Hi there! You’ve found my personal blog for all things generally of interest to me (Darren Tipton) and probably not many others. I have a wide range of interests from Blogging, Web Development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Software Development, Photography, Growing Veg, Gardening, Fishing & Cycling to name but a few. I’ll put the odd post on here if I can think of anything half useful to comment on.
Every now and again I get somewhat itchy feet and have to tinker with some new PC hardware. My normal PC (Athlon64 X2 6000+) was running fine, but I need a bit more oomph to handle some video processing I expect to be doing. The Athlon machine is three years old and I have plans for it as a media server so all is not lost. The current Athlon machine is also somewhat noisy, so there was some important considerations for designing the new machine.
Before building the new machine it was worthwhile taking some benchmark figures from the Athlon system these are compared below.
Handbrake – Open Source Video Transcoder
The Phoronix Test Suite – Which is an open source benchmarking system compatible with openbenchmarking.org which allows comparisons of data from anyone who has submitted benchmark data.
After lots of reviewing of components and various benchmarks the following components list was selected. There are some key points here.
Althoughy 16GB of RAM may be considered a little excessive, to run a web/ftp server, Windows XP and a 64bit built of Ubuntu simultaneously its kind of needed. The memory used for this is Corsair Vengeance Low Profile memory (1.6GHz @ 1.5v). Due to the use of an aftermarket heatsink (which was you can see from the photo’s is not small), low profile memory was selected, as the fins on the “normal” memory would have meant 16GB (4 x 4GB) sticks would not have been possible to fit, even though the motherboard can take it.
Normally, I would drop a grade or two of processor here and go with more RAM as for me this tends to be the bottle neck with a system needing to hit the swap space. However, as we have lots of RAM getting the right processor was important. The second generation Core i7 2600k @ 3.4GHz was interesting here. Not just because of it’s 4 cores but also due to Hyperthreading which to Ubuntu 64bit Linux build that is being used looks like 8 processors and being 64 bit it can happily make use of all the RAM and resources that can be thrown at it.The processor also has a “Turbo” where based on the temperature of the cores and resources needed, it can itself overclock to boost performance (in the stock configuration to 3.8GHz).
The “k” at the end of the part number indicates it is an unlocked processor meaning overclocking is possible. There are many blogs on the web talking about easily overclocking this processor to 4.5GHz or more which may be an interesting piece of work in the future.
Graphics wise, there was no serious need for a “beefy” graphics card as the systems main aim is not gaming. The Core i7 processor itself includes an Intel HD3000 GPU on its own silicon which can be made use of on the motherboard. However this does apparently use some of the thermal budget on the chip and also makes use of the system RAM. As I also want the possibility of dual booting with Windows 7 for some gaming, a separate moderately specified graphics card was included. As the PC will hardly ever be rebooted, the nice boot speed of an SSD was not considered here and the 1TB drive installed gives enough headroom for current data requirements.
Of the components I normally skimp on, it would be the case and the PSU. Although my last experience this area has taught me the case, PSU and processor heatsink/fan combo contribute most to noise. Investment in the Fractal Design case which comes with 2 x 120mm fans here was a good choice. This case is one of the best engineered cases I have ever seen, complete with removable dust filters for the fans and noise absorption material. The large fans mean they spin slowly getting alot of airflow but without the noise. The case is large enough for future expansion and its hard drive bays do not need you to remove screws to remove the drives. Very neat.
Fractal Design Define R3 Black Pearl Case
Antec TruePower New 650W Modular PSU
Asus P8Z68-V LX Socket 1155 Onboard graphics output 8 Channel Audio ATX
Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache
Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver
Be Quiet Dark Rock Advanced C1 Cooler
Corsair 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz Vengeance “low Profile” Memory Kit CL9 1.5V
Sapphire HD 6770 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E Graphics Card
Seagate 1TB 3.5″ Barracuda SATA-III 6Gb/s
LG GH22NS70 22x DVD±RW SATA Optical Drive
| Testcase | Athlon64 X2 6000+ 3GHz |
Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz |
| Handbrake | 28fps | 340fps avg, >400fps peak |
| pts/LAME | 27s | 13.7s |
| pts/x264 | 21.5 fps | 143.0 fps |
| pts/7zip | 3,587 mips | 19,991 mips |
I’ve spent alot of today playing with Ubuntu and Unity, I noticed that when Zooming in, the graphics tore and windows where slow to drag. I found this on the Ubuntu forums which seems to do the trick and make it super smooth.
A variant of this seems to work as below just change the Compiz settings
Link to: Original information on Ubuntu Forums
Ubuntu really opened up Linux again for me, but since getting 11.04 (Natty) working well for me with Unity I’ve read many posts regarding Unity vs Gnome Shell. Both of which change the way the desktop works quite significantly and for some people not in a good way. Almost changing the desktop to work like a netbook. If you have lots of screen space, why would you want to do this?
This leads to then the possibility of looking at other solutions and finding out that there are other desktop environments such as XFCE, LXDE even with an Ubuntu based distribution or using other distro’s and modifications / extensions to Gnome Shell such as Linux Mint. With Linux it becomes very easy to “distro hop” as you find a feature in one distro that you like and simply move over.
With Windows and Mac this almost doesn’t happen. The choices for the OS are fairly limited to “Do you want Windows or Mac OS and maybe 32bit or 64bit choices for Windows.” There’s not alot else.
For me a PC is about getting work done and achieving the day to day tasks, the PC should help me to do that. If an OS is sitting in the way of doing that, its not so productive and where an OS can be customised so heavily and the options / flavours available are so diverse does this not just lead to a problem of what you should choose? Certainly for a corporate environment, where would an admin start in specifying an OS for all employees in a company.
At my next change I think I’ll be giving Xubuntu a spin, right now Unity is doing an OK job, but I just don’t like having to type in names of apps I am looking for. It just doesn’t seem right.
For as long as I can remember owning a PC I have experimented with Linux in its various guises. Mainly as an alternative to the mainstream Windows, a way to get my work done and with the hope the different OS may use the hardware I have more efficiently or at least appear faster. My first encounter with Linux was Red Hat some 15 years ago now.
At the time I was running the 16 bit, Microsoft Windows 3.11 on top of MSDOS and was fedup with the constant “page faults” it would throw. However, Linux was it then just didn’t seem to cut it as a desktop OS that almost anybody could pick up and use. Importantly for me, I just needed to get my work done which typically involved typing essays and assignments for school and college. Now I am more interested in writing the odd blog post and checking email, surfing the web. For the last 18 months I have been happily using Linux to do all these things. I’ve even got my wife using it and she’s normally a strictly Windows only PC user!
Below are some of the main topics and questions I came across when deciding to go Linux and make the switch and may help any other prospective user.
A distribution is a collection of software and applications built around the central Linux Kernel. Linux is like Lego. Distributions can be build to fit any particular application or requirement.
Some popular distributions are:
There are others, but the list is very long and its worth taking a look at Distrowatch.com
Yes, of all the distro’s I tried there are Live CD’s which will run direct from the CD on booting your PC. There is the option to install right next to your Windows install either on a seperate partition of the same hard disk or even as an application inside of windows that can be added / removed through the Add / Remove Programs Control Panel menu. This is done via WUBI.
All this really helps as firstly you can get some confidence the distribution will work with your hardware before letting Linux take over your system. I ran Linux next to my Windows install for about three months before installing Linux on it’s own and have never looked back. It works with all my hardware so far without the need to download any special drivers. The operating system just detects everything.
Many modern PC’s (even the Netbook I am typing this on) have processors that are capable of 64 bit operation. In the past 64bit Linux has had problems due to being seen as new technology. Also companies did not have 64bit builds of their applications. 64bit operating systems can address more memory natively and have larger registers on the processor.
In theory they can operate much faster on code optimised for 64bit. For the majority of applications the user may not notice any difference compared to 32bit although for applications such as Music or Video editing / encoding or if running a server this can make a big difference. This blog post from Phoronix from 2009 seems to be the most referenced benchmark.
Happily, many of the issues seem to be resolved in most cases including for the operating system being able to run 32bit code where it is needed.
When I switched to Linux, I decided that a direct switch to 64bit may be a good idea. The only way the situation for 64bit would improve is if people use it. I’m happy to say I’ve tried and run both 32bit and 64bit over a number of months and not noticed any issues. My experience now of 64bit is that is just works, as you would expect it to. If you have lower specified hardware (my wife’s netbook for example) it will happily take the 32bit version.
Yes, much easier than Windows in many cases and if you don’t want / need a 3D enabled desktop just choose a lightweight desktop such as LXDE or XFCE which are designed to be light and fast and work well on lower specified machines.
There are several and as mentioned earlier, Linux is like Lego. In many cases you can just install a different desktop and get along. Personally I’ve been getting along well with Unity from Ubuntu. I’m not a Linux power user, I just read / write email, write documents normal office tasks and edit web pages. It just works. From what I gather, Unity was developed as a Netbook interface but has since become the mainstream desktop for Ubuntu.
There seems to be a constant debate on the internet about Gnome Shell vs Unity for me, I couldn’t really care less. I need a machine that is stable, I hardly ever need to reboot, I can write documents on, communicate even do the odd bit of video editing. Ubuntu and Unity allows me to do that. I’m sure other distros do too and I’ve been using Linux Mint in a virtual machine for a while also, and I’m very impressed. For me, stability rules right now. When the next LTS release is available I will give it a go or may switch even to something that is proven to work time and time again (Debian?).
There are so many choices with Linux. What is right for one person may not be right for another – but the beauty is the choice or build your own!
On 24 Sept I headed over to Richmond Park to see what was going on. There was a possibility that I could have been a little early as I believe it was the first weekend of the rutting season. As you can see from last year there was certainly some action.
This year there was some patterns though. Firstly, the large big males seem to already have their ladies sorted out very early. I don’t know if this always happens (may have to do some reading up here) and secondly, any antler action was mainly between the younger juveniles testing their wares. Maybe things get a bit more tense mid to end of the season as males left without mates try to break up hierarchies already set. Who knows, anyway here’s a few shots I took early on a foggy, Saturday morning.
