Category: Computer bits

Over at AnandTech, they take a look at the triple-SLI graphics configuration made possible with nVidia’s newest 780i chipset. Three GeForce 8800 cards in one box. That’s some serious drool inducing graphics processing power. Minimum power supply specs? A whopping 1.1 kW! That’s more than most microwaves ovens in the average kitchen.
According to the power consumption tests they did, the system draws a little over 400 W just idling and over 700 W under load playing Bioshock.
Ok, it’s a pretty extreme configuration that probably doesn’t appeal to anybody except the most hardcore of gamers (and maybe the number-crunching performance junkies out there). What do normal people need with three GPUs in a system anyway. If you’ve got one of these, you’re not going to be doing anything else with it anyway because there’s no room left for any other PCI/PCIe cards.
I bet a fully outfitted system would be pretty cool for doing 3D word (wicked cool gaming too of course), but would probably cost as much as a small car. I think I could have some fun with one. Will 3x SLI catch on? Outside of the small niche market of hardcore gamers and performance junkies I doubt it. With nVidia’s CUDA though, it might appeal to number crunchers looking for supercomputer-class processing in a (relatively) cheap desktop solution.
I wonder if a generator will be listed as an option…

My computer at home picked yesterday to decide that the only bootable device it had was the floppy drive. Not sure what’s going on, but no amount of cajoling, bribery or tinkering in the BIOS was able to get it to see anything other than the floppy drive as a bootable device. The BIOS is recognizing all the drives, just doesn’t let me choose any of them as a boot disk. Darned thing won’t even boot off a CD either.
On the plus side, it boots up just fine from floppy.
Time for some intensive troubleshooting. I have a feeling I’ll have to accelerate my plans to replace this computer and get a new one much sooner than I planned. I was really enjoying the Powerleaped CPU too. It’ll be really disappointing if I can’t get the computer up and running again.
Maybe I can just get a new motherboard off EBay.
Update: I was able to boot up another computer using my boot drive, so I think something on the motherboard finally gave out.

Or, Why I Need a Bigger Hard Drive
Shortly after the wedding, I wanted to convert our wedding video from VHS to something digital, so I bought a video capture card to stick into the computer. Knowing digital video takes up a lot of space, I also added a 160GB hard drive to the system as well. Did an ok job, but I soon discovered that the 1.5GHz processor in the computer was a little underpowered for video stuff making for occasional spotty captures and long rendering times. Had fun capturing videos of stuff with it though, and managed to get a few seasons of Good Eats archived away as MPEGs on CD.
Then the card languished for a while and got removed to make room for a 5 port USB card. Earlier this year I finally Powerleaped the computer and decided to dust off the video capture card. Took out the modem to make room (finally got DSL, so didn’t need that anymore) so now I can start capturing again.
Of course in the interim, stuff got put onto the 160GB hard drive, so now I need another hard drive to store the AVI files on. It’s going to have to be an external one because I’m out of molex power plugs inside the case. I’m not sure the power supply in my computer has enough to power another device anyway. Fortunately there’s the Firewire port to plug into. The 750GB external drives have been coming down in price pretty rapidly, so I’ve got my eye on those. That should definitely give me more than enough room to keep me video capturing for a while.
Working on making a DVD of a recent talk given at the last Lab Club meeting. Next up I’m going to recapture the wedding video.

Fedora 8 is out which means it’s time to upgrade radinfo from FC 6 and stick in that new 250 GB hard drive for some added capacity. It’ll mean a few hours of downtime, but it’s a much needed upgrade.

So here’s the plan:

• Install the new hard drive
• Install Fedora 8 to the new drive from the LiveCD
• Boot off the new drive
• Reinstall the required packages
• Restore stuff from the original drives

Should be a piece of cake.

Given my past record, it will be a piece of crumbly concrete cake.

So my weekend was spent backing up the Franken-computer at home so I could reformat and reinstall Windows to see if it would help with some performance issues I was having. Not sure it helped with performance, but I got rid of a lot of crap collecting on the system.
Took most of Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday to get all the essential software installed off CD or downloaded, along with moving a few things back and forth between drives so the backup files weren’t fragmented into a billion pieces (and thus causing everything else to fragment into more chunks on that drive).
Still have a few things that need to be re-installed, and stuff from the PDA that needs to be restored to the computer. Should have the computer back to a usable state after today.
Bleh.