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How To: Build A NAS Box

Michael Brown — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Crush the performance of consumer network-attached storage devices by building your own! And you can use a number of legacy parts to do this on the cheap!

Time: 3 Hours

What You Need

FreeNAS
Free, www.freenas.com
ISO Recorder
Free, http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
USB Thumb Drive
Motherboard
CPU
Case
Memory
Videocard
Optical Drive
Power Supply
One or More Hard Drives

A network-attached storage (NAS) device is the Robin to a LAN’s Batman. The two should be inseparable, and for good reason. A NAS box gives you a guaranteed way to store all of your files and stream your media. Running a NAS box also means that you don’t have to boot your power-leeching desktop rig every time you want to access your files from another device.

But you don’t have to go out and purchase a NAS device. You can build a superior alternative using spare parts left over after upgrading your PC.

We recently gathered a bunch of components that had been gathering dust in the Lab and built a FrankenNAS that absolutely pulverized its admittedly budget retail competitor, the $135 Linksys NAS200. Using an Asus A8N32 SLI Deluxe motherboard and a dual-core 2.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU, we were able to shorten our transfer speeds to one-sixth of the NAS200’s on small transfers and around one-seventh on larger file moves. Note that you don’t even need top-of-the-line hardware for your device. Our open-source operating system, FreeNAS, will run on almost anything.

But just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s simple. So we’re going to walk you through the finer points of setting up a FreeNAS-based network storage device of your very own. You’ll be streaming your favorite movies in no time!

1.Burn the FreeNAS ISO to CD

The first step in the process is building the physical NAS box, but since it’s no different from assembling a PC, we’re skipping ahead to the installation of the operating system. In order to do that, you’ll first want to set your NAS motherboard’s BIOS to boot from an optical drive.

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, a Unix-like open-source OS developed in the early 1990s. It’s not Linux and it’s definitely not Windows, so you should be aware that using the OS as the backbone of your file storage is going to first wipe out anything that might be on the hard drives you use. On the upside, FreeNAS itself requires no hard drive space for installation. It’s so compact, we’ll be using an embedded version that can run off a USB thumb drive or a CompactFlash card as small as 32MB.

Download the FreeNAS ISO and drop a CD in your burner. If you don’t already have software capable of burning an ISO image to a CD, download and install the free utility ISO Recorder. If you’re using ISO Recorder, right-click the file you just downloaded and choose the option “Copy image to CD.”

Once you’ve burned the image, put the CD in your NAS box’s optical drive, restart your computer, and boot FreeNAS from the CD. One caveat: Make sure your motherboard’s BIOS is configured to boot from a USB device, as we’ll be installing the operating system to a thumb drive.

2. Install FreeNAS on a USB Thumb Drive

We’re going to set up our NAS to boot from a USB thumb drive so we don’t limit our upgrade options. If you didn’t listen to us in the last step and are using an old mobo that just won’t boot from a removable device, you have two options. You can boot from the CD and store your configuration file on a USB thumb drive or CompactFlash card or you can partition your hard drive, copy the OS to that partition, and boot from there. Be aware, however, that you cannot use the resulting storage partition for RAID: FreeNAS allows only whole drives in an array.

Quick Tip: Double-check whether FreeNAS offers support for your hardware by checking the compatibility lists at http://www.freenas.org/index.php?option=com_openwiki&Itemid=30.

When the FreeNAS Console Setup menu appears (tap the Escape key if the FreeNAS splash screen doesn’t disappear on its own), plug a thumb drive into the NAS box’s USB port and choose the menu item “Install/Upgrade to a hard drive/flash device, etc.” At the next prompt, choose the first option: “Install ‘embedded’ OS on HDD/Flash/USB.” Choose the optical drive containing the FreeNAS ISO image and hit Enter. Next, select the USB thumb drive on which you want to install the OS. Note that the installation process’s default choice is the hard drive, so make sure you’ve changed it to your thumb drive before you hit the Enter key.

After you’ve installed the operating system on the thumb drive, remove the CD and reboot your NAS box.

3 Configure Your Network Settings

When your NAS box has rebooted, choose item 1 from the Console Setup menu: Assign Interface. Unplug the NAS box’s Ethernet cable and choose the OS’s Auto Detection option. When prompted, plug the Ethernet cable back in and hit the Enter key. You should get a message that reads “Detected link-up on interface XX,” where “XX” is the name of your Ethernet interface (in our example, the name was “nve0”). Hit the Enter key again.

The next screen will read “Configure OPT interface.” This enables you to configure a second Ethernet port, assuming your motherboard has one. For now, choose the option that reads “Finish and exit configuration” and hit the Enter key. Accept the naming scheme presented in the next screen and hit Enter.

Next, type the number 7 and hit Enter to reboot the computer. When the machine has finished rebooting, choose item 2 from the Console Setup menu: Set LAN IP Address. The OS will ask if you want to use DHCP. Choose Yes unless your network is set up with static IP addresses. At the next prompt, select “AutoConfiguration for IPv6.”

The OS will then give you the IP address that’s been assigned to the NAS box. You can now ping your NAS box to verify that it has joined your network and you can manage its settings using your web browser. Just type the NAS box’s IP address into your browser’s address bar. The default user name is “admin” and the password is “freenas.”

Next: Configure Your NAS, Format the Drive, and Get Started!

4. Configure Your Drive

Once you’ve logged into the web GUI, you’ll want to take a whack at a few important configuration steps: Change the name of the NAS; set the correct date, time, and time zone; and create a unique username and password. Start by clicking General (in the left-hand menu stack, under the System heading) and change the desired information in the large pane on the right.

Click the Password tab, type in the existing password (“freenas”), and enter your new password in the two boxes provided.
You’re now ready to prepare your hard drive. Go back to the left-hand menu and choose Management under the Disks heading. The plus sign inside the circle on the right-hand pane indicates that you can add an element to the NAS. In this case, we’re going to add a hard drive. Click the plus symbol and all the drives in your system (including the optical and USB thumb drive) will appear in the window next to the Disk heading. Be sure to choose your hard drive.

You might want to experiment with some of the options on this page (especially “hard disk standby time,” “advanced power management,” and “acoustic level”), but leave them at their default values for now. Do make sure that the value for “Preformatted file system” is set to “unformatted” before you click the Add button; then click Apply Changes.

5. Format and Mount the Hard Drive

Ready to wipe your drive? Return to the Disks heading in the left-hand column of the NAS box’s administrative options and click Format. Make sure you’re ready to proceed, as the option will erase any information previously stored on the drive. Choose your hard drive from the drop-down menu, enter a volume label, and accept the remaining default choices: “File System: UFS (GPT and Soft Updates),” “Minimum Free Space (8),” and “Don’t Erase MBR (unchecked).” Click the Format Disk button.

A drive must be mounted before it can be accessed, so go back to the left-hand Disks menu and click Mount Point. Click the circled plus sign, select Disk from the drop-down Type menu, and choose your hard drive from the drop-down Disk menu. Choose EFI GPT from the Partition menu and UFS for the File System value. Click the Add button when you’re finished. An OK message in the Status window indicates that the drive was successfully mounted.

6. Enable Services and Create Shares

We need to access our NAS box using computers running Windows, so it’s essential that we enable the SAMBA networking protocol on our NAS box. Look in the left-hand column for the heading labeled Services and click the CIFS/SMB menu item. Place a check mark next to Enable in the main window but leave all the values at their default settings. Click the Save and Restart button.

Now that SAMBA’s up and running, you’ll need to create one or more network shares that allow your remote computers to treat the NAS box’s hard drive(s) as though they’re a local resource. Click the Shares tab in the “Services: CIFS/SMB: Settings” window and click the circled plus button. In the screen that appears next, give the share a name, add a comment describing the purpose of the share, set the path, and click the Add button. Click the Apply Changes button on the next screen.

When you’ve finished configuring FreeNAS, click the Backup/Restore button to create a backup of your configuration. You should now be able to find your NAS and your newly created shared folders listed in Windows XP’s “My Network Places” (or Vista’s “Network”).

How to Stream from Your NAS Box

Now that your new NAS box is ready to go, getting all your movies and photos to stream to your media device of choice is extraordinarily easy. Here’s how you do it. Pull up your FreeNAS administrative options page and click UPnP under the Services menu. Click the Enable check box and assign a name to your device. Then select the NIC you’ll be using. Add the directories you want to share and pick a component profile that best matches your UPnP device—like your Xbox 360, for instance. Click Save and Restart, and you’ll be ready for some movie-watching!

Everything You Need to Know About Photovoltaic Cells

Michael Brown — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:49:11 -0500

In one second, the nuclear fusion process taking place inside the sun produces enough energy to satisfy the needs of the earth’s population for nearly 500,000 years. Photovoltaic cells are capable of capturing some of that energy and converting it into usable electricity; unfortunately, today’s technology can’t do this very efficiently.

French physicist Edmond Becquerel first described the photovoltaic effect in 1839. He discovered that some materials were capable of producing small amounts of electricity when exposed to sunlight. The first photovoltaic cell, however, wasn’t created until 1883, and more than 70 years passed before the next major scientific advance took place, when researchers at Bell Labs developed the first crystalline silicon photovoltaic cell in 1954.

Most modern photovoltaic cells are still manufactured from silicon, the same semiconductor material used to produce GPUs, CPUs, and other integrated circuits. The majority of commercial photovoltaic cells are manufactured from crystalline silicon—either single- or poly-crystal silicon. The latter are less efficient than the former, but their lower manufacturing cost largely makes up for the conversion shortfall.

The bulk of the progress that’s been made since the 1950s stems from the efficiency at which absorbed light is converted into electricity. The Bell Labs product was capable of just 4 percent efficiency; today’s commercial products are approaching 20 percent efficiency.

Photons from the sun pass through the cell’s n-type layer to strike atoms in the p-type layer,
dislodging some of those atoms’ electrons in the process. The freed electrons move up toward the n-layer,
creating an electrical current that can be stored or service an electrical device.

The Photovoltaic Process

A photovoltaic cell is created by sandwiching two silicon wafers: an n-type layer and a p-type layer. The n-type layer exhibits a negative electrical charge and has an excess of electrons, while the p-type layer exhibits a positive electrical charge and has a shortage of electrons. The two layers are separated by an n-p junction. The cell is then attached to a backplane, a layer of metal used to physically reinforce the cell and provide an electrical contact on its bottom. A second electrical contact is placed on the top of the cell to create an electrical circuit. The cell is then treated with an anti-reflective coating to compensate for silicon’s otherwise shiny nature.

As photons—particles of light—hit the photovoltaic cell, they pass through the n-type layer and strike the p-type layer, where they are either absorbed by the silicon atoms, reflected, or pass straight through the material. Absorbed photons knock electrons loose from the silicon atoms, leaving empty “holes,” which are filled by electrons further back in the circuit. The loose electrons flow through the electrical contacts on the p-type layer to the contacts on the n-type layer. This flow of electrons produces an electric current that can be drawn off and stored in a battery or used to power an electrical device.

An array of cells is electrically connected and mounted into a frame to form a photovoltaic module. A narrow metal grid is applied to the top of the module to transport electrical energy, and a sheet of glass or plastic is placed on top to protect the cells from the environment (everything from bad weather to bird droppings and stray baseballs). A group of interconnected modules is known as an array.

Photons contain varying amounts of energy, depending on their wavelength. Within the visible spectrum, red light possesses the least amount of energy while violet light has the most. The same goes for the invisible spectrum: Infrared light possesses very little energy but ultraviolet light contains a great deal of it.

Most modern photovoltaic cells are capable of converting only high-energy photons into electrical current, which explains why mainstream solar panels are so inefficient. One of the most promising ideas for increasing the efficiency of solar energy is to stack cells with different properties on top of one another. This way, high-energy photons can be captured by a cell on the top of the stack, while lower-energy photons pass through to subsequent cells that are better suited to those photons’ wavelengths.

AC/DC

The electrical devices in your home (appliances, computers, air conditioners, lights, and so on) operate on alternating current (AC), but a solar array produces direct current (DC). The solution is to install an inverter that converts the solar array’s DC into AC. Inverters are designed to power off when there isn’t enough electrical current for them to operate, e.g., at night.

Solar panels produce the most power in the presence of direct sunlight, but they’ll produce some energy on cloudy or even rainy days. They can’t produce any juice at night, of course, so you’ll need some means of storing the electricity that they create when the sun is shining. Batteries can provide total independence from your local electric company, enabling you to potentially live “off the grid,” but this solution presents a host of environmental problems, and there’s no guarantee it will provide all the energy you’ll need. The more practical alternative is to tie your system into the electrical grid.

In a grid-tied system, you sell the excess energy your solar array generates to your local utility, and you buy back the electrical power you need for your home. With this method, the utility acts like an unlimited energy-storage system, giving you all the power you need whenever you need it. The inverter is connected to the meter the electric utility uses to measure your consumption, which means your meter will spin backward whenever you generate more than you consume.

For most households, the reward for going solar is more feel-good than financial: It could take a decade or longer to recoup the investment in even a moderate-size system. That situation is changing rapidly as the escalating cost of producing electricity from fossil fuels moves in inverse proportion to the cost of deriving energy from the sun.

Everything You Need to Know About GDDR Memory

Michael Brown — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:11:36 -0500

We invariably refer to the video memory in modern videocards as GDDR, differentiating it only by version (GDDR2, GDDR3, GDDR4, and now GDDR5), but the technology’s full acronym is actually GDDR SDRAM, which stands for Graphics Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory.

“Double data rate” describes the memory’s capacity for double-pumping data: Transfers occur on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal. This endows memory clocked at 800MHz with an effective data-transfer rate of 1.6GHz. “Synchronous” refers to the memory’s ability to operate in time with the computer’s system bus. This allows the memory to accept a new instruction without having to wait for a previous instruction to be processed, a practice known as instruction pipelining.

GDDR2 memory was never a very popular solution among GPU manufacturers: The technology required 2.5 volts to power its input buffers and core logic (i.e., VDD voltage), which is the same as GDDR. GDDR2 operated at much higher clock speeds than its predecessor, however, which produced a tremendous amount of heat. The fact that GDDR2’s VDDQ voltage requirement (the electricity needed to power the memory’s output buffers) was only 1.8 volts didn’t compensate for this problem.

Survival of the Fittest

GDDR3—an open standard developed by ATI in conjunction with the standards organization JEDEC Solid State Technology Association—is the most widely used graphics memory technology in use today. Ironically, Nvidia introduced the first graphics processors designed to use GDDR3: The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, followed by the GeForce 6800 Ultra. ATI didn’t deploy a GDDR3 solution until it shipped the Radeon X800.

GDDR3 improved on previous GDDR designs by supporting higher clock speeds while requiring less power. These chips consume less electricity, so they produce less heat and can rely on simpler cooling hardware (GDDR3’s VDD and VDDQ voltage requirements are both 1.8 volts). GDDR3 also has separate read and write data strobes, which contributes to a much faster read-to-write ratio (meaning the turnaround from a read operation to a write operation occurs much more quickly) than GDDR2 supported. GDDR3 chips have a hardware reset feature that can wipe their memory clean to start receiving new data should such an operation be necessary.

ATI and Nvidia (in conjunction with JDEC) both had a hand in establishing the specification for the next generation of graphics memory, GDDR4, but Nvidia has so far decided not to use the new technology in any of its reference designs. ATI, meanwhile, incorporated the new memory first in its Radeon X1950 XTX cards and subsequently in several models of its Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series.

Evolutionary Dead End

GDDR4’s improvements over GDDR3 were mostly incremental. It seemed to offer a power advantage in that it could operate with just 1.5 volts, compared to GDDR3’s 1.8 volts. Board designers, however, quickly discovered that they needed 1.8 volts anyway to ensure stability at higher clock rates.

Two other GDDR4 enhancements are more significant in that they increase the memory’s overall performance: The new memory doubled the size of GDDR3’s prefetch scheme from 4 bits to 8 bits, and its burst length was locked at 8 bits (GDDR3 supports either 4- or 8-bit burst lengths). Prefetch enables the memory chip to anticipate the need for data and grab it before the GPU asks for it, reducing the time the processor has to wait. Burst length defines the amount of data sent in burst mode, a process in which data is transmitted without waiting for input from another device, such as the GPU.

GDDR4’s 8-bit burst length might be one reason Nvidia ultimately passed on this type of memory: Nvidia’s processors support only 4-bit burst lengths. With ATI (now AMD) being the only major customer for GDDR4, just two manufacturers—Samsung and Hynix—decided to manufacture it. This circumstance has kept the price of the memory relatively high.

Successful Mutation?

GDDR5 is the next major development in graphics, and as with GDDR4, AMD’s ATI division has already paired it with its higher-end GPU: the Radeon HD 4870. Nvidia continues to hang back, professing satisfaction with the performance of GDDR3.

GDDR5 requires just 1.5 volts of electrical power, which should make the memory run cooler—a feature that could aid in overclocking, reduce manufacturing costs, and extend battery life if used in a notebook PC. The new memory’s prefetch and burst length remain the same as that of GDDR4: 8 bits on both counts.

GDDR5 technology supports densities ranging from 512Mb to 2Gb, so it would require just four 2Gb modules to create a 1GB frame buffer (here again, however, real-world parts are currently limited to 512Mb and 1Gb). Boasting a raw theoretical data rate ranging from 3.6Gb/s to 6Gb/s (although we won’t see that upper limit for several years), GDDR5 promises to deliver twice the memory bandwidth of GDDR3 running at the same clock frequency.

More practically, that high data rate also enables a GPU manufacturer to achieve nearly the same memory bandwidth with an economical 256-bit interface as it would by building a much more expensive 512-bit bus into its GPU.

Nvidia’s professed ambivalence toward GDDR5 hasn’t stopped a third major memory manufacturer—Qimonda—from joining Hynix and Samsung in the market for GDDR5 memory. Hmm, is anyone taking bets that Nvidia’s next-generation GPU will tap GDDR5?

In the Lab: Michael Brown Re-examines 802.11n Draft 2.0 Routers

Michael Brown — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:02:39 -0600

I believe in real-world testing, but since I was living in an apartment when I wrote our router roundup in the November issue, I tested the products in our corporate office. I suspected that this environment—with its concrete floors and ceilings, aluminum-stud walls, and multiple wireless networks—would be more hostile than the typical home.

Imagine my surprise when the benchmark results in the environment of my newly built house turned out to be remarkably similar to my office results. Since the MIMO (multiple input/multiple output) technology at the heart of the 802.11n standard benefits from bounced and reflected signals, I presume that the concrete floors and ceiling and the aluminum studs actually enhanced the routers’ performance—bouncing and multiplying the signals as they traveled to the remote client.

My new home is located on what was once a dairy farm, so I had earlier hypothesized that the absence of competing wireless networks would result in much better performance. Now I think that all the metal and concrete in the office was more conducive to MIMO’s signal propagation than my home’s wood-frame construction.

Two aspects of my house’s design had a highly negative impact on range and throughput. The routers had a difficult time penetrating my double-walled, double-insulated media room. The room is fabulous from an acoustic perspective, but it’s practically a Faraday cage when it comes to wireless (I hard-wired it with CAT5e). Reaching clients outside the house was also difficult because the exterior walls are clad in dense fiber-cement siding.

Despite all this, I still think my house is a better real-world environment than the office. You’ll find additional information about my Wi-Fi testing methodology at my blog.

Intermatic Home Settings Lighting Control Starter Kit

Michael Brown — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:13:18 -0500

If you’re considering automating your home, lighting is the best place to start. But if you’re afraid that handling bare electrical wires will leave you with an Einsteinian hairdo, pick up Intermatic’s Home Settings Starter Kit.

The kit, based on Z-Wave radio-frequency technology, consists of one HA07 remote control and two HA03 plug-in lamp modules. Plug the module into an outlet, plug your lamp into the module, program the remote, and you can now turn on the light from nearly anywhere in your house. No need to change out the existing outlets or switches in your home; no need to deal with bare wires.

Push the button on either the remote or the module itself, and the lamp will turn on or off (depending on its current state). Push and hold down the button and the module will behave as a dimmer switch, reducing or increasing the lamp’s brightness.
Since this is Z-Wave technology, the remote is always aware of what state the module is in. If you turn the lamp on or off at the module, pressing the button on the remote will have the opposite effect; i.e., it will turn the lamp on if it’s off and off it’s on. Z-Wave operates on a mesh network, so if one module is out of range of the remote, any remotes that are within range will relay the commands until they reach their intended target.

Although the remote has only 12 channels, limiting you to 12 individually controlled devices, you can create up to 12 groups with up to 16 devices each for a total of 192 items. The remote features an astronomic clock that will automatically turn controlled lights on at sunrise and off at sunset, taking daylight savings time into account. You can also create 28 other timed events.

To control devices from your PC, add Intermatic’s HA23 ThinkEssentials package ($50) or a similar application from another manufacturer—all Z-Wave products are interoperable. Lighting is just the beginning. Catch the bug and you’ll want this technology throughout your home.

XFX 8800 Ultra XXX Edition

Michael Brown — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:09:03 -0500

ATI and Nvidia have long entertained us with their game of GPU one-upmanship. Each time ATI thought it had a part that could beat Nvidia, Nvidia moved the goalposts. But now that ATI has been reduced to an AMD brand, it seems its engineers no longer want to play.

Nvidia’s 8800 GTX was already the fastest consumer GPU on the planet, so what does the 8800 Ultra get you? Virtually the same hardware running at higher clock speeds—insanely higher clock speeds in the case of XFX’s XXX Edition. Although Nvidia tells us this is new silicon—and not merely hand-selected parts that proved capable of running at higher clock speeds—the Ultra has 128 stream-processing units and a 384-bit interface to 768MB of memory, just like the older part. It also has a much larger fan to handle the resulting heat.

The core on a stock GTX runs at 575MHz (with its actual shader units clocked at 1.2GHz), and its memory hums along at 900MHz. A stock Ultra is spec’d to run at 612MHz (with a 1.5GHz shader clock), and its memory runs at 1.08GHz. XFX has goosed those rates even higher, cranking its Ultra XXX Edition up to blistering speeds with a 675MHz core, a 1.67GHz shader unit, and 1.15GHz memory clock speeds.

But that awesome speed comes at a cost: Until now, we’ve been pleased with the relative quiet at which Nvidia’s GPUs run. The Ultra changes all that—the fan on a single XFX card is loud enough to wake the dead. Put two of them inside a box and you can stir an entire cemetery.

We rarely complain about a component’s price if it delivers impressive performance, but we have to draw the line somewhere. The Ultra is spectacular, but then, so is the GTX. And while the average GTX cost about $585 at press time, the price for this particular Ultra hovered around $875. Can you say “diminishing returns”?

PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT

Michael Brown — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:45:19 -0500

Having designed the graphics architecture for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, ATI’s management had boasted for months ahead of its acquisition by AMD that its engineers were experts at designing the type of unified shader architecture envisioned by DirectX 10. Imagine our surprise when the R600 not only hit the market several months after Nvidia’s take on unified architecture but that the company’s best offering can’t compete with Nvidia’s top two GPUs.

AMD, for its part, says not competing with Nvidia at the high end is all part of its master plan, that it would rather focus on the “mainstream” graphics market, where most people are actually buying new videocards. And so it has positioned the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT in this PowerColor card to compete with cards based on Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTS with 640MB frame buffers. If you believe that, we’ve got some prime real estate in Afghanistan you might be interested in. No, we’re convinced AMD ran into some design problems that it just could not resolve.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT is indeed faster than Nvidia’s 640MB 8800 GTS (but not the insanely fast 8800 Ultra or the only slightly tamer 8800 GTX). It’s also street-priced about $50 higher—but that’s about what we’d expect from the faster component. What we didn’t expect is a GPU that sucks down nearly as much electrical power as an 8800 Ultra while delivering benchmark results that are about 50 percent lower. (The HD 2900 XT requires both a six-pin and an eight-pin cable connection to your power supply.)

Power consumption isn’t something you think about every day, but with energy prices soaring, you should know that our test rig (see the footnote in our benchmark chart) draws 175 watts from the wall with a single Radeon HD 2900 XT at idle. That number jumped to a shocking 318 watts while benchmarking Quake 4 and increased to a staggering 515 watts when we dropped a second card in our Bad Axe II motherboard for CrossFire testing. A single 8800 Ultra, for the sake of comparison, sucked down 192 watts at idle and 320 watts under load in the same motherboard.

Another glaring problem with the 2900 XT is the absence of any driver support for AMD’s new Unified Video Decoder, which is designed to deliver hardware support for high-definition video decoding. Without UVD support, the 2900 XT must rely on the host CPU to handle much of this workload. To be fair, none of Nvidia’s 8800-series cards feature that company’s second-generation PureVideo HD engine either (you must step down to the GeForce 8600 to get it), but at least Nvidia has the excuse that its faster designs are several months older than the 8600.

It’s also interesting to observe that the 2900 XT is considerably slower than either the 8800 GTX or the 8800 Ultra, despite having 2.5 times as many stream-processors (320 compared to 128). This fact, combined with AMD’s FUBAR driver support for UVD and the card’s massive power footprint, strengthens our opinion that the 2900 XT is just not what AMD intended.

Those foibles aside, this card boasts some impressive architecture, including a true 512-bit memory interface (the best Nvidia can offer is a 384-bit interface, and that narrows to 320 bits for the 8800 GTS that this card competes with). The chip also has a built-in programmable tessellation unit—again, based on technology already present in the Xbox 360—but this feature won’t be of much real-world use until it’s exposed in DirectX 10 (or will that be DirectX 11… or 12?). But getting back to the real world, the fact that the stream processors in Nvidia’s part are clocked at more than twice the speed of its core didn’t help the 8800 GTS outrun the 2900 XT: PowerColor’s product delivered single- and dual-card benchmark numbers that were 15- and 25-percent higher than what equivalent 8800 GTS configurations could produce.

The 2900 XT, of course, supports CrossFire—AMD’s technology for operating two videocards in a single PC. And as with the latest spins of the X1000 series, the master/slave concept has been eliminated: All HD 2000 series GPUs have a compositing chip baked right into the silicon. AMD has also jettisoned the external cables that previous-gen CrossFire cards used for communication—replacing them with simple ribbon cables that fit inside the case. As with Nvidia’s SLI technology, however, you can operate only one display while in dual-videocard mode.

Two of PowerColor’s HD 2900 XT cards running in CrossFire are indeed faster than a single 8800 Ultra, but a pair of those cards will cost you slightly more than a single Ultra. And if you swing Nvidia’s way, you can always drop in a second Ultra for even more insane performance (click here for our review of the XFX 8800 Ultra XXX Edition).

It would be easy to dismiss this card as a whiff, but it’s really not a bad product, and it’ll be a whole lot better if AMD can unlock its UVD circuits.

Shure SE530PTH Earphones

Michael Brown — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:10:48 -0500

For the price of one set of Shure’s SE530PTH earphones, you could buy two 30GB iPods, 17 sets of Apple earbuds, or 500 encrypted songs from iTunes. A worthy investment or Marie Antoinette–style consumption? With that question in mind, we couldn’t resist auditioning these pricey phones to the sound of Cake’s Fashion Nugget, ripped and FLAC-encoded, on Cowon’s D2 digital media player. We don’t know if Shure’s BOM (bill of materials) justifies a $500 price tag, but we did have awfully big smiles on our faces after using these earphones.

The SE530PTHs fit snugly in your ears and prevent outside noise from reaching your eardrums, just as Shure’s other in-ear phones do. In the past, there’s been a downside to this setup: When you need to hear outside noise—such as when your roommate is desperately trying to tell you the house is on fire—you’ve had to pull the buds out of your head. So Shure came with a brilliant solution called Push to Hear (PTH).

Push to Hear is a slightly bulky module that fits in-line between the earphones and your MP3 player. Activating PTH turns on a directional microphone and cuts the player’s volume. A green LED assures whoever is speaking that yes, you really are listening. PTH is a terrific, albeit expensive, solution to a common problem.

The earphones themselves feature three sets of microdrivers in each earpiece: a tweeter and two woofers. These bass twins deliver a heaping helping of low end—not as much as M-Audio’s IE-20XBs (reviewed in the March 2007 issue), but it’s much better defined in the Shures. They deliver faboo sound at the other end of the spectrum, too. The vibraslap opening on Cake’s title track sounded like it was drilling deep into the left side of our brain—and we mean that in a good way.
Every link in the audio chain is crucial to delivering a great audio experience, but we draw a (dotted) line at spending twice as much on your earphones as you do your MP3 player. So, no Kick Ass for you, Shure.