Tongfamily Website

As usual, Anandtech has done an incredible job with its “guides”:http://http://anandtech.com/guides/ to buying PCs. I agree with most of the recommendations. Right now I’m getting a high-end system for video and photo editing and printing and another mid-range system for Calvin. Calvin’s old computer is dead and that means our backup now goes to my Dad. So, time now to get a high-end ($1500) and a mid-range system (sub $1000).

Most of this is straightforward as prices and technology haven’t changed much. The most confusing area this month is memory. There was a time when if you got PC3200 Ram, it was slower than PC3500, etc. all the way up to PC4400. BTW, these confusing numbers are basically 16x more than the bus speed. So, PC3200 ram means, you can run the bus at 200MHz which is stock, PC4000 means that you can boost memory speeds to 250MHz as so on. It also turns out the other way to express this is DDR speeds which are 2x the bus speed, so DDR400, PC3200 and 200MHz front-side-bus are the same numbers. Don’t ask my why they do this, but its the way it works mathematically.

Second mysterious thing is that memory has a certain number of cycles between the time you give it an address and the time when you get back data. This is normally called CAS (column address select if that means anything to you). Normally CAS 2 memory is faster at a given speed (e.g., PC3200 CAS2 memory is faster than PC3200 CAS 3 memory). But, to throw you for a loop, with OCZ called Enhanced Bandwidth (see “Anandtech”:http://anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2019), they have a technology where CAS 2.5 memory can be faster than CAS 2. Confused now. Anyway, here’s the net recommendation.

There are two things that throw you for a loop, very fast PC3200 memory can be overclocked quite a bit now, so that they are cheaper than PC4000 memory and also run faster. How about them apples. Also, the overclocking characteristics of Intel’s Pentium 4 and the AMD Athlon are different, so you have to pick different memory for different processors. Here’s a good summary:

h3. On the Athlon

Late breaking “news”:http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2198&p=4 is that if you have the DFI Lan Party UT Nf3 250Gb, then this advice changes, the Samsung memory performs super well with this board. Memory with Samsung chips are reviewed by Anand tech in the “fast 2-2-2 PC3200 memory”:http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2174 roundup.

The two tested memory products were the OCZ 3200 EL Platinum Rev 2 and the Geil 3200 Ultra X (model number GLX1GB3200DC for 1GB and GLX5123200UP for 512MB. “ExcaliberPC”:GLX5123200UP has the 1×512MB memory for $160 and “BuyExtremegear”:http://www.buyxtremegear.com/rm178127.html has it for $158.

The OCZ 3200 EL Platinum Rev 2 (Model OCZ400512ELPER2 for 512MB and OCZ4001024ELDCPER2-K for 2×512MB) are also hard to find. “ComputerHQ”:http://www.computerhq.com/OCZ_512MB_DDR_PC_3200_OCZ400512ELPER2/products/partinfo-id-496362.html has it for $178. Newegg has the 2×512MB for “$248″:OCZ4001024ELDCPER2-K. So, getting a pair is cheaper right now.

“Anand”:http://anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2145&p=19 recommends Ram that uses the Micron memory chips if you don’t have the above board. You need to get the the Crucial “Ballistix 3200″:http://anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2145&p=9 or OCZ 3500EB or “3700EB”:http://anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2057&p=16 (275MHz max). With the Crucial, it could get to DDR514 (e.g., 262 MHz). The OCZ are CAS 2.5 memory than when overclocked are faster than the CAS 2 memory you normally would think is faster. Another oddity.

Also somewhat ironically, looks like the cheapest place to buy the Crucial Ballistix is “direct”:http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodule.asp?module=DDR+PC3200&Attrib=Package&cat=RAM. Right now, its $139 for 512MB which isn’t bad at all.

h3. For Intel

Things are simple with Intel. First Intel overclocks much better and in general, if you get the new CAS 2 memory from Geil PC3200 “Ultra X”:http://anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2174&p=1 or the OCZ PC3200 “Platinum Rev 2″:http://anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2145, you’ll get the most bandwidth and the ability to overclock to DDR561 or 280MHz from the stock 200MHz!

As you can see from the “graph”:http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2174&p=9, at DDR533 (266 MHz bus speed), the top performers were the Crucial PC3200 Ballistix, OCZ PC3500, Geil PC3200 Ultra X and Kingston Hyper-X 3200 LL with Intel hardware.

While working on Bill’s Athlon 64, I discovered there are some things you can do for hot Athlon XPs. In the same “SilentPC”:http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?p=64530 piece, but there are some utilities that allow an Athlon XP to actually halt when idle. Apparently Windows XP doesn’t do this, so you need a special little utility to do it and hopefully reduce power since most of the time the system is waiting around for a keyboard input or something.

You need a couple of programs. One called vcool and another called coolbits apparently.

Got down to San Diego. _I know, I know, guide to Beijing/Shanghai and San Diego are coming soon._

Anyway, checked out Bill’s Athlon 64 3200+ Shuttle SN85G4 is unstable after about 5 minutes. Here’s how to diagnose. Essentially, after about 5 minutes of running flat out, the machine hard shuts down. No windows error, the whole machine shuts down. That points to either a thermal problem (e.g., the machine is running too hot and with the Athlon 64 new motherboards have a shut down diode) or it is the power supply that has a circuit breaker shutdown since the supply in the SN85G4 is only 240 watts as I remember and Bill has this machine loaded up with 2GB memory, 250GB hard disk, ATI 9600 All-in-wonder and the AMD Athlon 6400 3200+. Here’s how to diagnose it:

# “Radified”:http://radified.com/Articles/stability_testing.htm. There are many ways to test the stability of your PC, because there are a variety of applications that will put a heavy load on your CPU, such as SETI@home and RC5. See Radified for more details on testing. I particularly like Prime95 because it verifies results.
# “Silent PC Review”:http://www.silentpcreview.com/article172-page1.html. They have an article about AMD Quiet and Cool technology. Installed this so his computer would power down when it isn’t working hard, so I hope that at least normally the machine doesn’t have a problem. This is the original C0 revision of the Athlon 64, so it idles at 800MHz (instead of 2GHz) at 1.3V instead of the full power 1.5V, this reduces the power requirement to 35 watts. The “thread”:http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?p=64530 on their site is quite amazing in its detail on cooling.
# “Speedfan”:http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php, “Motherboard Monitor”: and “CPUCool”: . Tried these programs to see if it is a thermal problem. They all seem to give different readings, but pretty consistently, the temperatures in a long compute-intensive “memtest86+”:http://www.memtest.org/, “prime95″:http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm or MPEG2 encoding caused temperaturs up to 70 Celsius. According to “anandtech”:http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm, 70C is really the limit as also mentioned in “AMDBoard”:http://forums.amd.com/index.php?s=e58f78bb5692297a84ec87ef098690e4&showtopic=20337&st=0&#entry167429, although “HardOCP”:http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTI0 says it is 85C
# Other thing to try is to swap out the graphics card to reduce voltage requirement. One hint here is that with 1GB memory stick removed, the system seemed much more stable with the full 2GB installed, it would only take about 5 minutes of memtest for it to shutdown.

So I didn’t get to fix it, but if you’re having the same problem, it might be a good time to get the thermal paste out and relube that Athlon 64 processor. Some folks have reported up to a 8 Celsius temperature drop by doing that. In the mean time, I’ve asked Phil to swap out the video card to get the power requirements back to something reasonable and see how stable it is. If I were to guess, I’d say it is the power supply, but it could be thermal. I can’t find the Shuttle temperature shutoff spec anywhere, but that would be the next step.

I haven’t covered notebooks before as this is a big topic and don’t buy many, but with the model change to Dothan, they are becoming pretty interesting. Given the performance improvments of the new Intel chips (AMD doesn’t play in mobile much), you should probably wait until notebook folks swap to the new 7xx series of chips.

Background and Information

Intel’s up to date roadmaps . The changes Intel makes are the biggest variables in buying notebooks particularly. Here’s a great summary by the Inquirer that makes it much easier to figure out what the giant is up to. Also great for historical reasons to figure out what they have been doing in the past. Relevant facts on “notebooks”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17053

Dothan is a big deal, with it, “Anandtech”:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2129&p=6 shows that a Pentium-M 744 or 745 (2GHz and 1.8GHz respectively) beats a Pentium 3.2GHz and equals the Athlon-64 3000+ in Business Winstone (e.g, typing in Word and Excel). That means for general purpose processing, notebooks have finally caught up. A fun machine to build would be a desktop that used this chip instead of the power hungry desktop Pentium Prescott or Northwood if you just wanted to build a Shuttle for business as an example.

* In july 21, they quietly announced the 733 and 723 according to “Digitlife”:http://www.digit-life.com/news.html?106917 and “The Inquirer”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16665, a 90nm Dothan but with just 2MB cache running at 1.1GHz and 1.0GHz respectiviely.
* In Q3, they’ll deliver the 723, the first 90nm Dothan with 2MB cache (I’m using a 745 right now which is a 1.7GHz 2MB cache Dothan and it is a screamer)
* In Q105 they’ll introduce a 2GHz 2MB ULV chip which is pretty amazing.

Ultraportable or Mini-notebooks

If you have to buy right now, then there are pretty much only two choices.Well, given we’re going on the road alot, I’m looking at a bunch of mini-notebooks. Ludwig used one in Europe and liked it. I think one with a DVD drive would be just about perfect. Here are the choices:

* Sony VAIO PCG-TR3A. Has everything but battery life. I owned an earlier version five years ago and the main issue is that it was just sloooowwwww. Now it has a 1GHz Pentium-M so I’m curious what speed is like. Also back then the battery was just terrible, but now it looks reasonable. Cnet Asia has a “roadmap”:http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/hardware/notebooks/0,39001749,39184367,00.htm that doesn’t have any mini-notebooks so hopefully this model won’t got away overnight. There is also a TR5A that is $3K because it has 1GB of memory and a DVD RW drive.
* Fujitsu Lifebook 5020D. This is very similar but has a longer lasting battery as reviewed by “Maximum PC”:http://www.maximumpc.com/reviews/notebooks/review_2004-05-06.html.
* Fujitsu Lifebook “P7000″:http://www.computers.us.fujitsu.com/www/productbridge_pseries.shtml This model has been replaced by the P7000 which uses the 713 processor which is exciting as its a Dothan based system although it only has a 1MB cache. The P7000D uses the Atheros 11gab chipset so is about $100 more expensive.

These are two in category. They have the same performance essentially, so it is the side issues. “Ars Technica”:http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review831_main4153.html likes the Lifebook as does MaximumPC as well.

So if you can wait, wait for Sony and Fujitsu to update to the 733 and get that for best performance and lower power. These notebooks are so underpowered, that will make enough difference to wait.