New PC: More Decisions Made

I have decide on an ASUS P5Q Deluxe Mobo, 4 GB of DDR 800 RAM, a 500 GB HDD and an ATI 4850 Video Card.

The GPU was based on a a desire for a PC that can play occasional games, so a ‘decent’ frame rate in “Flight Sim 10” (26 fps @ 1680 x 1050 with AA4x) and “Test Drive Unlimited” (66 fps @ 1680 x 1050 with AA4x) were required, and the fact that it can manage Crysis at 37fps @ 1680 x 1050 albeit without AA is a bonus.

At about £120 it’s a little pricey, but it will easily last the life of the PC without the need to upgrade.

The HDD conclusion came from the fact that with almost everything installed, and some ‘zipping’ up of older, less used documents etc/, I now have almost 50 GB free on a 250 GB HDD!  I may be tempted to install 2 of these drives and use the second unit purely as a backup device.

Managed to go Golfing

After several weeks of really wet Monday’s and another couple of weeks of ‘Man Flu’, I finally manager to get down the golf course today.

Given the 7 week break since I last played, I was quite pleased with how well I hit the ball, and the poor scores were mainly down to very tricky greens!  They are not very flat and the speed of the green seems to vary from one end to the other!

I only played 6 holes, as part of a four ball with three lads I met on the first tee, but by the time we had played that many (another two 4 balls in front!) I was starting to flag a little, and my back has started to tighten up already!

CPU Update

Following on from my recent investigations, I realised that there was in fact a 3.33 GHz Dual Core CPU, the E8600.  I checked the benchmarking details of this item against the E8500 (winner according to the previous post), and found that it gave an average of 40% improvement over my current CPU compared to the 35% for the E8500. So am I going for the E8600?  Probably not!

I added some cost data to my little spreadsheet, and came to the following conclusions for cost per % of improvement:

E8500 - £4.54
E8600 - £5.25
Q9550- £10.05
i7-920 - £16.15

So at £220 rather than £164 (CCL Computers today's date) it is not a cost effective option, and the extra 5% would equate to a 4 second saving on a 1’40 task!!

New PC: Q1 CPU

Still struggling over the spec for new PC, Current dilemma:

First question AMD or Intel?  I am happy with Intel, and it seems that Photoshop CS4 is written to take advantage of the Intel instruction set, so… Intel it is>

Next Question:
Do I Spend £180 and get a 3.1GHz dual core (E8500) or for an extra £100 get a 2.8 GHz quad core (Q9550)? 

Moving up the quad core speed list the 3.0 GHz Q9650 is about £460 – way too expensive.

The Core i7 CPU’s are the last option, with the 2.66 GHz version (i7-920) being available for about £240 (faster versions jump to £490/£880 for 2.9/3.2 GHz)

The article on Tom’s Hardware (CPU Charts Q3 2008)confirms that the dual core at a 3.1 GHz would be on average 35% faster than my current processor across a range of real world applications*, moving to a 2.8GH Quad core would, in most cases only give me a 20% improvement, and the 2.6 GHz i7 would be even worse at a mere 11%.

This is a only true, however, for those apps which currently are not written to take advantage of multiple cores (i.e. almost everything!)  For the select few that are (WinRAR 3.8, AVG antivirus) the improvement for the Quad Core averages 90%, and for the i7 130%!!

If software writers continue to be slow on the uptake of this multi-core technology, I think the 3.1 GH Dual core is the way to go.

* The benchmarks considered here were: 
Applying multiple filters to a large image in Photoshop CS3
Zipping up a large number of files with Winzip 11
Ripping a DVD in iTunes
Converting a large document in Acrobat Pro 9
Running a demo in Unreal Tournament 3.0
Scanning a collection of files with Grisoft AVG 8
Zipping a large number of files with WinRAR 3.8

Only the last two apps are ‘Multi-Core Optimised’

Just about back…

to where I was before the hard disc failure.

I have, after many hours of downloading, and updating, patching, installing etc. managed to restore my PC back to a fully working condition, with no significant loss of data.

All I know that is missing is three weeks worth of e-mails, and none of them were of great significance.

The biggest pain, was that just before losing the drive, I had spent about 10 hours tidying up the “My Documents” and “My Pictures” folders.  After restoration, everything was a mess again, and it just seems much more like hard work when you have to do the same job for the second time!

The upshot of the last rationalisation, is that the free space on the 250 GB drive is now near 50GB, so it will last till I change the PC now.  Additional benefit of ‘zip’ or ‘rar’ ing several large but not well used folders is that the number of files on the drive has decreased by several 10’s of thousands, which makes backups (yes I am backing up every day at present) and defraging much quicker.

Arggggghhh!!!

My hard drive failed over the weekend, it is not even seen by the BIOS reliably, so not much chance of recovery.

I have now switched back to the smaller (250GB) drive that I recently installed Vista 64bit on, and after several hours of updating AV programs, Windows, utilities etc (who would have though there were so many updates in just 3 months?) I now have a vaguely working machine.  Fortunately, I did refresh my backup on the external HDD just three weeks ago, so not too much data loss, but it is still a pain!

OK, now to see if I have configured 'Live Writer' correctly...

Katherine Piccys

I was quite surprised by how well some of the pictures from my little canon iXUS 85 turned out.

Set to 'Night Snap' mode, and flash turned off.  Only a little re-touching (levels, vibrancy and cropping) in Photoshop and they are now available for all to see here:

http://photoalbums.redbreva.co.uk/KJ-12122008/index.html

Katherine Jenkins 2008

Not long got back home from the NIA in Birmingham - Public transport really is shocking for a major city on a Friday night - it took over 1 hour to get a bus 5 miles home! - Anyway...

Really enjoyed the show, not as much as previous shows, not Katherine's fault, I just don't think the NIA is anywhere near as good a venue as Symphony Hall.

Blake were as good as I expected them to be - but a bit louder!!  (One of the joys of a front row seat in front of a speaker)

Faryl Smith was an unexpected, and very welcome surprise - she really is a VERY good singer - but needs some work on 'chatting to the audience' - she forgot the name of the 'Big London Show' she attended last night (It was the Royal Variety apparently)

Finally, William Joseph was a pleasant surprise that should well find at least some of his work on my iPod before too long

Finally special thanks to the nice gent in Block A Row B Seat 2 for the sweets he handed round during the interval ;-)

Will have a look at my photo's in the morning and see is any of them are worth posting.