AlexHopmann.com

Dell has a new “All In One” Printer, the “Dell 948 AIO Printer”. The big news is that apparently it does two-sided printing, which is pretty huge. If it could also scan two sided I’d replace my existing Dell AIO 962 right away. Overall I’ve been very happy with the 962 except that the software doesn’t appear to work with Vista and they don’t appear to be updating it. I’d also be very interested in knowing if the same ink cartridges work with the newer Dell printer.

The Penryn 45nm QX9750 is out and available although for psycho expensive prices for now. I see reports that the 3.2ghz / 1600mhz FSB QX9770 is due next week along with the newer X48 chipset (just weeks after the X38 came out.. how odd).

In any case early benchmarks suggest that the X48 is hardly better than the X38 at least with current CPUs and video cards. Meanwhile the new Radeon 3xxxx series is due tomorrow so it seems like it might be a busy couple of weeks to watch the new announcements and pick our parts for a system.

DDR3 RAM continues to drop its price rapidly- looks like $239 for the 1333mhz 2×1gb kits. Of course I ideally want a 2×2gb which is still running in the $900 ballpark, compared to $225 for fast (1066mhz) DDR2 sticks. All in all it leaves me still tempted to stick with a less expensive P35 and DDR2 for now, any maybe I’ll upgrade the motherboard later (although it seems like it will hardly be worth it).

1TB hard drive prices appear to be falling quickly as competition heats up. Western Digital came out with their “green” drive that can spin down from 7200 to 5400rpm to save energy and Fry’s is already selling them for $265. This represents a price drop of 25% in the past month. I suppose its not surprsing given that the market has gone from a single vendor to three. In any case, it looks like good news for building big storage arrays.

Toshiba has introduced a 22-inch LCD that sports a 3840×2400 pixel resolution or I’d estimate about 220dpi. Nice! The bad news is they cost about $17,500 initially so this is clearly only for specialized applications, and I suspect you need a custom video card to drive the thing. Still, it makes me hopeful again that we will see high resolution come to the mainstream in a few years. I’ve seen some examples and its just hard to describe how much better computing is when the fonts and all the UI are rendered with so much more accuracy.

Of course it looks like I jumped the gun a bit in some of my conclusions in my previous post about video cards. ATI also announced their new generation of cards, the HD 3800 and they look pretty impressive too. Of course at the moment it looks like a bit of a vaporware launch (to head off today’s NVidia announcements), with no benchmarks / details, but the real launch is less than 3 weeks away so it seems like a good time to wait a bit before deciding.

Lots of hardware news is out today. First of all an update on an older item. I bought the Gigabyte SilentPipe GF 8600GTS for the Media box a few months ago. I guess its not the end of the world since I did need something until now, but it turns out to have been a mistake. The Zalman HD135 case supports full height cards, but just barely. There is no room over the top of the connector but the heat sink on the SilentPipe card goes above the top and the top of the case doesn’t fit (although its very close).

Also this is hardly a totally silent case anyway- with the thing buttoned up I had some heat problems so I probably need better cooling on the video card and/or another fan anyway.

I’d been thinking about maybe picking up one of the AMD (ATI) Radeon HD2600 cards. They have great media benchmarks and I’m not really planning on using this machine for 3d. But today along comes details of the NVidia 8800GT which should be faster than the existing $399 8800GTS, and available for just about $200. Its built with a better process (65nm) so its lower power, and there are 1-slot versions so it won’t block the slot next to it. Hopefully even a normal fan-cooled version of these won’t be too loud, and I’m probably going to want the same thing in my workstation too (since it blows away everything in the AMD line for gaming and only the $600 card is any better and that isn’t by much).

Of course this card (especially at $200) makes the motherboard choice even more painful since using NVidia SLI starts to sound reasonable. But the Intel P35, X38 and X48 chipsets don’t support SLI, so you are left with some pretty painful choices.

On the processor front, it does appear that Intel is going to have an upgrade to the 3.0ghz 1333mhz bus Penryn chip in Q1 2008. The upgrade should be 3.2ghz with a 1600mhz bus. The clock is only 7% faster, but its one of those things where if you combined it with the faster bus AND fast DDR3 memory the whole thing might be good for a 20% improvement. But even with DDR3 prices coming down, they are still likely to be 2x DD2 in 3-4 months and its hard to imagine that you don’t end up paying $600 extra for that 20% improvement.

I wonder when NVidia is going to come out with a new chipset? Their 680SLI is feeling a bit old compared to the new Intel ones and given that they have a video-card coming out with PCI 2.0 I’d expect them to do a chipset to go with it.

More details are out on the initial 45nm lineup. It looks like they haven’t been successful in cranking it up to 3.3ghz yet. Since the top chip is only 3.0ghz, it looks very tempting to just go with the 2.83ghz model which is just 5% slower but costs about half the price. Of course that chip isn’t going to ship until two months later so depending on how my budget looks I might not have the patience.

Some of the first real X38 chipset reviews are coming out. The news looks pretty disappointing. Most of the new boards are DDR2 since DDR3 memory is just too expensive to buy. And compared head to head against a P35 chipset board they offer no performance advantages today. All things being equal if things don’t change in a major way I’ll just buy another Asus P5K for my workstation and equip it with 4GB of relatively inexpensive high-speed (1066mhz) DDR2 memory. That stuff costs about $270 for 4gb right now so all things considered its very affordable.

There are a couple of advantages that the X38 is supposed to have, but none of them are really useful yet at least for me. The X38 has better support for over-clocking but I don’t really care about that. Its supposed to have slightly better support for DDR3 memory but the P35 supports DDR3 also and as mentioned its starting to look like it doesn’t matter since DDR3 is just not realistic in the short term.

The other big advantages are that it supports two full x16 PCI-e channels whereas the P35 supports one at x16, and one at x4. So if you do dual video on a P35 the second one is somewhat bandwidth limited, although I haven’t seen any reviews that really show how big that impact is. I’m not planning on buying a second video card in the short run anyway. Also the x16 PCI-e channels support PCI-e 2.0. But no video cards do yet. Any idea when PCI-e 2.0 cards are coming out? With this winter’s refresh or much later?

In any case its starting to look like its going to make sense to just stick with the P35. Considering that the x38 boards cost at least $100 more right now worst case I can upgrade the motherboard next year once it matters. Although to be realistic, by that time its usually not worth upgrading the motherboard without upgrading all the other components too…

Several sites reported last week that Intel plans to ship Penryn, the 45nm technology CPUs November 12th. Initially they will ship the high end chips and some of the server ones which should be fine for me. Hopefully I’ll be building my new workstation just about for Thanksgiving although there is one potential glitch. My assumption is that I’m going to hold out for DDR3 memory which should add about 10-20% to system performance once you get the faster DDR3 parts. The problem is that right now it is astronomically expensive- close to $200/gb (compared to $70/gb for decent DDR2 memory). Since I want 4GB I really don’t want to pay $800 for the memory.

My hope is that the prices are so bad right now since there are only one or two motherboards that can actually take it. Once the X38 chipsets ship in a week or two there should be a lot more DDR3 capable boards on the market and I’m hoping the prices will be down to $100-$120/gb by the time I’m ready to buy.

I bought an extra 2GB for the “media center” box that I’m using as a workstation at the moment. With the quad-core CPU there is plenty of horsepower for running virtual machines which are useful for all sorts of development purposes. But RAM quickly becomes a limiting factor and I wanted more than my existing 2GB.

So I order a pair of high quality RAM from NewEgg, put them in the other two slots and.. Nothing. The machine won’t POST. The power light comes on, but nothing- no beep, no video, nothing diagnostic that I can see to help figure it out.

Ok, maybe the new RAM is bad. I pull it out, pull the old ones out and put the new ones in by themselves. Works fine. Hmmm. I tried a BIOS upgrade and several other things but so far no luck.

The only hint I can find online is that I might want to try increasing the voltages to the RAM. Since I don’t know what “normal” is this scares me a bit to be honest. Any other thoughts? Each pair works on its own, each is a matched pair, PC6400 (800mhz DDR2), in the appropriate sockets. Similar timings on both sets although they aren’t from the same manufacturer.