above why I need plenty of CPU (especially given that remoting to XBoxes sometimes requires real-time transcoding).
• For hard-disk I assume I’ll have 1 1TB drive, 2 if I happen to have room.
• I wish something like cable-card were an option but it doesn’t look like it is, and from what I hear it barely works even when it is an option (its OEM-machine only at the moment).

Selecting the right case seems like a key first step and its a giant pain. I really haven’t seen many options out there that are reasonably small, very quiet, have enough room for an OK video card + a tuner or two (possibly analog + digital), etc. There are small and loud boxes. There are big and quiet ones. Few that combine both qualities. Another advantage of keeping the box small is that its easier to reuse it somewhere else in the house in 3 years once this machine is obsolete.

I thought my talk at Ignite 3 went really well. It was really nice of Sasha to say that my talk had the most interesting content. I’ve seen several posts that echoed my thoughts that Jordan Schwartz’s talk on bees was very entertaining and there were several other really cool talks. I was a bit disappointed by a few talks that were too straight forward pitches for peoples companies/products. Sure I suppose I could have gotten up and talked about the latest in software development and Launch21 but it didn’t seem like the right thing for the audience.

Bruce’s talk on prison was also interesting, although it suffered just a tiny bit from expectation-setting. The title/topic was so attention getting that his talk (on teaching CS classes in a couple of prisons in Massachusetts) was, while very interesting, a slight let-down.

The logistics were overall way better. It was crowded but there was a good set of chairs and it was well organized. There was some last minute complication getting the video projector working right but Jesse and the other folks running the show did a great job pulling it all together.

I also like the format of the talks. It is pretty frustrating trying to design a talk that works in 5 minutes, but the results can be pretty cool. A couple of tips-

1. Focus. 5 minutes is enough time to almost get across 1 point, maybe 2 if you stretch it. This focus can be a good thing if you embrace it. I wanted to talk about engine timing, magnetos, more about prop speed controls, and a bunch of other things, but frankly if I had it probably would have quickly bored people who don’t actually deal with the details of flying airplanes.
2. No text. Or almost no text on your slides. At 15 seconds per slide no one has time to read them anyway, and they limit your flexibility as a presenter. Show some engaging pictures / graphs / graphics for each slide and focus on using your talking to make your verbal points.
3. Practice. You don’t need to over practice, but it probably needs more practice than the typical 30 minute talk does. Most of us can give a 30 minute presentation on a topic we know well pretty cold. To get it into 5 minutes and get the transitions from slide to slide right you probably need to go through it 5-20 times.
4. Think about the audience. This applies to any talk, but for this venue, consider that no topic will be directly meaningful to everyone (unlike a talk at the Exchange conference where I bet the entire audience cares about Exchange). So keep it entertaining and try to relate it something that a broad group of geeks will be interested in. Your topic might not be directly relevant to them, but they typically care about knowing interesting stuff about how just about anything works.