What's new

5 November 2009

A new Ask Dan, all about drives.

5 November 2009

More letters!

22 October 2009

Letters!

21 October 2009

From aerial torpedoes to RoboCars.

14 October 2009

Another Photon-light sale!

The US dollar's in pretty lousy shape at the moment, so this could be a good time for people outside the USA to buy some stuff from the Photon factory outlet.

The current "October Pre-Holiday Sale" takes 15% off all Photon lights, Maha batteries and chargers, and Leatherman multi-tools, which they now also sell for some reason.

The 15% discount also applies to their expensive but good variable-brightness "Photon Pro" one-AA-cell light, which has been upgraded with a significantly brighter high-power white LED, in addition to its little red LED for when you don't want to lose your night vision.

And, as usual, I get a cut of the action if you click here and buy something!15 September 2009

Alternate history: Of railways, roadways, 3D cards and PC clones.

13 September 2009

Letters!

2 September 2009

Ask Dan: ExpressCard vs PCMCIA.

In which I figure out why it's possible to get adapters that plug ExpressCards into CardBus PCMCIA slots.

(It's more interesting than it sounds. Well, I think it is, anyway.)

5 August 2009

Letters!

21 July 2009

A couple of aspects of modern computing, and modern transport, that'll seem completely bizarre to people in the future.

22 June 2009

A bold new computer metaphor.

21 June 2009

Letters!

19 June 2009

I haven't begged for money for more than nine months...

...so I thought I'd have a really big beg this time.

Anybody wanna help me buy a new PC?

19 June 2009

Next stop, clay tablets: It's possible to back up computer data onto ordinary paper. And it's less silly than it sounds!

8 June 2009

I just wrote a blog post about a couple of Australian "economic stimulus" programs which Aussie readers might find interesting.

(My apologies to readers who already subscribe to my blog's feed.)

31 May 2009

Letters!

16 May 2009

Which kind of sci-fi super-battery should you ask the aliens for?

30 April 2009

Letters!

(Also, mail to dan@dansdata.com was bouncing for a bit. It's fixed now, though; please re-send anything that didn't get through.)

18 April 2009

Would you like to live forever?

31 March 2009

Ask Dan: A PC for the parents?

24 March 2009

Letters!

13 March 2009

In the unlikely case that you have not yet bought quite enough Photon lights, they've got another sale running now. The list prices for various of their products have been reduced a bit now, and there's a "March Madness" sale running on top of that, until the end of the month

As usual, I get a cut of the action if you click here and buy something.

26 February 2009

A "200Hz screen" can be any one of at least three different things.

23 February 2009

Letters!

21 February 2009

We're all prisoners of game theory.

25 January 2009

Letters!

24 January 2009

Are you going to believe me, or your lying eyes?

14 January 2009

I'm back from my holiday, and yesterday wrote what almost amounts to another flashlight review on my blog.

(If you'd like to be automatically notified of new posts on Dan's Data and How To Spot A Psychopath, I remind you that the Dan's Data feed is here, and the How To Spot A Psychopath one is here.)

2 January 2009

I done reviewed me a hard drive.

It's all environmentickal.

31 December 2008

More letters!

31 December 2008

GPGPU and the Law of New Features.

18 December 2008

More letters!

16 December 2008

Letters!

16 December 2008

Four SATA SSDs, compared.

(Plus one low-cost ring-in.)

10 December 2008

Photon sales mentioned too frequently here. This one reduced to point form:

* Many price reductions
* Free US/cheap international shipping continues
* I get a cut if you click this and buy something

Message ends.

10 December 2008

Letters!

4 December 2008

Letters!

29 November 2008

Whoops - I forgot to mention, even though I'm sure you were all hanging on my every word, that the Photon Light people have a 15%-off-all-lights Thanksgiving sale going at the moment. It ends on the third of December.

(They're also still doing the free/super-cheap shipping deal I mention below.)

26 November 2008

Internet washing machines, and magic rip-off boxes.

21 November 2008

Ask Dan: Box O' Drives wanted.

11 November 2008

Letters!

4 November 2008

Ask Dan: Intel or AMD?

4 November 2008

Ask Dan about RAM.

27 October 2008

Letters!

26 October 2008

On nontransitive relationships.

You know - like in Street Fighter.

16 October 2008

I wanted to love this thing. But the manufacturers just won't let me.

8,500 megabytes per dollar!

(updated September 18th, 2009)

Hard-drive prices have taken another couple of steps downward since I last updated this, a few weeks ago.

Now, Australian shoppers can get a "1500Gb" drive for $AU168.30 delivered.

The real formatted capacity of a "1500Gb" or "1.5Tb" drive is a hair under 1400 gigabytes, unless you're Apple. But you're still getting a nice round 8,500 megabytes per dollar.

This remarkably-good-value is the same one that's been leading the local bucks-per-gig charts for some months now, the Samsung EcoGreen unit that I wrote about here. The "green" drives spin at 5400RPM rather than the usual 7200, but their gigantic data density means they're still more than fast enough, especially if you're just using them as an add-on data-bucket - perhaps along with a cheap USB drive box.

Aussie shoppers who'd like to pick up a 1.5Tb Caviar Green from Aus PC Market for $AU168.30 delivered can click here to do so!

 

Three cores, low dollars!

(updated September 2nd, 2009)

If you're building a new computer and you care about bang per buck, AMD's Phenom II is a very tempting proposition.

Phenom IIs come in two-core "X2" and four-core "X4" versions, like Intel's Core 2 CPUs. But you can also get three-core, "X3", Phenom IIs. This odd-in-both-senses core count is actually quite sensible; for desktop-computer tasks, including high-end games, three cores can give some benefit over two, but four cores will probably only give you a trivial extra benefit, unless you're multitasking heavily or running some heavyweight multi-threaded app like (certain kinds of) video encoding.

It's still drawing a bit of a long bow to justify even three cores for any sort of normal PC, but the triple-core Phenom IIs are so cheap that you might as well buy an X3 instead of an X2, especially if you intend to overclock.

And they're not slow, either. They can't compete with Intel's flagship Core i7 CPUs, but they're up there with the fast Core 2s.

So how cheap are Phenom IIs, I hear you ask?

Well, here in Australia m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market are currently selling a Phenom II X3 710, with three 2.6GHz cores, for $AU190.30 delivered.  For practical purposes, most users are unlikely to notice a difference between the X3 710 and the current entry-level Core 2 Quad, the Q8200 - which sells for $AU258.50 delivered.

The cheapest Phenom II is the almost-on-sale X2 545, with two 3GHz cores which'll make it better for games at stock speed than the X3 710; AusPC list it for only $AU146.30. Even the 2.8GHz Phenom II 720 "Black Edition", the special overclockers' model with an unlocked multiplier, is only $AU212.30 delivered!

(You can save a bit more money again by buying an "Athlon II", which is a cut-down two-core Phenom with no level 3 cache. This has a significant effect on performance, though. And the cheapest Athlon II only costs $AU117.70, but that's not great in bang-per-buck terms compared with two- and three-core Phenom IIs.)

Socket AM3 motherboards to suit a Phenom II are cheap, too, and the DDR3 RAM that AM3 motherboards take is now also reasonably priced (compare and contrast the situation a couple of years ago). Phenom IIs are also compatible with "Socket AM2+" motherboards, which take DDR2 RAM, which has been the penny-pincher's choice for rather a while now.

If you've already got a few gigs of DDR2 RAM in your current computer then that might tip you over the edge to AM2+ instead of AM3, but the memory price difference really is tiny now. Cheap DDR2 RAM is now barely more than $AU100 delivered for a couple of 2Gb modules; that's about 40 megabytes per dollar. Two-by-2Gb DDR3 starts from about $AU150 delivered; that's a 50% price premium, but not a lot of actual dollars. If you're building a new PC, I'd definitely go for AM3 and DDR3.

(A three-by-2Gb DDR3 pack, as used in triple-channel Core i7 systems, can be had for about $AU200; that's 31 megabytes per dollar.)

Readers from Australia or New Zealand who'd like to start configuring a new PC with a 2.6GHz triple-core Phenom II X3 710, which costs only $AU190.30, can do so by clicking here. To order the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition, with an unlocked multiplier for better overclocking, you can click here.

(The Aus PC Market Phenom-II page also has three combo packs on it, that give you a Phenom II, Socket AM3 motherboard and two 2Gb DDR3 RAM modules for a discount of around $AU20.)

If you buy a whole system worth of components from Aus PC Market, they'll assemble the computer for free. (They'll also assemble any other connectable components you buy from them in one transaction, like a hard drive and an external box for it, for instance.)

(Oh, and while we're on the subject of penny-pinching, don't forget that if you buy a whole system, Aus PC Market will sell you a 1Gb USB flash drive for only 99 cents! I realise it's irrational to get excited about such a deal when you have to buy a whole computer to be eligible, but my inner miser just can't help it.)