Hardware I Have Known

Current Systems

I did decide that I liked the Corsair case so much that I replaced it. The quick release side panel and carrying handles on the top are both great.

Upgraded video card to an nVidia RTX 2070. A big part of my job at work involves raytracing, so I am quite interested to see hardware raytracing turning up in consumer gear.

Done.

I am now the proud owner of a 48 core high-performace ARM system. Boy has this been a learning experience. I have never used a system with an out-of-band management system, and certainly not one where the main system has no video output. I don't know what the 15-pin HD connector on the back is for, but it does not output VGA. As a server, HTTP works (you are using it now), SSH, and NFS. SAMBA is buggy. It randomly restarts. OS bug, I am sure. (OS update later fixed this) As for performance, I need to post that. I found that Handbrake does not scale to 48 cores. In fact, it does not scale well past 8-10 cores. As such, the i5-4670K is faster. However, I can run 5 encode jobs simultaniously, making the ThunderX about four times faster than the Haswell. You just need a bunch of work to keep it busy. Oh, and 10gigabit ethernet is nice.

It was actually Sidney experimenting with Kody on the Pi 3 that convinced me to go that route. Sure, if video is not in a format that the Pi can play in hardware, the CPU sure won't play it, but I have a huge fileserver for transcoding, so I should be fine.

After shopping around, I got an addin soundcard from HiFiBerry. As someone who can not stand bad audio, but is no expert, this has proven to be good enough for me.

Last, don't use Kody without the smartphone remote app. It is really nice. The WiFi dongle you see in the pictures that is almost as big as the computer is really just for backup if the phone app has a problem.

It is odd that I have a system this expensive, yet right now it only has free software installed. That may change in the future, but for now Krita has proven to be a very capable tool for artwork.

There's quite a bit to like. The case is quite well made. I really like how they made the port access. There are two flipdown sections, one on each side of the case. On the right is a USB, a headphone/microphone jack, and a microSD slot. On the left is a second USB port, a micro HDMI port, and a custom jack for ethernet (requires included RJ45 adapter). On low power settings, the fan often does not spin at all. Between that and the SSD, there is often nothing moving and therefore no noise.

Not that it's perfect. Working with photos requires full brightness. The battery only makes it about 2.5 hours. At lowest brightness and an easy load it will make it about 5 hours. This is nothing like the 8 hours I want. Besides the room brightness sensor, Intel saw fit to include in their driver the ability to change the backlight brightness based on how much 'white' is on the screen. This cannot be disabled except at full brightness. This messes with movies quite a bit. It is not a Samsung problem as all Sandy Bridge mobile laptops seem to exibit this behavior. Lovely.

The 3D seems to have issues with rendering. Scenes that are properly lit by AMD, nVidia, S3, and earlier GMA chipsets are harsh and almost flat lighting. Triangles that share two verticies sometimes show a gap between them. Last hardware video decoding (DXVA) is just broken. It does not work Intel, quit claiming it does.

As you can see, nearly all of these problems might be fixable by a video driver update. I can only hope for the best.

Retired Systems

My testing had already shown that h.264 based 1080p video was going to require a very beefy cpu. Software only, a Phenom II was needing two, and sometimes 3 cores. Even the turbo boosting i7 I have access to at work could not manage using a single core. The laptop I am currently typing on is proof that I am glad I did not go that route. While online sites have been singing the praises of Sandy-bridge and the HD3000 integrated graphics, the truth is that there is simply something wrong. 1080p video will only play when rendered to a texture and drawn on a polygon. The standard EVR surface does not work and DXVA support is broken. On the AMD front, they simply did not have a powerful enough CPU that was under 80 watts. Cooling that would just be too noisy.

The dedicated decoder was not really an option. The online world simply changes its own standards too often for a single hardwired solution to ever support everything.

The last choice was 3D hardware assistance. Until now this had it's own problems. By the time you have a CPU AND a GPU, it is nearly impossible to use less power than a high end CPU. The Brazos changes this a bit. Here we have a decoder that is supported by a large company that knows full well that video and light 3D will make or break their future.

As you can see, I again used a discrete audio card. This time it is an HT Omega eClario. I would have liked to keep the SB X-Fi extreme Audio, but Creative's Windows 7 drivers have a very bad reputation and it is getting hard to find MiniITX boards with a PCI slot instead of PCIe. Compared to the X-Fi, the eClario is less warm (less bass) and maybe a bit sharper. Remember not to turn the computer audio above 50%. It actually overdrives the outputs.

The downside of the system? The sucker's noisy. It's not as loud as the standard performance PC, but it is up around the level of a first generation PS3. I question the accuracy of the temperature sensor. When first powered on it already reports 60 degrees C. If I disconnect the MB fan, the CPU reports 80 degrees within a minute. Mind you, the heatsink is barely warm to the touch. Quieting this one down will be some work.

Before seting it up as a file server, I installed Windows and ran a few tests. For the first time since I've been aware of Via, the hardware accelerated video actually worked. Too bad I wasn't planning to use it.

The system has served well and been quite responsive. Yes, I reused the case. There are multiple entries for it in my benchmarking section. The speed wasn't half bad when it was new.

That said, this is a major performance improvement. For about the same power as the C3, I have a system that is slightly less computation power than a Pentium 4 and slightly more than an Atom. However, unlike the Atom and P4s I have used, the reaction times of the platform are lightning fast. Click on something and it happens instantly. The same OS (CentOS 5.5) on either of the others can take several seconds to respond.

In order to lower noise, the fan on the CPU is disconnected and an 80mm fan is attached to the side of the case to blow air across the CPU and harddrive.

On the other hand, I bought this motherboard mere months before PCI-express became the new standard. It's entire life it was hobbled by the lack of videocard upgrades. Then again, I never hit a game that I couldn't play. Even better, I was still often in the top 20% or so, especially on MMOs. The screenshots of Pirates? Most of my guild didn't know the game could look that good.

Oh, and another thing. That's a steel case. A steel case that size is HEAVY. To newegg's credit, they did list the weight (42lbs). I just never thought to look. Put in an EATX board, two passive CPU heatsinks, a passive GPU heatsink (9800 Pro), and a Thermaltake fanless powersupply and the sucker was probably pushing 65lbs. There's a reason I sewed together that strap you see. On the other hand, with two fans and a harddrive being the only moving parts, it was easily the quietest computer I've ever seen in this performance class.

This machine was pressed back into service for awhile after a group of thugs broke into my house.

About the system itself; it will not win any races. In video playback, it has proven to be a bit faster than a Pentium M at 1.2GHz. Clock-for-clock it's slower, but at full speed still draws less than half the power. It is perfectly capable of playing mpeg2/4 and h.264 video up to 720p. 1080p is simply out of reach without some form of assistance. This is fine for me right now, my TV is only 720p and nearly everything I've downloaded is 480p or 720p. Still, 1080p is only a matter of time. It has a PCI slot, but I have a better sound card there.

On the subject of sound, the sound onboard is nothing special. It has analog 5.1, but it is a bit thin and scratchy sounding. In other words, onlys slightly worse than the average built-in. The SPDIF is a bit better, but I've never been happy about the D/A converter in my amp. Dropping in an old Creative X-Fi Extream Audio was a major improvemnt. I did run into one problem worth noting. When I put in the card and tried music, I could hear I/O, CPU, and even mouse movements in the speakers. A quick look showed that the main power line for the case runs diagonal from the jack to the power board on the far side, less than half an inch from the audio card's pre-amp inputs. A sheet of aluminum foil and some packing tape fixed the problem.

The P series met all of my requirements for a laptop when it was new: over 6 hours battery life (it did 7) so that a full day's work could be put in without needing a recharge. It has a full DVD-RW so that discs could be burned while on the road. It included CF and SD card readers for transfering photos for storage. It has certainly served well.

I am actually having trouble finding a replacement now that the battery is shot. The downside of the netbook craze and the collapse of the computer retail market is that it is nearly impossible to find a small laptop with a good screen. One needs only look as far as Anandtech to see the debate between reviewers that think this part trivial and those that think it one of the most vital.

Fanless operation is hard on harddrives. I learned quickly not to stack them. Later I learned that if you orient them vertically, the "stack effect" provides enough airflow to keep them within operating spec.

One of the strange things, as popular as the Riva TNT was, you would have thought nVidia would have had drivers for it, but no. Riva 128 and TNT II, but no hint of the TNT. As such, I had to replace the video card. I actually used the S3 Virge from the previous webserver.

From looking inside, it seems I mothballed the system fully installed and ready to go. Figures, I couldn't even give it away.

The system would not post.

In studying the board, I found that the jumpers were set to 200MHz while the chips were 150MHz. The chips and the board were not from the same source. I was able to boot and run the system with the correct jumper settings, but it would not recognize two CPUs. I finally decided to buy a pair of CPUs that did work together. No dice. It's a good thing that the new ones were also an upgrade.

The system was finally killed by a problem I've seen in several systems since. The system will freeze at random times. Over a few days, the system will only survive a few minutes before freezing, even if sitting in the CMOS menu.

Still, it lasted years; surviving multiple moves in and out of the dorm and a year in an appartment, finally dying in my current house.