HotHardware's Two and A Half Geeks Webcast - May 23, 2012

The World of Flash-Based Storage: A New Memory Tier

We've spent a lot of time talking to manufacturers of SSDs, OEMs, and especially PCI Express base SSD guys. And one thing that's become clear is their focus on caching - it's a key aspect of what they do, and it's fascinating to see how they view flash as another memory tier. When you think about hard drives operating in milliseconds access times, or DRAM/system memory operating in nanosecond access times, there's a significant disparity between those two. That's where flash-based storage comes in - it bridges that gap by providing an additional scratch pad for the system to draw on, resulting in lower latency.

The Implications of Flash-Based Storage

This concept is what fusion-io coined as "PCI-Express based SSDs as another memory tier." It allows systems to tap into flash-based storage as a separate memory layer, effectively increasing the speed and responsiveness of the system. This is particularly interesting when you consider how hard drives operate in milliseconds, while DRAM or system memory operates in nanoseconds. By integrating flash-based storage into the mix, systems can access information much faster - think milliseconds instead of seconds.

Fusion-io's Take on Flash-Based Storage

The folks at fusion-io have been instrumental in popularizing this concept. They've demonstrated how a well-designed caching layer can significantly improve system performance by providing a buffer between slower storage and faster DRAM or system memory. This approach is gaining traction across the industry, with companies like Corsair, Crucial, and others exploring ways to integrate flash-based storage into their systems.

The Intersection of Flash-Based Storage and Caching

Caching plays a critical role in this strategy. By placing frequently accessed data in fast flash storage, systems can reduce latency and improve overall performance. This is particularly important for applications that require rapid access to information, such as databases or streaming services. As we move forward, it's likely that we'll see even more innovative uses of flash-based storage, further blurring the lines between traditional memory tiers.

The Tegra 3 Spring Sweepstakes: A Fun Contest

On a lighter note, we've got an exciting contest to announce! The winners of the Tegra 3 spring sweepstakes with NVIDIA will be receiving some fantastic prizes - including a Transformer Prime and Acer Iconia Tab A510 tablet. There are 22 grand prizes up for grabs, and we'll be announcing the winners soon. Stay tuned for more details on this fun contest!

Tablet-Based Contests: The Future of Giveaways

We're not done with contests just yet! In the weeks ahead, we'll be launching another tablet-based contest, featuring some amazing hardware from NVIDIA and friends. This is shaping up to be a fun way to engage with our audience and get people excited about new tech. We can't reveal too much just yet, but trust us when we say it's going to be worth keeping an eye on.

Final Thoughts

That's all for today, folks! We've covered some fascinating topics in the world of flash-based storage and caching. If you want to learn more, head on over to HotHardware.com or check out our social media channels (youtube.com/hothardware, facebook.com/hothardware, twitter.com/hothardware). Until next time, stay geeky!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: encoming up on this episode of two and a half geeks we're going to take a nice long look at AMD Trinity is this the ivory bridge killer no not really and then we're going to take a look at in nvidia gtx 670 and maybe people look at a giant monitor talk a bit about contests and maybe just a little bit more possibly likely next the far didn't set wicked fast has rocked in the benchmarks we're going to up the ante a little bit processing power and kinder understanding welcome back to tune up geeks am i as actor alongside Dave altavilla and Marco Chiappetta are you guys doing fantastic and you are a good friend i am doing less than fantastic how about you Marco I'm doing alright i'm missing katherine jenkins shaker thing on the dance floor to record this but you know such is life well you sir are clearly yeah you you're sacrificing for the greater good because yeah the audience wants to know all kinds of things they want to know your opinions on stuff and that's way more important than you watching something you probably dvr'd it's amazing they want to know the true yes they want to know and in meinen them maybe we can somehow tie this to the trinity i can't at all i'm just going to jump to the AMD trinity is out of the you guys had a review of the 810 4600 em now this is supposed to be AMD's answer to ivy bridge intel showed up with that number was like it's over it's over anybody's like no it's not please we still exist we're good we got something awesome and from what i understand thanks to hot hardware you guys actually broke down exactly how much of the processor or the APU is dedicated to graphics how much of its actually doing dedicated to the cpu how did the AMD apu the trinity do about is you would expect with more real estate carved out to the graphics processor engine that the GPU inside the radeon 7600 series graphics that's on board it performed a little bit better in games and got blown out of the water and cpu-based you know standard compute workloads to put it mildly so but these these particular processors i'm going to guess or maybe a little tiny bit cheaper than the intel one so you might not be getting crazy cpu performance but do you necessarily even need something like that if you are a gamer you are well or or even if you're not a gamer and you hit the nail on the head is how much CPU throughput do you need and how much graphics and multimedia throughput do you need and that's kind of the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question when it comes to the applications that a chip like the the Trinity 810 processor you know what that will be installed in and so you think about this and the a 1040 600mm is what we looked at it is a fork or a quad-core chip with integrated graphics 384 radeon cores on board at 686 megahertz top end and the CPU side is a base frequency of two point three gigahertz to a turbo core speed of 3.2 gigahertz so this ship belongs in a notebook and it's really a sort of a standard mid-range design I wouldn't say necessarily an ultra light and but it is absolutely you know something that's a very capable chip for for most mobile applications you know you think about your your classic 14 and 15 inch machine maybe even a 70 17 inch excuse me a multi medium machine definitely enough cpu horsepower for most end-users and very capable in terms of gaming and multimedia performance actually played some you know dx11 titles at playable frame rates you know games like batman arkham city even some of the directx 10 the sort of last generation game titles like just cause 2 and far cry 2 now you're talking about you know frame rates in the 45 to 50 frames per second so really is enough cpu and GPU well depends on what you need certainly Intel's ivy bridge processor that we looked at you know a few weeks back takes this thing behind the woodshed in just about every CPU benchmark you can throw at it but there's enough cpu horsepower we think for the mainstream and you're talking about a price delta in the average notebook of a few hundred dollars so the average a 10 based multimedia notebook is probably going to be in the five to six hundred dollar price range whereas the average Ivy Bridge notebook you know sort of a similar sku quad core skew is probably going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred dollars more you know based on Intel technology so you know it really depends on how much you want to spend and what you're going to do with it if pricing is the option here was that's the actual issue that is would it make more sense to deal with an AMD trinity now or would you go with the last generation sandybridge I mean how was the performance between those two I mean it's not really fair to compare that but if last generations version of Intel's technology is better than this why would you ever do it so the question is is it better than sandy bridge no it's not now even sandy bridge you know really you know clock for clock core four core outperforms this chip there's just no question about it if you took a look at our our cinebench page it sort of tells the story and about as clean a picture as you can paint for both cpu and GPU and you can see AMD strength in the in the GPU side at with the open GL benchmark to be exact and then on the CPU side you can see Intel strength and if you look at like a core i5 2520 em sandy bridge processor again with with Intel HD 3000 graphics at 2.5 gigahertz that scores a 2.8 in cinebench and the Trinity processor scores a two point oh five so you know it's it's still behind a notch versus Intel's dual core technology and that Sakura 525 20m as a as a dual-core chip so really you know it's just not even in the same league as Intel's previous generation sandy bridge processor you know in terms of raw CPU throughput but when you just talk about average workloads you know this this processor pretty much has what you need for you know the average I guess mobile computing experience all right so yeah I mean if you're going to do any heavy duty number crunching or perhaps some you know some professional workstation type workloads this is not going to be a mobile chip that you know is for you it's it's definitely more of a sort of a mid-range chip for the average you know multimedia base notebook and one of the tests we actually ran was we played back at 1080p h.264 encoding QuickTime movie trailer clip and the thing actually oscillated between zero and five percent cpu utilization playing back an HD HD video clip 1080p HD video clip so you know it's got some strengths and weaknesses it's not going to be a heavy duty number cruncher on the cpu side it's going to give you some good multimedia performance and it's going to do it for cheap so AMD's get you know definitely a place in the market with it you know and certainly I guess Intel's probably going to come out with with some other technologies to compete at the lower end of things but you know an interesting offering for sure from AMD and it's always good to have that competition oh these silly ap use an Ivy Bridge gym just there like we can put a CPU and graphics on the same chip it's fine because you don't you're not going to miss anything wrong that's what discrete graphics still are around and that's why we got to talk about the nvidia geforce gtx 670 because let's face it even even even like a hundred dollar card is going to blow both of those things out of the water but let's talk about 670 particular because you guys had a bunch of reviews of a reference design and a couple of competing products that are also based on 670 welcome to Tommy Marco I can tell you a lot first let me show it to you here is the nvidia reference design now it looks like you're a typical to slot graphics card but I Nvidia did something funny with the cooler the card looks big but if you look at the PCB it actually ends here they could they could make some really tiny 670 s if they wanted to it's a much smaller card than the 680 but the GPU at the heart of this thing it's actually the same gk104 the only difference is one of the SMX is one of the streaming multiprocessors has been disabled so instead of having fifteen hundred and thirty-six cuda cores the 670 has 1344 and instead of 124 texture units it has 112 but other than that and just the frequencies on the GPU it's basically the same card as same two gigs of memory clocked at the same effective 66 gigahertz all of the same features same outputs slightly lower power because the you know the performance level is somewhat lower but it's essentially a more affordable 680 which is fewer CUDA cores ok so now you actually compared an EVGA version and gigabyte is there actually any difference between these two I mean they're based on the same technology what kind of differences were there other than design so there were a couple of differences so the reference card let me just throw some clocks at you really quick just to get him out of the way the base clock on the reference gtx670 is 915 megahertz with the boost clock somewhere in the 980 megahertz range now the EVGA card that we looked at is there they're super clock model that superclocked model has a slightly overclocked GPU I'm just refreshing my memory here GPU clocks are 967 base clock with a boost of 1046 but the memory is clocked much faster an effective data rate of 6.2 gigahertz on the EVGA card the EVGA card also uses the same basic PCB design as invidious reference reference 670 the gigabyte card we looked at however uses the same PCB as the 680 it too is overclocked it had a base clock of 980 megahertz the booze clock they don't specify it but we saw it I in my testing it went up to 1.1 to consistently while in boost mode but the memory is clocked at this stock speed the this effective six gigahertz so the main difference though with the gigabyte card in addition to the larger PCB it's also got a custom cooler a three fan cooler on this thing so it ended up being a little bit louder at idle because there's three fit and spinning on it but super effective cooler I tested it while overclocked and temperatures were barely in the you know 60 to 70 degrees Celsius range really nice card from gigabyte now didn't one of those actually have a recall one that was subject to recall was it which one was it it was the EVGA card the not all of the EVGA superclocked cards there was a small batch that I guess didn't pass through qualification properly and some of them were defective my initial sample ended up actually dying on me right at the end of testing but but EVGA took them back right away replace them right away so anybody that may have gotten one from this batch that didn't complete quality testing is going to get a new card then the points about these about the 670 that should be brought up yes so the MSRP for the reference six 70s 399 bucks which is it's expensive for a graphics card but not bad for an ultra high-end card and that three hundred ninety-nine dollars basically gets you a GPU that performs on par with amd's four hundred and fifty dollar 7970 and it does so at lower power so Nvidia is really putting the pressure on on AMD with this one the 670 performs ninety to ninety-five percent as well as the gtx 680 in that in memory bandwidth bound circumstances it's basically the same speed as a 680 yet it's cheaper it's 399 for two gig cards a four gig that four gig frame buffer double the normal sized overclocked card will be about four hundred and eighty bucks so it starts to get even more pricey than there but great performance for a more competitive price is the story with 670 on to something we don't discuss very often on the show monitors you guys look at the dell ultrasharp you altra sharp now ultra shop ultrasharp you 30 11 30 inch monitor now i have a couple of dell monitors i'm staring at 2 24's they're not matched that drives me crazy which one of these is why i was staring at that the 30 inch maybe i can replace the 24s maybe I get to 30s maybe I lose my mind and just just just get lots and lots of screens just add them anyway we should talk about the you 30 11 well what would you guys find out yet this is actually uh you know a classic dell 30 inch panel and and and we've Marco and I have kind of been fans of of Dell's 30 inch panels for many years now from the 2007 wfp series to the 3,000 excuse me to 3007 to the 3008 i'm actually rocking a 3008 wfp right now in the you 30 11 is the follow on to that the the next generation model of 30 inch panels by Del it is an IPS display it has a native resolution of 2560 by 1600 3 and 17 its brightness a thousand to one dynamic contrast ratio and seven milliseconds greater gray pixel response time with 178-degree vertical 170 degree horizontal viewing angle so there's all the specs out of the way it's a nice panel and what what we liked about this more so in addition to superb image quality maybe not quite as tight as HP's zia 30w series by the way we'll get to that but what we liked a lot about it was the copious amounts of inputs available i/o connectivity options in Paul Lily's words more connections than a fast-talking Hollywood agent on this puppy so it was kind of nice to have things like DisplayPort DVI HDMI VGA all of it it's it's all on this panel something it doesn't let you do though is put in portrait mode because the base isn't built for that for some reason you're paying I think a premium because it's a dell monitors 30 inches I think it's a somewhere between a thousand fourteen hundred bucks but for some reason it can't pivot is that that's that's right is there is there any issues with this i mean i know that this look what what our goods about good things and bad things about this apart from the come on who actually puts a 30 inch modern port remote I don't know but that's yeah that's about exactly what I was going to say was he you know are you really gonna tip this thing on its end probably not I mean you gotta make a quick quote I make a pic point about that do it just a quick point about portrait mode on a 30 inch if you have a standard height desk with a 30 inch monitor in front of you with a standard height chair you know ergonomically you should have at the top of your eyes lined up at the top of your monitor you can't do it when it's in landscape mode so if you put it in portrait your heads going to be tilted back half the time yeah you look at the ceiling yeah no I totally agree i I don't I don't see that as too much of a downside no it's it's you know if you look at if you compare and contrast the two the H versus the HP zia 30w that the specs are identical I mean that you know nits brightness contrast ratio pixel response time all that good stuff they're identical what we did see with the dell you 30-11 is just a little bit of of bleeding of color uh not not bleeding but almost like a what did what did Paul termina diffusion seda defeat yeah diffusion light diffusion so in in really bright scenes with dark black backgrounds you might see you know in spots really bright white colors or what have you might appear a little bit of a bleed just just ever so slight we didn't see that on HP's panel on the CR 30 w color saturation was really good blacks were super black there wasn't any backlight bleed at all visible and ghosting absolutely non-existent with the Z what student with the you 30-11 from del Sol versus the Zi 30w you you've got a couple of trade-offs you've got you know a lot fewer inputs on those 30w a lot not you know more available connectivity options in the dell version 03 w is also a little bit less expensive and but it also has a slightly better image quality and in some cases the other thing that that that Marco brought up before the show which is a very valid point is that Dells panels have you know some fairly good on-screen control and calibration and configuration options for the display to set up the display that is good if you're the kind of person that wants to muck with things and really dial things in to your liking not so good if you don't like mucking with things and as a result Dells you 30 11 is a little bit more finicky that way you got to spend some time setting it up calibrating it I actually run a color correct monitor in calibrator myself on my panel and if you set it up real well with with with the color a color remettre you absolutely can get you know get it just perfect but it's a little bit more finicky than HP's which is just plugging in bang you get a digital connection and it sets up and and you don't have to mess with it so a couple of trade-offs but a real nice panel by dell and a case to be made for 30 inches of screen real estate 30 inches of love we are big fans of big panels around here I I'm not going to make any jokes at all about that because that was ridiculous let's talk about something that I didn't have time to read so this is going to be a complete education to me Marco you gonna be talking about the Corsair I can never say that right accelerator SSD what are we talking about is an SSD says SSD cache in the lineup so I'm completely unprepared for what knowledge you're about to drop Marco ok drop that knowledge the the Corsair accelerator course say it's basically a it is a standard SSD the model that Joe looked at was a 60 gigabyte SSD based on previous gen San force technology now what makes it different is corsair includes as the caching software with this drive this it although you can totally use it like a regular SS see you can make it your boot driver if you wanted to but its main purpose is to be used as an SSD cache now what's great about this is let's say you you have a system already it's all it's been tweaked perfectly it's got a standard hard drive in it you'll love how it's set up you're not then were to reformat you know you don't trust reimaging to a smaller volume like this or maybe you couldn't even reimage to the smaller volume because 60 gig isn't enough for you by adding an SSD cache you basically can get almost SSD like performance without messing with your setup at all you plug in this drive you install the cash the cash software and once it monitors your activity for a little bit all of your most recently or most commonly accessed bits of data get cached to the solid state drive and you end up with a system that performs as if it has an SSD for its main volume but you don't have to manage multiple volumes and your hard drive just appears like it normally did before ok that's like oh thats up to there there there's no one's here there's new ones here so if you if you if you have the means to afford a big enough SSD to have it as your boot volume and you can install all your stuff do it that's still the ideal way to go if you already have a system configured don't have the cash for a big enough SSD to handle all your stuff a small sixty or thirty gig SSD like this that includes the caching software is an awesome easy to install upgrade for not a lot of money I forget the price on this particular model i think it was about a 90 bucks but you're talking plug it in install a cash app and banging SST like performance you know with basically minimal setup you're plugging it in installing an app like it's done question I'm good yeah no I was gonna say if I may jump in here actually you know it's funny we've spent a lot of time talking to manufacturers of SSDs OEMs whatnot and especially PCI Express base SSD guys are are very much into the caching world if you will and it's funny the folks at fusion-io to coin there a pci-express based ssds as another memory tier and I think that's really if you think about flash in that regard flash technologies whether you use an SSD as a you know a target OS volume or in this case really what what what what this is doing is is as a cash it's really another memory tier you think about hard drives operating in milliseconds access times you think about dram or system memory operating in nanosecond access times there's a big you know window big disparity between those two access times and so now you slide in flash or an SSD as another memory turn between and that's what this is all about it allows you to you know have another scratch pad if you will that the system can draw on for quick access to information and lower latency so it's I think it's I think it's a great thing and I think it's a continual evolution of where we'll see flash in general in computing architectures moving forward it's good stuff the dumb question I was going to ask is any chance you can get the application without buying the hard drive you know we actually Joel talks about that a little bit corsair is not the only one it's a company called and fellow that makes the other cash software and ozzy uses it with their cash drives corsair uses it I believe crucial also uses it the apps that come with them are tied to the drives their serial numbers and it does do a check for a particular drive I haven't looked into it if you could buy it separately in the consumer space I know when the enterprise you can but I mean there's those little reason to do it unless you have a stack of SSDs laying around if you had a small SSD let around you want it to use I guess there's probably a way to do it I have to look into that okie dokie so how all the contests going these days I hear the winners announced their their contest murmurs again it's like it's like a cyclical what's going on they're going they're still going and actually we are about to announce winners for go ahead and announce them here they've i'll put the post in but go ahead and announce the names if you remember uh I'm gonna I'm gonna hold off on that because I don't want to screw it up how's that okay other but there are what you want to announce them you know and now you're making me I you know it will announce him in a post in just a little while the the announcement will be up before the podcast is posted there you go we put it this way the winners are so fresh that we need to double check our facts to make sure they're still there valid before we release them to the wild that's how fresh they are so yeah it in other words yeah we've chosen winners and so we'll be announcing them soon and yeah that for the Tegra 3 spring sweepstakes with NVIDIA where you could wear our winners will be winning a transformer prime and acer iconia tab a510 tablet so 22 grand prizes there we will be coming out with yet another tablet based contest in the weeks ahead very soon to follow and again it's looking like a friends and NVIDIA are stepping up with some some pretty hot hardware in the tablet form to to keep folks engaged and you know on the edge of their seats here at hot hardware so stick with us we'll have we'll have some more goodies to give away soon so if you want to find out about contest details maybe this stuff we talked about maybe if you were hosting the show and you want to actually be prepared for the program you would read hot harbor calm you best well you should sorry I didn't have time to read corsair so as I can't do yeah I've made a mistake today but thankfully Marco drop knowledge to the point where I was just dumbfounded but again all that great content is at Harbor com or you can go around the web lots of places to go where where could you possibly find hot hardware content well if you're a dig there's do calm / hot hardware if you are at I don't know YouTube you can go youtube.com / hot hardware bids facebook.com / hot hardware and twitter com / hot hardware so lots of different places also on google+ you just got you a search for hot hardware as you can see all kinds of stuff there and i think that pretty much wraps up this episode two and half geeks do you two have anything left to say no we've tortured you enough yeah I'm good everybody's good we're all gonna watch Dancing with the Stars together now so goodbye thank you for final IMcoming up on this episode of two and a half geeks we're going to take a nice long look at AMD Trinity is this the ivory bridge killer no not really and then we're going to take a look at in nvidia gtx 670 and maybe people look at a giant monitor talk a bit about contests and maybe just a little bit more possibly likely next the far didn't set wicked fast has rocked in the benchmarks we're going to up the ante a little bit processing power and kinder understanding welcome back to tune up geeks am i as actor alongside Dave altavilla and Marco Chiappetta are you guys doing fantastic and you are a good friend i am doing less than fantastic how about you Marco I'm doing alright i'm missing katherine jenkins shaker thing on the dance floor to record this but you know such is life well you sir are clearly yeah you you're sacrificing for the greater good because yeah the audience wants to know all kinds of things they want to know your opinions on stuff and that's way more important than you watching something you probably dvr'd it's amazing they want to know the true yes they want to know and in meinen them maybe we can somehow tie this to the trinity i can't at all i'm just going to jump to the AMD trinity is out of the you guys had a review of the 810 4600 em now this is supposed to be AMD's answer to ivy bridge intel showed up with that number was like it's over it's over anybody's like no it's not please we still exist we're good we got something awesome and from what i understand thanks to hot hardware you guys actually broke down exactly how much of the processor or the APU is dedicated to graphics how much of its actually doing dedicated to the cpu how did the AMD apu the trinity do about is you would expect with more real estate carved out to the graphics processor engine that the GPU inside the radeon 7600 series graphics that's on board it performed a little bit better in games and got blown out of the water and cpu-based you know standard compute workloads to put it mildly so but these these particular processors i'm going to guess or maybe a little tiny bit cheaper than the intel one so you might not be getting crazy cpu performance but do you necessarily even need something like that if you are a gamer you are well or or even if you're not a gamer and you hit the nail on the head is how much CPU throughput do you need and how much graphics and multimedia throughput do you need and that's kind of the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question when it comes to the applications that a chip like the the Trinity 810 processor you know what that will be installed in and so you think about this and the a 1040 600mm is what we looked at it is a fork or a quad-core chip with integrated graphics 384 radeon cores on board at 686 megahertz top end and the CPU side is a base frequency of two point three gigahertz to a turbo core speed of 3.2 gigahertz so this ship belongs in a notebook and it's really a sort of a standard mid-range design I wouldn't say necessarily an ultra light and but it is absolutely you know something that's a very capable chip for for most mobile applications you know you think about your your classic 14 and 15 inch machine maybe even a 70 17 inch excuse me a multi medium machine definitely enough cpu horsepower for most end-users and very capable in terms of gaming and multimedia performance actually played some you know dx11 titles at playable frame rates you know games like batman arkham city even some of the directx 10 the sort of last generation game titles like just cause 2 and far cry 2 now you're talking about you know frame rates in the 45 to 50 frames per second so really is enough cpu and GPU well depends on what you need certainly Intel's ivy bridge processor that we looked at you know a few weeks back takes this thing behind the woodshed in just about every CPU benchmark you can throw at it but there's enough cpu horsepower we think for the mainstream and you're talking about a price delta in the average notebook of a few hundred dollars so the average a 10 based multimedia notebook is probably going to be in the five to six hundred dollar price range whereas the average Ivy Bridge notebook you know sort of a similar sku quad core skew is probably going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred dollars more you know based on Intel technology so you know it really depends on how much you want to spend and what you're going to do with it if pricing is the option here was that's the actual issue that is would it make more sense to deal with an AMD trinity now or would you go with the last generation sandybridge I mean how was the performance between those two I mean it's not really fair to compare that but if last generations version of Intel's technology is better than this why would you ever do it so the question is is it better than sandy bridge no it's not now even sandy bridge you know really you know clock for clock core four core outperforms this chip there's just no question about it if you took a look at our our cinebench page it sort of tells the story and about as clean a picture as you can paint for both cpu and GPU and you can see AMD strength in the in the GPU side at with the open GL benchmark to be exact and then on the CPU side you can see Intel strength and if you look at like a core i5 2520 em sandy bridge processor again with with Intel HD 3000 graphics at 2.5 gigahertz that scores a 2.8 in cinebench and the Trinity processor scores a two point oh five so you know it's it's still behind a notch versus Intel's dual core technology and that Sakura 525 20m as a as a dual-core chip so really you know it's just not even in the same league as Intel's previous generation sandy bridge processor you know in terms of raw CPU throughput but when you just talk about average workloads you know this this processor pretty much has what you need for you know the average I guess mobile computing experience all right so yeah I mean if you're going to do any heavy duty number crunching or perhaps some you know some professional workstation type workloads this is not going to be a mobile chip that you know is for you it's it's definitely more of a sort of a mid-range chip for the average you know multimedia base notebook and one of the tests we actually ran was we played back at 1080p h.264 encoding QuickTime movie trailer clip and the thing actually oscillated between zero and five percent cpu utilization playing back an HD HD video clip 1080p HD video clip so you know it's got some strengths and weaknesses it's not going to be a heavy duty number cruncher on the cpu side it's going to give you some good multimedia performance and it's going to do it for cheap so AMD's get you know definitely a place in the market with it you know and certainly I guess Intel's probably going to come out with with some other technologies to compete at the lower end of things but you know an interesting offering for sure from AMD and it's always good to have that competition oh these silly ap use an Ivy Bridge gym just there like we can put a CPU and graphics on the same chip it's fine because you don't you're not going to miss anything wrong that's what discrete graphics still are around and that's why we got to talk about the nvidia geforce gtx 670 because let's face it even even even like a hundred dollar card is going to blow both of those things out of the water but let's talk about 670 particular because you guys had a bunch of reviews of a reference design and a couple of competing products that are also based on 670 welcome to Tommy Marco I can tell you a lot first let me show it to you here is the nvidia reference design now it looks like you're a typical to slot graphics card but I Nvidia did something funny with the cooler the card looks big but if you look at the PCB it actually ends here they could they could make some really tiny 670 s if they wanted to it's a much smaller card than the 680 but the GPU at the heart of this thing it's actually the same gk104 the only difference is one of the SMX is one of the streaming multiprocessors has been disabled so instead of having fifteen hundred and thirty-six cuda cores the 670 has 1344 and instead of 124 texture units it has 112 but other than that and just the frequencies on the GPU it's basically the same card as same two gigs of memory clocked at the same effective 66 gigahertz all of the same features same outputs slightly lower power because the you know the performance level is somewhat lower but it's essentially a more affordable 680 which is fewer CUDA cores ok so now you actually compared an EVGA version and gigabyte is there actually any difference between these two I mean they're based on the same technology what kind of differences were there other than design so there were a couple of differences so the reference card let me just throw some clocks at you really quick just to get him out of the way the base clock on the reference gtx670 is 915 megahertz with the boost clock somewhere in the 980 megahertz range now the EVGA card that we looked at is there they're super clock model that superclocked model has a slightly overclocked GPU I'm just refreshing my memory here GPU clocks are 967 base clock with a boost of 1046 but the memory is clocked much faster an effective data rate of 6.2 gigahertz on the EVGA card the EVGA card also uses the same basic PCB design as invidious reference reference 670 the gigabyte card we looked at however uses the same PCB as the 680 it too is overclocked it had a base clock of 980 megahertz the booze clock they don't specify it but we saw it I in my testing it went up to 1.1 to consistently while in boost mode but the memory is clocked at this stock speed the this effective six gigahertz so the main difference though with the gigabyte card in addition to the larger PCB it's also got a custom cooler a three fan cooler on this thing so it ended up being a little bit louder at idle because there's three fit and spinning on it but super effective cooler I tested it while overclocked and temperatures were barely in the you know 60 to 70 degrees Celsius range really nice card from gigabyte now didn't one of those actually have a recall one that was subject to recall was it which one was it it was the EVGA card the not all of the EVGA superclocked cards there was a small batch that I guess didn't pass through qualification properly and some of them were defective my initial sample ended up actually dying on me right at the end of testing but but EVGA took them back right away replace them right away so anybody that may have gotten one from this batch that didn't complete quality testing is going to get a new card then the points about these about the 670 that should be brought up yes so the MSRP for the reference six 70s 399 bucks which is it's expensive for a graphics card but not bad for an ultra high-end card and that three hundred ninety-nine dollars basically gets you a GPU that performs on par with amd's four hundred and fifty dollar 7970 and it does so at lower power so Nvidia is really putting the pressure on on AMD with this one the 670 performs ninety to ninety-five percent as well as the gtx 680 in that in memory bandwidth bound circumstances it's basically the same speed as a 680 yet it's cheaper it's 399 for two gig cards a four gig that four gig frame buffer double the normal sized overclocked card will be about four hundred and eighty bucks so it starts to get even more pricey than there but great performance for a more competitive price is the story with 670 on to something we don't discuss very often on the show monitors you guys look at the dell ultrasharp you altra sharp now ultra shop ultrasharp you 30 11 30 inch monitor now i have a couple of dell monitors i'm staring at 2 24's they're not matched that drives me crazy which one of these is why i was staring at that the 30 inch maybe i can replace the 24s maybe I get to 30s maybe I lose my mind and just just just get lots and lots of screens just add them anyway we should talk about the you 30 11 well what would you guys find out yet this is actually uh you know a classic dell 30 inch panel and and and we've Marco and I have kind of been fans of of Dell's 30 inch panels for many years now from the 2007 wfp series to the 3,000 excuse me to 3007 to the 3008 i'm actually rocking a 3008 wfp right now in the you 30 11 is the follow on to that the the next generation model of 30 inch panels by Del it is an IPS display it has a native resolution of 2560 by 1600 3 and 17 its brightness a thousand to one dynamic contrast ratio and seven milliseconds greater gray pixel response time with 178-degree vertical 170 degree horizontal viewing angle so there's all the specs out of the way it's a nice panel and what what we liked about this more so in addition to superb image quality maybe not quite as tight as HP's zia 30w series by the way we'll get to that but what we liked a lot about it was the copious amounts of inputs available i/o connectivity options in Paul Lily's words more connections than a fast-talking Hollywood agent on this puppy so it was kind of nice to have things like DisplayPort DVI HDMI VGA all of it it's it's all on this panel something it doesn't let you do though is put in portrait mode because the base isn't built for that for some reason you're paying I think a premium because it's a dell monitors 30 inches I think it's a somewhere between a thousand fourteen hundred bucks but for some reason it can't pivot is that that's that's right is there is there any issues with this i mean i know that this look what what our goods about good things and bad things about this apart from the come on who actually puts a 30 inch modern port remote I don't know but that's yeah that's about exactly what I was going to say was he you know are you really gonna tip this thing on its end probably not I mean you gotta make a quick quote I make a pic point about that do it just a quick point about portrait mode on a 30 inch if you have a standard height desk with a 30 inch monitor in front of you with a standard height chair you know ergonomically you should have at the top of your eyes lined up at the top of your monitor you can't do it when it's in landscape mode so if you put it in portrait your heads going to be tilted back half the time yeah you look at the ceiling yeah no I totally agree i I don't I don't see that as too much of a downside no it's it's you know if you look at if you compare and contrast the two the H versus the HP zia 30w that the specs are identical I mean that you know nits brightness contrast ratio pixel response time all that good stuff they're identical what we did see with the dell you 30-11 is just a little bit of of bleeding of color uh not not bleeding but almost like a what did what did Paul termina diffusion seda defeat yeah diffusion light diffusion so in in really bright scenes with dark black backgrounds you might see you know in spots really bright white colors or what have you might appear a little bit of a bleed just just ever so slight we didn't see that on HP's panel on the CR 30 w color saturation was really good blacks were super black there wasn't any backlight bleed at all visible and ghosting absolutely non-existent with the Z what student with the you 30-11 from del Sol versus the Zi 30w you you've got a couple of trade-offs you've got you know a lot fewer inputs on those 30w a lot not you know more available connectivity options in the dell version 03 w is also a little bit less expensive and but it also has a slightly better image quality and in some cases the other thing that that that Marco brought up before the show which is a very valid point is that Dells panels have you know some fairly good on-screen control and calibration and configuration options for the display to set up the display that is good if you're the kind of person that wants to muck with things and really dial things in to your liking not so good if you don't like mucking with things and as a result Dells you 30 11 is a little bit more finicky that way you got to spend some time setting it up calibrating it I actually run a color correct monitor in calibrator myself on my panel and if you set it up real well with with with the color a color remettre you absolutely can get you know get it just perfect but it's a little bit more finicky than HP's which is just plugging in bang you get a digital connection and it sets up and and you don't have to mess with it so a couple of trade-offs but a real nice panel by dell and a case to be made for 30 inches of screen real estate 30 inches of love we are big fans of big panels around here I I'm not going to make any jokes at all about that because that was ridiculous let's talk about something that I didn't have time to read so this is going to be a complete education to me Marco you gonna be talking about the Corsair I can never say that right accelerator SSD what are we talking about is an SSD says SSD cache in the lineup so I'm completely unprepared for what knowledge you're about to drop Marco ok drop that knowledge the the Corsair accelerator course say it's basically a it is a standard SSD the model that Joe looked at was a 60 gigabyte SSD based on previous gen San force technology now what makes it different is corsair includes as the caching software with this drive this it although you can totally use it like a regular SS see you can make it your boot driver if you wanted to but its main purpose is to be used as an SSD cache now what's great about this is let's say you you have a system already it's all it's been tweaked perfectly it's got a standard hard drive in it you'll love how it's set up you're not then were to reformat you know you don't trust reimaging to a smaller volume like this or maybe you couldn't even reimage to the smaller volume because 60 gig isn't enough for you by adding an SSD cache you basically can get almost SSD like performance without messing with your setup at all you plug in this drive you install the cash the cash software and once it monitors your activity for a little bit all of your most recently or most commonly accessed bits of data get cached to the solid state drive and you end up with a system that performs as if it has an SSD for its main volume but you don't have to manage multiple volumes and your hard drive just appears like it normally did before ok that's like oh thats up to there there there's no one's here there's new ones here so if you if you if you have the means to afford a big enough SSD to have it as your boot volume and you can install all your stuff do it that's still the ideal way to go if you already have a system configured don't have the cash for a big enough SSD to handle all your stuff a small sixty or thirty gig SSD like this that includes the caching software is an awesome easy to install upgrade for not a lot of money I forget the price on this particular model i think it was about a 90 bucks but you're talking plug it in install a cash app and banging SST like performance you know with basically minimal setup you're plugging it in installing an app like it's done question I'm good yeah no I was gonna say if I may jump in here actually you know it's funny we've spent a lot of time talking to manufacturers of SSDs OEMs whatnot and especially PCI Express base SSD guys are are very much into the caching world if you will and it's funny the folks at fusion-io to coin there a pci-express based ssds as another memory tier and I think that's really if you think about flash in that regard flash technologies whether you use an SSD as a you know a target OS volume or in this case really what what what what this is doing is is as a cash it's really another memory tier you think about hard drives operating in milliseconds access times you think about dram or system memory operating in nanosecond access times there's a big you know window big disparity between those two access times and so now you slide in flash or an SSD as another memory turn between and that's what this is all about it allows you to you know have another scratch pad if you will that the system can draw on for quick access to information and lower latency so it's I think it's I think it's a great thing and I think it's a continual evolution of where we'll see flash in general in computing architectures moving forward it's good stuff the dumb question I was going to ask is any chance you can get the application without buying the hard drive you know we actually Joel talks about that a little bit corsair is not the only one it's a company called and fellow that makes the other cash software and ozzy uses it with their cash drives corsair uses it I believe crucial also uses it the apps that come with them are tied to the drives their serial numbers and it does do a check for a particular drive I haven't looked into it if you could buy it separately in the consumer space I know when the enterprise you can but I mean there's those little reason to do it unless you have a stack of SSDs laying around if you had a small SSD let around you want it to use I guess there's probably a way to do it I have to look into that okie dokie so how all the contests going these days I hear the winners announced their their contest murmurs again it's like it's like a cyclical what's going on they're going they're still going and actually we are about to announce winners for go ahead and announce them here they've i'll put the post in but go ahead and announce the names if you remember uh I'm gonna I'm gonna hold off on that because I don't want to screw it up how's that okay other but there are what you want to announce them you know and now you're making me I you know it will announce him in a post in just a little while the the announcement will be up before the podcast is posted there you go we put it this way the winners are so fresh that we need to double check our facts to make sure they're still there valid before we release them to the wild that's how fresh they are so yeah it in other words yeah we've chosen winners and so we'll be announcing them soon and yeah that for the Tegra 3 spring sweepstakes with NVIDIA where you could wear our winners will be winning a transformer prime and acer iconia tab a510 tablet so 22 grand prizes there we will be coming out with yet another tablet based contest in the weeks ahead very soon to follow and again it's looking like a friends and NVIDIA are stepping up with some some pretty hot hardware in the tablet form to to keep folks engaged and you know on the edge of their seats here at hot hardware so stick with us we'll have we'll have some more goodies to give away soon so if you want to find out about contest details maybe this stuff we talked about maybe if you were hosting the show and you want to actually be prepared for the program you would read hot harbor calm you best well you should sorry I didn't have time to read corsair so as I can't do yeah I've made a mistake today but thankfully Marco drop knowledge to the point where I was just dumbfounded but again all that great content is at Harbor com or you can go around the web lots of places to go where where could you possibly find hot hardware content well if you're a dig there's do calm / hot hardware if you are at I don't know YouTube you can go youtube.com / hot hardware bids facebook.com / hot hardware and twitter com / hot hardware so lots of different places also on google+ you just got you a search for hot hardware as you can see all kinds of stuff there and i think that pretty much wraps up this episode two and half geeks do you two have anything left to say no we've tortured you enough yeah I'm good everybody's good we're all gonna watch Dancing with the Stars together now so goodbye thank you for final IM\n"