Comments on: Ultimate Developer Rig – Kovacs Edition

By: James Kovacs

James Kovacs — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:02:44 +0000

@Anand – It really depends on what you’re doing. If the application is written with multiproc in mind, you could see almost a 2x perf boost between 2-core and 4-core CPU (at the same clock speed, which 3.33 and 3.0 GHz roughly is). 2x speed up is ideal and well-written multi-proc apps can approach this. Audio/video processing typically scales well as each processor can crunch on a different portion of the data. Some graphics programs like Paint.NET or Adobe Photoshop scale well with multiple cores. Other applications will leave one or more cores idle because they were written with a sequential mindset. Personally I don’t notice a huge difference for day-to-day tasks between my Core 2 Quad Q9450 desktop and my Core 2 Duo T9600 laptop, though I do for audio/video processing tasks. I would also consider the new i7 platform as the Core i7 CPUs outperform Core 2 Quads at the same clockspeed by quite a margin. I honestly haven’t investigated seriously, but Tom’s Hardware has some articles comparing them. Hope that helps.

By: Anand Narayanaswamy

Anand Narayanaswamy — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:39:41 +0000

Hi,

I’m also planning to buy a new PC. Should I purchase core2duo or core2quad? Will I see any major difference between core2duo 3.33 and core2quad 3.0GHz.

Regards,
Anand N

By: James Kovacs

James Kovacs — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:10:36 +0000

@Colin – 750W is quite the beast. Let me tell you the story… About 2 years ago I bought my RAID array. I had a stock 450W supply, which was going to be barely enough. I was also debating whether to run dual SLI cards. So a 650W Zeus seemed like a good choice. The Zeus failed under warranty after about a year. While it was away for RMA, I needed a hold-over. The closest they had in stock was the 750W Strider. Hence the 750W monster. Looking at the Thermaltake page (awesome find BTW), I calculate just shy of 500W for my system. The biggest difference is capacitor aging, which I put at 30% since the box is on 24/7 as it is the hub of my business. If I decide to overclock, the total is closer to 550W. Most PSUs have peak efficiency between 50-75% load, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_power_supply. So while somewhat oversized for my rig, 750W isn’t that bad.

As for energy efficiency, I hear you! The Strider is rated at 80% efficiency under most loads, with peak efficiency around 84%. One stat that is impossible to find from manufacturers of consumer-grade PSUs is the energy efficiency curve based on load. This review of the Strider (http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story3&reid=27) actually tested it under different loads and the Strider did well under most load conditions. So I’m pretty happy. If I was buying a new supply today, I’d do more research and definitely consider a higher efficiency supply.

Regarding ATI… Yes, the perennial argument. I’ve used both over the years and been happy with both. I don’t think you can really go wrong with a quality NVidia or ATI card. My recommendation – think about what you plan to do with the card and then look at the features and benchmarks. Buy what works for you.

Regarding HDD… Yes, SSD is faster. If I had infinite money, that’s the way to go. The Samsung comparison was unfair though to HDDs. They compared the SSD against a 2.5" HDD. They don’t even mention whether the HDD is 4200, 5400, or 7200rpm. I would be curious how SSD stacks up against a 7200 or 10,000rpm 3.5" drive with a large cache. I’m personally holding out the most hope for hybrid drives, which combine the two technologies.

Regarding seats… IKEA all the way. :^P

By: Colin Bowern

Colin Bowern — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:37:47 +0000

Wow, 750W is quite the beast. You must have shares in some Alberta power company to hold that one. I am contemplating a new rig myself and stumbled across http://www.thermaltake.outervision.com which calculates the PSU requirement and could never cross 430W. Did you look at the 80PLUS certified ones? In these days of rising costs all around having a PC that can run with as little power loss as possible seems important.

On the ATI front I’ve been quite happy with the Radeon drivers. They have been quite stable, especially in the early days of Vista.

On the HD front I was poking around at solid state drives as a boot drive. I have been slowly reading up at http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-buyers-guide.html to see if this makes sense. While it is a marketing sourced video Samsung has a nice demo of SSD and conventional HDs side-by-side at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJMGAdpCLVg which will at least prompt the question of the benefit of being an early adopter in this space. I agree that RAID 0 on the data drive makes total sense. Development pushes around a lot of I/O, both read and write. Without hot-swappable drives I think it would make more sense to toss money into an online backup service like Carbonite.

With all this hardware what about the ultimate developer seat? We picked up a bunch of great chairs from Global and they made all the difference – http://www.tinyurl.com/586sab