Two new computers at the house.

General Computing Hardware & Networking
1

Greetings all. I finally broke down and purchased two photo-editing workstations for the photo lab at the house. Although I often assemble my own rigs from parts, I decided to pay someone else to do it this time, as the mobo I wanted has a rep for being a pain to install op system on with all SATA drives (my config), as well as tricky to get the RAID configuration right.

Computers have arrived, are BOINC’ed out, and are happily churning away at a modest 47C temp on the CPU. Man, I love speedfan!

Two main points of interest in the builds:

  1. they are QUIET! The boxes have two fans, one on the CPU, and one on the rear of the case. Everything else (vid card, chipset, etc) just uses passive heatsinks to deal with the temp and keep the noise down. The case fan is a 120mm one, and has a light noise level at the lowest speed; the CPU fan can’t be heard unless you push it past 75% of it’s speed, so that’s where I’ve pegged it.
  2. they are very solid. I’ve owned OEM boxes in the past (Falcon NW, Alienware, heck even Dell and Gateway). These are by far the tightest, most bullet proof computers I’ve ever encountered.

I’m very impressed with the company that built them, and would recommend them for consideration to any friend, especially if you’re looking for a powerhouse that doesn’t generate a bundle of noise. Link to their site: Puget Systems

My Configs:

Antec P180 Mid-Tower Case (very solid, very quiet)
Asus P5DH Delux mobo (fanless heatpipes for chipset cooling)
Intel Core2 Duo E6600 (first non-AMD I’ve bought in 7 years, sigh)
Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT 256MB Silent (fanless but very capable)
4GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 (shows up as 3.2GB under XP Pro*)
Seasonic 650W High-Efficiency Power Supply (nice, solid & quiet)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATAII (op system)
3 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATAII (RAID0 config)
24" BenQ FP241W Monitor**

A few benchies:
PC Mark 05 Results
System Score 6271
CPU Score 6042
Memory Score 5147
Video Score 5374
Hard Drive Score 5738

3D Mark 05 Results
System Score 5781
CPU Score 8636.00

So no record breaker, but still very capable.

  • I’ve learned that when you use a 32-bit operating system, and large amounts of memory, that the mobo will often take a chunk off the top to use for cache of memory, PCI-Express video cards, and even BIOS cache. In my system, the BIOS indicates it’s taking almost 900MB off the top. I’ve read reports of configs where people have had 1.1GBs appropriated off the top. Oddly enough, the same configs with half the memory appropriate almost nothing for cache, I guess they just let things run slower. Live & learn… (editted to add: Woops, got that wrong. See explanation in follow-up posts.)

** Another item I came across was a bit disturbing. Historically, the advancing pace of PC technology owes a great deal to gamers; they pay premium prices for advances in speed and performance. It seems that when it comes to flat panel monitors, the need for speed has actually caused a decrease in capability. A number of manufacturers, in order to attract gamers, feel the need to post very low pixel-fade times for their monitors. Many of them have done this by switching the color space of the controlling chips from 8-bit to 6-bit+dithering. As a gamer, you may never notice the change, but a photo-editor, especially someone who works with smooth tone transitions like a graphic artist, will start seeing some pretty ugly artifacts on modern monitors. I almost placed an order for a Dell 2407 monitor, before learning that it is a 6-bit replacement for their highly regarded 2405 monitor. Did some further reading and found BenQ, which makes 3 versions of their 24 in monitor: a traditional 8-bit version, a faster 6-bit version for gamers, and an IO intensive variety for console fanatics. Very pleased with the look and color balance of the BenQs; but when it comes to new monitor purchases, buyer beware.

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Didn’t know that cheers. Quite interesting to know considering I was thinking of hooking an Xbox up to my LCD next year where I might not want the thing in the lounge, depending on new flatmates.

The Core 2 Duo’s are jaw droppingly good on things like Folding and BOINC. Not seen them in use elsewhere. Even the Core Duo’s can beat A64 chips.

My HP/Compaq OEM machine is very nice. I thought ill of it because I bought it from PC World. (quiet you at the back…I know, I know, but thanks to a cock up at the place I ordered from, they couldn’t get it to me until AFTER I was at uni…no good…)

Looks like some good rigs there though :thumbsup:

Nice to see you back as well :slight_smile:

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That’s why I would never get rid of my bulky 24" Sony GW900 CRT CadCam Monitor, LCD just can’t match the colour span.

Though that said also, its a hard to find a vid card now that allows greater than 32bit colour :frowning: in desktop apps gone are my day’s of using 96bit colour.

**Re 4Gb memory I thought that was a limitation of windows xp and also how its splits between kernal memory and application memory spliting 2gb/2gb unless the 3g/ flag in the boot.ini is used.

Windows server editions and x64 versions being totally different.

4

[QUOTE=PMM;362478]That’s why I would never get rid of my bulky 24" Sony GW900 CRT CadCam Monitor, LCD just can’t match the colour span.

Though that said also, its a hard to find a vid card now that allows greater than 32bit colour :frowning: in desktop apps gone are my day’s of using 96bit colour.

**Re 4Gb memory I thought that was a limitation of windows xp and also how its splits between kernal memory and application memory spliting 2gb/2gb unless the 3g/ flag in the boot.ini is used.

Windows server editions and x64 versions being totally different.[/QUOTE]

Agree wholeheartedly on the monitors, but the wife wouldn’t stand for CRTs, so the flatpanels were the best I could find.

On the memory issue, if I read right, the /3G flag in boot.ini will tell your system to support apps asking for more than 2GB of memory. The issue (phenomenon?) I’m having with the BIOS blocking out part of the 4GB is, from links like this one, just what you should expect from a 32-bit operating system. (The linked post discusses 4GB on laptops, but the the same exists for any computer running a 32-bit op system). The BIOS “talks” to various devices through a memory map, and is reserving those addresses from the operating system to keep confusion from occurring. (On a system with only 2GB of memory, the “vacant” addresses above 2GB can still be used to allow the operating system to talk to devices. The different memory sizes of the devices determine how big these blocks need to be, which explains why people see different sizes “appropriated” on different configs). There’s a switch in the BIOS that tells it not to do all this, but if I understand how things are working, lying and saying I have a 64-bit op system would be a bad thing, causing my computer to talk to cards and such when it really is just trying to write to memory.

Net-net, if I had known this in advance, I could have put only 3GB in my rigs, still used the upper 900MB of addressing space for communication to devices, and would have ended up with only 100MB or so less main memory than I got by filling it out to 4GB.

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@DanBrady, If you do use that much memory, is a 64-bit OS an option?

Also interesting news about monitors. Never had much trouble with blurring even with ancient 25ms monitors, so anything made in the last 3 years is fast enough for me. Will have to bear that in mind on future upgrades.

@PMM, On the 96-bit colour, did any hardware support it? 32 bits a channel in hardware is a fair bit… but maybe I’m used to 8 bits per channel. Guess it’s all gaming orientated for speed now. Going back to the early days, I was amazed enough with the step up from 256 colours to 16 bit :smiley: Even when 24 or 32 bit was around, I often ran in 16 bit due to faster gfx memory operation.

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Yep I used to apply a registry hack to allow the option think it was one of
nvidia geforce cards (old skool).

and I think its 24/24/24+24 for transprancy ??? can’t quite remember.

Most cards ATI / NV do on the 3d side deal with 96bit / 128bit internally I think messing with the image HDR (High dynamic range) messing
and the ramdacs do but never anymore quoted as a option for desktop usage.

32 bit mode on each colour channel is only really allowing you 255 shades of one colour if your working an image heavily weighted to one colour the transitions can be noticable.

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My boards suffer with the same on the bios taking out a large chunk of ram, but still it’s being used to good effect. When I had the full 4Gb in on each reboot I could get different amounts of ram showing depending on the settings in the bios for caching. In the end I split the 4Gb into two machines with 2Gb each and flogged a few chips. Today at work I found myself with 150Mb free out of the 2Gb, I was working reasonably hard at the time though :lol:

DT.

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8 bit per channel is 256 shades per colour = 24 or 32 bit total. Agreed that you can pick out the non-smoothness of that. But from a practical point of view, would a gfx manufacturer fit more than 8 bit DACs on the output for something that isn’t used? And particularly in the old days, could you afford to use more gfx memory and memory bandwidth required to support such an increased depth?

Gotta have a poke around on google now… you got me curious…

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0 - 255… black is not a shade of any colour :wink:

I presume it was dropped as not being to important for screen viewing
with the limited screen res anyway.

Importance was kept by having the depth of colour space in the software packages.

Joe normal not really in need of such modes, plus the memory overheads incured.

10

Not yet. The apps that I use most heavily (Photoshop, Nikon Capture, IMatch & Photo Mechanic) do a pretty good job taking advantage of the multiprocessor support (finally!), but in general all perform worse in tests under 64-bit operation. They worked reasonably on my old machine, which only had 2GB. I would occasionally try to work too many large photos at once, which would bog things down, and I was hoping that 4GB would alleviate that. 3GB is still better than 2GB, so I’m not that upset. And I’ll keep watching and waiting for indications that a 64-bit OS would perform better than 32 with my apps.