[OCN] My Thoughts on Core i7
February 7, 2009 § 3 Comments
Everybody knows that we, members of OCN, have a serious problem. Look at it from an average Joe perspective: we spend thousands on high end computers, and at every single occasion we go out and browse Newegg on a quest to find an upgrade for our systems, which according to us are quickly becoming obsolete. We then proceed to sell our memory, processors, graphic cards and all our other barely used gear, things which are sometimes only a couple of weeks old, in order to purchase the latest and greatest. While the common mortals still call a Pentium 4 HT/P965/7900GX2 system a top gaming machine, we constantly crave for more, more performance, more 3dMarks, smaller SuperPI times, and bigger e-peens. And after spending 50$ on Crysis:Warhead in order to be able to run the benchmark tool, we sit our asses on the chairs and play CS:S at framerates exceeding by 6 times our monitor’s refresh rates. We are hardware junkies, hung on PCB like a druggy is on PCP.
Probably my best piece of to now. I spill my guts on what I think of the new Intel platform that features the new Core i7 processors and x58 motherboards. Read the entire article with feedback from the Overclock.net community here.
[OCN] Rethinking Hard Drives and Storage
July 21, 2008 § 4 Comments
In this post, I explore how hard drive makers have spent too much time and effort making drives only bigger and faster, and not thinking about making more products tailored to what the consumer needs, and how there are many segments that are still open to whoever wants to take them.
The hardware industry in itself is constantly changing, but one sector that has particularly evolved over the years is the disk storage sector. Nowadays, everybody from hardcore enthusiasts like we OCN-ers to our formerly computer illiterate grandparents are now juggling around with voluminous files, music, movies, and large collections of high-resolution digital pictures, so the overall demand for bigger, faster drives just keeps growing.
Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital and all the other hard drives giants are well aware of this trend, and thanks to ferocious competition amongst themselves, great milestones have been reached. A terabyte of raw storage is now something that pretty much any willing person can afford, redundant and stripped storage via RAID is now within everybody’s reach thanks to integration to many chipset solutions (think P35+ICH9R and later, nearly all Nvidia chipsets since the 5 series), drives are quieter, faster and more energy efficient than ever before, and most importantly, cost per gigabyte is rock bottom, below 0.20$/GB in many cases.
All this progress has me thrilled, however, I think that it is time to reconsider how we use our disk drives, and other means of storage on non-removable media. It seems that too much emphasis is put on making hard drives, bigger, faster, when maybe all we need to do is to think up and create mission-specific storage products, as to better suit the needs of every user and every machine, specially in these days where many people have more than one computer fulfilling more than one task.
One of my best articles this year if you ask me. Critics are more than welcome, feel free to leave your own point of vue either here (no registration required) or on the OCN blog, which requires membership to comment.
[OCN] Nvidia Turning Friends Into Enemies?
May 25, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Everybody’s in the fight for GP-GPUs… and it makes me question Nvidia’s ability to survive in such a market, specially when all it’s CPU producing friends are openly declaring war.
Nvidia is acting weird lately. Apart from keeping the bar high in the GPU sector, Nvidia seems to be wanting to take over something else, the CPU sector. I’m a bit confused as if they want to do so using CUDA and GPU-powered applications to entirely eradicate the need for a powerful CPU and build crappy replacements of their own, or just trying to beat Intel at their own game, plain and simple, by producing super high end chips.
I might be totally wrong, but in the case that this “can of whoop ass” turns out to be a flop, this may very well be the end of Nvidia as we know it……
OCN: Blu-Ray Wins?
February 16, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I’ve started a more hardware-orientated blog on Overclock.net recently, for a few good reasons. First was that I didn’t feel like posting every single rant and thought about everything here, and secondly because having a blog in a place that already has a very targeted audience yields much more comments and pageviews, which makes me feel good 
. Despite the fact that I promised to myself that I wouldn’t be cross-posting my stuff from one blog to another, which I think defeats the purpose of having 2 separate blogs, I can’t help myself but link to a pertinent (according to me) article I recently wrote. I won’t be cross-posting ALL articles, but the best ones I most likely will, in hopes of giving this under-used blog something to live on. </explanation> On with the article.
If there is one thing on the tech scene that pisses me off, it’s those silly proprietary format wars that keep raging on for everything. It’s seems that companies don’t get together to talk about how to solve problems and make formats standard, but rather how to make them as different and incompatible as possible in order to give the end user a bigger headache.
Everybody can recall at least one of the famous format wars that have been going on in the past decades: PPC vs x86, USB vs Firewire, Minidisk…
