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LifestreamAfter memory, graphics and hard drive were upgraded. New score is clearly held back by CPU/RAM speed/MB. Final score = 7.1 / 7.9. End of the line for this system.
The planned hardware upgrades are coming along nicely. I was very lucky to nab a new graphic card this morning in what I thought was a bargain but later turned out to be a lucky misprint. Sucks for the reseller, but I was honestly not aware of the mistake and so I got my hands on the XFX Radeon HD 5850 "Black Edition" at almost 40% off of the going price. In fact I got it 20% cheaper than the cheapest "vanilla" HD 5850. And add to this the fact that the 5000 series is still to this day in short supply …
Of course under normal circumstances I’d never pay for a factory overclocked card like this. But I’m sure it’s good for something. I’ll save a few minutes not having to overclock it myself. Har har har. I’m not so sure about the cooling though. It’s the same cooler as every other 5850 out there. Adequate but not fantastic. Though from reviews I gather the card runs no noisier than at stock speeds. Don’t know about temperatures though. But you’d think XFX would do something at least to improve the cooler. Oh well, I might get an after market cooler at any rate. I’m going to have to test it first to see how it compares to my old 2900 Pro. Plus the situation with XFX and warranty after such as modification is a bit unclear. The last time I did this to a graphic card was the 9700.
I am obsessed with power consumption obviously so I’m hoping for something like this (cut and pasted from here, sorted by typical 3D consumption):
That is the theory at least. Unfortunately I don’t have data on the 2900 Pro peak power draw, but its typical 3D draw is so gigantic that measuring it seems fairly redundant. The point has been made. The 2900 series was awful. The 4890 and 4870 were awful too in their own way but at least they delivered a performance that could relate to their massive draw. And the 5000 series offers superior performance at decreased consumption. It’s like magic. We’ll see if Nvidia’s Fermi can match that.
Addendum: I got the card and have installed it. In terms of size it was as clumsy as the 2900 Pro. Though with the small difference that the power connectors on the 5850 are placed on the short end of the board. I can only say that it was a snug fit with the Gigabyte Aurora due to the 3.5” drive cage. On a side note I also had to do a complete geometric recalibration for my standard resolution (1280×960). Not just a nudge but the screen was a mile off to the left. The joy of CRTs …
In terms of performance I’m not much of benchmarker. I ran Furmark at 1280×960 8X for 120s and saw more or less exactly a tripling of frame rates. The GPU ran at 74 degrees C compared to 79 degrees for my old card. So in terms of temperatures I’m not that impressed. But Furmark is a bit synthetic, the card is mildly overclocked and I already knew the cooling was spartan at best. At least the fan is a tad quieter than on the 2900. Idle temps by the way are around 41 degrees which I think is pretty good.
Power consumption improved about as much as I had anticipated. I don’t have any fancy testing equipment so I can only use a kill-a-watt to approximate the total power consumption. For this particular setup, idle / desktop consumption dropped from 145 to 100 W or so. That is obviously with SpeedStep scaling down the frequency of the CPU. A particular 3D game dropped from 250 to 210 W. The Furmark test dropped from about 275 to 230 W. And that is with several times the performance obviously. Also, much to my surprise, the sleep / S3 STR consumption dropped dramatically from about 16 W to about 9 W. I had no idea that graphic cards contributed so much to S3 consumption.
All in all energy savings of up to 200 SEK per year give or take. An LCD monitor would probably cut down the costs by just as much. But all of this is obviously based on excessive use.
Camera has been idle far too much lately.
My current hiking boot is on its last legs. Looking back through the blog I can see that I bought this boot a little over six years ago. It’s Garmont Syncro GTX something. A mid-range and a somewhat lower boot for general applications. About the first thing I did with it was to step into a water filled ditch in the woods in the middle of the winter. Good times … But anyway, the boot itself has held up ok, though the soles were done for already last year. Now I could of course have these boots resoled. I found a local place that was able to get hold of Vibram replacement soles. But resoling a boot will cost nearly 50% of the market price of this mid range model. And this pair of boots just doesn’t feel fresh enough anymore to go for resoling. Put another way, a new pair of soles could get me another five years, but I doubt the boot itself would hold up as long. And for the record, from what I can tell, there is no boot being sold under the Syncro designation anymore. Otherwise I might have considered getting a Syncro redux.
So I figured I’d go for a new pair of boots, towards the high end of the spectrum. And so after much internet research, griping, and hesitation I proceeded to look around and try the models that are in fact available. For practical purposes, these include the entire line-up of Haglöfs and Meindl. Plus to some extent Hanwag and Viking. By method of elimination I got down to a pair of Meindl Island MFS Pro. The entire Haglöfs line just felt iffy. And even the Meindl boot needed moldable footbed insoles, from what I believe to be SofSole, to really excel.
I’m gonna have to think this through. Not just because it’s an incredibly expensive solution but because it most likely fails miserably on wet slippery or icy surfaces. One of the few solid criteria I had put up. But then again so do most high end boots because of their incredibly hardy soles. I don’t know if Meindl’s soles are particularly bad but it’s bad enough for them to deal with it on their website. And some customer reviews have phrased this boot’s performance on ice as plain death wish suicidal. That is also why I initially wanted Viking or Haglöfs, because they both offer a softer, more all-round sole that possibly offers better grip on slippery surfaces. It is also quite possible that it doesn’t make much of a difference and that these softer soles just wear down much quicker.
Also I’d be a little wary using such hoity-toity boots on a daily basis. People can brag a about boots that they’ve had all their lives, but most likely those boots spent most of their time on a shelf. Worn on a daily basis for 6-7 months a year I can ruin pretty much any product. It doesn’t matter if it’s built like a tank. So the question is if a pair of Meindl is in fact just opening up for a new mid-range second boot in the long run. One with better grip and less of a price tag that I can wear on a more daily basis. Highly specialized winter boots, like IceBugs or whatever are out of the question though. And while on the topic of even more specialized boots, I suppose that Lundhags or other rubber bottom boots are also out of the question.
Addendum: I also just realized that there are some noteworthy line-up changes for the next season. Two of these changes even made the Outdoor Industry Award 09 list. One being the weird synthetic Haglöfs Grym (coolest name ever?) and the other being an upgrade to the Meindl Island. The upgrade is already evident on Meindl’s website and should appear in stores early next year. From my point of view the upgrades are significant, thus buying a deprecated Meindl Island MFS Pro now when the Meindl Island MFS Active is right around the corner is just lunacy. Especially since Meindl only upgrades their boots once every decade or so. Word on the street is that Island Active will be available in late March. In other words right on time for the sandal season.
I really don’t like they way my new Samsung F2 sounds. Makes me wary to put a bunch of these in a NAS. Imagine the fun of having an enclose of F2s next to your bed howling like wolves in the night. Turn your volume up …
Posting around, and comparing it to a friend’s Samsung F1 drive, has however suggested that this sound is normal. As is the very similar but shorter whining that occurs while the drive is running. I wonder why I’ve never seen this mentioned in reviews. I know WD has their head parking noise going on, but it can be turned off permanently on most revisions. I sure wish you could shut the F2 up.
Not satisfied with the Scythe Hard Drive Stabilizer I decided to opt for a more hands-on approach. A nasty T166 suspended using elastic:
The end result is far better, and cheaper. The downside is of course that you can’t throw your case around. Also, I noticed the hard drive temperature went up one degree compared to the Stabilizer in the same slot. I found it weird since the Stabilizer is mostly a bunch of rubber that doesn’t conduct heat very well. But apparently rubber is better than nothing.
The Scythe Kama Plus is still a real life saver though. Funny cause I thought beforehand that it would surely be a waste of money and that the Stabilizers would be solid. I am quite sure that I would be reluctant to run any drives in this position without the extra fan taking in fresh air.
I could probably fit one or two more drives in this position so I might do the same thing to the Samsung F2. Not that I have to. The difference in terms of vibration is staggering compared to the T166 suspended above. Anyhow, I need more elastic. I only got a meter and a half and used up over a meter suspending just one drive.
I believe this could have been a problem as far back as Vista, but since I just jumped on the bandwagon I was simply taken aback by this complete foul-up. The problem is simply as follows: Older and 3rd party applications have their dialog boxes and interface garbled by what appears to be a font size problem. Text becomes too long, wordwraps, gets hidden, sometimes making part of the ui invisible.
Illustration:
(from left to right: Radeon Bios Editor, Transfer Time Calculator, Nimtoy, XYplorer, Acdsee Classic)
Ultimately I am sure this could be blamed on developers not keeping up with the times. But whatever Microsoft did under the hood I want it undone and bloody fast at that. Could it have something to do with DPI aware? Or is it a font replacement (“FontSubstitutes”) in the registry? I have set my system font size back to 100% (96 DPI) from 125% (120 DPI) or whatever it was out of the box but beyond that I am at a loss.
Addendum: Indeed, moving back to 120 DPI “solved” the issue. But I can’t run W7 kiddie style obviously. Icons become blurry as hell for most applications, and things get so large on my preferred 1280×960 screen that nothing will fit anymore. Quite a dilemma. But it must be some sort of a bug. Some sort of font size or dialog box element anomaly.
Solution: After much google-fu I came upon a discussion that pointed to this. Turns out that because my installation started out at 120 DPI, certain (bitmap) font settings in the registry where locked to correspond to that DPI setting. Switching back to 100% will shrink the interface but keep the font size, thus breaking the layout. There is a registry fix at the above link that will reset bitmap font sizes back to what they ought to be at 96 DPI. Or vice versa if you for some reason have the opposite problem. All in all another example of how LCD users and Microsoft surveys are ruining things.
So, I got a couple of Hard Drive Stabilizers from Scythe as well as the Kama Plus front air intake. It was a bit of a gamble, since my Gigabyte Aurora has all these tool-less solutions throughout the case. I was impressed with all the rails and sliders and whatnot at first but in time I’ve realized what a nuisance they can be when trying to install something out of the ordinary.
Long story short is that both products worked out nicely, and actually did what they were supposed to do. The only remaining issue would be with the models needing to be fastened better, or padded rather, on the right side where you cant use screws (because of the case).
I couldn’t wait for a NAS to I decided to get some more hard drive space in the meantime. I figured the 1TB Samsung F2 (HD103SI) would last me a while. Ironically this was the drive I originally had wanted for a NAS system, but due to hibernation issues couldn’t use.
About the NAS project, well, it has stalled because the people on the QNAP and Synology support forums haven’t provided solid answers. They have been unable to provide anything but sketchy power consumption figures. And they have been completely unforthcoming when it comes to BitTorrent. Basically, I want to move my torrenting to a lean NAS platform. But the lingering issue is one of speed. How fast could could a 1.2 GHz Marvell/ARM-based NAS run BitTorrent (with encryption enabled). A simple question but one that I’ve yet to get a proper answer to. People that I’ve asked have either not ventured beyond the built-in client or they don’t have a fast enough connection so that they can be of any help or their ISP throttles torrents. Needless to say I DO NOT want a $350 NAS on my hands that I wont have any use for.
Another complication with Synology (and probably QNAP as well) is that pretty much every new “green” drive is incompatible in one way or another. The above drive doesn’t enter hibernation. Data on Seagate LP is dodgy and not very reassuring. And my second drive of choice WD10EADS has just come out in a new revision (00P8B0) that supposedly brings a two-platter design - and total incompatibility with most NAS units and many other platforms. I’m unsure as to whose fault this is, but buying a green NAS has gotten a lot harder all of a sudden.
Another dismal quarter.
Left 4 Dead 2: The first person shooter equivalent of Space Invaders. Seriously. I’ve seen cattle in a slaughterhouse feeling less herded than the unwitting player of the L4D series. Linear like a 2D scroller. And dumbed down as well with console-like controls and abilities.
And how about Dragon Age. Role-playing. Cute. Massive install anyhow. Not for SSD owners certainly. I just don’t have the patience for games like this anymore. Half-baked interfaces and backwards inventory systems. No thank you.
The only game recently that I’ve been able to play for more than an hour is Borderlands. But even that got boring after a while. Fat chance that you’ll ever take the time to replay the game using any of the other characters.
It’s interesting though that many of these games, including the dreary Modern Warfare 2 now have co-op in some form. Too bad it obscures any effort to make single-player last a little longer.
Looking forward to a new year of utter dismal releases. Only now in DX11. If we’re really lucky, Battlefield 1943, Assassin’s Creed II and Mass Effect 2 may not totally suck.
Oh and props to EA or DICE or whoever finally screwed up Battlefield Heroes. I guess someone got greedy and figured they could make people pay to get ahead in the game. Even though they promised this exact thing would never happen.
