Saturday, October 22, 2005

Nerd stuff

Ok.. yeah i'm a nerd. Here are some CPU-Z info from 2 laptops I setup/fixxed for some friends.

First:



This is a celeron 2.2Ghz from a Dell Inspiron 1100. It's not a bad machine for what it needs to do. For day to day tasks in windows, there's enough power to run most of anything you might want to do. It does start showing it's weaknesses if you start running too many programs at once. It only has 256MB of DDR333 so that is a factor. With another 512 stick, this thing should do fine.

Second:



This is a Pentium 4-M 2.0 Ghz from a Toshiba Satellite. This is the mobile version of the Pentium 4, NOT a Pentium M. This is the predecessor to the Pentium M. The performance is about the same as the celeron 2.2. This one had more ram (512) so multitasking was a bit speedier. The laptop itself was rather large, but it was able to take 10+ hours of folding without missing a beat. Another 512 of ram would do well for this machine.

Something to notice is the FSB of both machines. The true FSB is only about a 100Mhz, but being intel chips, the FSB's are quad-pumped for 400Mhz effective Bus. Having never owned a Pentium of these speeds (my fastest Pentium is a 700Mhz P3), I couldn't say how much the slow bus affected overall speed. I know that on my Athlon64, with the integrated memroy controller, the FSB has become less of an issue.

From these shots, the major difference between the two processors is that the P4-M has twice the L2 cache of the celeron 256k vs. 512k. Cache does make a big difference in performance.

Other than that, both processors seem to perform comparitively.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Oh dear lord...

http://hardmac.com/news/2005-10-10/


OSx86 running on 4 physical intel processors. Hyperthreading enabled. That's 8 logical processors..... holy crap.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Smack that SAS...

After hours upon hours of compiling, updating and otherwise working my laptop into the ground... I have SAS 6.1.0 working under 10.4.

I can't take much of the credit... I followed this and merely adapted it to 10.4 (instead of 10.3 or 10.2 as in the instructions).

Here is how it went:

Download the most up to date version of xmm-newton-sas from here.

There are four files needed:

xmmsas_XXXXXXXX_1832-common-config.tar.gz

xmmsas_XXXXXXXX_1832-common-doc.tar.gz

xmmsas_XXXXXXXX_1832-powerpc-apple-darwin6.8-bin.tar.gz

xmmsas_XXXXXXXX_1832-powerpc-apple-darwin6.8-libextra.tar.gz

The X's are replaced with the date of the most recent build. If you go through the ftp site, the path is pretty simple to follow.

Extract everything to some folder, such as ~/SAS/.

Use the following commands to set your paths:

export SAS_DIR=~/SAS/xmmsas_20041122_1832
export SAS_PATH=$SAS_DIR
. $SAS_DIR/sas-setup.sh
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$SAS_DIR/libextra:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

replace ~/SAS/ with your path, and xmmsas_blah blah with the version you have.

After you get THAT working... make sure your fink(and X11.app) installation is up to date. If so, get the qt3 package.

sudo fink install qt3

Then go watch a movie. Depending on the state and speed of your system, this could take a while to d/l and compile the necessary packages. On my 867mhz G4 it took roughly 2.5-3 hours.

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/sw/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

to update tell your SAS installation to use your newly compiled DYLD libraries instead of the older ones that came with sas.

If you get something similar to this error:

dyld: Symbol not found: __cg_jpeg_resync_to_restart .... then do:

sudo fink remove libjpeg.

Updating libtool might help as well (sudo fink update libtool).

Don't ask me WHY removing libjpeg works... I'm not really sure. Hope this helps.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

64-bit Action.

I bit the bullet about 2 weeks ago. I did a major upgrade to my desktop. I purchased a:


Athlon64 3000+ Socket 939 "Venice" Processor


Epox 9NDA3J Motherboard

Total from Newegg: $230 after tax and shipping.

That along with 512 borrowed from Rachelle has given me a very nice desktop to work with. (I recently bought another 512, so that I can return Rachelle's 512 to her next time I'm home).

Pictures of course:



The two boxes, right out of the FedEx packaging.



The contents of the motherboard package.



The motherboard itself. Note that there are a total of 4 DIMM slots, as opposed to the normal 2 or 3 DIMM slots of budget boards. The reason this is worth noting is that when I upgrade ram, i'll be able to merely ADD ram, than having to replace it. Also the board supports Dual-Channel.



The picture of the processor itself. The stock Heatsink/Fan is EXTREMELY Quiet. I love how I can barely hear the system going, and thats only if I don't have any music or anything else going on. Stock the processor runs at 1.8Ghz with a 200Mhz Bus(kinda). Equivalent performance is to a 3.0Ghz Pentium 4, for most tasks.

Stock the system ran a very cool 40C, under full folding load.

UPDATE: I overclocked the system. Its now running at 2.43Ghz with an 270Mhz Bus(kinda). Thats about a 30% overclock. To translate into easier to appreciate terms. I'm getting the equivalent speed to a 3.5-3.7Ghz P4 or a 3500-3700+ Athlon.



The processor is running at a still cool 44C, again, under full load. What used to take 1.5 Hours/frame to fold, now takes roughly 23mins/frame.