Saturday 17 November 2007

Pic of the day: TERRA, my new all-in-one PC from Multikom. More of all the good stuff! (Picture taken after unpacking but before use.)

Quad & Tera

Now about my new computer. It's quite something, and for such a reasonable price too. It has an Intel Core2 Quad CPU, Q6600 running at 2.39 GHz. That is not exactly a record, there are a couple faster quad-cores out there, and more in the pipeline. But it is still pretty amazing. My yardstick is of course Sims 2, the greatest computer game of all time. Well, so far, but it will take a lot to exceed it. Anyway, as far as playing Sims 2, the game is running rings around the old Monster, and using only around 20% of the processor doing so!

It doesn't hurt that it has 4 GB of RAM, even though the current operating system can only use 3.25 GB. I still prefer XP over Vista, because so many of my online friends have had problems with Vista. It is still 2.25 GB more than I had on the old computer... I have stuck with that for several years now, through three different computers. Having lots of RAM is great if you use several programs at the same time, including the various Windows tasks that run in the background.

Speaking of background tasks, I am now running two instances of Folding@Home, each of them using 25% of the processor capacity. (On average that's one core each, but a look at the graphs show that the computer actually distributes the work among all four cores, so they do almost the same amount of work.) I could probably increase that to three instances of folding, since the computer hardly evers goes up to 75%. On the other hand, running the processors full tilt draws more power, creates more heat, and requires the fans to run more. In winter, converting more electricity to heat is not a problem: I already have an electric space heater with thermostat, so the net effect would be the same. On the other hand, the old monster wore out two fans. The previous North computer also wore out the fan, though it did not stop completely, just make some disturbing noise. That also happened to at least two of the Fujitsu-Siemens machines, one of them overheated to the point of smelling of burned rubber. So I am not keen on packing a full load on the computer just because I can.

Not that the computer seems to be overheating yet. It is not even lukewarm to the touch, and the air that blows out is not painfully hot either, as it used to be on the earlier machine. On the other hand, the free CPUID Hardware Monitor tells me that the temperature in the cores lie around 50-55 degrees Celsius, which is not cool to the touch. (50 degrees is halfway between water's melting and boiling points, which represent 0 and 100 degrees respectively. At around 60 degrees, water is too hot for your hand.) On the other hand, the old computer had a hot spot showing 128 degrees C, or well above the boiling point of water! Presumably this is in the power supply, the same spot that melted in december 2006. Even the outside of the metal chassis is quite hot while it stands in a chilly room with the side panel removed. In comparison, 50 degrees is rather acceptable.

I'll think out ways of stressing the machine in the days to come.

***

Apart from the fast processor and the plentiful memory, there is 1 TB of hard disk. Yep, a terabyte. Thousand gigabytes. A million megabytes. A million million bytes, that's a lot of bytes, each byte representing one letter (or something else with roughly the same information density). Do you remember thinking "who would need a whole gigabyte?" I remember it, perhaps because I had the good sense to journal it. Of course, that was before you could download entire movies (legally and otherwise) in a few minutes, before digital cameras with "megapixels", before computer games where screenshots are indistinguishable from photos. MP3 was new and exciting; today you can download music that is more detailed than a CD.

That said, I am only going to fill up a corner of one of the two disks this year. Still, this feature made me decide to give my new computer the network name TERRA, a wordplay on its terabyte of hard disk. A few days later, of course, the name Terra will become famous as several Norwegian municipalities lose huge amounts of money in a subprime property investment arranged by consultants from Terra Securities. But I don't know that yet at the time I name my computer. November 19 is the day the Terra Securities scandal will explode in the mass media. They should have stayed more down to Earth...

But who cares, I like the name.