Ashtefere

Yeah, I figured as much Mumak, that's why I asked him to audibly check, because if he has done a retention mod the only problem left would be a dodgy fan.

-Ash

Brian, according to that screenshot the fan on GPU2 is running at much lower speed than GPU1. Can you audibly check the fans when loading to see if GPU 1 is running noticably higher than GPU2?

If that is the case, could be a dying fan. If the fan is OK, then it is a bios issue and needs an update.

What I would do is try run a few wires from GPU2 fan to GPU1 fan header to test if the fan runs at the same speed, or just swap the fans around. I would say thats your issue.

-Ash

Uncompressible data is an unrealistic test for any drive. You arent going to be using 100% uncompressible data. So yeah, random is better for all benchmarks.

So the tweaks didnt change anything huh? Thats a bit of a worry. The intelPPM trick will most definately help though, as it disables the auto cstate change.

Looking forward to results with your m18x

-Ash

Then color me curious about the results after the tweaks. Those numbers are actually quite good!

-Ash

What machine and what drive Michael?

-Ash

Yeah, its a monster. Definately getting a couple for a nice tasty raid0 array.

-Ash

An underclocked 6950 core can be unlocked to an underclocked 6970 core. And then overclocked to a 6970 level.

Then people melt their laptops.

But if I could, by the fucking gods you bet I would. I would do whatever ungodly cooling mods necessary to have two fully unlocked desktop 6970's in a laptop in crossfire. That would be just... that would just... it would... ack!

-Ash

OCZ's business practices are more than questionable.

I would personally go for the Corsair Force 3 series at this point, over OCZ.

Without a doubt, the corsairs should be the fastest drives out by about 5k-10k IOPS.

I run a datacenter with many of the corsair force 2 drives, and havent had a single DOA (which is suprising for SSDS) whereas the OCZ equivalent drives had a 1 in 4 (yes, thats one in four) DOA rate. Stopped buying them once I figured that out and switched to the corsairs.

Sandforce v1 drives have a few issues, for example if you fill it up completely with incompressible data you can never trim it to full performance again. Thats pretty fucking bad.

The new Sandforce drives (vertex 3, force 3) are exceptional. They have excellent wear leveling (90 years+ at full thrashing all the time) and are the highest performance - so long as the manufacturer builds high quality drives with the chips (hence the OCZ issues...)

The intel drives are higher build quality than any other drive, bar none. Its ridiculous. But you get slightly less performance and slightly less wear leveling reliability. We are still talking 60-80 years continuous use so its not something to worry about though.

-Ash

Nice, 580m and 6990m incoming.

Shame about those hard disk random access times though. I have a nice shuttle priced up that I am going to build instead so...

Yeah.

-Ash

I forsee your user title being changed to "bag handler" very soon, wbabt.

-Ash

Australian alienware website just came up with pricing. Its fucking hilarious.

Dell AU is even greedier than USA.

Starting price is $3299 AUD.

Yeah, fuck that.

-Ash

Hi Alex.

I have been waiting for the M18x, and was using the Dell USA site to guage pricing before release.

You see, because the australian dollar is quite a lot higher than the US dollar at the moment, I expected dell to have fairer pricing with the m18x when it was released in australia.

Obviously, this is not the case.

As you can see here: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dkcwkr1&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&model_id=alienware-m18x

The USA pricing for the same laptop is $2269 USD (only $2101 AUD!!!)

In australia it is $3299 AUD. This is nearly $1200 more for the exact same laptop, shipped from the exact same global location (malaysia was the last place I had my m17x shipped form).

I know, personally, that the price to ship the laptop to australia is the same or less than it is to USA.

I know that the AUD is higher than the USD.

What I dont know, is what costs the extra $1200? Was the crate made of gold? Did an olympic swimmer drag it along the ocean by a golden string in their teeth?

I can order this price through a USA drop shipper (as I did for my m14x) and only pay a very small price in customs duties. For the m18x this would be less than $200. I know dell must also pay this - so that leaves the extra $1000 unaccounted for.

I am sorry, but I cannot buy any more products from Dell Australia. They have demonstrated unrivaled greed for no reason, and I am not going to feed that business model. Instead, I will be placing this order through Dell USA.

Thank you for letting me know, though Alex. Feel free to forward this along to your management so they can understand customer sentiment.

I will also be letting other australian users of cheaper alternatives, as it is harmful to australian consumers to feed this kind of business model.

-Jonathan

Thats the email I sent the rep who notified me. Cant wait for the response!

-Ash

Lower latency ram always beats higher bandwidth ram - and by a very very large margin. Watch out for that.

-Ash

Worst case scenario the notebook SSD will be a few seconds slower than a fully powered desktop SSD. The benchmarks will show it to be a lot slower but real world usage you won't really see it.

Yeah, I realise that but for the money I am paying, the premium I am paying, and the work I am doing I expect and need it to be 100%.

I need to make package files and compile code many times an hour, sometimes 50 times or more, and over the course of a day or a week it adds up very quickly to be a massive unnecessary timesink.

For gaming, no one is gonna miss it but for my work it is a dealbreaker unfortunately.

-Ash

I would have expected intel to do a workaround.

This shit is kinda a dealbreaker for me. I do game dev and rely on high HDD speeds for the tools I use.

If I buy a notebook I want the power saving features. I also want my SSD's to run at full speed.

Fuck.

-Ash

Does the m18x suffer from the same random write issues that the m17x r2 does? I wasnt aware of this. Otherwise, random writes are the same as a desktop - there isnt a reason why they should be different.

Any links for this?

-Ash

Happened to me

But it was my first ssd, 8gb. I thought I was so awesome! Early adopter and all.

Such a scam!

-Ash

Edit: Huuy, if you have windows on the SSD, make sure the page file ISNT on the ssd.

Writing to the drive causes the stutter, so pagefile, temp files, save game, etc will all cause the stutter.

Re: Suttering

This isnt microstutter - microstutter is very very different. Microstutter doesnt actually stutter, so its a bit of a misnomer. Microstutter is when 2 gpu's render their frames too close together, making the output look like almost half of the FPS currently being rendered. This is present on all multi-gpu systems, and can be somewhat rectified with vsync+triple buffer.

What you are experiencing is most probably due to your SSDNOW having interrupt stutter, which happens with all jmicron SSDs. There isnt really a fix for this unless you buy expensive HDD caching software (i forget what it was called) or you toss it out. The whole jmicron generation was junk.

Switching temporarily to a normal hard disk will show this to be the case.

Sorry for your bad luck - whoever sold you the drive, try get a refund.

-Ash

Bulldozer isnt going to impress anyone because it isnt refined.

Bulldozer is a fucking **amazing** jaw dropping design - it is the future of multi chip architecture (it would be perfect if it had intels ring bus tech though...) and the multi core system is amazing.

Only problem is, its revision 1, and any performance hitches in it wont be attacked until further down the track.

With each revision of bulldozer, it will increase in performance drastically. In about 3 revisions, AMD will be at least the same level of performance as intel, and then after that will come out on top again.

For now, intel has reign. In 2+ years, that will end.

-Ash

Ivy is backwards compatible with Sandy bridge chipsets, thankfully, and seeing as CPU's dont have bioses it will work just fine - at worst it will display in the bios as "unknown CPU".

Also, as for my "soon" comment on release, we are looking at a release around the time of bulldozer, so about June 11th for Ivy.

Ivy is just entering mass production now, and intel usually mass produces for about 3-6 months before a release date in order to have enough stock to sell. Rumors are that production speed has been ramped up in order to steal bulldozer's thunder - and this is gonna be devasting for AMD.

Ivy looks to be on average 30-50% faster clock for clock than bulldozer...

-Ash

Alright guys...

Anyone considering a 2920XM should probably hold off on buying it!!!

Intel announces 3D Tri-Gate transistors | bit-tech.net

Check the link.

Intel just dropped a fucking bomb on the microprocessor world. Ivy bridge is gonna drop soon, and will contain a much higher performance increase than originally hinted.

Intel first said the ivy die shrink would be 20% more performance, but this is incorrect as they had an ace up their sleeve.

Ivy bridge will now have a 37% performance increase over Sandy bridge, clock for clock!

Thats nearly 40% boost... that is jaw dropping, and usually only tock implementations have that kind of increase in performance. In engineering terms, this is fucking insane!

My recommendation is get the 2720qm for now, and ebay an ivy XM as soon as it drops!

-Ash

My comparisons were to the r2 - the r3 is significantly smaller than the r2/18. The r2 and the 18 are similar in size.

People should learn to read

-Ash

Second this, cant find it cheap anywhere.

In fact, im actually considering the 2820qm, as I really dont want the loud fan noise from overclocking the CPU that will no doubt occur with that tiny little heatpipe.

Maybe I will upgrade the CPU much, much later third party.

-Ash

Just spoke to dell AU chat: "that product is not yet launched we have no idea on pricing we are fucking retarded etc"

zzzzz

-Ash

Yeah, same as we did in Aus with the 5870m crossfire.

Likely, standard price will be higher but crossfire price will be lower here.

Here's hoping!

-Ash

Alienware M18x Laptop Details

Aussie site has the placeholder up, but cant buy it yet. I am gonna laugh when they announce the price.

Who here wants to bet they ignore the exchange rate?

Exchange rate: 1.10

GST: 10%

Total adjusted price the m18x SHOULD be: 100% of USD

Total adjusted price the ma18x WILL be: 180% of USD

-Ash