AlexHopmann.com

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.

Two other notes on my hardware plans. First of all, the ASUS board says that it will support the future 45nm processors, yet several of the roadmaps show new Intel chipsets coming out and one of their features being support for the 45nm parts. I’m curious what the real story is here?

The other is whether or not to try Vista 64-bit? On the one hand going 64-bit could make a future upgrade to 4gb of RAM more easy. And I’ve checked and in theory all the pieces I’m getting will have Vista 64-bit drivers. On the other hand its hard to imagine that the 64-bit drivers are as tested (not to mention Vista itself) plus I’ve heard that 64-bit Windows was used as an excuse to lock down various DRM things that seem very consumer un-friendly. I will be trying out Vista’s Media Center support- I’m not planning on upgrading my existing Media Center box, instead I’m building this new one and I’m going to make sure its stable before I trust it as my main TV.

This week the various hardware review sites are full of news of next Monday’s impending price cuts from Intel. On one level this is all great news since never before has this level of computing power been available at reasonable prices. At the same time there is additional news of future Intel processor roadmaps which all leaves me with a quandry about how long to wait to build my next computers. The 45nm “Penryn” desktop CPUs are supposed to ship before the end of the year, but the question is how far before the end of the year and how much better will they be than the existing 65nm CPUs that are shipping next week. Next week it will be possible to get a 3.0ghz Quad-Core 1333mhz front-side bus CPU, and sure its expensive, but will the 45nm version be any better?

AnandTech did a very useful article asking some of the key questions about the current processor lineup. For me the key questions were “does 1066mhz vs 1333mhz bus really matter for a quad-core CPU?” and “For $266, should you buy a quad-core Core 2 Quad Q6600 or a dual-core Core 2 Duo E6850?”. The former answer was “barely”. Comparing two almost identical quad-core CPUs with the different bus speeds the faster bus had less than a 1% difference overall. The biggest difference was for some of the encoding tasks, which are good benchmarks for my media-center machine, but those were still only in the 4% range.

On the second question, the quad-core chip spanked the faster clocked dual-core chip for many of the media encoding, etc, tasks. This leads me to an interesting plan- I think I’ll build a Media Center box using the Q6600 (2.4ghz quad-core) fairly soon. For this application I think it should be fine, I doubt that my earlier plan of using the 2.66ghz 1333mhz bus version will really make that much difference- at most about 10-12%, and for half the price (of the CPU).

The other dilemma is whether to both with DDR3 memory. The P35 motherboards come in either DDR2 or DDR3 versions (some have both). I was assuming that I’d want to switch to DDR3 as soon as possible (so I could buy consistent memory between machines) but a recent review shows almost no difference between the two. Fast DDR2 is better than slow DDR3, and today the only DDR3 available is slow and still costs 2-3x as much as the DDR2. Much as I’m tempted to get the ASUS P5KC that has 4 DDR2 and 2 DDR3 slots, the rest of the board doesn’t look nearly as nice as the normal P5K Deluxe so I’ll probably stick with that.

CPU: Intel Q6600- 4x 2.4ghz 1033mhz bus. $266
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe. $220
Case: Zalman HD-135 Media Case. ~$275
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 460W $99
Memory: 2GB (1GBx2) DDR2 800mhz PC6400 CAS4 ~$105
Video: Gigabyte GF 8600GTS Silentpipe3- $183
TV Tuner: AverMedia MTVPEMCER- $104
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $32

Total is about $1280 without hard-drives. One of the cool things about the Zalman case is it has 6 3.5″ drive bays. I’m tempted to go with 4×750GB drives which should cost an extra $800 or so. A pretty hefty addition to the price of the overall system, but 3TB is nothing to sneeze at. The newer 1TB drives are nice but way higher in cost per GB. A more reasonable option would be to go 4×500GB, which only drops me to 2TB storage (still not bad), but costs half as much and I’ve got the extra two drive bays for later.

Finally once I put the system together I might need to buy an extra case fan. I’m aiming for as silent as possible, but with no fan on the video card and all the drives its likely that the stock cooling won’t be able to handle it. I believe you can upgrade the HD-135 case with extra fans- hopefully it supports the 120mm ones, although it isn’t clear. Ideally it should be fine as is, but we will see.

As for the new workstation PC, I think I can hold off for now. I’m at least waiting for the X38 chipset to come out and ideally I’d like at least a 3.0ghz quad-core CPU and can wait for prices to come down a bit more on those (or the 3.2/3.4ghz ones to come out at the same price).

SmallNetBuilder has a review of the D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router which is one of the first of the draft 2.0 compatible “N” routers to hit the market. Don’t you love all how “Xtreme” it is?

Overall it looks really good and I’ve heard some good things about it from the folks at Pure. I’m going to wait for the DIR-855 Dual Band version which should be available “soon” according to the D-Link web site. This version supports the 5ghz band and given the various reports of problems with 2.4ghz N routers coexisting with existing B and G equipment on 2.4ghz, I’m hoping that 5ghz will be less congested. When I tried 5ghz in the past (using “A”) the experience was very poor- the range was much lower for the 5ghz products, but I’ve heard that has improved in the past 4 or so years.

This looks very cool, via Engadget.

I went ahead and bought the Gigabyte SilentPipe GF 8600GTS for my existing media center box. I noticed that the fan had frozen on the existing card in the box and that could certainly explain some of the failures of that machine. Plus I’m hoping that this card will move into the new media center machine in a fairly straightforward way. It was a bit risky to get the Nvidia one before the benchmarks on the ATI Radeon 2600 XT came out. Those benchmarks came out today and the 8600GTS beats the 2600XT in just about every test, although for now they still only have the gaming tests (grrr). The media tests are yet to come, and those are the critical ones I feel for the cards in this price / utility segment.

The NVidia card from Gigabyte has been working great. The construction seems very solid and while it does take two slots it seems to do a good job of cooling without a fan. Somehow while installing it I managed to fry the on-board networking on my media center, so I had to get a card for that. With the two-slot video card I was out of normal PCI slots, but I noticed there was a PCI-express 1-lane slot that was open. Luckly DLink makes a PCI-express ethernet card which has also been working great. Still, it was pretty amazing that there is pretty much only one PCI-express networking card that exists in the market.

Earlier I mentioned looking at the Zalman HD135 and HD160 cases for the new media computer I’m going to build this summer. I was at Frys earlier today and had a chance to check them both out in person. The HD135 looked much nicer than the HD160. The HD160 doesn’t use thumbscrews to get the case off- you have to remove 5 normal screws to open the case. Now, hopefully you aren’t doing that often, but it sounds like a major pain when you do. The HD135 seems to have plenty of room for everything, tons of drives, and its a bit smaller height (although slightly deeper but that should be ok).

Gigabyte now has silent versions of both brands. The Gigabyte GF8600GTS GV-NX86S256H is a two-slot silent card, and the Gigabyte ATI 2600 XT GV-RX26T256H is a one-slot silent card.

The NVidia version is available now, the ATI one soon (was just introduced at Computex). I would kill for a head-to-head comparison of these two cards.

Sapphire is shipping the Silent HD 2600 XT which is a passively cooled video card that is a candidate for the media-center box up against the NVidia 8600GTS from Gigabyte. I would love to see some benchmark comparisons between these two cards. No word yet on pricing for the Sapphire card.

One advantage of the Sapphire- apparently its available in a 512MB version which for high resolution displays (like the 24″ and 30″ LCDs I use rather than conventional TVs) might turn out to be useful.

Intel introduced the new 3-series chipsets today. The usual sites have some good write-up. Looks like I’m going to want to hold out until the X38 comes out in Q3 for my desktop machine although the P35 should be fine for the media-center box. It will also be interesting to see how the G35 turns out (shipping also in Q3)- whether the video decode acceleration will be good enough to run a really good media center vs. using a GF8600GTS. I’ll likely still be going for the NVidia card- Intel’s integrated video has come a long way but its still going to be miles away from a discrete card.

One key improvement to me is that the RAID-1 support is supposed to be much better. With the new board things like boot time are supposed to be much better under RAID-1, which makes that more of an attractive option for me.

There are some cool looking Asus motherboards that have lots of heat-pipe cooling for the chipsets, etc.