AlexHopmann.com

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.

I’ve been rethinking what video card to put in the new workstation that I’m going to build this fall. Since this machine will also be something that I want good high-end 3d on (for high end WPF work, games, Flight Simulator, etc) I want a step up from the NVidia 8600GTS that I put in the media center box (which I’m using as a workstation in the short term).

My initial thought was to go with the NVidia 8800GTS (640MB version). Many of the reviews say the 320MB version is just fine and the extra memory is unnecessary, but I run on a Dell 30″ monitor at 2560×1600 pixels so I’m going to opt for the extra memory.

The 640MB NVidia cards run about $360, but at right about the same benchmark scores and price (about $380) is the top of the line AMD (ATI) Radeon HD 2900XT. Most of the write ups score the two cards just about equal head-to-head.

But the balance might tip to the Radeon because the Intel chip-sets (the current P35, and the X38 that I hope to get) only support the AMD “Crossfire” dual-card option and don’t work with NVidia “SLI”. Its pretty ironic that the Intel chips are likely going to tip me towards an AMD video card, but there you have it. I’m not planning on buying two cards right away, but it gives me the option to get a second one a year down the road (although by that time there will probably be a new generation of cards and I’d be better off just replacing it with a single new card).

I’ve got the Media Center PC all going now, except for the TV tuner and that I’m planning on using it as a workstation for the next two months or so. But its time to start considering more seriously the new workstation PC that will replace it.

News has just popped up about the launch date and prices for the Penryn processors so there is a little bit of data to go on- looks like the big rollout day is November 11th so it will be close to the end of November probably to pull it all together. Most of the parts that I’m considering have not really hit the market yet or are so new that the pricing is still astronomical. Also it looks like they aren’t hitting 3.33ghz on the high end, only 3.13ghz for a whopping $1200. At those prices its going to be really tempting to take a step back to the 3ghz model or further. [Correction- this data is for the Xeon server processors, not the desktop ones I would be using]/

Meanwhile, I’m also hoping to get a motherboard with the high end P38 chipset (not available yet anywhere that I have seen although it was announced months ago) and ideally DD3 RAM which is currently priced so high as to be unrealistic. Stay tuned to see if I hold out for the P38 and fast RAM or just bail and get another Asus P5K with lots of cheap DD2 RAM. Given that I like to play with multiple server boxes running in VMs, it seems like an easy bet to go for more RAM (4GB or more) over faster RAM which in benchmarks I’ve seen is only good for a 2-5% boost, although with the quad-core CPU with a 1333mhz front-side bus, its quite possible that DDR2 800mhz RAM would really hold it back.

Rough equipment list-

CPU: Intel Penryn 4x 3ghz 1333mhz bus. $850
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe P38 equivalent. $275
Case: Zalman HD-135 Media Case. ~$275 ??? Undecided. Another HD-135 actually seems like a reasonable idea. I can keep the computer in my rack totally away from my desk.
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 500W $119 Works well in the other machine, although I’m considering a 600W given the faster CPU and higher end video card.
Memory: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR3 1333mhz PC6400 CAS4 (currently $750 for 4×1gb, no way I’m going to pay that much)
Video: ??? GF 8800GTS 640MB or ATI HD2900XT 512MB $400
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $33
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB $199 x 2.

Total right now is $3100 although I’m hoping to get it well down under $3000 before I start buying the pieces. I can trace back to 1987, the high end computers I’ve bought have always been $3000-$4000, and while there have been amazing breakthroughs in the cost of lower-end systems, the industry still does a good job extracting at least $3000 from people who want more power. I could probably drop 20% performance and get it down to about $2200 which is worth considering

Step down from the top system-
CPU: Intel Penryn 4x 2.66ghz 1333mhz bus. ~$500
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe. $220
Cheaper case: $200
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 500W $119 Works well in the other machine, although I’m considering a 600W given the faster CPU and higher end video card.
Memory: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR2 800mhz $400
Video: ??? GF 8800GTS 640MB or ATI HD2900XT 512MB $400
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $33
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB $150×2 (by that time)
= $2172

Correction: The prices and release dates are for the Xeon processors. There is still hope that there will be a desktop Penryn processor that hits 3.33ghz and for an earlier release.

I’ve been giving some thought to upgrading one of my home RAID arrays lately. I currently have two 6-drive arrays attached to a single server via LSI MegaRAID SATA controller cards. One is using 250mb drives for 1.25gb capacity and the other is using 400gb drives for 2gb capacity. So far they have been operating fairly well.

While more capacity is nice, reliability is the most important thing. I bought that first array back in June 2004, which is just over 3 years ago. If I recall from the Google research on hard-drive reliability (ironic note- I couldn’t find the actual study with a quick Google, only lots of articles about it), age is one of the big factors towards failures, with lots of failures starting to happen when drives get to be about 3 years old.

So one question is about an upgrade process. I have lots of practice with simple usage of this array, at least enough to know not to pull multiple drives all at once. But to be honest I have not ever done anything complicated. Can I upgrade the drive size by just pulling the drives one at a time, replacing each with a bigger drive, waiting for it to rebuild until everything is balanced again?

Or is it much safer to copy everything somewhere else? This sounds like a pain since its 1TB, but then again with drive sizes now getting 1tb of free space somewhere else isn’t as hard as it used to be, just a bit slow.

Apple finally upgraded the Mac-Mini to a Core 2 Duo. The store is not back up yet so the full pricing and options are not available, but starting at $599 this seems like a potential great option for the display I’m working on for the kitchen. Of course I can use the fairly small Asus barebone I bought for that too so unless I have a problem with the Asus I’ll probably stick with that for now.

It looks like Intel is on track to ship the 45nm Penryn chips sometime in Q4 this year. I’m hoping that means October (2 months from now), not December (4 months from now), but I guess you never know. There are more details out on the improvements and I’m glad I’m waiting for the new workstation machine.

At the same time the Media PC is fully built except for the tuner and I’m very happy with it. The Q6600 quad-core 2.4ghz chip is plenty fast for what that machine needs to do and its 3x faster than any of my existing machines so I’m going to be using it as a workstation for the next couple of months until those Penryn chips actually release.

I’ll write up some more details on the build and the Zalman HD135 case soon. I got some step by step pictures. One thing I can mention write away is that the case is a lot deeper than I was really thinking. It is close to square- 17.5″ wide, 16.5″ deep. For my applications this should be fine (the place I want to put it has plenty of room behind), and it makes it fairly easy to lay things out since the drives do not overlap the motherboard at all. Its also a little thicker than I was thinking. While they advertise that its 135mm thick (HD135), its actually closer to 160mm, because it has little stands and the power-supply has a cut-out so it goes lower than the rest of the case. This is actually a good thing- I was a bit concerned when I unpacked the power-supply and thought it might not fit. As long as you have 160mm of space + a little extra room for exhaust, its a nice design.

I posted a couple of weeks back about the spec for a media center box that I’m building. I’ve got most of the parts now and am building the machine soon (still waiting on the case) although initially I’m going to use it as a workstation machine rather than media-center.

While figuring this out I thought it would be interesting to compare what I was purchasing to an equivalent Dell machine. For years I always built my own PCs (before that I bought Macs). Then I realized probably back in 1998 or 1999 that certain Dell configurations were such great deals that it never made sense to built it yourself, just buy the crazy discounted Dell and upgrade whatever parts you needed to.

Starting a bit more than a year ago the Dell machines stopped being the same good deal. It pretty much can be traced to the introduction of the XPS line. The XPS were the “high end” machines, but never had good discounts. Initially the non-XPS machines could still be had at 40% off (some inflated price) but were available in configurations that either started out high-end or could be upgraded. For example one of my machines was initially a 2.4ghz P4 Dell that I upgraded to the 3.6ghz cpu later. Because Dell offered the same model with the 3.6ghz chip, I knew the upgrade was possible. Lately however Dell has gotten rid of anything remotely high end in any model line but the XPS so the choices haven’t been as good if you want anything beyond basic performance.

To quickly review the specs on the machine I just bought
CPU: Intel Q6600- 4x 2.4ghz 1033mhz bus. $290
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe. $220
Case: Zalman HD-135 Media Case. ~$275
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 500W $119
Memory: 2GB (1GBx2) DDR2 800mhz PC6400 CAS4 ~$99
Video: Gigabyte GF 8600GTS Silentpipe3- $183
TV Tuner: AverMedia MTVPEMCER- $104
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $33
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB $199.
Total is $1522 for a fully functional system.
Add Windows Vista Premium for $115 for a total of $1637.

So today I went shopping on the Dell site. Things had improved quite a bit since the last time I checked- go figure that the pricing changes are a bit harder to anticipate there, but they do show up. There was some strange CPU pricing still- the dual-core 2.66ghz CPU was $100 more than a quad-core 2.4ghz CPU, but I think they just hadn’t fixed things up since the Intel price cuts.

I first tried to compare to the Dell XPS 210. Since my machine will be in a medium-low profile case, this was the most equivalent case that they provided. The bad news is there was no way to get a XPS 210 to an equivalent configuration. They didn’t offer any quad-core CPUs for it (for no particular reason), only offered a 500gb drive maximum and only have crappy video choices. The total still worked out to $1728.

The XPS 410 was a much closer comparison. I managed to spec one out that was just about equivalent. Same CPU, same GPU, same hard-drive. The only deficiencies in the Dell were that the TV Tuner card is less powerful, the power supply is only 375 watts (which is probably fine) and there is one less PCIex1 slot. That configuration worked out to only $1499 which is a pretty good deal- compare it to $1522 or $1637 depending on whether you want to include the price of Windows (which the Dell does include).

The plus side for the Dell is that it includes support. Of course at this price its only the 1-year basic support. Up that to the 3-year premium support and even with the discounts that adds the price is still $1698.

The down-side is that the Dell case is really poor compared to the one I’m getting. Almost $400 of my price is going to the case and power supply, with the goal of a low noise, low-profile (135mm high so it can fit in my cabinet which is only 170mm clearance), high quality case. The Dell cases are OK, but they are nothing special and in any case the XPS 410 is 18.75cm wide so it would not fit where I want it. Its pretty easy to get a decent home-built case for $99 (there are some with power-supplies for as little as $19.99 on NewEgg).

In the end the prices are both in the same ballpark and the trade-off is flexibility vs. having someone else to deal with the problems that might happen. Now, Dell support for laptops has been great, but I’m not so sure how well it would work out if I had a problem with a desktop. Mostly desktop machines are reliable enough that its safe to put aside $200 and if something breaks, you just order a new one. None of the parts except the CPU are much more than $200 and if that broke there are likely going to be better ones available for $200. For me the hassle of following up on a warranty / RMA return is rarely worth the cost of the item so its easier to just buy another one.

Which brings up another point- one of the nice aspects of going the home-built route is that you can pretty much get premium parts all around. Thanks to Dell keeping up the price pressure, its possible to stick with the good reputation name brands and the results can be pretty good- these guys tend to keep their drivers up to date and the failure rates tend to be low. With the Dell you don’t know who is actually making all the bits and pieces, and Dell has to update the drivers which often creates a big lag. Its usually not a big problem since anything causing big reliability problems will get addressed (if its generating support calls for Dell).

Next step- I’ll report some results from my build.

AnandTech published one of the two reviews I’ve been looking for today, comparing the video decode performance between the AMD/ATI and the NVidia GPUs. They key findings are that both of the one step under the top cards are the best for media scenarios- the AMD Radeon 2600HD and the NVidia 8600GTS. Comparing the two head to head the NVidia card has better video quality, especially “noise reduction”, although its unclear how much noise reduction you really want for any properly mastered HD content. The Radeon has better support for VC-1 decoding which is not supported in hardware n the NVidia card, but VC-1 (designed by Microsoft I think) is much less CPU intensive to decode in the first place- on a low-end P4 machine it was still only taking 30% CPU so the quad-core Q6600 I’m planning on getting should handle even multiple simultaneous streams of it with no problem.

The missing review is still the stability one. For a media-box, running for weeks without crashing or needing a reboot and without hangs or missed recordings is a key criteria. Maybe I shouldn’t be hoping for that driver stability review from the web-sites that tend to publish tons of over-clocking results, but its not like anyone else has really researched this yet either. I’m pretty convinced that there will be some big differences between NVidia and AMD on this stuff…

The other application I should mention is Media Center with several XBox 360s remoted. Each remote XBox creates a whole new login for Windows with another set of the the Media Center apps + most of the basic system stuff. With the XP 2005 version its only about an extra 100mb for this extra stuff and the base system (for me) is only about 900mb on a non-memory constrained system, so 2gb should be plenty. Of course so far my experience with Vista is that it needs about twice as much memory for everything and I don’t see why this would be an exception- maybe its one of those better safe than sorry things to just get the 2×2gb memory instead of the 2×1gb ones since its only about twice as much ($210 vs about $100).

You know, I thought I understood this stuff but I think I’ve maybe been making a mistake in my thinking about 32-bit vs. 64-bit.

With 32-bit Windows by default each application is limited to a 2gb user address space. The other 2gb is available to various kernel things. It is possible to adjust this ratio to give more address space to the application, but limiting the kernel can have some really bad effects.

So what happens when you have 4gb or 6gb of RAM in a 32-bit system? Can you use it? Granted, each application can only use 2gb (by default). But if your goal is not about some one monster app but rather to have a smoothly running multitasking system (IE- plenty of resources for those 4-cores you can buy now) can one app use 2gb, another app use 2gb and the rest split of the remaining 2gb (+ of course system caches)?

Part of my goal is to have a system that can run a few VMs smoothly. So far my experience isn’t great. The performance inside a VM is much better but running VMs (given that the things I run in VMs sometimes needs lots of memory) both leaves my base OS with very little memory, plus I tend to get lots of hanging in other applications. For a developer that wants to run Orcas betas in one VM, an IE6 image in another and linux in a 3rd, a fast quad-core system with 6gb of RAM seems pretty useful, as long as the OS can VM software can take advantage of it.

I’m also curious if this is one of the differences between the free and paid VMWare solutions / Microsoft Virtual PC / Parallels? I’d love to see some reviews that really compare how efficient and flexible they each are.