Leopard at work

Installing MacOS Leopard on our media mac at work

Real world benchmark of the super fast PC

You've read about the PC upgrade I did during the summer. SuperPC Well, things have been going great with that upgrade PC and it has been super stable which is not guaranteed when you are overclocking. The other thing that have be en doing off and on is converting all my CDs into FLAC which a lossless (no data discard format, unlike MP3 which is lossy). The goal is to have the entire CD collection on a server so I can access the entire collection via the Squeezebox 3 network music player. On the old PC, it would take nearly a minute to convert a song from WAV to FLAC. On this new PC, it takes about 7 seconds and that is just using one of the cores. WOW !. Now it takes more time to extract the WAV off the CD (rip) than it does to convert. With the new PC, I should have the entire collection ripped and converted to FLAC by the end of the year :-)

Transferring Digital Video

I have been helping my friend John spec out a new computer with the primary goal of having something fast enough for digital video editing. His son Ryan (not the brainiac who answered the Riddle) is a very good wrestler, and John uses the videos to archive Ryan's season as well as as a coaching tool.

Transfer of digital video should be fairly straightforward ... plug the camera into the firewire/1394 port, use a program like Windows movie maker, Sonic DVD, or Adobe Premiere elements to transfer the video. However, on his current machine, the transfer would start to dropped frames after about 4 minutes so he has to transfer things in very small segments which can be a PITA.

So, I ran a series of experiments on my machines of various speeds to determine what is best combo for video transfer without dropping frames. in all test scenarios, I shutdown all extra programs and services like Norton antivirus, realplayer, etc. On a dual core P4 with 1.5 gb of ram, 2 SATA HDs (one for the OS and one for the transfer), I was able to transfer 50 minutes of video with about 200 to 600 dropped frames. It was random when the drops happened but I am guessing it has something to to with HD access on the SATA channels. I switched the transfer HD to an external USB 2.0 HD and transferred the entire 50 minutes without a single dropped frame. Woohoo!!!

For these experiments and for future use, I highly recommend winDV to transfer your video. The program is tiny (less than 100kb) and it does one thing and does it very well (transfer digital video). This minimizes the software footprint on the computer's RAM and therefore gives more room for the transfer itself. Once on your computer, you can use any editing program you wish. Last, this link has some very helpful hints.

Cleaned up the wiring in the PC upgrade

Check out the fresh and clean wiring inside the PC.

Benchmark Results

Got the system running stable at 3.0 ghz. That is a 1.2 ghz overclock above the stock speed. (See first picture). Sandra CPU benchmarks at 3.0ghz shows a 27188MIPS and 19166 MFLOPs. Stock speed gives 16379 and 11447. The old athlon 2500 was 6871 and 2872. 3dMark2006 at 1280 x 1024 resolution is 5820. The athlon got 1600. Last, the 3.0 ghz speed gives a 5.3 rating on vista's performance rating.

New Speed Demon PC built

The computer upgrade is up and running. Woohoo ... the first picture is of the motherboard with the Rosewill heatsink mounted. These modern heatsinks are tall !! The second picture is the X1950XT graphics card. This thing is solid and the cooling system is pretty robust. Third picture is of everything in the case up and running. Last picture is the Windows Vista benchmark at stock settings (a 4.7 rating). BTW, big thanks to vincent for buying me Windows Vista for my bday.

Computer Upgrade time

{Edits added to translate technospeak into JanaSpeak to help regular people understand the significance of this upgrade.}

It has been nearly 4 years { that was Season 2 of "24"} since my last major computer upgrade. I am currently running an Athlon 2500+ on a ECS Nforce2 board (this combo was a $99.99 Fry's special back in the day) with a Nvidia 6800 graphics card. The machine is decent but rather slow by today's standards. {Think of this as popcorn shrimp at Red Lobster. Decent and will fill you up but you aren't going to blog about that meal.} Also, the motherboard has been acting flaky lately so i figure it was time for an upgrade.





New parts are MSI P6N SLI motherboard with the nvidia 650i chipset. Processor is the Intel Core 2 Duo E4300. Heatsink is the Rosewill RCX-Z775- EX (they might as well add Deluxe Turbo SuperFun to that long-ass name). The videocard is a Sapphire ATI X1950XT based graphics card. 2GB of Crucail ballistix RAM rounds out the upgrade. The E4300 runs at 1.8ghz stock and paired with the MSI board and the rosewill cooler, I am expecting to hit 3.0 ghz via overclocking the FSB. {Think of overclocking as ordering 2 shrimp tempura rolls at Kyoto's, and they decide to give you 4 rolls at no extra cost.}