The Clever Shark

US Senate: Sergeant-at-arms now investigating a Senate leak of a report on the investigation of a Senate leak. If you think about this one for too long your head will spin, then explode.

Create your own Bush/Cheney 04 poster! Come on people, be creative…

Want to optimize your nutrition? Eat bugs! I’m pretty sure roaches are Atkins-friendly.

Now that I have managed in putting together my AMD64 system I actually have concrete costing figures to evaluate whether or not this represents a good deal, compared with Apple’s current desktop offerings.

To be quite honest, things really don’t look good for Apple. Not only did my home-built box, dubbed “Postal” (yeah, after the game), cost less than Apple’s cheapest G5 model, but it’s considerably better-featured, even in those areas which are traditionally Apple’s strongest.

The Tale of the Tape

All in all, the AMD64 system cost me slightly under $1700, including XP Pro. A quick trip to Apple’s online store shows the cheapest G5 desktop offering at a whopping $1800.

If the two systems were similarly equipped that would be one thing. However that is clearly not the case. Here is how the systems differ, where comparisons may be made.

The rest falls outside tangibly-comparable criteria. I’m willing to concede that OS X probably has the edge over XP (32-bit) at this point, but that can’t be expressed in numbers; let’s say that my experiences with OS X, which have only been with fairly old hardware such as a 500Mhz G4 processor, have not left me waxing poetic about its performance, but I imagine that given a very fast processor it must be something quite neat.

The video card comparison was also a little difficult. Not having experienced or benchmarked the 5200 Ultra, I can’t comment on its performance, but the Radeon 9800 is *the* chipset of the hour, and the integrated TV tuner, as well as the software that came with the retail AIW, caused me to give it the nod. I’m having a tough time finding a comparison between the two chipsets, which frankly aren’t even in the same class anyway. That’s why Apple offers the 9800 Pro for a whopping $350 extra — more than I paid for the retail All-in-wonder (wow).

That being said, there is an overwhelming advantage on all fronts except the *standard* OS, all in favor of my own AMD64 system. The RAM comparison is particularly shocking, since the G5 comes up short in both quantity AND quality (speed). Even the Superdrive, once the crowning jewel of Apple’s lineup, is now outdone by a fairly generic $110 NEC drive.

64-bit OS availability

Once again Apple is “pwn3d” in this area. 64-bit versions of both Windows (XP in preview, and 2003 Server) and Linux (SuSE and RedHat, including Fedora) are available right now. For the G5 only Linux is available; a 64-bit OS X is not foreseen until late 2005. Not that Linux is a bad OS — I should know! — but frankly the case for Linux on this particular hardware is rather limited. For one thing neither of the systems in question supports anything close to 16 gigabytes of memory at this time (which would be a good instance of 64-bit support being necessary, or even useful). Also 64-bit-enabled applications remain a rare breed on any OS. So, another, albeit minor, point scored for the AMD64 platform, at least as of March 2003.

Other considerations

The G5 definitely has the cooler case. I couldn’t deny that in a million years. That being said the Super Lanboy case is nothing to sneeze at, and it’s undeniably lighter. Personally I like the side window and the LED front fan, but those would never have been deciders. All in all it was $70 very well spent, I think.

Both computers enjoy a reputation as being fairly quiet in a typical setting. I’ll take the word of G5 reviewers’ at face value here. The dual-processor model is a radically different story, but as someone who’s built a dual-processor (AMD) system I know that comparisons really can’t be made, for simple reasons of physics. Also the G5 DP model appears to have issues with defective power supplies, which Apple is working on.

I’ll not go over the issue of software availability for the respective OS’s, because frankly that’s the stuff that flame wars are made of, and I don’t care to start one on the subject just now. However I couldn’t help but be frankly offended at the listed price of components on the Apple Store site. I don’t think you could be overcharged more if you were a woman dressed as a stripper going to a neighborhood garage for repairs you weren’t sure you needed!

It was really shocking to see very ordinary components being sold OEM for prices which were sometimes 50 to 100% over retail costs. I can definitely see where those “fleecing” accusations aimed at Apple are coming from. What’s more, several options which really should exist for customers simply aren’t offered, at any price, which is mind-boggling.

For example, Apple wants to charge you $125 to upgrade a system from 256M to 512M memory. That is just a blatant ripoff in a day and age where one can purchase a single 512M PC2700 stick for $85 from a reputable dealer (Crucial). Even buying the upgrade to 1G, in 2×512 configuration, costs hugely more than buying 2 512M modules from Crucial, and that’s supposed to be an upgrade from 256M!! I’m not pulling numbers from my butt here, just looking them up from the Apple Store web site.

Apple’s hard disks are also ridiculously overpriced. You shouldn’t be paying much more than $1/gig for 7200rpm SATA drives, and yet the cost of upgrades on the Apple site is pretty extravagant compared to my own researched, reasonable prices. Also because Apple does not tell you what brand the disks are included, you can’t go and buy another disk somewhere else if you want to build a mirror array, for example. Personally I don’t see much of a point in SATA if you can’t build an array on it, yet for some reason it would seem that Apple’s SATA controller is not capable of doing just that.

Should that be the case it certainly explains why twin-drive combos are largely unavailable, except for the 2x250G combo (which is still overpriced, but by a slimmer margin). There is no indication there that these drives are delivered in a RAID configuration, so I have to assume that they’re not, even for the more expensive G5 models.

Also as I said the Radeon 9800 Pro video card OEM is being sold for more than I paid for the All-in-Wonder 9800, which includes extra software and a remote, so Apple fails to impress there as well. There is no rewritable DVD drive available on any of the models either, which is very puzzling from a company that was in the avant-garde of bringing DVD authoring to the masses.

Conclusions

This isn’t one of those “why you should switch” articles, really. Mostly this reflects mostly my personal reasons for abandoning the Apple Way and focusing on other forms of computing, despite my erstwhile allegiances. My remaining investment in MacOS software is practically nil, and I was building primarily a gaming box, something which is not the Mac’s forte — although things are improving there.

Obviously my experience is hardly representative of the average Mac user, or even mac techie, at this time. If you own $2k’s worth of software for the Mac, some of which is only available for the Mac, then it’s probably worth your while staying the course.

That being said, it does appear that Apple has in fact entrenched itself further into the market of niche computing, and has practically given up on being a major player in desktop computing generally. To the unconverted, spending over $2500 for what, stats-wise, appears to be the equivalent of a system you can build for $1700, is practically tantamount to folly. Then again as many a flame war has shown explaining computing in terms of numbers and dollar values is oft decried as sacrilegious by the average Mac zealot (I should know, I used to be one).

Given the evidence the only thing I can conclude is that Apple is quite happy being the niche player, and frankly there’s nothing specifically wrong with that attitude either. To use a rather forced metaphor of car brands, BMW is quite comfortable appealing to its own small but loyal and wealthy consumer base, and there’s no indication that it’ll disappear overnight — in fact it will continue existing for quite some time and give its shareholders a decent value. However if I were to buy a car based on budget and value, BMW wouldn’t even be in the running for my dollar. If money were not an object, and I began caring more about less tangible benefits, then it would be higher on my list.

Likewise for the G5… yes, it’s a 64-bit processor, but so is the K8/AMD64. The memory is not as fast, the motherboard is much less well-featured than the Asus K8V, and several vital (IMHO) configurations are simply not available, but the G5 is a damn cool machine, and offers the OS X experience, which no other brand offers… but the benefits of this are intangible, and to me frankly immaterial.

So, I’m happy with my purchase. And no doubt that people who buy G5s are also happy with their purchases, but it was time for that parting of the ways.

Never mind the Taliban: many extremist forces with close ties to power in Washington want to turn the US over to a Christian version of the sharia. The army took care of the religious extremists abroad, who will take care of it here?

In an astonishingly moronic move, a woman tries to pass a $1 million bill at Wal-Mart. There’s not much I can say to top that.

A history of some of DARPA’s wilder projects to date. I rather like the ‘killer bees’ idea myself.

Under a proposed new rule by the Bush Administration, it will be legal for companies to screw workers out of earned overtime pay. With amusing cartoon. Frankly nothing this Adminstration does can shock me anymore.

I know that I’m a few articles behind on what has been previously promised, but I just put together a pretty high-spec gaming machine last weekend using an Athlon64 processor, and I’m so impressed that I pretty much have to write about it.

What’s the big deal about this, you may well ask. Well, for the past almost-three-years I’ve been using a system for gaming which I had built during a stint of unemployment in the spring of 2001. Back then it was pretty much cutting-edge, with its 1.33Ghz AMD K7 (“Thunderbird”) processor and 266Mhz DDR RAM, ATA133 drive, etc.

Then again we’re talking computers here. What was cutting edge 3 years ago is barely even fit to sell on ebay nowadays, especially systems built for gaming. This year in particular will see the arrival of a crop of games which redefine the term “abusive minimum requirements”, and it was in fact with one of those games in mind (Unreal Tournament 2004 to be precise) that I decided to build an entirely new system.

As I’ve said in previous articles I’ve always been a very keen follower, voire practically a disciple of AMD when it comes to the PC platform, and I can finally say at this time that my leanings were entirely correct. AMD is seriously kicking some Intel ass in the 64-bit arena. Intel’s Itanium — oft-dubbed the Itanic — is, practically speaking, dead as a workstation/consumer chip, leaving AMD64 the sole major player in that arena of x86-compatible computing.

The Setup

The system is equipped as follows:

• Athlon 64 3200 CPU
• Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard
• 1GB (2x512MB) Kingston non-ECC PC3200 DDR RAM
• 2x80G Seagate Barracuda SATA drives set up as a RAID-0 array
• NEC DVD+-RW drive
• ATI All-in-Wonder Pro 9800 video card
• Antec Super LANBoy aluminum case
• Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 CPU heatsink & fan

The Fan

Since when should one list a heatsink & fan as a major component of a system? Only when one is very impressed with it performance of course. The SB is an extremely quiet (believe the hype on this one) heatsink/fan combo for the K8/AMD64 processor. Using the K8’s built in “Cool and Quiet” feature, the fan starts and stops frequently depending on system load, but you can hardly tell the difference in sound between the two states. Geek-wise this is pretty amazing, given my experience with other Thermaltake heatsinks & fans on the dual-processor system I have built recently and which sounds like a small aircraft (more on the subject in an upcoming article).

The tool-less, force-less tightening device also earns very high marks from this lifelong geek, who’s more than a little used to spending 10-20 minutes in placing a heatsink delicately and correctly atop the formerly small CPU die on Athlon processors.

The Case

As its name indicates, the Antec Super LANBoy is something you’re meant to take along to LAN parties, and it’s built for that purpose. It’s surprisingly light, and frankly I think it only weighed as much as the packaging that came with it. The secret there is aluminum construction and a great deal of optimization when it comes to case size. The case does feature the nice extras which users like myself have become accustomed to, like the easy-mount brackets which place your hard disks right behind the front ventilation fan, and some neat, innovative touches, like an all-purpose drawer next to the floppy bay on the front panel, in which all necessary screws are found.

This is very, very tight case, and frankly I’m lukewarm about recommending it for use with the K8V motherboard becomes the floppy controller is mounted “sideways” on that board, which results in a fairly difficult fit for the mobo when the floppy cable is inserted. Who uses a floppy nowadays? Well, forcibly, anyone using a K8V board. That board’s SATA buses (one Promise, one Via) require the use of additional drivers during the Windows XP installation process, and there doesn’t seem to be a way around that, so you do need it.

Other than the tight fit, this is a great case. It’s very light and uses extra-large, low-speed 120mm fans in front and rear for great ventilation with a very low noise factor. The improved thermal management of the AMD64 processor goes a long way to help in that department too.

The Drives

I’m taking full advantage of the new-ish Serial ATA interface to put two Seagate 80G disks into a RAID-0 array (striped) in order to maximize performance. There’s a lot to be said about Serial ATA, way too much for this article even, so I’ll talk about SATA in general in an upcoming article (yet another one). It’s really “RAID for the masses”. I have the drives connected to the Promise FastTrack 378 controller, although I’m not entirely sure that this works more efficiently than the Via controller; that being said, once the array is built, it’s best to let it just do its work, especially with a striped array.

The RAM

I chose the cheapest PC3200 memory type, mostly because this is a gaming machine (not a server) and does not need to be fault-tolerant. Also I doubt I’ll ever need more than 1GB RAM in this box. I’d recommend the same to anyone at this point.

The Motherboard

This is where it gets interesting. The Asus K8V deluxe is a hell of a board, and it’s loaded with pretty much peripheral a user should need, short of the video card, for obvious reasons. It features not one set, but two sets of Serial ATA raid controllers (a Via and a Promise one), and the Promise controller can also be used to create an IDE RAID array. That’s up to 3 RAID arrays on one PC, without adding a single PCI card, which is damned impressive.

The board also features 6 hi-speed USB ports, two IEEE-1394 ports (“Firewire”, as it is sometimes known), a 6-channel sound chipset, an integrated wireless port (for which a wireless adapter is not yet available from ASUS), and a 3COM 390 Gigabit Ethernet controller. It would be difficult to ask for more on that score.

It also comes with all the internal extras which customers of Asus’s Deluxe boards have come to expect, such as a great level of customization, advanced jumperless overclocking abilities, etc. Again, I’m extremely impressed here. One thing I’ll have to do very soon is change the generic ASUS startup screen and replace it with the CleverShark logo, which is reputedly a very easy process. Yes, it’s a rather cheesy point to harp on, but it’s majorly cool.

Also those extras are essentially what separates the K8V Deluxe from other non-FX boards made for the Athlon 64 chips, since all of them use the same K8T800 chipset.

The Athlon 64 Chip

Obviously this is the “piece de resistance” in this high-tech buffet. Users of other Athlon chips will find that they can take what they know about their CPU and blissfully forget that knowledge when they’re dealing with the AMD64, which rewrites the rules of the game.

For a start, say goobye to the perilously small CPU die of previous Athlon chips — your CPU is now encased in a ceramic sarcophagus, which makes the surface of the CPU completely flat. I cannot emphasize enough how much easier this makes the installation of a heatsink & fan. Also helpful is the use of a plastic “guide” for the heatsink, which is a concept long in use with Pentium 4-based motherboards. No more fried CPUs!

The thermal management of the AMD64 chips is considerably advanced compared to that of previous Athlons. To those of you using leftover heat from your CPUs to heat your apartments/houses, the AMD64 is bad news… it runs very cool. So cool in fact that you’ll notice your CPU fan stops fairly frequently, which will probably cause you to freak out a bit (I certainly panicked briefly when I saw that). Running a previous-generation Athlon without a running fan is not something you can do for very long before smells of burning silicon become evident! This is not a problem in the case of the AMD64, however.

I’m definitely not getting the maximum amount of boost from using a 64-bit chip as I am currently using XP Pro. I know that there is a 64-bit version of XP being offered by Microsoft — in fact I have a copy of it running — but unfortunately it does not as yet have sound drivers for the sound chipset included in the K8V Deluxe; some people have reported success with it, but I’ve had no such luck so far.

Needless to say well-made games, like Unreal Tournament 2003, just fly when used on the AMD64. I can now run the game at a full 1280×1024 (the maximum resolution for my monitor) and full visual detail without choppiness. I’ll be checking out other games — Halo in particular — later this week but I fully expect to not be disappointed. Windows is hugely more responsive on this platform than on my previous gaming box. That being said I can also report a similar performance boost from my dual Athlon 2400 system, but the 64 would seem to be a lot cheaper energy-wise, and has the added advantage of not being so loud while in use that it will drive me insane.

All in all that system has cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500. Not in the “cheapie” range by any means, but I think I’m getting a lot more quality for the money than if I had ordered the system pre-made, and I’m very happy I spend the money.

Al-Qaeda head honchos not the technological geniuses we’ve been led to believe they are. You can switch phones, but if you keep using the same SIM card you might as well not bother.