Sunday, June 16, 2002
Breathe some life into your PC
Posted by Jason Dunn in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 11:59 PM
I tend to think of myself as a fairly serious power user, and I like to have top-tier hardware. The machine I'm currently using (1 Ghz Athlon, 768 megs of RAM) was cutting edge when I bought it last year, but lately it has been looking a little long in the tooth - so I did a few upgrades. A few weeks ago I had a blue screen of death on my Windows XP box, the one that finally edged me into a video card upgrade. When I bought my machine last year, I dropped $500 CND on a 64 meg ATI Radeon card - top of the pack at the time. Since purchasing it, I've been cursing that card daily - ATI has the worst drivers known to man! I finally broke down and bought an Xtasy GeForce 4 MX 440. Not a top of the line GeForce 4 Ti, but I don't play many FPS games, and the price was right with the dual monitor support (and I saw a significant performance increase with screen redraws). Having a card with dual monitor support, it seemed like a shame not to have two monitors, so I picked up a sibling for my 17" Samsung LCD monitor. I highly recommend both the monitor and the video card - superb performance on both, and surprisingly affordable. So now that my machine had excellent visual components, was anything missing? Sadly, yes. 
I've been getting into video editing again (after taking a three-year hiatus), and even with a 1 Ghz processor and 768 megs of RAM, playing some full-resolution DV clips (720 x 480) would bring my machine to its knees - the video would play for a few seconds, sputter, stop, play again, sputter...very frustrating. I was using twin Maxtor 40 gig drives that were screamers at the time, but I felt pretty certain that they were the system bottlenecks. Having read about a new hard drive recently, I knew I had only one choice: get the fastest non-SCSI drive on the planet.
So I picked up a 120 gig Western Digital Special Edition drive. What makes this drive so fast? The secret is in the sauce: a massive 8 meg cache. After installing the drive, my system performance was dramatically different: my un-cached drive speed over the 40 gig Maxtor drives increased by a factor of 10 (I kid you not). System boot time, application load time - everything was radically faster. And keep in mind this is on an XP install that's only two weeks old - I'm running lean and mean with very few apps installed. What about the video you ask? What a difference! My 4 gig video captures play flawlessly - no sputtering or stopping. I haven't been this thrilled about a hardware purchase in a long time - by far the best hardware investment I've made this year.
Best of all? The drive comes in three different capacities (80 gig, 100 gig, 120 gig), and costs as low as $122 online. If you're looking for a boost in overall system speed, get this drive. Don't be fooled by its lack of ATA133 support - it will crush any ATA133 drive on the market and run neck in neck with even Ultrawide SCSI drives. Killer drive, killer price - check it out.
I've been getting into video editing again (after taking a three-year hiatus), and even with a 1 Ghz processor and 768 megs of RAM, playing some full-resolution DV clips (720 x 480) would bring my machine to its knees - the video would play for a few seconds, sputter, stop, play again, sputter...very frustrating. I was using twin Maxtor 40 gig drives that were screamers at the time, but I felt pretty certain that they were the system bottlenecks. Having read about a new hard drive recently, I knew I had only one choice: get the fastest non-SCSI drive on the planet.
So I picked up a 120 gig Western Digital Special Edition drive. What makes this drive so fast? The secret is in the sauce: a massive 8 meg cache. After installing the drive, my system performance was dramatically different: my un-cached drive speed over the 40 gig Maxtor drives increased by a factor of 10 (I kid you not). System boot time, application load time - everything was radically faster. And keep in mind this is on an XP install that's only two weeks old - I'm running lean and mean with very few apps installed. What about the video you ask? What a difference! My 4 gig video captures play flawlessly - no sputtering or stopping. I haven't been this thrilled about a hardware purchase in a long time - by far the best hardware investment I've made this year.
Best of all? The drive comes in three different capacities (80 gig, 100 gig, 120 gig), and costs as low as $122 online. If you're looking for a boost in overall system speed, get this drive. Don't be fooled by its lack of ATA133 support - it will crush any ATA133 drive on the market and run neck in neck with even Ultrawide SCSI drives. Killer drive, killer price - check it out.
