Brenda's new car

After my wife has had so much enjoyment and reliability out of out ten year old Ford Mondeo Zetec 2 litre Automatic we decided it was time to replace it. Of course we chose another Ford Mondeo 2 litre Automatic but the only option was the top-of-the-range Titanium X Sport with turbo in the guise of Ford's new technology petrol EcoBoost engine.

This just under two year old example was found in nearby Southampton and after the AA had done its checks and vehicle inspection which came out as perfect, I picked it up today. She is really pleased with it. And I am too, as the depreciation on these is quite steep so we got a lot of car for our money and with only 10,000 miles on the clock.

The performance and comfort levels are much improved over the previous Mondeo model and with all the added extras as well. The car also has a good reputation for reliability too. Now, all I have to do is sell the old one. There seem to be a lot of time-wasters in the second-hand car market!

Modular power supply trial

I've never used a modular power supply. In fact, I haven't purchased many large output PSUs over 600W. Most of the gaming systems that I build from scratch have a single graphics card with only one PSI-E power connector. So, when I started to think about upgrading my system, other factors like efficiency and modular cables seemed to more important.

I selected the Corsair CX500M for just £50 as a good way to evaluate whether I want to include these factors and other benefits into my future system builds. I've used the Corsair CX430 quite a few times without any problems and though the CX430M (modular) was a contender, spending just £7 more for the extra power seemed wise. Though with modern CPU and graphics card power requirements declining, the smaller would also be a valid choice.

I'll report back if it is a spectacular success or dismal failure. I will not be posting an unpacking video on Youtube however!

Laptop replacement drive options

A customer has a fairly modern budget laptop which has a failing hard disk drive. He wanted to know what the options were for replacing it. He is running Windows 7 Home 64-bit and has a reasonably large photo collection. He complains that his laptop is slow, perhaps party because of occasional disk read errors.


I thought about his requirements and came up with the following list of options:
1) a standard hard disk drive (5,400rpm, 500Gb) is just £60
2) a faster hard disk drive (7,200rpm, 500Gb) is £85
3) a super fast, lower capacity solid state drive (120Gb) is £110
4) a super fast, higher capacity solid state drive (240Gb) is £180
5) a super fast, high capacity solid state drive (500Gb) is £360
6) a hybrid SSHD (500Gb) for just £100

It is more of a compromise of performance versus capacity. The laptop that I use is option 3 which only contained selected pictures that I’ve taken in the last couple of years. The majority or ‘archive’ of my photos are available elsewhere and completely backed up and secured. That way I enjoy a fast laptop with a limited amount of recent photos that I would want to work with and show people without the burden of have to backup much greater quantities of data files and potentially loose it all if my laptop were to crash or be stolen, etc.

So it is trade-off, either: change your way of working and enjoy better performance; spend a lot of money to keep the performance and archives; or continue as you are and live with it. Obviously your budget is also a factor.

How many photos do you have? How big in Gb is your photo archive? How many do you intend to take in the future? Do you intend to change you camera to a better model? Do you delete the not so good photos? Many factors are involved and only the user can answer these questions.

Luckily the data storage options today are varied (SD-card, USB memory stick, USB mobile disk drive, hard disk drive, network attached storage, home server, cloud storage etc.) are relatively cheap. I work with them all to enable my photos to be removed from my camera, edited, stored and archived, distributed to various devices and made available for people to view, enjoy and comment.

The new technology is the SSD hybrid drive. Basically the access speed of an SSD with the storage of a hard disk drive. The SSD part holds the most recently used files with much faster response time. Windows boots quickly as do the commonly used software applications like your photo editor. However loading the actual photo (assuming it hasn’t been viewed recently) takes the usual time. As these are brand new devices there are no reliability figures, but the manufacturer (Seagate) had been in the hard disk drive business for ages. The PCpro article in my last post showed that the SSHD is a reasonable performance/capacity compromise.

I've ordered an SSHD for the customer, and it'll be the first one I've used. I'll post the results here soon.

How fast a PC do you REALLY want?

PCpro magazine published last month (July 2013) a very interesting article under the above title. They tested similar PC configurations with variations in CPU (single, dual and quad core), memory (single and dual channel, fast and slow, capacity, etc.), disk drives (old, modern, hybrid and SSD) plus interconnects (USB2, USB3 and Thunderbolt).


These tests included their Real World benchmark plus common tasks such as copying folders, restarting Windows and loading game levels. It was a very interesting read and they certainly dispelled a few technical myths and confirmed many of my suspicions about modern hardware configurations. For example:

• great performance increases as you increased the CPU core count, but Hyper-Threading had little impact
• 4Gb of memory is the new 'sweet spot' for performance gains and dual channel and fast memory shows little impovement
• reboot of Windows is not a great test on overall system performance; 2Gb reboots just as fast as 4Gb
• laptop and old desktop HDDs are slow; modern 7,200rpm HDDs are much better but SSD is the way to go
• USB 3 with an SSD drive is blazingly fast.  The future of backups?

Unfortunately this article is not available online (yet?) but it makes a fascinating read.   The last interesting fact is from the overall system comparison; the Lenovo Atom-powered, Windows 8 tablet took a crippling 39 minutes to reboot Windows compared to the self-built gaming system's 23 seconds.

A vast improvement

I recently negotiated a good discount on what is the fastest DELL system that I have ever bought. The Vostro 270 mini-tower comes with a Intel i5-3470 quad core processor. Though not considered a high-end CPU, this 3.2GHz (turbo boost up to 3.6GHz) appears in responsiveness and benchmarks (PCmark7 4,811) to be much faster than the dual core 3.3GHz Intel i3-3220 model (PCmark7 2,792), which is considered to be a good budget gaming processor. The £50 price difference is probably well worth it.

There are two flies in the ointment:

• Intel has just released its latest 'Haswell' successor to the 'Ivy Bridge' i5-3470. The i5-4570 3.2GHz offers slightly better performance with lower energy usage. DELL has already introduced these into its premier XPS 8700 and Optiplex 9020 lines but with a hefty price premium over the £25 that just the CPU price difference would indicate. Presumably these processors will migrate to the mid-range Vostro models in the course of time.
• The 'balance' of the gaming system is probably affected. If you spend and extra £50 on the CPU you should also spend £50 extra or more on the graphics card. But the DELL supplied 300W PSU is then proably too weak and doesn't have the extra PCI-EX graphics card power connection that would be required.

All things considered, this is a very good bang-for-the-buck upgrade.

Fixing the fastest

It started with a customer wanting his modern but exotic Cyberpower PC being configured to boot Windows from the Crucial m4 SSD (after upgrading the firmware) instead of using it as a disk cache. I then spent twelve hours, excluding food and football, trying to get it to boot from that SSD.

I started by removing the large nVidia GTX590 video card so that I could get to the SATA ports. The temporary replacement card allowed me better access but the screen refused to show the UEFI BIOS. I tried a DVI/VGA adaptor and another card and was finally only able to see it when attached directly to the monitor with VGA. The the mouse and keyboard worked in the UEFI screens but when I started to install Windows 7 they ceased to function. I tried another keyboard and mouse, there was no PS/2 socket and it wasn't until I noticed a couple of USB 2 sockets hidden high on the I/O panel that the problem was solved.

However, Windows install didn't recognise the SSD drive. It tried it in another computer and it worked fine, detected and formatted. Still not available for Windows install in the Cyberpower, either in SATA 3GBps or 6GBps. I substituted a spare HDD and was able to install easily onto that, plus added all the necessary drivers. I thought that I could clone the HDD onto the SSD on my data recovery system but though three programs showed the SSD to copy from, they all apart for True Image 2013 Trial (costs £40) would not let me copy to the SSD. I started looking at partitioning, reducing the size of the HDD partition to match. I noticed that the HDD was GPT partitioned whilst the SSD was MBR. I reformatted the SSD as GPT but still the cloning wouldn't work.

Replacing both drives back into the Cyberpower, the Windows install finally saw the SSD but would not allow me to select it giving an error (0x80300024). Research on this error showed that it won't install if there is another device with Windows already installed on it present. Removing the HDD solved this and finally after twelve hours, I was able to install and boot the system into Windows from the SSD. Completing the installation with updates and programs was easy.

I the decided to benchmark the system which has an Intel i7-3960X processor, initially the fastest Sandy Bridge E CPU at 3.3GHz. With 16GB DDR3 memory the performance was incredible. I was then able to overclock the system to what I thought was a safe 4.2GHz. The PCmark 7 of 6,104 was over twice my gaming system at 2,588. I respected this system as the fastest PC in the world, but a real pain to configure. It is big, bright, noisy and fast but way too expensive and fragile.

A quality gaming system for £250

DELL recently had an offer that if you bought a Vostro 270 desktop, you could purchase another one for half-price. So I bought two systems each with an Intel i3-3220 3.3GHz processor, 4Gb memory and 500Gb hard disk plus Windows 8 Professional for just £400. Obviously, this offer isn't for everyone unless you have a friend who also wants a cheap, basic system. [It has since expired.]

I expected DELL to cancel my order, but they arrived this morning. After installing Windows 8 (never a pleasant experience), I was pleased to discover that this was a fast, well-built system that just needed a good graphics card. I used a £50 Asus HD 6670 with 1Gb GDDR5 memory. This card does not require an extra power connection and with DELL's 300W quality power supply, I felt that this would be a good choice. Also the GDDR5 memory alleviates somewhat the HD6670's poor memory bandwidth. It is much faster than the commoner DDR3 versions.

This ends up as being a really good mid-range gaming system (Windows Experience 7.2, 5.9, 7.0, 7.0, 5.9) that is able to handle most modern games, even though you might have to lower the detail levels slightly. And all for just £250 including VAT and delivery! An obvious upgrade would be an SSD drive.

I challenge the DIY system builders to configure a better, faster system that includes Windows 8 and perhaps even the two years next day warranty.