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Issue #214 May 2008
Who Said Variety Is Good?
by Steve Ciarcia
When English poet William Cowper wrote, “Variety’s the very spice of life/That gives it all its flavor,” he certainly wasn’t trying to buy a computer! I’m an engineer familiar with the technology and the players, but I have to admit that after four days of intense research on selecting a new computer, it is one of the ultimate frustrations in life. In fact, I think the less you know, the better. Sanity prevails only for those people blissfully ignorant enough to walk into a Circuit City or Best Buy and purchase a computer strictly based on the color of the case.
Choices have always been part of the computer buying process, but in the past, they seemed to have been more limited and logical. Five years ago, when I bought my 17² WXGA Toshiba laptop, the choice was P4 and nothing. Yes, there might have been a couple of different clock speeds to choose from, but options were all about peripheral choices rather than the elemental ingredients of the processor architecture. Given the range of CPU choices and software at that time, even a naive purchaser usually couldn’t screw it up even if they did select by case color only.
Today, the preponderance of bloatware powered by processors that can range in performance from a turtle to an Indy racecar brings the process of choosing a new computer to a whole new dimension of price and performance issues. Today we no longer have just a few versions of the P4 and whatever generation Athlon. Instead, we have so many Intel processors that you need a road map: Celeron, Pentium D, Pentium Dual-Core, Pentium Duo, Pentium Core 2 Duo, Pentium Core 2 Quad, Pentium Core 2 Extreme, etc., etc. AMD is just as bad with Semipron, Athlon X2, Athlon 64, Athlon X2, etc., etc. To confuse things further, Intel and AMD use names like Conroe, Penryn, Santa Rosa, Windsor, and Agena to describe technologies we’re all supposed to care about too. Arrrgh!
Ultimately, I had to come to grips with the fact that whether we like it or not Microsoft controls the planet. Even though I intend to continue using XP Pro for as long as possible, I will eventually be forced to switch to Vista. Because my new computer has to run Vista at some point, it is essential that I know the relative performance of the 100 or more Intel and AMD processors so I know if I will have enough horsepower when I do switch.
For example, is the X7900 in a Dell laptop faster than a T7700 in an ASUS? A little bit of research led me to www.cpubenchmark.net. I recognize that there are dozens of benchmark tests, but this site has some really great graphs comparing hundreds of processors. The PassMark scores provide a relative comparison between computers that I wouldn’t otherwise have. As a baseline, I started by checking my 2.4-GHz P4 17² Toshiba I was replacing. It scored a 354. By comparison, the Dell with an X7900 is 1,518, and the ASUS with a T7700 is 1,284.
Obviously, how much of this horsepower you get to use depends on the speed of the peripherals attached to the processor and the efficiency of the software. Both Vista and XP Pro can use multi-core processors as long as they are executing multi-threaded software. OK, I know that probably none of the software I presently use benefits from dual cores, but the immediate benefit of using XP on a new platform (albeit even at the same processor clock speed) is that it should run a lot faster simply because the RAM, disk access, CPU caches, and graphics processing are a whole lot faster on a new system.
When it comes to making a final choice on a laptop, I have to admit that I’m my own worst enemy. I know too much about the good and bad points of all this stuff and it just complicates alternatives. In the end, the only rational solution for me is to approach this the same way I typically solve everything else—complete overkill.
The requirement to install XP Pro instead of Vista eliminated all of the usual consumer brands and left me in the world of “gaming computers” where they are used to customized solutions. I toyed with the idea of an Apple laptop but even that wasn’t enough. After a bit more research, I found the biggest and baddest laptop at XoticPC.com where I ordered a Sager NP9262. It has a Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor (2.4-GHz 8-MB L2 Cache—1,066 FSB), 4-GB DDR2 800 dual-channel memory, 2× 160-GB 7,200-rpm SATA-II 300 HDD, an nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX 512-MB video card, and XP Pro!
For reference, the PassMark score on the Q6600 is 2,711, not bad for a laptop and still plenty of gas for dealing with Vista or, heaven forbid, a computer game. Ultimately, the alternatives among XP, Vista, and processor selection end up being the way I buy cars. Like single-thread software limits the Q6600’s potential, the Connecticut state police pretty much define my driving style. However, plug in some multi-threaded software and give me a German autobahn and you’d better move out of the way.
Follow-up Comments
Knit One Pearl Two
Getting a new computer is a real pain and I’m glad I don’t do it more than every four to five years. I would have waited longer this time around, but Microsoft seems bent on jamming Vista down our throats and I only had a few more months to get a new computer configured with XP Pro. When I left you in the last editorial, I had decided to order the hairiest, most powerful, laptop I could find and presumed that when I did finally have to choke down Vista a couple of years from now I’d still have enough horsepower to run it. My choice was a Sager NP9262.
Normally, I wouldn’t waste more than one editorial in the magazine discussing all of this stuff, but all the e-mails I’ve received suggest that a lot of you share the same replacement agony I just went through and very much dislike monopoly control of an essential ingredient in our day-to-day and business lives.
In any case, walking into the local Circuit City or Best Buy for a computer was out for a number of reasons. Unless custom configured, the only operating system is Vista, Vista, Vista, or Apple. In addition to no choice of OS, bargain-priced systems usually have bargain processors and hard drives. Certainly, there were deals to be had, and the Gateway I bought a while back to get a taste of Vista was one of those; but once you specify things like a 45-nm processor or a 7,200-rpm hard drive, you are in custom territory.
Short of the local off-brand computer store, the only way to get custom-configured hardware and XP Pro is to order a computer online. While there are perhaps others I didn’t discover, the brands that I found that still make custom configurations with XP Pro are Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell, ASUSTek Computer, and Sager Electronics. In the end, I ordered the biggest and baddest available. Here’s what I thought of it after a couple weeks of use.
The Sager NP9262 is considered in the realm of powerful desktop replacements and not strictly a “notebook” computer. It is built on the D901C chassis by Clevo and uses a 17² widescreen LCD available in two versions: WSXGA+ 1,680 × 1,050 resolution in a matte finish or the WUXGA 1,920 × 1,200 resolution with a glossy “glare”-type finish. What follows is the configuration I received from XoticPC.com.
My system configuration:
• 17² WUXGA (1,920 × 1,200) Glossy screen
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600—2.4-GHz 8-MB L2 Cache—1066 FSB processor
• NVidia GeForce 8800M GTX 512-MB—DirectX 10—PCI-Express video card
• 4,096-MB (4 GB) DDR2 800 Dual-channel memory
• 2× 160-GB 7,200-rpm SATA II 300 HDD
• Combo 8×8×6×4× dual-layer DVD/CD writer
• 2-Megapixel camera
• Windows XP Professional 32-bit
OK, the sucker weighs about 12 lb, and when packaged along with a 3-lb power supply and all of the usual junk in the same computer case, it’s about as portable as lugging around a couple of cinder blocks. It’s transportable, period. Move it more than once a week and you need a different computer.
The build quality on the NP9262 is the best I’ve experienced in all of the computers I’ve owned. (Apparently, Clevo also makes a substantial number of the units sold under other “recognizable” computer brand names too.) My 17² Toshiba P4 that I was replacing has a 1,440 × 900 display, so I decided to do it one better by going to 1,920 × 1,200 on the new Sager. The good news is that digital photos are wonderful, and you can easily fit web pages side by side; but if you are over 40 years old like me, using this resolution is more fantasy than reality. Before I went blind from trying to read microscopic print, I changed the display resolution to 1,600 × 1,024. Certainly, the highest resolution is still available, and I like the glossy screen, but if you are thinking about this or another laptop with 1,900 × 1,200 on a 17² display, get a magnifying glass or save the $145 upgrade cost.
When it comes to processor selection these days, welcome to another decision quagmire. I think shooting dice has better odds than figuring out whether the combined trade-offs of front-side bus speed, CPU clock rate, core architecture, L2 cache, and disk drive rpm/cache ultimately mean anything in the real world. I’m still confused.
I ordered the NP9262 with a “desktop intended” Q6600 2.4-GHz Core 2 Quad processor (the Q6700 was $300 more) because I believe down the line there will be more multi-threaded software that will use it. (I’ll offer a bit more empirical data about current benefits later.) In the short run, the 3.0-GHz E8400 offered for the same price would probably perform better than the Q6600, but I’m not buying a system to review and benchmark. I don’t want something that will become obsolete just because Bill Gates decides to expand his bloatware empire.
OK, this isn’t a review, but I feel I’ve had some success finding an adequate solution for myself. Let me just list the highs and lows:
Pros
• Extremely fast: a notebook package with the power of a desktop
• 8800 GTX SLI graphics capability (best available even if I’m not a gamer)
• Holds up to three hard drives including RAID capability
• Build quality is top-notch.
• Virtually no “trial period” software preinstalled to trash up your desktop
• Very quiet: It does not seem to get any hotter than the Toshiba P4 and the USB notebook cooler I added as insurance is probably quite unnecessary.
• Programmable macro keys even if I don’t use them ;-)
• Beautiful LCD
• Comes with a one-year Sager parts and labor warrantee and a three-year labor and technical support warrantee from XoticPC.com
• Did I tell you that this sucker is really fast?
Cons
• USB ports may be in an awkward position for some users.
• About as portable as a block of concrete
• Short battery life, but this is a desktop replacement, not an airline travel portable.
So, did I discover anything good in all of this overkill? Does selecting a premium combination of front-side bus speed, CPU clock rate, core architecture, L2 cache, and disk drive rpm/cache ultimately mean you get more throughput?
Frankly speaking, aside from booting about five to eight times faster than my Toshiba P4, I think if you are using just plain vanilla Microsoft Office, you are better off just buying the best prepackaged sale computer you can find and forget all of this esoteric hardware. According to the Windows task manager with Excel, Word, Outlook, and three Internet Explorer windows running concurrently, my Q6600 CPU usage was only 1% to 2%. Basically, 98% of my blazingly fast computer was concentrated on waiting for keystrokes! Of course, there could be a lot more to understanding CPU usage in Windows Task Manager than I’m aware of (or perhaps it really doesn’t work), but when you have a quad processor it shows four separate core displays and a combined usage percentage. For the most part, when using MS Office, only one core seems to do all of the work and the others sit there twiddling their cache. It’s only when I heavily load the system with graphics tasks that all of the cores show considerable activity. Someone with more knowledge of XP Pro will have to explain to me how all of these single-threaded tasks apparently seem to get distributed so evenly among the other cores when there is a bunch of them running concurrently. Did Microsoft actually do something right?
Sorry. I’m being facetious. This isn’t a scientific review by any means, but let me tell you how I know this all seems to work a little bit better than my P4. From the instant I turned on the NP9262 I could tell it could do a lot more parallel tasks than my P4 ever could.
My typical computer test these days is running my webcams or a streaming video and seeing what task manager says (or in the case of the P4, waiting while everything catches up). I decided to compare the Toshiba 2.4-GHz P4 (XP Pro, 2 GB of RAM, and whatever generation nVidia graphics they put in back then), the Gateway 2.0-GHz Core Duo T2450 (Vista, 2 GB of RAM, and integrated Intel video), and the NP9262. The test simply consisted of running my webcams and going to www.hulu.com and viewing streaming video. (All of the tests were conducted via a Wi-Fi connection.)
On the P4, I was able to get 3 FPS (frames per second) on two of my webcams (640 × 480) with about a 47% CPU load. When I added a streaming video from hulu.com (Battlestar Galactica), it went up to 95%. The 2.0-GHz Gateway was approximately the same but provided about 6 FPS on the webcams.
The Sager could do considerably more and I suspect it had a lot to do with all of the horsepower provided by the nVidia 8800GTX. In fact, I was so impressed that it could handle so much in parallel, I added a Gateway 22² HD2200 monitor to the NP9262 as extended video display so I could see more as well. Rather than just one 17² laptop display, the Gateway HD2200 created a virtual monitor where the cursor goes smoothly between the two displays and gives the equivalent of a 3,300 × 1,050 overall display. It’s neat.
As for evaluating real processing loads, I think the limiting factor was my ISP, not the Sager. With the two network-connected webcams running 14 FPS, I then added Word, Excel, Outlook, and five separate hulu.com streaming video windows. All of the videos seemed perfect with no hesitations. According to Windows Task Manager, I was averaging about 33% load (all four core displays showed activity). Adding three more hulu.com streams (eight total) worked fine, but I could see an occasional update hesitation in some of the video streams. I attribute that to my DSL bandwidth of about 6 Mbps and I was certainly using it all. According to task manager, the CPU usage was about 42%.
Personally, I would have thought there would not be that much difference between a P4 at 2.4 GHz and a Q6600 at 2.4 GHz when everything is supposed to be single-threaded software. Apparently, faster RAM, faster hard drives, more efficient core architecture, big caches, and high-powered graphics engines really do add up. And as for multi-core processing, there’s also obviously a bit more going on than I expected. I can understand now why some people want 20-Gbps Internet connections because there are processors that can take advantage of it.
So, overall, I am quite satisfied that the NP9262 is everything it claims to be. The only integration problems I had were the usual things that always happen whenever you try to load a new generation of software (Office 2007) by a person accustomed and quite satisfied with the earlier generation. And, tell me again why turning on a newly installed piece of software still needs to have 73 updates downloaded to make it current or why you have to download the complete 216-MB Service Pak 1 for Office 2007 before it says you already have it installed. Arrgh!
For all of those people out there who complain about outsourcing technical help and never talking to a real person, buying a Sager and dealing with XoticPC.com was a revelation. During the configuration phase, I had a number of questions and someone at XoticPC was always available to discuss it (the line is answered by a person, not a phone tree). I’m encouraged that there may be some real substance to their free three-year XoticPC labor warrantee and forever technical support. Of course, the real test of getting a new computer is testing how you are treated by the manufacturer. After loading Office I had a few questions so I decided to call Sager technical support. Their technical support number was answered by a real person (speaking real English) with no waiting. I’m impressed.
Finally, as an addendum to the addendum, I want to thank all of the people who e-mailed me with suggestions as to which XP Pro computer to buy. Aside from the people suggesting a dual-boot MacBook Pro, the most often suggested brand was the Lenovo ThinkPad. I did seriously consider it for a while but a major prerequisite was a 17² display and there are no 17² ThinkPads. However, further research and some significant sale pricing suggested a second look for another purpose. Certainly, I have solved the primary “power computing” problem with a block of Sager concrete, but perhaps a lightweight portable could replace one or both of my Sony computers. A 14² ThinkPad T61 with a T9300 processor looks like a perfect candidate. Don’t worry. I won’t bore you with the details when I do it.
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