|
Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-05a
Helping the great unwashed get sloshed with news
Lowel Blender LED array for cameras, camcorders With HD video shooting & editing now the fastest-growing business application for computers, will the portion of the populace pursuing that show an interest in the new Lowel Blender ($650) variable tungsten to daylight LED-array portable light debuting this spring from Tiffen? The answer is maybe, but not because of the light. The light itself is a 4"x4"x3" package that can fit a camera shoe or an optional handgrip, run an hour & a half from a standard camcorder battery, maintain full intensity during that whole time & make it easy to adjust its color temperature by tweaking one knob for tungsten (warm) white brightness, another for daylight (cool) white brightness. Its price is below the price of consumer-level HD camcorders, so while it may be a considered purchase, it won't be a forbidden purchase (per the category's empirical purchasing profiles). The thing that may delay any land rush to buy the Blender is that many of the people shooting video for their businesses are new at it & haven't yet learned how critical good lighting is to getting good results, or how simple this breakthrough light makes getting that to happen. If you know your way around shooting, ask Hilary to line you up with a Lowel Blender light for review. Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x1216 haraujo@tiffen.com http:/.tiffen.com
PNY GTS 250 hits the graphics sweet spot Sometimes feature creep creeps up on our graphics cards when things like running better monitors at higher resolutions or getting pushed hard by games can make an old card cry out for help. The new breed of help for mainstream computer users is the really sweet PNY XLR8 GeForce GTS 250 (street $110-160). There's built-in support for dual monitors & it's SLI-ready for anybody who wants to add even more graphics muscle & more monitors to a system. While there's a lot of muscle to this card (it's 2 PCIe slots wide to accommodate its advanced onboard cooling fan & vent), don't mistake it for a gamer tamer; this is for mainstream users who need a graphics card that will keep up & maybe stay a little ahead of their display capabilities & their software requirements. It's shipping & reviewable now, with a step-up version with 1GB of DDR3 video RAM coming soon; ask Sue. Contact: Susan Bartolucci, PNY (Parsippany, NJ) 973-560-5592 sbartolucci@pny.com http://PNY.com
New Thermaltake ISGC Fan 12 quietly reinvents case fans When it comes to computer case fans, it's cool to be quiet but quiet fans tend not to cool very well. Thermaltake just reinvented case fans with its new ISGC series; the new 120mm (12cm) ISGC Fan 12 (street under $20) debuts at dealers this month. Like most modern case cooling fans, it's driven by a brushless DC motor; unlike most, it rides on a hydrodynamic bearing that reduces noise while bumping life expectancy up to 50,000 hours. The pitch & curve of its 9 blades helps increase air flow by 15% (800-1300rpm spin speeds deliver up to 58.3CFM) while its unique notched outer blade edges reduce noise by 3% (resulting in a quiet 16dBA rating). It comes with vibration-absorbing soft mounts or you can mount it with screws. New Thermaltake CPU cooler products based on this ISGC fan design will be out this summer. If your workspace gets significantly quieter when you turn your computer off, you can understand what might compel a lot of users to swap out their current case fan for an ISGC Fan 12. Ask Ramsom to put one (or more) in your hands & join the ISGC Fan club. Contact: Ramsom Koay, Thermaltake Technology USA (City of Industry, CA) 626-968-9189x127 ramsom.koay@thermaltakeusa.com http://ThermaltakeUSA.com
Twice the giggles with dual GigaLAN While the ECS X58B-A Black Series motherboard offers dual GigaLAN Ethernet connections & most users will only plug into one, it's fun to see what you can do with two. Gamers will often bring in 2 separate WAN connections so they can dedicate one to work & one to play (this reduces their latency when online gaming). Businesses will often arrange WAN connections from 2 different providers (like cable & DSL) to assure maintaining connections even if one or the other should fail. Some users connect to the WAN on one port & to their peers through another so the PC becomes a firewall & router for everyone. This is absolutely a motherboard for people who like to preserve all their options. Ask James. Contact: James Lleverino, ECS/Elitegroup Computer Systems (Fremont, CA) 510-771-0286 james.lleverino@ecsusa.com http://ecsusa.com
Keeping open roads open connections The economy is starting to improve, gas prices are a big improvement over last year & even the weather is getting better but cellular coverage dips are as dippy as ever. There are a lot of little fixes that people can apply as they hit the roads again for whatever reason & the best way for you to help them know about those is to have pros show you the head-to-toes fixes they can install; Point To Point, we should add, offers them all. From improved antennas to booster amps to in-car harnesses to voice-response touch-screen speakerphone car kits to handset docks that both deliver more signal & keep phones charged, even to custom upholstery extensions so the car doesn't look like the work of Frankenstein, they offer it. If there's coverage that can come of it, they can also arrange for one of their installers to get any or all put into your car. Ask Brett. Contact: Brett Haysom, Point To Point Technology USA, Inc. (Viola, DE) 302-284-4721 brett@ptp-usa.net http://www.ptp-usa.net
Counting calories, carbs, fat & protein on one hand Peckish blackberry lovers can devour them by the cupful; it takes a while to eat a whole cup & it only amounts to about 75 calories. Beyond watching their weight with blackberries, healthy eaters can now watch what they eat on a BlackBerry: Calorie Tracker for BlackBerry, developed for Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong.com by BlackBerry Alliance partner Regard Solutions (Steve Beauregard sbeau@regard.com 310-883-2205) is available through App World ($3.99). A user can monitor both calorie intake through food (more than a half million items) & calorie outgo through exercise (more than 2,000 activities); it also tallies carb, fat & protein intake. There's always healthy coverage ahead when you turn to BlackBerry; if you're not using one, ask if Ms. Berry can help. Contact: Victoria Berry, Research in Motion (Waterloo, ON) 519-888-7465x73663 vberry@rim.com http://rim.com
One TuneBug will stand alone TuneBug technology (some licensed from NXT) can make any surface that can carry the vibrations into the soundboard ("cone") of a speaker. So far, we've only been talking about two versions that you plug into audio sources to play them out loud, one of which is designed to place on hard hats or helmets, another that you tote to place on tabletops & such. Much like that totable model, another also includes its own media player, so bottom line, it's the smallest geometric volume for the loudest sound volume that you don't stick in your ear. All 3 debut this summer; ask Dick. Contact: Dick Brown, Silicon Valley Global (San Jose CA) 408-497-6403 dbrown@sv-global.com http://tunebug.com
Special Report: When 10K, SATA versus SAS & HD Sometimes we just have to get geeky. This is about the speed of getting data transfers where hard drives are involved. We need to begin by excluding solid state drives; so officially, this is about where high-density rotating magnetic media are involved. We want to consider the difference that spindle speeds make, with a focus on 7200 versus 10K RPM, but even before we get into that, one possible point of confusion is the path between the drive & the system. The most & mostly ubiquitous standard for that connection is SATA II, capable of 3Gb/sec transfer speeds; SATA 3 with 6Gb/sec transfer speeds is en route to availability later in the year, but in the meantime, there's a 3Gb/sec alternative called SAS, for Serial-Attached SCSI. In the serial realm, since each 8-bit byte also needs a start bit & a stop bit, data words are 10 bits long, so you may see 3Gb/sec also expressed as 300MB/sec (capital B for bytes, lower case for bits). You can plug a SATA drive into a SAS controller (we'll use that term instead of "host adapter"), but you can't plug a SAS drive into a SATA controller. In today's Seagate world, where SAS is considered an enterprise phenomenon, 10K & 15K Cheetah drives are available for SAS but not for SATA. In the WD world, 10K Velociraptor drives are available for SATA & have a 16MB buffer, which can be significant to the math. (At 300MB/sec, it's a 53msec pad, which is ten times bigger than the drive seek times). The buffer can talk to the wire at the full data rate, but the drives aren't fetching the data at anywhere near those speeds. We checked Tom's Hardware for some well-charted transfer rates for various drives, measured in MB/sec. A 7200RPM Barracuda shows average read speeds around 82, write around 81; a 10KRPM Velociraptor scores 102 on both read & write (current SSD speeds are around 90 for read & 70 for write, though the newest SanDisk, OCZ & Patriot Memory SSDs claim 200-240 read & 140-160 write). One factor that affects real-world operations but may not affect test bench drive scores is latency when seeking; since a 7200RPM drive spins 28% slower than a 10K drive, it takes that much longer for a given sector to spin into position; in this context, SSDs latency is negligible. So, in considering SATA II versus SAS, the consideration is really more in the drives than in the bus; either one can handle 3-4 of these drives at their maximum data rate. Applications may be more of a governing factor. Consider HD video: the standard calls for 1080x1920 pixels at a 29.96Hz frame rate. Color data may take 2-4 bytes per pixel, so the total raw data size for uncompressed HD video can run 125-250MB/sec. OK, the ground just shifted; the choice is now how many times faster the video data rate is than the hard drive can handle. In the final step of the HD editing process, called rendering, when the finished video is recorded to disk, an uncompressed 20-minute project can involve 300GB of data, which takes a bit over an hour on the 7200RPM drive, but some 10-11 minutes less on a 10K drive & some 30 minutes less to a spanned pair of the fastest available SSDs (their max capacity is 256GB). All that said, the preference for 10K drives in video editing applications may be less about ratios & more about rationalizing the purchase against a simple desire to speed up everything else on a system, from booting to application loading. Separating video content onto its own drive to keep transfers from being interrupted by main-drive housekeeping chores has a huge effect on rendering times; larger memory pools in a 64-bit O/S does a lot to reduce frame drops when editing; but what's the real effect of a 10K drive choice? It shows up most dramatically when doing long imports or when rendering & can mean saving more than half an hour of transfer time per hour of project length - though at current capacities (300GB for the Velociraptor), longer projects need to be considered in terms of attached array choices rather than simply internal drive choices. One final note: the huge files implied by uncompressed HD video data do not necessarily represent the only file type in a project. Rendering for broadcast or for Blu-Ray, for example, generally involves some level of compression for the final format; this reduces the file writing burden for the drive but places additional workload on the system's CPU & RAM. Also, we absolutely want to make no pretense of this applying to cinematic projects, where pixel density is 4-64 times greater than HD (based on 2, 4 or 8 times as many scan lines in the 2K, 4K or 8K formats).
I7 project: Preparing for the initial software installation When we built our little Atom computer, all it took to format its one hard disk then install the O/S & applications was one click of the menu choice on a CD release of Ubuntu. Our Core-i7 rev-up won't be that simple. One reason is that we have to initialize 2 kinds of RAID arrays, a software-based RAID1 (for the 2-drive C:Main volume) driven from the motherboard & a hardware-based RAID 5 (for the 4-drive E:Video volume) driven from a controller card. We want both the C:Main volume & the D:Backup volume to be bootable. So far, assuming we have some way to get the "F6" raid drivers installed (via attached floppy or a USB drive pretending to be one), this is a straightforward matter of following the instructions & letting these few installations move forward. So far? Let's see if we can anticipate a few problems. As we noted a few issues back, the 64-bit installation of Windows Vista is deliberately intolerant of unsigned drivers. We made a project of creating a folder for 64-bit versions of the drivers for our peripherals, from scanners to printers, graphics cards, handsets, etc. New 64-bit releases of our key applications grew into stacks of packages as the hardware came together; others continue to arrive by download. We created migration file sets for both Windows & Office on a separate eSATA drive. Is that enough? It should be but it almost never is. We still need to document the settings of external things we get into as Administrator, like routers. We're moving from a keyboard with an embedded fingerprint scanner to using a better keyboard & a separate fingerprint scanning pod; while the fingerprint gear is from the same company, there's no migration path, so we have to keep a spreadsheet of links & logins then enter that stuff manually. Even once everything gets loaded, configured anew, personalized anew & looks ready, we still have to configure the choreography of timing for things like nightly to weekly cloning sessions, update checks, malware scans, etc. Despite a significant time investment in preparations, software loading chores take just short of 2 full days. On the other side of that, we can finally road test these systems & report on how close their real-world performance comes to our expectations for them.
Special Report Bonus Review: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P As we've noted elsewhere, the choice of motherboards that a Core-i7 can live on presents a ton of small variations. We asked Gigabyte to let us take a look at their GA-EX58-UD4P, a Socket 1366 board with 6 DDR3 slots, 2 PCIe X16 slots & an X8 for graphics (with SLI & CrossFireX support), an Intel X58 Express Northbridge, an ICH10R Southbridge, Realtek 7.1-channel HD audio & other fairly normal features. It offers 8 rear-panel USB ports plus sockets for 4 more, 3 Firewire ports (1 rear panel, 2 socketed) & PS/2-style keyboard & mouse ports. A rear bracket offers 2 eSATA connectors & a 4-pin Molex power connection. There are 8 SATA II connections (6 from Southbridge & 2 from a Gigabyte chip; a cable connects to the rear bracket) & 1 PATA. Unlike many competitors, this board offers only a single Gigabit LAN connection (which won't make much difference to most users); unlike some competitors, this board has a lot of features that can help overclockers, like a second (backup) BIOS, a clear-CMOS button, a hardware over-Voltage control IC & visible alerts for overvoltage & over-temperature. By policy, we don't overclock & don't engage encryption, so we won't address either. The board is populated with bangle bands of status LEDs for Voltage, temperature, frequency, phase & other overclocking concerns that, barring emergencies, we can forever ignore. The documentation does a wonderful job of specifically identifying each of the 8 SATA ports (something we haven't seen done quite so well elsewhere). The floppy & IDE connectors (we don't use these) are along the edge, which helps route their flat cables out of the air flow. The one PCIe X1 slot can only fit a short card (because a longer card would bump into the DDR3 modules). This is one of the easier motherboards to work with during system assembly, with one of the most helpful manuals. Bottom line: the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard offers an intriguing combination of installation ease, splendid documentation, a full set of well-implemented features & the extra bells & whistles that can set many an overclocker's heart atwitter.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda Seagate has been an awesome supporter of our Core-i7 project, providing a total of 12 of their 500GB drives (4 in each system plus 4 to an external array) & at this writing, our first hands-on (as a box of 8 arrives, with 4 for each system) of their 1.5TB SATA II 3.5" Barracuda drives. We'll get to the drive in a second, but we want to note that each drive also comes with a SATA signal cable, a 4-pin Molex to SATA power cable, 4 mounting screws, a well-written installation guide & an "Internal Hard Drive Upgrade Kit Software & Manual" CD (also includes diagnostic software tools). The spec on this Barracuda 7200.11 drive claims a sustained data rate up to 120MB/sec; this is 15-20% higher than you might expect from other drives, in part because even with perpendicular magnetic recording, this capacity rakes 4 platters to happen. At 7200RPM (120/sec), it can take up to 8.3msec before the sector you want on a given platter spins into place; with random chance on a single platter, that's about 4.2msec, but with 4 platters, it's about 1msec, meaning a seek time response advantage. (Those calculations are for reads; on this drive, read seeks are about 15% faster than write seeks). SATA II NCQ (native command queuing) essentially gives the drive a to-do list instead of waiting for one chore to finish before issuing another, which also adds to what gets done during each spin. At 120MB/sec, the 32MB cache on the 7200.11 drive holds up to 0.26 seconds of data, equivalent to 120 complete rotations of the 4 platters. When not reading or writing, the drive idles at just 8 Watts, significantly less than earlier generations. Its rated MTBF is 750,000 hours or approximately one human lifetime. There's almost no user who will care about any of these specs except 1.5TB SATA II 3.5" when they buy this drive, but specs ain't for nothing. Boots, application loading & most other operations will be noticeably faster & overall system operation a bit snappier. These drives may also be a good choice for users who are only using on the order of a quarter of their capacity today. One reason is reduced head mileage simply because the bits are so much more tightly packed. One reason is reduced power consumption & case heating since the sooner disk activity can end, the more time the drive spends in its idle mode. We should raise a few cautions for those, intrigued by the capacity & speed of these drives, who may want to assemble a RAID 5 array. If we anticipate that actual data rates will average over 100MB/sec, an external 4-drive RAID 5 array can't communicate over an eSATA cable (it would become a bottleneck) & should be an internal array, connecting through a battery-backed embedded processor controller over at least generation 2 PCIe X4. That array would have a 4.5TB capacity, which will create challenges in backing it up (requiring at least 3 of these drives, simply spanned). It's something like giving your teenager the keys to an XKE or Ferrari, but neither algebra nor common sense will prevent an excited gamer from going in that direction. For the rest of us, it's a lot of speed & capacity at a very real price, providing 5 times the capacity of today's biggest 10K drives & accomplishing comparable speeds. Bottom line: the 7200RPM 1.5TB SATA II 3.5" Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive is a marvelous choice for economically taking capacity & delay out of your way in desktop computing.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: MXL FR-400 Boundary Mike Boundary mikes come closest to hearing the way people hear, picking up everything around them, or so it seems; what a boundary mike isn't picking up is any sign of echoes & that's their special power. A boundary mike is designed to be placed on a flat surface, like a floor or a desk or a conference room table, with the mike elements very close indeed to that surface; they are acoustically too close to that surface to pick up its echoes (which mikes on table stands will do all too readily). Boundary mikes are great as a mixed element in stage productions because they help pick up the sounds of props, slaps, footsteps & other stage "business"; they are also a great way to gather all the audio from a meeting table all at once, whether that's to capture news or police interrogations or to send by wire. They're also useful in recording music, even under the lid of a piano. The Marshall MXL FR-400 is a 3-capsule horizontal boundary mike with a wide 120-degree cardioid pattern (so there is a front & back to it, in terms of sensitivity). It needs 48V phantom power at its XLR connection. A tiny bottom switch lets you choose to cut or boost bass or leave the audio flat (our choice); we tried all three & could hear the difference, which may be useful in specific circumstances, but few we ever encounter. In our tests, we tried turning away from the mike & talking to an opposite wall, there was almost no difference in clarity & no perceptible "sewer pipe" effect. The kind of sensitivity & clarity that are a hallmark of this mike also raise a small caution flag: we could hear, in full fidelity, the quiet rear fan on the computer under the table the mike was on. As we said, it pretty much hears everything a human hears. Bottom line: the MXL FR-400 3-Capsule Horizontal Wide-Cardioid Boundary Mike adds important flexibility in any mike strategy, performs extremely well & exhibits levels of sensitivity & acoustic accuracy at a much higher standard than its price would suggest.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: LSI MegaRAID 8704ELP Software-based RAID, even when assisted by gate arrays, pays a toll in decreased array performance & another toll in CPU resource consumption (at times as much as a third of available resources). Full performance in an array really requires a controller with its own embedded processor, its own cache memory pool & its own ability to communicate with the system at full speed. One of the major brands in intelligent controller chipsets is LSI, so we asked them to let us review the LSI MegaRAID 8704ELP card. This is one of the few PCIe X4 cards (requiring generation 2 PCIe on the motherboard) that can handle the necessary data bandwidth with the system; surveying all those X58 motherboards & observing the preferences of people building on them we saw that longer slots tend to get populated by adding graphics cards, so we thought it optimal to find an X4 solution. The embedded processor runs at 500MHz & addresses 128MB of DDR2/667 cache memory. A 4-lane SAS connector on the card lets one breakout cable plug into 4 (SAS or SATA) drives. We wanted to create a RAID 5 array of 4 Barracuda 500GB drives as a dedicated Video works-in-progress volume; since video involves very long files, our configuration calls for wide 1MB stripes. Best practice with these SATA II drives is to enable their cache; for the controller's on-board cache, we select an adaptive read-ahead read policy & a write-back write policy. When RAID 5 arrays use a write-back cache strategy, they are vulnerable to becoming unrecoverable if a power interruption results in the cache not being written to the drive; LSI offers a cure for this in the BBU05 daughter board, with a battery that can maintain the cache contents for up to 3 days, so they can still be written to disk when power resumes. The alternative to write-back cache is write-through cache, which makes data flow dependent on the successful completion of the write-to-drive action, with no buffering; for RAID 5, while it removes a vulnerability to sudden interruptions it does so at a significant performance cost, dropping data flow by a factor of 6:1 to 8:1. For reads, the choices are no read-ahead, standard read-ahead (always reading the whole stripe) or adaptive read-ahead (read the whole stripe only if the previous 2 requests were for sequential sectors; this is recommended). The performance of this card is remarkable, but it comes at a modest cost, with street prices around $500 for both the card & the backup battery daughter board; RAID 5 itself bumps prices, since it means buying 4 drives to serve as one volume, but these costs result in the best possible speed, capacity & safety, so in a work environment, these costs of doing business may be, on balance, negligible. Bottom line: with its backup battery daughter board, embedded processor & remarkable data handling, the LSI PCIe X4 MegaRAID 8704ELP 4-port RAID card grants every wish for accomplishing a very high speed, high-capacity, high-reliability volume that fits inside an otherwise normal desktop computer.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: Master Magnetics Magnetizer We had done something stupid & it wasn't the first time. About one time in ten when we put together a PC, the rear panel grounding strips end up inside one or more of the connectors (especially the RJ45) instead of touching its top. This time we were dealing with a fully assembled mid-tower system already loaded with slotware, drives & everything else before we noticed. Stupid! The only "minimally invasive" way to correct this was to undo the motherboard mounting screws (with blocked vertical paths to about half of them) & the rear brackets on the cards in their slots, slide it all forward half an inch, flip the strips to where they should have been then refasten everything. In the more relaxed, earlier hours of mounting motherboards, we always count on some of the screws sliding underneath & briefly turning the project into a shake & slide mechanical puzzle game. If only, we thought, there was some way for a screwdriver to grip the screw in both directions; we then discovered that our veterancy was creating an outdated, unnecessary prejudice against bringing magnetism inside a computer case. We hit the local hardware store looking for a magnetized long-shank #1 Phillips-head screwdriver; they didn't have individual magnetized screwdrivers. We went to Plan B & left with a new non-magnetized screwdriver with a 6" shank & a Master Magnetics "The Magnet Source" 07224 Magnetizer/Demagnetizer. For a little thing, it's making a major difference. The last time we had to remount a motherboard to fix a grounding-strip gaffe, doing everything took a little over 3 hours & cost a couple of knuckles; this time, start to finish, took about 6 minutes & with not one piece of hardware getting lost or making good its escape & no bodily harm. We now have an excellent screw-gripping screwdriver with a nice, long shank that's perfect for these in-the-case projects. Bottom line: a Master Magnetics "The Magnet Source" 07224 Magnetizer/Demagnetizer should have been in our tool kit years ago.
Minority whip One of the effects of being wowed with woe is that people with little to fear get scared & start behaving as if a threat down the street is meant for them, too. It's news to report that unemployment is topping 10% but dwelling on that can make 70-80% of the population afraid of it. Statistically, 10% unemployment - a relatively small if unfortunate minority - means that 9 out of 10 people are still working & can still afford to buy things; alas, a strong & repeated focus on that statistic whips the majority of people into hunker-in-the-bunker responses. Just about all of those people are consumers but don't forget, some of them are also advertisers; even before declining consumer confidence affects sales, advertisers respond to their own fears by cutting spending. These days, those people you reach are thinking less of us versus them & more in terms of them now, us next. You know that as well as anybody because broadcast & print journalists are in our third & fifth (respectively) overlapping recessions. We're not suggesting that you sugar-coat your coverage; we will remind you that depending on the weather forecaster's attitude, the same sky can be partly cloudy or mostly sunny. Keep your coverage balanced, but keep in mind that it can scare people. Contact: Martin Winston, Newstips (Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com http://Newstips.com
# # #
Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
|