(no subject)
Nothing much going on in general. Just cruising along. Work is busy and going OK, we just have a lot to get done and the customers are starting to demand that we ship them the new stuff to try.
My car is probably close to its last legs. It has 210k miles on it and I don't know how much more can be expected. Plus it doesn't match our needs any more, we need something with some ground clearance and AWD to manage the places we'd like to go. We don't need a mountain goat, but something that can be driven up a steep loose trail with 6" rocks scattered around without worrying about getting stranded. My best bet for an all round car that will do 99.8% of what I want is a crossover like the Acura MDX or Infiniti fx35, but I find the Acura uncomfortable so...
For Christmas I was thinking watch that actually keeps accurate time (my automatic is gaining a few minutes a day now that it is working again) or X-Plane v10.
X-Plane 10 will get bought. It's about $90 but it is an accurate flight simulator. It taught me about the way fuel burn changes with altitude and the fact that you can get stalled on full power at 30,000 feet, but by flying differently can cruise up to 40,000 feet in the same aircraft while using less fuel to do it. Some versions are FAA approved because they are 100% accurate.
Well the thing is that they have hugely expanded the graphics requirements by pushing visibility out from 20 miles to 100 miles. So on a good enough monitor you can see SFO from near Sacramento if you are high enough. I figured that by spending less than it cost I could replace my old graphics card and everything would run fast enough. But the newer graphics cards are PCIe 2 or even 2.1 and my machine turns out to be 4 years old and only capable of PCIe 1.0. Rats. So, new motherboard and swap the processor? But the memory is DDR2 and the processor is socket 775 or something, newer boards are 1155/1156. and use DDR3.
So, new machine.
The processor and motherboard together were just under $300. I hate the way the big heatsinks hang off the boards so I went for Antec 920 sealed water cooling ($90 on Amazon) which turns out to actually be an Asetek cooler. Fine, had them before and they worked well. New Egg had a recertified PNY GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card for $180 instead of $260. For comparison it will be about five times faster than the old card I paid $410 for in 2007. Last time my 2GB of RAM cost $200, this time the 16GB of much faster RAM was $85. The disk drive is actually more, the problem is that all the hard disks in the world use tiny ball bearings made in two factories on the flood plain just outside of Bangkok which were both flooded. But at least it is a SATA III 6Gb/s drive.
Blu-ray wasn't an option last time and the decebt DVD drive was $100 or so, this time the Blu-ray drive was $63 because I went for a fast pne with excellent reviews, I want a drive to always have the x-plane disk in so I spent another $20 for a DVD drive.
I will transfer most of the disks from the old machine, but the system drive needs to be fast. I may run out of SATA connections though.
The last box I built was a $230 Antec case with a $150 PSU. This time I went for a Cool Master HAF 932 with a Cool Master ultra quiet PSU.
The deciding factors on this are that it uses three oversized, and therefore very quiet, fans. One at the lower front sucking air over the HDD cage, one on the side blowing on the motherboard and one at the top sucking warm air out of the system. It also has a 120mm fan at the back that I can replace with the cooler. I think the total is about $1100.
For comparison, the best machine in HPs high performance category has a processor that is only 1% slower, a graphics card with 1/3rd the performance, 12GB instead of 16GB but twice as big a drive for $1450. I can spec a Dell Alien machine with the same processor, graphics and memory but a slower disk and no second DVD drive for $1900. Acer can do something similar for $1900 with less RAM and processing performance and a 17% faster graphics card.
Looks like DIY is still the best way.
My car is probably close to its last legs. It has 210k miles on it and I don't know how much more can be expected. Plus it doesn't match our needs any more, we need something with some ground clearance and AWD to manage the places we'd like to go. We don't need a mountain goat, but something that can be driven up a steep loose trail with 6" rocks scattered around without worrying about getting stranded. My best bet for an all round car that will do 99.8% of what I want is a crossover like the Acura MDX or Infiniti fx35, but I find the Acura uncomfortable so...
For Christmas I was thinking watch that actually keeps accurate time (my automatic is gaining a few minutes a day now that it is working again) or X-Plane v10.
X-Plane 10 will get bought. It's about $90 but it is an accurate flight simulator. It taught me about the way fuel burn changes with altitude and the fact that you can get stalled on full power at 30,000 feet, but by flying differently can cruise up to 40,000 feet in the same aircraft while using less fuel to do it. Some versions are FAA approved because they are 100% accurate.
Well the thing is that they have hugely expanded the graphics requirements by pushing visibility out from 20 miles to 100 miles. So on a good enough monitor you can see SFO from near Sacramento if you are high enough. I figured that by spending less than it cost I could replace my old graphics card and everything would run fast enough. But the newer graphics cards are PCIe 2 or even 2.1 and my machine turns out to be 4 years old and only capable of PCIe 1.0. Rats. So, new motherboard and swap the processor? But the memory is DDR2 and the processor is socket 775 or something, newer boards are 1155/1156. and use DDR3.
So, new machine.
The processor and motherboard together were just under $300. I hate the way the big heatsinks hang off the boards so I went for Antec 920 sealed water cooling ($90 on Amazon) which turns out to actually be an Asetek cooler. Fine, had them before and they worked well. New Egg had a recertified PNY GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card for $180 instead of $260. For comparison it will be about five times faster than the old card I paid $410 for in 2007. Last time my 2GB of RAM cost $200, this time the 16GB of much faster RAM was $85. The disk drive is actually more, the problem is that all the hard disks in the world use tiny ball bearings made in two factories on the flood plain just outside of Bangkok which were both flooded. But at least it is a SATA III 6Gb/s drive.
Blu-ray wasn't an option last time and the decebt DVD drive was $100 or so, this time the Blu-ray drive was $63 because I went for a fast pne with excellent reviews, I want a drive to always have the x-plane disk in so I spent another $20 for a DVD drive.
I will transfer most of the disks from the old machine, but the system drive needs to be fast. I may run out of SATA connections though.
The last box I built was a $230 Antec case with a $150 PSU. This time I went for a Cool Master HAF 932 with a Cool Master ultra quiet PSU.
The deciding factors on this are that it uses three oversized, and therefore very quiet, fans. One at the lower front sucking air over the HDD cage, one on the side blowing on the motherboard and one at the top sucking warm air out of the system. It also has a 120mm fan at the back that I can replace with the cooler. I think the total is about $1100.
For comparison, the best machine in HPs high performance category has a processor that is only 1% slower, a graphics card with 1/3rd the performance, 12GB instead of 16GB but twice as big a drive for $1450. I can spec a Dell Alien machine with the same processor, graphics and memory but a slower disk and no second DVD drive for $1900. Acer can do something similar for $1900 with less RAM and processing performance and a 17% faster graphics card.
Looks like DIY is still the best way.