Pete Austin’s Blog

I consider myself pretty tech savvy – I probably would have my job if I wasn’t. So when I noticed my computer exhibiting strange video behavior a few months I was sure I could figure it out pretty quickly. But then days of troubleshooting became weeks of annoyance and weeks became months of frustration.

One day I picked up a new mainstream video card for my home desktop. It was a single-slot middle-class Nvidia card that did require a 6-pin power connection but was by no means a power hog. Almost immediately after installing the card I began to notice single-pixel video artifacts popping all over the screen. Then the artifacts turned into complete picture outages on the monitor. The screen would just go black, flash a few times and then come back with the artifacts.

I tried everything to isolate the cause. I went through driver revisions. I replaced the card. I swapped between single and dual-link DVI cables. I thought perhaps the motherboard was overheating from the added wattage and put extra fans in to increase cooling airflow. I cleaned the components of any dust. I swapped the jack that the video card used on the modular power supply. At 600 watts, I was sure that my power supply was capable of supporting the middle-class video card and my small form factor system.

For a while I just learned to accept the flaw and conceded that I would need to replace the motherboard. My budget G965 motherboard used an extremely cheap 3-phase power system and electrolytic capacitors. For the record, I will never again buy a mother board with less than 5-phase power and all solid capacitors, but in this case even these cheap components were not the cause of the video problems.

Today at work I was cranking away on my dev box and it suddenly occurred to me the most likely candidate that I had not even considered yet. The power strip I had all my home computer equipment plugged into was an ancient strip that I had had since college. I started think that maybe my five-year-old, $15 powers strip was the real component incapable of dealing with the added wattage of the video card. So I picked up a new APC power strip on the way home from work, swapped everything to the new strip and just like that – my system ran flawlessly. No artifacts and no video outages. In fact, the video quality is amazing compared to what it was on the old power strip. The colors are deeper, the contrast sharper, and the brightness increased. All because of a defective power strip.

So this brings me to a point I want to make about power conditioning. As an avid home-theater buff I’ve seen all sorts of power-conditioning products peddled for high-end electronics use. Products from Monster, Panamax, and APC are advertised everywhere from A/V forums to big box retailers like Best Buy and Fry’s. Up until now I’ve thought them to be the single biggest rip-off in the realm of consumer electronics. I won’t back off calling Monster the biggest rip-off brand in consumer electronics, but I will say that I stand corrected on the question of whether or not clean power makes a difference in audio and video quality. I’m not saying that everyone needs to have $200 power strips and stand alone home-theater power conditioning units. I’m just saying to spend the extra $20 on a higher quality power strip and rest-assured that you are seeing and hearing everything you are supposed to be.

Leah and I headed down to the Qwest Event Center for this year’s Ski Fever convention today in search of our first snowboard gear. Every year the Ski Fever show comes through both Portland and Seattle but we missed it last year. Plus, last season we only managed to get out to Snoqualmie a couple times so we just rented gear from REI each time. The gear was alright, but it was..well..rental gear. We both had a blast learning to snowboard though so this year we resolved to actually buy our own gear for a little better experience.

I really wasn’t sure what kind of deals we might be able to find at Ski Fever, especially considering thatthere are some pretty good deals available online. I tried asking around to a lot of friends and fellow ski/snoboarders but strangely no one I asked had ever been to the show before. So we just threw caution to the wind and went for it.

The show was actually pretty fun, but at the same time a little overwhelming. Almost every ski and snowboard shop in the area was there with their gear which included new, last season’s, demo, used, and everything in between. In addition there were booths for most every major resort in the northwest and British Columbia. Deals were definitely there, but you had to really work to find them. We spent almost six hours at the show finding our gear. Ultimately we both picked up complete board, boots, and binding sets and spent far less than we would have at any store or online. We got brand new gear and in some cases were even able to haggle the price down a little.

The show included some other stuff like skier/snowboarder celebrity appearances (oh whom I had absolutely no idea who they were) and some events like rail-riding and acrobatics. It added a little to the atmosphere but they weren’t really that great. Almost every booth had some sort of raffle going on and of all the ones we entered I actually did win one of the drawings..a free t-shirt from a resort (yeah). The bottom line is that the show is really meant for the gear and that’s what it does best. Here’s the gear that Leah and I picked up.

My setup:
Ride Decade board
Burton Mission bindings
Burton boots

Leah’s setup:
GNU B-Nice board
Burton Citizen bindings
DC boots

In a previous post, I talked about a meeting I had with a group of Intel sales reps back at the end of June. I’ve gotten a lot of hits on it and I thought I’d post a follow-up. When we met, Intel was in full hype mode about their upcoming solid state drives and promised that they were about to change the market. Fast forward three and a half months and there have been some new developments. While I’m usually a very modest individual, I want to point out that I was right on a few points. Now don’t get me wrong here.  I’m not posting out of hubris. I wanted to follow up on this because I think it’s an indicator of greater market conditions. What’s changed is that Intel has lifted the NDA on their first solid state drive.

But I want to work my way back to that. To follow up on my mention of Seagate; at the time (pre stock market crash) Seagate Technology was (and still is) the market leader in magnetic hard drives and I mentioned that its share price looked like a great deal considering the doubt many people had about the realistic timelines surrounding solid state drive technology. Well, then the bottom fell out of the market and everything went to shit. With the economy in its current state it’s hard to see any company actually growing profits and their share prices reflect that. But are Seagate and other hard drive manufacturers facing obsolescence? Not at all. In fact, it’s leadership has just come out with revised roadmaps for 2009 restating that not only will they themselves be releasing their first solid state drives (solely focused on the enterprise market mind you) next year, but that they will continue to lead the expansion of magnetic storage technology in the form of 2TB+ hard drives. Furthermore, they have reiterated that they will be slowly releasing solid state drives into retail as appropriate in light of the fact that they are simply not cost-competitive in the marketplace. By the way, they are speaking directly to Intel with that statement. Not the other SSD manufacturers.

The next thing that happened occurred just yesterday. Apple announced its latest notebook refresh in the way of its new MacBook Pro and MacBook models. And what was the big hardware improvement for these models? Apple completely dropped Intel’s G45 integrated graphics in favor of Nvidia’s latest discrete mobile graphics. Ouch. So basically Apple confirmed to everyone what most already knew, that Intel’s latest graphics chip was not the next big thing in integrated graphics, but rather a barely adequate stop-gap that only served to allow Apple to release its previous generation of notebooks with the stellar Intel mobile CPUs it really wanted.

So we find ourselves back at the point I made almost four months ago. Intel makes simply the best processors on the planet. But they’ve strayed into unfamiliar waters of technology that some of its competitors are far more established in. Consider the following: Intel announced that it would be releasing two models of solid state drives. One mainstream drive based on MLC NAND flash and another enterprise-focused model based on SLC memory. However, only the mainstream MLC drive has actually been tested by independent reviewers, it’s still not available in retail channels, and it’s priced at $600 for a 64GB drive. To put that in perspective, it would be easy to configure a complete Dell laptop with an 80GB hard drive included for just $700. Hmm, $600 on an otherwise inexpensive component that’s not even available yet or $700 on a complete system now?

So did Intel at least get the performance of their drives in line with the hype? Actually, yes. Their mainstream MLC-based drive simply outperforms every other solid state drive currently on the market at any capacity level. Of course Intel knows this and has also priced their drives higher than every other solid state drive currently on the market. Compared to the magnetic hard drives that it is supposedly going to make obsolete, performance is very good but in many applications it’s on par with today’s fastest consumer hard drives and there have been observed performance problems with random write operations. Not exactly the stats you expect to see in a product that proclaims to be the end of magnetic storage technology.

Furthermore, you didn’t see RAID results included in the reviews. Why does that matter? Because many business systems rely on RAID to provide protection from data corruption and drive failure. The price of these drives is already a sticking point. If the RAID performance is no better than current technology at a fraction of the capacity, you can expect business customers to look the other way.

The bottom line, Intel needs to pull back on the hype and modestly release their solid state drives. Solid state drives will have their day. The performance speaks for itself, but whatever level of success they achieve in the market will show you exactly where the technology is positioned and how it will fare against a very scalable magnetic storage technology.

As a footnote: remember the example we all hear about how computers that used to be the size of an entire room are now the size of our iPhones? We are fast-approaching the day when technologists will say, “Enterprise SANs that used to fill half of our data center, now resides in just 4Us of rack space.” Magnetic storage technology will be how we get there.