Merry Chrimbles everyone, and don’t eat too much this Christmas!
from everyone in Andysworld!
Archive for December, 2012
Merry Chrimbles!
Sunday, December 23rd, 2012New Desktop Computer Part IV:- Complete – 7 TFLOPS
Tuesday, December 18th, 2012it’s been a long and difficult birth for this PC, lots of testing and unknowns, to get this created, but here it is:-
So what does this computer do, well at idle it consumes approx 200 watts (measured) of electricity, at full load, it uses approx 850 watts (measured) of electricity to drive an Intel Core i7 990X Extreme Edition processor, and two nVidia SLI GTX 590 3GB DDR5 RAM, that’s a total of 4 GPUs, and the machine’s number crunching performance is approx 7 TFLOPS. (GPU+CPU combined) The GTX 590 were one of the worlds fastest graphics cards, recently surpassed by the nVidia GTX 690.
Yes, this rig runs very hot, and may need to be water cooled at a later date, or change of case and fans, or radiator based cooling for the CPU, still under testing and development……work in progress!
New Desktop Computer Part III: What is Andy going to do with 48GB of RAM in his Desktop PC?
Sunday, December 16th, 201248GB of RAM in a Desktop PC, that’s a server I here you say, other than virtualisation with VMware Player 5.0 or VMware Workstation 9.0, or Client Hyper-V in Windows 8.0, or Oracle Virtualbox 4.0, it does seem a bit extreme, even the latest games, or Adobe Photoshop, you will be hard pushed to utilise all the memory.
Those that are old enough, once upon a time, in year DOS! we used a driver called – ramdrive.sys, that you could load into system memory, and turn some system memory into a ramdrive. RAM was expensive years ago, and only a few kilobytes or megabytes could be used as a ramdrive, but system access was almost instantaneous.
about eight years ago, a company wrote a ramdrive driver for Windows 2000 for clients, to use as a Windows 2000 profile drive for the storage of user profiles for a large terminal server project, to speed up the logon and logoff of users. I’ve been searching for an updated version since, that works with the modern Windows OS, now I’ve found one.
Now with the cost of memory for desktop PCs falling, the following company DR Dataram have produced a new RAMDisk for modern operating systems, and it’s FREE, and allows you to create RAMDisks up to 4GB, if you want to create RAMDisks larger than 4GB, you will need to part with 18.99 USD! It supports Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012.
Install the software, specify the size
Specify Load, Save and Autosave options
and Hey Presto! you’ve got a ramdrive, out of system memory, and the magic of a ramdrive compared to an SSD, checkout the following benchmarks!
Performance of DR Dataram RAMDisk versus 4 x SATA 3 Kingston 200v+ SSDs in RAID 10
Comparison SSD versus RAMDisk
and for the geeks in the audience, that like IOPS
Comparison of IOPS
Comparison of IOPS - the numbers!
So, this Christmas if you want a fast data disk for your OS, spend your money on RAM for your computer, and bin that SSD (they wear out anyway!)
@ExpertsExchange introduce New Experts Ranks: Ace and Prodigy
Thursday, December 13th, 2012I was quite surprised to receive two emails from Experts Exchange late last night, Congratulations, you have earned a new rank! and noticed my new Eeple (avatar).
Experts Exchange have introduced two new Ranks
Prodigy – 5,000,000 points
Ace – 3,000, 000 points
So, I now have two new ranks,
Prodigy – VMware (the 1st Expert!), Ace – Virtualisation (the 1st Expert!), I also get two new T-Shirts for these as well!
Happy Sound Check Day!
Wednesday, December 12th, 2012Happy Sound Check Day everyone!
hanccocka is hooked on @ExpertsExchange
Wednesday, December 5th, 2012My Bio has recently been published on the Experts Exchange Company Blog
it reads…
Andrew Hancock (a.k.a- hanccocka) first joined Experts Exchange in 2003 at the prompting of another Experts Exchange expert, Richard Quadling.
…
Brother and Sister together at last!
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012
Angus and Tilly, together at last, or the ground is frozen solid, and it’s too cold!
Polytunnel at the Allotments
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012Yesterday, I helped, erect the community polytunnel at the allotments. Mr Mantis helped out as well, and dug the trenches!
for more details see the Allotment Website
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