Belated birthday present

[plonq]

It's here! It's here!

Mostly.

The two packages that they sent by Purolator are here, but they shipped the power supply by Canada Post, and it has not arrived yet. Its last status shows as "Item out for delivery" at 7:47 this morning, so it should be showing up at any time. With luck I will have a new, functioning computer before the day is out. I have an evening of joy and heartache all lined up for me now. Assembling the hardware is fun, but installing and configuring the software is tedious. On the plus side, all of this equipment is new enough that drivers should not be an issue.

The really fun part is going to come later when I try to recover all of the data off the old RAID0 drives. I am going to leave that part until this weekend when atara is at work, since it will involve partly disassembling her computer. Short of tracking down somebody with the same motherboard as my dead one, I think our best chance for recovering the data is plugging the disks into her machine, since it is based on a newer version of the same nVidia chip set.

I had originally been looking to build a virtual clone of atara's new computer, but I changed out for the Intel quad core chip at the last minute. I don't really expect to see any better performance with that CPU, but they were offering free shipping on the whole order if I went that way, so I plugged my nose and jumped from AMD back to Intel again to save some money.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

The jump from single core to dual core with the core2duo truly doubles your computing power because you have a combined cache between the cores. Going quad gives only another 16% boost because the caches are not combined, thus the data all the cores work on has to be shared via the Ram (which is already much slower than the CPUs and a bottleneck). Most people won't notice significant change between dual and quad.

Now when Intel or AMD has 32Mbyte of L2 reaching all cores equally and four SDRAM channels, you'll see serious swiftness. But that's 2 years away.

[kfops.livejournal.com]

There's just something about a dancing chicken that makes the whole day seem better.

[atara.livejournal.com]

I think he did that because I'm brining a chicken for dinner tonight. :)