:: Flicks switch...::

[Force Master Hunter]

And viola, my home network is finished! LAN to all rooms, SBS 2000 to proxy / firewall (Not a bad little OS, quite decent when set up properly), with Exchange 2000, development zone (For the wife to write programs), Game zone (For LAN Parties), printers......

Even putting in a 24 U rack. Now all I have to do is upgrade the hub to the 10/100 switch and I'm set.

Server is in the study and I'm typing on the end of a 20 m LAN cable, in the garden with the laptop. This is sooo geeky.

[Force Master Hunter]

One stupid thing tho - new version of AOL does not appear to have a "Resolve via proxy" option. Old one did. With no DNS set up, proxy cant resolve AOL hostname, except if I did a static route, or use the IP address instead.

[DarthHERA]

Ok, I understood maybe 20% of what you just said o_O

[Force Master Hunter]

And next trick - fix my wife's P133 with 16mb PC.

[TheHolo.Net]

A P133? Hmm, might make an alright footstool maybe.

[Sanis Prent]

I can fix a P133 pretty well enough with a gallon of gasoline and a roman candle.

[Elieen Cross]

Well, you better. Or I'll deny you you kitten allowance until you do.

I dont believe how bad things work compared to the hardware you have. Now Upgrade me or else!

[Seerrasseei Tsseerra]

*understands none of that* mew?

[TheHolo.Net]

If you put the P133 on its side it might make a warm spot for the Kitties to lay.

[Morgan Evanar]

Kitten allowance... cold.

DT, upgrade her stuff to a Duron with an ECS K7s5A board....

[Seerrasseei Tsseerra]

*doesn't sound at all comfortable so she wouldn't want to lay on that* :evil :cat

[Q]

Or I'll deny you you kitten allowance until you doO_o :smokin

[Seerrasseei Tsseerra]

must not comment....must not comment........

[Alpha]

I understood about 1% of that computer geek language....

[Admiral Lebron]

The P133 can be fixed if you take the S&W 357 and apply two discharges to the center of it.

[Jyanis Scorpion]

Nothing beats a well placed fist to the modem.:mneh

[Evil Hobgoblin]

I think some reprogramming with a very large axe would be beneficial...

[Ogre Mal Pannis]

Someone mentioned an axe?

[Jyener Celchu]

I think I'm going to take up boxing and use my computer as the punching bag.

:spank

[Mhalbrecht Dalarsco]

Never use anything less than a P3 450.:idea

[Q]

I think I'll stick with my 1.13ghz, thanks.

[Mhalbrecht Dalarsco]

Well, that's better than a 450.

[imported_Firebird1]

No, just pour a cup of water on it, I can almost tell you what will happen. You'll have better proformance due to having a new computer.

Or you could upgrade it with a 8 MB Video Card and watch as it eats your hard drive!


Or you could let the kitties use it as a scratching post. They would have lots of fun...Untill they breach the case and begin scratching the power supply. They would then begin to scratch the power supply. This would send 115/200 Volts through them streight to ground. They would then turn into giant Cats who would take over the world!

Or you could let Hunter Fix it....

[Force Master Hunter]

She can wait until I have my ADSL, 1.5meg pipe installed early next month. THEN I'lll get her something really decent

[Tasha Kozkis]

Firebird, you post made no sense...

And Ron... my Celeron 300a is just fine for normal web browsing word proccessing etc, especially if i were to reformat and get it 256 MB RAM, and toss Windows 2k/ XP. Mind you, it wouldn't do well with games, but its fine for the folks.

Never use anything less than a 450mhz Duron/Athlon/p3 run by a moron who doesn't know much about PCs...

Now if I could stumble across some serious money, I'd toss two Athlon XP 1.53 GHz s into a Tyan dual board, decide on a Radeon 8500 or Geforce 3, a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and a nice 60 GB 7200 RPM drive (IBM or Maxtor), 1024 MB registered DDR, and a Pioneer 16x slot loading DVD.

Oh, and a Plextor 24x burner. :D

FHM, I have a spare p3 slot 1 board and the old 300 A if you want it. Shipping + $20 US.

[Q]

Hmmm.... you know, I might be able to actually afford that in a few months. :D

[Force Master Hunter]

Can I ask just what will you use that for? it's just plain wasted sitting around, doing nothing but play games. Me? I'll take a serious machine for what I and my wife do. I start with a Dell 2500, add some 18GB 15,000 UW SCSI drives, make sure PCI / AGP only, processor wouldnt really matter speedwise, as long as I can get throughput through the system. Anything over 500mhz for anything less serious than database or video edit is a waste, yyou get better by a decent system design and decent disks. And I video edit, so I'll take all the throughput I can get.

Clockspeed is not the be all and end all. Throughput, design.... much more important these days. My 1Gz laptop is no faster doing day to day stuff, cause it's so overpowered. If I want more, I build to server spec. If you reall y want quick, the quad Xeon box with 1Gb mem and 100GB 15,000 of RAID 5 blows anything PC based right off the planet. I'll have that first :)

Plus, what's the probelms AMD are having with thermal burnups? Sounds like they are pushing the core too far too me.

[Mhalbrecht Dalarsco]

All work and small time browsing and no play makes people boring and dull.
Get a P3 450 or higher, and get SWGBG when it comes out.

[Tasha Kozkis]

I'll admit that the AMD core doesn't have an adaquate thermal protection cutout (Fan failure = dead proccessor, where a P4 will drop its clock to something like 400 MHz and save itself), but as a I recall, the P4 and P3 doesn't run all that much cooler than a Palmino core (Athlon 4, Althon MP, Athlon XP.) The core burnups happen when fans die, or heatsinks are mounted poorly. AMD should have added better thermal protection.

And you are right, clockspeeds aren't the end all, which is why a Palmino at 1.53 GHz soundly trounces a P4 @ 1.8 GHz.

As for my system, I'd do plenty of automated video capturing and some encoding, DVD ripping/ encoding. You are right though, I should probably go for a RAID 0 setup, better add another drive. Also some 3d Modeling, which absolutely loves fast dual proccessors, and AMD kicks the crap out of intel's weak FPU in 3DSmax rev4.


Anything over 500mhz for anything less serious than database or video edit is a waste, yyou get better by a decent system design and decent disks. And I video edit, so I'll take all the throughput I can get.

Try doing some heavy Photoshop. You'll apreciate that 1+ Ghz machine that has obscene gobs of memory very quickly.


If you reall y want quick, the quad Xeon box with 1Gb mem and 100GB 15,000 of RAID 5 blows anything PC based right off the planet.

Which Xeons? There are several different iterations of them. Anyway, OH. I'm sorry, that IS PC based. Despite the fact that its a server platform, its STILL a PC.

And for my applications, my box might very well trounce that, seeing that very few are threaded to use four proccessors, much less two.

Just because you don't enjoy gaming does not make my preference of system a waste. Quit being a snob.

[Force Master Hunter]

And you are right, clockspeeds aren't the end all, which is why a Palmino at 1.53 GHz soundly trounces a P4 @ 1.8 GHz

Not on large memory bandwidth jobs or when the app is optimised to the new SSMD extentiosn. The achilles heel of the P4 is it's chaining to Rambust (Deliberate misspell), which, for most day to day operations, sucks. However, where Rambust kicks is for large bandwidth and constant streaming, where the latency times are no longer a factor. I'll be interested to see what the P4 does where the DDR chipset is tested. The P4 is beginning to remind me of the Pentium Pro, a really, really nice processor that was hamstrung because to use it well, you needed NT4 and 32 bit only apps. Run anything 16 bit on it was horrific. I personally wont use Rambus on a desktop, ever, but on a server that gets belted..... might be worthwhile, considering Rambust suits what a server does.


As for my system, I'd do plenty of automated video capturing and some encoding, DVD ripping/ encoding. You are right though, I should probably go for a RAID 0 setup, better add another drive. Also some 3d Modeling, which absolutely loves fast dual proccessors, and AMD kicks the crap out of intel's weak FPU in 3DSmax rev4.

DV editing, using Premier 5.1c, boastcast standardclips up to 30 minutes. That's what I use grunt for and to be honest, I use a PIII 450, 256mb memory. True broadcast editing (which, BTW, is approx 2.5 times the quality of DVD) takies up more pure grunt than anything else I have seen. My PIII-M 1Gz laptop can not do what the edit system can. Now why is that?

Because, throughput is the most critical item. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8100, which is about the fastest laptop out there and will match desktop systems for performance, just it can not handle the demands of true broadcast. The disk and mb subsystems - especially disk - just can not keep up. Oh sure, if I pumped the home system to 1Gz and above, I would get good decreases in render time. The point is, the big factor is sheer ability to move data between the processor and onto the disk. I can crunch, but if I cant get the data out, it's useless. Thence, to me the real factors of a haul ass system is not, and will not be a processor, but the mb / memory / disk subsystems. I also happen to have HP server memory, which gives a noticable bump in performance. The disks are the best I can get and these are what makes my system rocket. A decenrt set of SCSI UW's anyday over the latest processor, cause over a IDE of any knid, SCSI rules. Next on the list of speed priorities is setting up the OS properly and then tuning, tuning, tuning.

After all of that, the PIII 450 gets some serious, real world performance. Even with all the tweking and kludges I do to the laptop, it just can not do better than DVD type quality. Just simply does not have the throughput.


Try doing some heavy Photoshop. You'll apreciate that 1+ Ghz machine that has obscene gobs of memory very quickly

Not necessarily. See above.


Which Xeons? There are several different iterations of them. Anyway, OH. I'm sorry, that IS PC based. Despite the fact that its a server platform, its STILL a PC.

Nope. There is different articeture in serious servers. I know, it's my bread and butter, building servers. I'm also an old mainframer jockey. Might have i386 processors, but there are sgnifigant differences hardware wise in servers that are NOT shared by PC's.


And for my applications, my box might very well trounce that, seeing that very few are threaded to use four proccessors, much less two

Ah, now that is where I get clever. W2k Advanced server is what is needed here, which can "pretend" to a non SMP capable app that the processor pool is in fact one. If you have used this class of system, believe me, you wont doubt how ballistic this can be. Now, if I really wanted to be tricky, I would schedule the OS to use on processor, services to anther, disk to a thrid and app to the fourth. It's registry hacking that will allow that. Splitting porcesses to seperate processors makes the system work incredibly well. I could say max out two processors, but stil have the OS and services working at full speed.

Old mainframe trick :)


Just because you don't enjoy gaming does not make my preference of system a waste. Quit being a snob.

Guilty as charged. I began on mainframes and simply put, PC's still cant do what a decent 'frame could do 10 years ago. and the 'frame had less disk, less memory, less processor speed. Yet, it could do 500 odd concurrent user tasks without panic. It could be maintianed without shutdown. It could still crunch more numbers. What is really replacing mainframes is clusters, for they are the only things that can do a real computing job. And that is where I got my beliefs that configuring and subsystem design, plus OS means so much more than mhz ever will.

[Sanis Prent]

plus OS means so much more than mhz ever will.

Well...if you'd said that before XP came out, I would've laughed at you.


Oh...BUT I AM A BELIEVER NOW! :D

[Tasha Kozkis]

In my Photoshop case, all of the data would be in memory, due to my heap of registered DDR. Disk performance is a non-factor when you are applying filters. Same with 3D rendering. All of your examples play very little in my applications, except for capturing video. I won't be editing it, and my RAID 0 ATA 100 array will be perfectly adaquate.

Now after I captured the stream and want to encode it to MPEG 4 for convient storage, the Athlons absolutely destroy P3s or P4s (http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1543&p=9). Its a well documented fact. Again, you are speaking uniformed. My machine would be far better for my applications than a quad Xenon platform, not to mention that I could build my machine for well under $2500 US (maybe even under two grand. I need to find out exactly how much that registered DDR would run me). I shudder to think how fast your aformentioned

BTW, the Palmino core fully supports intel's SSE extension set, but not the newer extension set present in the P4.

Prent: Windows XP is a sweet operating system indeed. Its Windows 2000 Service pack 3, IMO.


Edit: I can build it for $2400 with a 21" monitor.

[Force Master Hunter]

In my Photoshop case, all of the data would be in memory, due to my heap of registered DDR. Disk performance is a non-factor when you are applying filters. Same with 3D rendering. All of your examples play very little in my applications, except for capturing video. I won't be editing it, and my RAID 0 ATA 100 array will be perfectly adaquate.

Which is why I pointed out what the real problem with the P4 is. And why I also pointed out I would love to see a P4 with DDR and see what it could do. I wonder if you saw the point I kept making, that system archieture (sp) means far more than the processor, especially now. Intel chained themselves to the wrong memory technology. really, combine the low latency of DDR with the bandwidth of Rambust, and you would have a kicker of a memory chip. No one is denying DDR is better for most apps and that is where you real increase in speed is coming from, not the processor. Try 133 mhz SDRAM and the same operation, see what happens.

Technically if you have your stripe on the same controller on a IDE, that is a waste of time and you are in fact slowing your disk access down. Stripe across controllers to get the benifits of a stripe.




Now after I captured the stream and want to encode it to MPEG 4 for convient storage, the Athlons absolutely destroy P3s or P4s. Its a well documented fact.

And you are writing heavily to disk. Look how much better you can go using a UW controller first. I pointed out I can get a PIII 450 to work much, much better than my PIII-M 1Gz, on the soimple fact the laptop with its ATA 100 drive can do 3.4 mb per sec. The SCSI's can go at over 5. Which one is best for encoding? The PIII 450 cause it can get the info onto disk, much, much faster. Dont matter if I can work hard at the processor, if I cant shove it through memory and disk fast, it's a waste. A system does not start, or does it end at the processor. It's a holistic approach, where software, hardware and firmware have to work hand in hand. I'm sure you are aware of that, but your emphasising one part too much. Give me a well matched system, with nicely balanced parts, a neatly hacked OS for speed anyday.


Again, you are speaking uniformed. My machine would be far better for my applications than a quad Xenon platform, not to mention that I could build my machine for well under $2500 US (maybe even under two grand. I need to find out exactly how much that registered DDR would run me). I shudder to think how fast your aformentioned

Please read again how I stated I can get a quad system to work with single proc apps. I proposed my solution, please see post. How is that uninformed, when this is my job?

Might I ask if you have ever used or set up a dual or quad server class platform? I cant remember how many I have. The last one was a Compaq, dual Xeon 550, capable of quad. SCSI UW 15,000 drives, on a quad controller, totalling 100 gb in usable disk, 1gb memory. Believe me, this AUS $15,000 system ($7000 US) (Cost was bumped by all the disks) would flatten anything PC, for any use. Operations that on PC's or laptops that take minutes, this thing did in seconds. It's showcased bloody good system design, so that two (now slowish) processors could do things in times that would make minds spin.

Thats the real story and the real point. I'll take design and matching and configuring over huge Proc numbers anyday

[imported_Firebird1]

100 MB of storage How did you get that one, and at what cost?
(Size of Hard Drive)

Anyways I like the PIII/IV series. It has proven to be a heck of alot more stable then my last AMD2 450 and yes I miss the benifits of the speed I would get in rendering some images. But since I'm a game player the Intel Chips have always impressed me more then the AMD ones.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Okay, I'm reading this because I was told by someone that I don't read enough threads. >_<


W2k Advanced server is what is needed here

I've heard of Y2K.... :D

and Morgan, do you want to build me a computer? ;) Twenty dollars plus shipping, right? :lol okay okay, I DID read it better than that. Anyway, you people are using words I recognize, and yet can't use in a sentance. Well, no, that's a lie.

Nerd, sentance with

The nerds are taking their revenge! Run!

*runs out of thread :zzz*

j/k about the nerd bit, you know I wuv you guys ;)

[Force Master Hunter]

Firebird1 : You mean 100 Gb, yes?

3 * 9Gb, 4* 18 GB, at the time it was approx $10000 in drives. Would be cheaper now. You also bring up an interesting point - stabilty. I dont have an issue with the sbaility of the PIII's I have fot, fact is I have not had a single failure in hundreds of PC's That I like. Now AMD in the other hand....'

I just bought 8 Durons. 4 (FOUR!!!!! THREE MORE THAN I HAVE HAD IN TWO YEARS!!!!) DOA. I was not inmpressed to say the least. We're not blown away by the performance either. The PIII 450 we have as a spare feels like it works better. Admittedly, I have not hacked the W2K loads to pieces to get some serious performance, but as a base install, they just dont seem to fizzle along as we were lead to believe. Now, I also got a few Dell Dimension 2100's, with Celeron 800 and a 900. Now they do sizzle niceliy, they have less RAM and a lower performance hard disk too. They also are an all in one jobbie, typically the worst type of mb for performance. Now, the Duron systems were about half the price, but I would have no hesitation to go Celeron over Duron, after what I have now seen. I'll pay for the fact Dell's are reliable and well built, have good drivers and for me documentation and readily availible drivers.

Now, I buy a lot of PC's in a year. This year is the lowest count and I am up to 40 odd so far. Last year was in the hundreds. I buy almost exclusive Dell. I've spend... .5 million with Dell in three years? And have I got my money's worth. Only three failures, no servers have died - ever, beautiful perfomance and Out of Box experience.

So I dont get the n'th degree out of the latest processor. Big deal. What I do get is machines like my laptop I have, the Dell Inspiron 8100 - reliable, fast, well built machines I am happy to recommend to anyone.

Oh and while I'm at it..... Just did some reading last night. The 8100 is about the fasterst laptop you can get, i cant get an AMD that will do what this beast can do it seems. Reviews I seen the 8100 is heavy, runs hot and doesnt have a fantasitc battery life. ABsolutlely agree. I also agree the performance is superb, the screen is magic, it has so much usability and options.... inbuilt DVD, optional removable CD-R.... ATA 100 IDE, 133 Front side (Which is new in a laptop), GeForce2Go 32 mb DDR graphics. Speakers suck. But overall, awesome machine.

And props to Dell for how I got it. I was originally slated to get a end of model Inspiron 8000, 15" screen, DVD, 1Gz, 256 mb, 20 Gb Hdd, ATA 66 model they are with GeForce2Go 32mbb, which was on a special deal - I WAS going to get a Inspiron 4000, but this bargain came up. $3995 (US $1950).

They ran out of 8000's and for free, upped my order to the 8100, with the uprated 15" screen, and the brand new internals. $1950 for a 1gz, 256mb, 20Gb HDD, 15" screen, inbuilt LAN and modem, Firewire, USB and the brand new PIII-M processor that apparently can give a 1.2Gz desktop Athlon and PIV 1.4Gz a hurry up. Lobbed late cause of a airline going broke, but OMG, this thing was worth every cent and every day delay. I have never had such an aweinspiring machine out of the box, never had something that just blitzed along for day to day stuff. Yep, cant video edit like the home beast, but that's due to the IDE, not the processor as I have said before.

Damn, this thing screams of good design. Seems I cant even wish for a better laptop, this is top line for now and man, does it show. Props to Dell for such a bbrilliant system