Father Xmas

Remember movies tend to be edited for content, time and language for TV. Therefore what you download is closer to what you would get on a DVD, which you would have to pay for.

TV networks are getting better at providing ways for the average viewer to catch up on missed or truncated episodes for FREE. Nearly all the major broadcast US networks provide the last five episodes of the current running series online either at their own network website or Hulu. Only CBS is somewhat stingy with free replays. This assumes the primary reason people seek out ways to download an episode of a currently running series is to catch up and not collect the season for future viewing.

Even BBC America caught a glimmer of understanding why fans of Doctor Who in the US are torrenting down the series. We don't want to wait weeks or months from when it was shown in the UK and we don't want to watch an edited for time version so BBC America can stuff in another three commercials an hour for The Graham Norton Show that's already two months old. So surprise, we get to see the latest Doctor Who Christmas special on Christmas. What a concept.

The Weather Channel, based in Atlanta, made a point tonight that the 2 feet of snow dropped on New England Wednesday will be cleaned up enough by Thursday morning that nearly everything will be open for business and running normally. Unlike Atlanta with it's 1 inch that got slushy then froze into ice.

Saw some more headlines about the flooding in Queensland. Two feet of snow may be annoying for us, please remember flooding is extremely devastating.

It astonishes me that I missed this thread. I'm usually so good finding these.

Offhand it looks good. Decent CPU, 4GB of memory, reasonably powerful video card.

The power supply is deceptively weak, with only 38 amps at 12 volts which doesn't jive with the 480 watt claim. But it's more than enough for the hardware in the case.

Looks to be a low end H55 motherboard from MSI (H55M-P31) which is fine.

The case may only have one rear fan.

Well since you have the fans in front of you, you should at least know what kind of power connector they need and may even have a part number on the hub. I'm guessing the fans are wired together which is obviously a problem if you don't solder. Have you checked with Cooler-Master or their forums?

I suspect this was a preemptive post due to what was released on Tuesday. You could say the Positron interview and Second Nature's post was a positive spin on the same subject.

(In reference to Katie V's post)

That was true before they added garbage collection / TRIM functionality to the drives and Windows 7. Write performance decay is a lot less, nearly non existent in some cases.

The thing is that mechanical hard drives have been around forever and people who right file systems, the part of the OS that handles reading and writing files have been using a few assumptions that have been true for very long time.

First, every sector on a hard drive is in the same place physically on the hard drive. The controller on the hard drive only needs to know that to get to cluster 2814, that's N tracks in and the Mth cluster on that track, every single time. Second, there is no penalty in performance writing over existing data. It make no difference if the sector is empty or has deleted data in it. Third, it doesn't matter if you write over that sector once or a million times, it will still work.

All of those aren't true on for an SSD. First there is the write penalty that Katie V mentions in her post. An empty 4KB cluster can be written to with no penalty. A previously used one needs the entire block it's in to be erased first and then considerably more than that 4KB cluster has to be written out. Second Flash memory can only be erased a certain number of times before it can't be erased reliably anymore.

So to get around those two problems the physical location of a cluster can move around. The previous cluster 2814 has "deleted" data in it, fine we'll write our new data in that empty cluster over there and call that cluster 2814. This is why defraging an SSD is pointless. On a normal mechanical hard drive the idea is to arrange all the clusters in a file in order to minimize moving the read head. But there is no such thing in an SSD and the SSD is actively fragmenting the file during writes to avoid the need to erase and rewrite a block to free up space.

Also there's a percentage of the total clusters held in reserve for writes. So a 64GB SSD may have 72GB of Flash so there's always some empty clusters available for a quick write.

What the garbage collector (actually more like an anti garbage collector) / TRIM function does is consolidate good data into blocks with fewer "deleted" clusters from blocks that are mostly "deleted" clusters. Then at the drive/OSes leisure, a block with no valid data (because it already moved the valid data out) can be erased without the need to write back any valid data into it. That now empty block can be sent to the end of the line for writes to help conserve the number of times it will be erased.

In most reviews nowadays you will see them torture test an SSD with loads of writes and deletes and more writes so write performance will start to suffer. Then then will wait a little bit and test again. That's what the "fresh"/"used" designation means in that review at Tom's Hardware.

That is a lovely case. Nice and wide with those wonderful cable routing holes lined with rubber grommets and integrated case fan controller. Big gaping hole behind the CPU so you can install a big CPU heat sink after you install the motherboard. Even has a USB 3.0 front port. Yes the downside is the cost of $160. Still cheaper than some of the more extreme looking cases or high end gaming cases.

PC Power and Cooling just introduced some new mid range PSUs at CES last week. They're currently owned by OCZ who has their own PSU line as well.

Well NASA just discovered thunderstorms generate antimatter so I'm inclined to blame all computer and network hiccups on that tonight.

Does this mean that there are Crocs in the streets? Now that would scare the bejesus' out of me.

Good luck. Stay dry.

PS. Sorry but I can't help thinking of a cheap SyFy movie of the week with poorly CGIed crocs roaming the streets of Brisbane, eating a faux Paul Hogan and terrorizing the tourists along the Gold Coast now.

When bored I use to hang out in The Hollows fighting Darwin by healing (and rezing) blasters who can't handle their aggro yet, up near the Atlas gate. Now that there's a "hospital" in the zone as well as the redesign of mobs and mission doors, I haven't felt the urge to hang there.

Also use to hand out inf to lowbies during Christmas. But that was before the market, now 10K per level is looked at as being cheap.

Works here.

1) NEVER defrag an SSD. There isn't a need. Auslogics Disk Defrag has a check box in it's options to not list SSDs so you can avoid doing so.

SATA III is the 600MB/s or 6Gb/s SATA interface. It has twice the peak bandwidth of SATA II which is 300MB/s or 3Gb/s. With conventional mechanical hard drives, you will only see a difference in Burst speed, basically dumping the on drive cache on a read. Right now top sequential read speed for a mechanical hard drive is around 150MB/s while most SATA II drives will have a burst speed of 225-250MB/s.

Translation - It's not a gaming laptop, if anything it's a slightly beefier netbook. Uses the new AMD Fusion E350 combo chip, both dual core CPU (new Bobcat design) and graphics in the same low power package.

Cool, I remember reading them back in elementary school.

Of course it will be sanitized for the NA market because Swedes think nothing about casual child nudity. Not to mention her lack of respect for adults in general.

Easiest thing to do is the following.

1) Bring up your private wish list.
2) Bring up one of my public ones.
3) Substitute the wish list number in mine with yours.

Poof, now you have a public link for a private wish list that isn't public, yet or ever.

Did anyone think that Mrs. Faraday being a lawyer came out of nowhere?

They sped past the names of the illusionist and tattoo lady if mentioned at all.

Since Orwell drove two rather high end cars it's obvious her day job is a car salesman. Those sale commissions buys her all those nice computers. Bet she raids all by herself.

These first two episodes are rough. Hopefully they can smooth out the rhythm and flow of the show. So we have the big bad and a league of international criminals, Tarot. I think The Cape needs to fight some more random thugs just to establish a rep with the locals. Better to have a street full of friendly eyes than having to rough up a few thugs every time you need info.

Doh! Clayface, of course. And I was thinking Scarecrow but wasn't sure.

Who's the first guy on the left in the smock and the pointy hair guy next to Bruce. I can figure out the rest.

Well if you never defrag your CoH folder on your regular hard drive, and the updater will frag it on every patch, then the lack of seeks on an SSD could speed up loading and zoning times besides the improved sequential read speed.

With 36A at 12 volts or 432 watts available at 12 volts I don't see that as a real problem.

My main problem with this is first, no brand names. Whose 64GB SSD? Whose P67 motherboard (looks likes Intel's, they aren't best known for overclockability options in their BIOS)?

Then there's the RAID 0. I hate RAID 0. The good news is since the array is meant to be the data drive, you can unRAID it and simply have two 1GB hard drives.

Lastly the Crossfire pair of HD 5750s. Together they average out in popular gaming benchmarks, actual and synthetic, around 5-10% faster than an HD 5850, still slower than an HD 5870. Of course these are in games where Crossfire works well. I don't know how well Crossfire works with CoH/V/GR(/EIEIO ). If it doesn't, you will be stuck with a single HD 5750 driving things.

So you have plenty of CPU power, lots of RAM, the OS on the SSD. Downside is potentially sub par video performance.

The can't police voice chat. It's tough to RP with voice chat. VCers will insist that the whole team must use VC and exclude non VCers from their teams which will create an atmosphere of have and have nots.

Not a problem today because VC is not part of the game, but make it a part and soon it will devolve into an XBox 360 CoD cesspool of 12 year old kids cursing at everyone.

You know that I now seem to have a 50/50 chance that either my browser will crash or the forum will log me off spontaneously whenever I have just spent a long time researching info for a long post.

So I'm going to do this a piece at a time and edit the post as I go along.

Major differences between my builds and these.

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$725 build

As newchemicles pointed out, my case has two additional front fans blowing are into the case.

That memory is Cas 9 while mine is Cas 8, but we are only talking about a 1-2% difference in practical performance.

The big gotcha is the hard drive. Searching for Samsung HD501LJ I get links not to an F1 but the T166. That drive uses 3 platters instead of 1 to achieve 500GB (it is a 3+ year old drive) so it's read/write speed isn't close to the F3 (39-82MB/s Vs 76-140MB/s).

Lastly and this is minor, the EA-430B power supply doesn't come with a power cord. Not a problem for some but it can be annoying if you are simply adding a new system instead of replacing one.

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The $1375 build

Again with the case but the bigger problem is the HD 6870 does generate a lot more heat than the HD 5770, which will exacerbate the problem due to the lack of intake fans.

Again the memory is Cas 9 instead of Cas 8.

The i5-760 is 5% faster than the i5-750.

Arctic AA-14G is worse than Arctic Silver 5 but is still probably better than the paste that comes with the Hyper 212 Plus.

The motherboard is the big difference. Yes there is a difference between the P55-GD65 and the P55A-GD65, besides the USB 3.0 and SATA III (6Gb/s) support. That being this board does not support SLi as a multicard option. I chose the P55-GD65 because you could go either way. Right now I'm leaning toward AMD, a few years ago a leaned toward nVidia. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. One of the things that really ticks me off about multiple video cards is you tend to be locked in with one or the other. The Fuzion hybrid solution is iffy at best right now but higher end Intel motherboards have started offering support for both but it's not universal, you still got to read the fine print. Also the P55A-GD65 sort of shortchanges you on motherboard cooling buy skimping on the heatsinks and heatpipe. On the other hand it does give you USB 3.0 and SATA III support but I don't that that outways the loss of nVidia SLi support. But that's me.

64GB SSD is fine for the OS and a couple of games where the lack of seek time, the real advantage of an SSD, will be advantageous. However one problem with the smaller size SSDs is that their performance isn't as high as their bigger brothers for writes. The problem is that SSD is one of the few that can actually take advantage of SATA III and I just poo-pooed the motherboard that has SATA III. Whatever, it rocks SATA II as well with the exception of streaming/sequential reads, which is when it exceeds SATA II's top speed.

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On both systems, the optical drive. Funny that you mention noise because I heard it the other way around, that Lite On is louder than Sony. Six of one. Right now SATA DVD burners are virtually generic with the vast majority in the $20-25 for an OEM part.

Okay, I'm done. Of course it didn't log me out or crash.