Dan on the state of hardware upgrades

[davidstone28]

Just love his laid back Aussie yet cutting style of writing

http://www.dansdata.com/gz041.htm

No suckering into marketing bling for our dan. Top stuff.

[Stoo]

Now that was a good link

I still can't believe anyone is falling for intel's BTX... *cough* cash cow *cough*

[nvening]

btx is great for cooling those toasty prescotts lol. But it is a step in the right direction, do you think intel made it so that there would be a problem with the AMD memory controler? I wonder

[shiato storm]

i rest my case for getting a new AGP and not PCI-e board...

[St3v3]

There are advantages to PCI-E, shame its hard to find a good AMD based one though.

As for BTX, lets ignore it and hope that problem goes away

Intel always change sockets so consumers go out and buy new boards for their CPU's. Intel make a profit cuz they sell the chipsets for them too, so they win either way.

As for DDR2, i dont believe in increasing the latency just for the sake of a few extra MHz. SDRAM to DDR was ok, but DDR2 is going way too far. I say they should make a serial form of memory so that upgrading it only results in a BIOS flash instead of a new slot type. Oh yeah, there was one, but it was extotionate to buy (Silly Rambus)

[Stoo]

btx is great for cooling those toasty prescotts lol. But it is a step in the right direction, do you think intel made it so that there would be a problem with the AMD memory controler? I wonder

But how pointless is that? The Prescot design is an evolutionary dead end as proven by Intel's inability to ship the 4GHz P4, so when we don't go along the "dumb and brute force" route and instead a "cooler and smarter" route, BTX becomes largly irrelvent.

The only thing it'll improve is intel's bank balance, and possibly cause a few headaches for AMD if it is ever adopted as an industry-wide "standard". Which I doubt, because everyone from the motherboard manufacturers to the case manufacturers are against it anyway (can you say "royalty payments"?).

If we all ignore it, it'll go away.. Consumer power and all that

[Stoo]

As for DDR2, i dont believe in increasing the latency just for the sake of a few extra MHz. SDRAM to DDR was ok, but DDR2 is going way too far. I say they should make a serial form of memory so that upgrading it only results in a BIOS flash instead of a new slot type. Oh yeah, there was one, but it was extotionate to buy (Silly Rambus)

Yup, hence why AMD didn't bother with it when it designed the onboard memory controller for the A64.
DDR3 looks a much better prospect, and by the time that becomes common place it won't be such a hassle to integrate into an entirely new chip design (K9/K10 anyone?)

[shiato storm]

plus ddr3 is present on some graphics cards...or am I way off the plot there...?

[nvening]

You do get ddr3 in some graphics yes, but, you also used to get ddr2 before the desktop sort, the point i am trying to get at is that the ddr2 that was used in grpahics cards was quite different to the desktop ddr2 we have today. So its likely to be much the same. While we are on the subject, what is GDDR3?

[Apex]

video ram it's ddr3 tbh just with the g missing

[Stoo]

You do get ddr3 in some graphics yes, but, you also used to get ddr2 before the desktop sort, the point i am trying to get at is that the ddr2 that was used in grpahics cards was quite different to the desktop ddr2 we have today. So its likely to be much the same. While we are on the subject, what is GDDR3?

Yes, and desktop DDR-II is just as flawed as the old GDDR-II was, namely that there is little advantage over DDR-I at a given clock rate, but it will scale slightly higher, but consumes more power and generates more heat.

GDDR3 is being used because it will scale higher than GDDR-II, but it uses less power, and generates a lot less heat.

DDR-II only has a limited shelf life, AMD recognised this with the A64 design, and hence didn't bother with it as it would add more transistors, increasing die size, increasing costs..

[Stoo]

If Rys is around he'll be able to get into the more technical details (although I'm sure he's mentioned them in an article already..)

[starbuck]

the start of that article is soo relevant to what happened recently.

went to upgrade a friends tiny pc. all I wanted to do it was upgrade the std cd writer to a dvd writer. The case was so badly designed and not meant for upgrading that I had to take everything out of the case(PSU, Mobo etc) then fiddle for about half an hour to get the old drive out then install the new one. Does anyone need more reason never to buy a branded pc?

[nvening]

this may be something to do with that name, TINY=BAD

[Stoo]

Actually, some of the Tiny machines weren't too bad at the start if you just wanted a cheap machine for the kiddies to break..
Then they went downhill rather rapidly when they discovered not actually making any profit on machines wasn't exactly a good business plan, hiked the prices up, and cut most of the free support away..

[nvening]

whern't as in the past tense