Project Colossus
To meet our needs, The Colossus had to be a versatile powerhouse that could multitask like no other with an emphasis on CPU rendering, all within my budget. I decided to go with a dual-socket Intel e5500 platform, keeping the cost to performance ratio in mind to avoid diminishing returns. Data redundancy was a must and extra scavenged hard drives are used to help keep costs down. After putting a plan together, it was time to do some shopping.

The Hardware:

• Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840 ($199.99)
• Motherboard: Supermicro X8DA3 ($449.99)
• CPU: (2x) Intel e5520 80w ($384.99 each)
• RAM: (2x) 3×2GB Wintec Industries ECC Registered DDR3-1333 ($199.99 each)
• CPU Heatsink: (2x) Noctua NH-U12DX ($69.99 each)
• Video Card: XFX ATI HD5870 ($379.99)
• PSU: OCZ Z Series Gold 1000W modular ($299.99)
• Optical Drive: Sony Optiarc 24x ($32.99)
• SSD + HDD:
  • -Intel x25-m G2 160GB ($479.40)
  • -Western Digital 1TB Black Caviar ($99.99)
  • -Western Digital 1TB RE3 Enterprise (2x) ($159.99 each)
  • -Western Digital 320GB Black Caviar (2x) ($64.99 each)
  • -Western Digital 500GB ($69.99)
• Miscelaneous:
  • Rosewill PCI RAID Controller ($19.99)
  • ICY DOCK 2.5″ to 3.5″ Drive Adapter ($24.99)

Total Cost: $3,835.21

Drive Configuration
To get the most out of our hardware and prevent a performance bottleneck, our operating system main drive will use a solid state drive (SSD). Unlike mechanical hard disk drives (HDD) that use physical platters, SSDs use flash-memory based storage that gives them much faster read and write speeds and incredible random access times, albeit at a premium price–$3.00/GB compared to around $0.10/GB for HDDs. We’re using a 160 GB Intel x25-m G2, the latest iteration of Intel’s MLC flash memory SSDs.

The latest firmware update for x25-m G2 drives enables TRIM support in Windows 7, hopefully without bricking the drive, as the first firmware update did with an unfortunate few. Along with TRIM support for Windows 7, Intel has provided a toolbox suite to execute a manual TRIM operation in XP and Vistato retain optimal drive performance. This will, for the most part, help the drive avoid the inherent performance degradation in all SSDs that occurs over time.

Whenever data has significant value, it’s wise to back it up. We’re going to do just that on the fly with data redundancy using two RAID 1 arrays, where the data on each drive is mirrored to another in case of drive failure. Using three 1 TB HDDs in RAID 5 was considered, but the cost of an extra drive and more substantially, the cost of a decent RAID 5 controller made RAID 1 our best option. Our two arrays consisted of a 320GB array, used for personal documents, and a 1TB array using Western Digital RE3 enterprise grade drives, that will store project files accessed by editing, modeling and rendering software. I also wanted plenty of space to store non-vital data, such as movies and music. For that I used a lone 1 TB and 500 GB drives.

This configuration already presented a problem simply because many of the dual-socket Intel 5500 motherboards only have six SATA ports and once we add a SATA optical drive, it will need eight. To solve this, I used an inexpensive 1.5 GB/s PCI RAID controller with two SATA ports and one IDE port that will also give us backwards compatibility with older drives. Despite its limitations, it’s just what we need for storage drives that won’t require high-speed transfer or complex RAID setups.

Building The Colossus
The Supermicro X8DA3 is a large eATX board, sized to accommodate two e5500 series Xeon processors and up to 96GB of ECC Registered memory, you read that right, ninety-six gigabytes. Supermicro had a particularly small list of tested compatible memory for the X8DA3, so we made our best guess with what was easily available. 12GB of Patriot ECC Registered memory was initially used, but ended up being swapped out for 12GB of Wintec Industries ECC Registered RAM due to incompatibility issues.

Taking a look at the board, right away we can see that the location of the 1394 FireWire pinouts is problematic as they get covered by whatever is placed in the secondary PCI-E 16x slot. On the bottom right corner of the board there’s an SAS controller under the green heatsink and ports to support up to eight SCSI drives. Supermicro actually makes an identical board, the X8DAi, that omits the SAS controller. Because of a discount, they just happened to both cost the same at the time of our hardware purchase and who are we to pass up SAS support?

The Noctua NH-U12DX CPU heatsinks we’re using are server variants of the popular Noctua NH-U12P. They’re certainly overkill, but oh so quiet. To have access to the primary PCI-E 16x slot and the CPU1 8pin power slot, we’ve opted for an odd heatsink and fan placement where one fan pushes air through the heatsink and the other pulls air through, both bringing hot air towards the top of the case where it’s exhausted by the Cooler Master ATCS 840’s two massive 23cm fans. That brings up the topic of our choice of case.

A full tower was the only option short of a rackmount that will fit an eATX board. There’s a substantial difference in size between a mid-tower ATX case and the ACTS 840 full tower. This thing could eat a mid-tower and still have room left over. It’s beautifully clean aluminum exterior does away with the plethora of plastic vents, lights and other cheap aesthetics that seems to plague cases these days. Additionally, the ATCS 840 has a removable tray which made life easier when installing the RAM, processors and heatsinks, not to mention the clip-on heatsink fans.

The OCZ Z Series Gold 1000W was chosen for its high efficiency and modular cabling. For a 1 kW PSU, it’s surprisingly small and light. Because The Colossus will also be used as a render rig, it may be at a heavy load 24 hours a day for weeks at a time, that means an efficient PSU is crucial. With an 80 Plus Gold rating, the OCZ ZSeries Gold 1000W has been reported to run at 87% efficiency at low and peak loads and barely surpass 90% during optimal loading conditions. The power savings alone easily justify the higher cost and the modular cable system helped keep the case clean and was easier to work with.

The ATI HD5870
Certainly the most controversial piece of hardware in our rig is the video card, ATI’s new-to-market HD5870, the most powerful single GPU card available and is currently in short supply–which would explain why it’s retail price has raised from $379.99 to $429.99 since we bought it, making it the best hardware investment we ever made.

Remember that even though Project Colossus is all about building a high performance computer, as a workstation, it should be a stable work platform. Using a brand new piece of hardware (with brand new drivers) as critical as the video card is questionable, traditionally one would use a professional workstation card that’s designed specifically to work with simulation, modeling and rendering software. So, are we crazy or something? While The Colossus is a workstation, our goal was to build an all around power platform for both work and play. For the same price as the HD5870, we would have been able to afford something along the lines of a Quadro FX 1800, which should deliver gaming performance close to the midrange 9600GSO, another G94b GPU based card. All in all, a desktop card is a compromise, trading professional software performance for gaming performance. It’s still a new card with potentially unstable and/or incompatible drivers. We could have gone with a card in the HD4000 or GT200 series that would have had mature drivers. So, why the HD5870? Because we’re crazy.

Now that The Colossus put together, it’s time to test it and offer some juicy benchmark results. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we make your computer look puny.

The Zune desktop software will also be getting some improvements with Mixview and a new Now Playing page which both offer new graphical and interactive ways to browse and view your library. And the new firmware will also bring support for a couple of games, audiobooks (supports Audible), and real ebooks through OverDrive. Most of those are great, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to read a whole book on a Zune. Anyways if you are interested in getting a new Zune, starting on September 16th, pricing will be set at $250 for a 120GB HDD model, $229 for a 80GB HDD model, $199 for a 16GB SSD model, and $149 for a 8GB SSD model. Apple is also rolling out new iPods today, so I might suggest holding off until the end of the day if you happen to be deciding between the two.

Links: Zune.net

Acer Aspire One Specification:

• Processor: Intel Atom N270 1.60 GHz
• Memory: 1GB DDR2 (533MHz)
• Chipset: Intel Mobile 82801 GBM
• Video: Intel GMA 950
• Storage: 2.5 inch 120GB HDD
• Card Readers: SD Card (1) & Multi-Card (2)
• OS: Windows XP Home Edition
• Display: LED 8.9 inch 1024×600 (WSVGA)
• Webcam: 0.3 megapixel camera
• Wireless: Acer 802.11b/g
• Ports: 3 USB, LAN 10/100 Mbps, VGA, & Audio in/out
• Battery: 24W 2200mAh 3-cell Li-Ion (3 hours)
• Input: 84-key Keyboard & Touchpad
• Weight: 2.19 lbs with 3-cell & 2.78 lbs with 6-cell
• Size: 9.8″ (W) x 6.7″ (D) x 1.14″ (H) inches

The Body: 3.5/5 stars
With the lid closed, the Acer Aspire One has a stylish glossy finish over its blue body. The bottom of the notebook is made of one piece of plastic except for perforations for air flow and a small cutout for access to the RAM. The external build is elegant, robust, and has a tiny footprint. The inside looks fairly good with a black keyboard and a blue surrounding, however there’s a large gap that appears between the lower and upper portion of the notebook which just looks unusual. There are two shinny orange pieces on the hinges, which stand out too much and takes away from the look in my opinion. The screen is surrounded by a highly glossy black frame which provides a nice contrast in some situations, however can become irritation when light reflects back at you. Most of the components are in the right places and are easy to access. Overall, the durability, feel, and looks of this notebook won’t be an issue.

The Screen: 4/5 stars
Like most sub-notebooks, the Acer Aspire One has an 8.9 inch display with a screen resolution of 1024×600. This resolution is just large enough to be able to view and use most standard-sized websites. I ran into occasional issues with some windows for certain applications being too large so the bottom or top wasn’t visible, but it wasn’t too bad. The LED backlit display is quite bright, sharp, and the colors produced are pretty vibrant. The viewing angles were fairly good. The colors faded much faster with slight change in either vertical direction; however horizontal angles remained intact for longer. The screen looks great for watching movies or viewing photos.

Operating System: 5/5 stars
The Aspire One is running Windows XP Home edition which is probably the most widely used operating system today. So there shouldn’t be any complains there. The machine boots up and is ready to go in about 55 seconds. Launching applications such as Mozilla Firefox takes just a second or two. With 1GB of RAM you can have plenty of applications running at once without any issues. Just about all the applications I use on a regular basis are available for download, but if you have any programs that come on a CD or DVD, you’ll need to find an external USB drive to install them. I was also excited to see that Acer had already upgraded XP to Service Pack 3, which will save everyone the time and hassle of having to install too many updates. Having run XP on a machine with a 900 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM, I can testify that XP is a very flexible OS and will run without any issues on this laptop.

Keyboard and Mouse: 3.5/5 stars
The keyboard is large enough to use comfortably. With a bit of getting used to, you can begin to type pretty fast without any issue. I was also glad to see that the keyboard didn’t have any weirdly sized or misplaced keys as I have seen on many other sub-notebooks. The main issue I had with the usability of the notebook was the awkwardly placed left/right click buttons. The left/right click buttons have been moved to the left and right sides of the touchpad, instead of placing them below. It was quite awkward to use and I often found myself clicking in the wrong spot only to realize that there weren’t any buttons there. Most people will begin to tap the touchpad to initiate a left-click, but will have no choice but to reach over to input a right-click. If Acer had moved the keyboard up just enough to allow room for normally positioned left/right click buttons, the Aspire One would have been much easier to use.

Speakers & Headphones: 4/5 stars
The speaker is located on the bottom-side of the Aspire One. It can get loud enough and remain fairly clear, but are nothing to brag about. The main issue would have to be that everything sounds quite muffled. Everything sounds different based of whether it is being held in your hands, on your lap, or on a flat desk. As for use with a headphone jack, the audio quality is excellent and will offer exactly what you would expect out of a laptop with a built in sound card.

Microphone & Web Cam: 3/5 stars
The Aspire One has a built in microphone and webcam making it a great little VoIP device. I made a few test calls using Skype over a WiFi network and the results were good. The microphone didn’t pick up to much background noise and the web cam was just clear enough to make out faces. The webcam performs quite poorly under poor lighting conditions. Both components are low quality pieces of hardware, but will do the job for communicating when away from something better.

Ports and Expansion: 4/5 stars
The Aspire one has a fairly good selection of ports. It unusually has two memory card readers, one just for SD and the other is a 5-in-1 reader. The reason for two was originally intended for the model with the 8GB SSD model since it allowed expanding the storage onto the SD card using the Linux OS. However they carried it on over the HDD version running XP, which happens to be quite unnecessary. On the front of the notebook you’ll find a switch to toggle WiFi on or off. The right side has the audio input/output, two USB ports, and the multi-card reader. The left side has the power port, VGA port, fan exhaust, ethernet port, another USB port, and a SD card reader.

Performance: 5/5 stars
The Aspire One is a fairly fast notebook. It actually has better specifications in just about every category than the 14 inch Sony Vaio I had been using up until just about two years ago. The HD Tune benchmark tool displayed an average of 49 MB/s data transfer rate, which is excellent. The wPrime 32 CPU test took about 124 seconds to complete which is better than most other sub-notebooks with other processors. The Aspire One is fast enough to do just about all the basic things you would need to do on your laptop on a daily basis. It obviously shouldn’t be used for video editing or gaming, but is great for multimedia playback, internet apps, email, chatting, note taking, and much more.

Battery Life: 4/5 stars
The Aspire One I reviewed only had a 3 cell battery; however 6 cells are also available. Unfortunately a 6-cell will protrude from the notebook. Benchmarks always vary, so I put it to the test in a real-life situation. With WiFi enabled and the screen at half-brightness, I was able to get about 2 hours and 40 minutes of juice out of it on average. I was mainly writing articles, browsing the web, or streaming media the majority of the time. The hours I got might not be entirely similar to what others may receive based of whether they are using hardware intensive applications or not. The battery life was around what other notebooks such as the Lenovo S10 receive, however I do wish it could fit a 6-cell without sticking out like the Asus EEE 900 does. Despite that, it’s fairly good amount considering that it’s got a standard HDD.

Conclusion
After having a chance to play with a couple of other main stream sub-notebooks such as the EEE 900, the Acer Aspire One is currently my favorite. Especially impressive since due to the fairly powerful hardware specs while it’s MSRP is now just $350 for the model in this review. And as I mentioned before the notebook doesn’t lack on looks either. However, my opinion might soon change as Dell and other companies are beginning to roll out more sub-notebooks with competitive specifications and pricing. Just about everything from the operating system, the hard drive space, and speed was satisfactory. The main downsides are probably the awkward positioning of the mouse buttons and the battery life. Overall, most of you folks who are looking for a cheap portable laptop will get exactly what you are looking for and won’t be disappointed with Acer’s Aspire One.

Buy Now: Best Buy $350 | Amazon $400 | Circuit City $330 (SSD Model)
Links: Acer Aspire One | Wiki Page

The Navigation System will sport a new display with a higher resolution and will be LED backlit for sharper colors. It will support playback of DVD movies, but only when the car is parked. Like more cars today it has full support to allow hands free access to Bluetooth enabled phones. But as a bonus it will allow dictating numbers to dial or even saying names in your phonebook without having to program your voice for ever possible combination. The upcoming cars featuring this new system will have a 40GB HDD and two SD card readers built-in. Unfortunately the car doesn’t allow ripping tracks from inserted CDs due to copyright restrictions, however it will allow copying downloaded music from those SD cards. (MP3, WMA, & AAC supported!) Additional options for a USB port to allow use of flash drives will also be an option. The MMI system also supports adding support for Apple iPod devices or AUX analog inputs, which will probably also cost extra.

The main reason Audi was at Nvision was because their new MMI systems will be sporting Nvidia graphics chips inside the dashboards. The chips will be used to generate good looking 3D graphics rapidly. Many city centers will have 3D building models and topographical terrain maps. It looks quite similar to what is currently available in Google Earth. All the 3D content will be generated in real-time while providing turn-by-turn directions. According to the Audi rep, the graphics chip has been specially designed to withstand high and low temperatures while being able to absorb large amounts of shock, which would be important since it’s part of a vehicle. The GPS data with those 3D maps and voice prompts will apparently takes up around 25GB of data. When it comes time to upgrade to the latest sets of maps, dealers will apparently be able to simply install the updated content pack onto the Audi’s HDD.

Update (08/29/08): I previously had stated that the Audi will be using a Nvidia graphics card, however it turns out it’s just a Nvidia graphics chip. Sigmund, thanks for the correction.

Earlier this year during the Consumer Electronics Show, Netgear announced their new Storage Central Turbo (SC101T). Although it only reached store shelves a few months ago, this is still the newest version of Netgear’s bestselling Storage Area Network (SAN). The SC101T is much faster and much more versatile than its predecessor, allowing for multiple users to access data simultaneously and even protecting music, photos and videos.

The Upload Test:
The SC101T is a great Storage Area Network (SAN) (aka. Network Attached Storage – NAS), providing gigabit speeds. When coupled with a gigabit router, can offer fast backups and data access for networked machines. In addition to allowing 2 SATA hard drives, of any size, to be combined, the SC101T offers amazing upload speeds. After running a quick test, my results showed that it only took approximately 3.5 minutes to upload a 4.5GB file through my gigabit connection versus the 8.5 minutes it took using a standard 10/100 Ethernet connection.

The Throughput Stress Test:
To further test how well Netgear’s Storage Central Turbo would perform, we connected the unit to three wired computers through a gigabit connection and a single wireless media streaming device. After loading up large separate video files on all the units at the same time, our computers and media streaming device continued to receive the data seamlessly. Despite so much data flowing through, the video continued to play without any staggering, delays, or hiccups. It was quite impressive compared to the previous generation of NAS devices.

Setup Utility:
The Storage Central comes with the Storage Central Manager Utility, which is required to be installed on our machines to be able to access the drive or make any administrative modifications. This was one of the main pitfalls to Netgear’s product since the user-interface wasn’t too friendly (still usable). One thing that made us give this a thumbs up was that fact that the drive combinations didn’t need to match and it even supported a RAID configuration.

We highly recommend this to anyone who has multiple machines on a network and manages a lot of media. It is extremely worth the investment to backup your data instead of having to spend a few thousand dollars and go through a long and tedious process to have your data recovered if your Hard Drives fail. For just $150, Netgear’s Storage Central Turbo (SC101T) is well worth the money. This of course doesn’t include any hard drives, but it won’t be too expensive as prices are continuously dropping. A 500GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive costs just $130 now. If this “solution” is too expensive, we recommend just purchasing an external hard drive to backup your important documents. It isn’t worth the pain of loosing years worth of data because of something as simple as a power surge.

Buy Now: Netgear Storage Central Turbo – $143 (No Tax & Free Shipping)
Links: Netgear (SC101T) More Info