Quad-Core #2
Ξ February 24th, 2008 | → | ∇ Technology |
I think that in the past I might have been a product snob. In some cases, I probably still am. I often want the best that I can get and sometimes that means that I look for a name brand. In recent years, and with ever increasing frugality, I still might look for a name brand, but instead of having to have the newest, most up to date, I often will look to past recent releases of products and possibly even manufacturer refurbished items. Used. or slightly. To take the auto industry’s term, pre-owned. Most of these products you can’t even tell that someone else used them, and so we come to this most recent acquisition, my a6152n HP Quad Core workstation.
I know that this is a technology post and therefore I should be obligated to inform you of all the hoopity flops and all that, but all I have to say is… “It’s real fast”. Mainly because I haven’t done any tests or benchmarks. I’m too busy for that. And to show that I’m too busy, I acquired this little machine 2 weeks ago and just today turned it on for the first time. Not to be further honest with you, I already bought my wife one for her photo busines and it screams for photoprocessing and multiple applications etc.
With the 3GB of RAM and the quad core processor (I think that is 2 duo core processors slapped together to make 4 on one chip, I could be wrong) it really works nice.
One complaint. It came with Vista. I’m not a techno-whiner, well maybe I am and I don’t really want to join in with all the Vista nay-sayers. But… I start this thing up and I’m not running anything and 1GB of memory is used up while not running any applications. GRRRRRRR. So like my other quad core that Brandi uses, I will be loading XP on it. Not that it is much better, but it uses less RAM and it is more stable for the wider number of applications that we are using.
So, why do I need this machine? well, I don’t really NEED it and that sets up for another future post about our NEED for technology vs our WANT for technology, or rather our SLAVERY to it.
It does some cool things for 3D like multiple processor rendering for stills and frames for video. Rendering for DVD’s is improved. All in all it comes down to waiting, and I’m not good at waiting especially when there are lots of other things to be doing, but waiting 2-3 minutes for a render when it could be just 10secs makes the decision for me. I’m sure I’ll post more on that later. We will have to spend some time doing some graphics stuff and I’ll have to post some pics later…
tomb
on February 24th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Curious to see if it works as quickly with XP. I don’t know if XP can take advantage of the extra processors. I like fast too, but I am looking towards Apple’s Macintosh for it’s well integrated OS and hardware. Did you look at Apple before buying another Windows PC?
-Sean