E2180 overclock success on Asus P5LD2 v2

Sorry for the lack of updates recently– I’ve been busy, to say the least.

Anyway, last night I finally found some time to crack open the E2180 that was still in its UPS box. I stuck it in the Asus P5LD2 box that I have laying around (most of the owners of this exact board should know exactly what I am using it for 🙂 ) After a couple minutes of tweaking, it’s sitting at 3.2ghz. I haven’t spent too much time trying to max the clocks, but I do know that at 3.4ghz the setup wouldn’t stay on reliably– perhaps the chip is asking for more voltage, but I am unwilling to give it more than 1.4v

It is running at 3.2ghz stable. I am sure the chip can do much better in a more recent board, such as the 650i board I have sitting in the box still. But at $90, even if the chip is only stable at 3.2ghz, I’ll be OK with that. 🙂

Update: The system primed overnight at 3.2ghz at 1.3v VCore– going to try with less voltage tonight.

Even though this isn’t quite as fast as my Q6600 @ 3.6ghz, the E2180 was also less than 1/3 the price– and at 3.2ghz, it is definitely offers more than 1/3 the performance. A LOT more.

Windows Updating itself – Biggest Botnet ever

Check out this report from Gizmodo.  Resistance is futile, baby.  A foreign entity who has complete control over your OS, leaving you little ‘presents’ without your knowledge.  All you blackhats have nuthin’ on the Borg.
MS is suffering one PR blunder after another recently.  No wonder Apple stock has gone through the roof.  Not only are people being drawn and pulled by Apple’s design prowess, MS has also been intentionally pushing users toward the other camp with these fiascos.  With the way the trend is going, I should really consider readjusting my portfolio and sell some MSFT for AAPL.

In the meantime, I’ll just sit here quietly and read the news on my Fedora Core VM.  🙂

Core 2: Does L2 Matter?

NordicHardware posted this article today.  They compared the impact of L2 cache size on chips running at the same core frequency.  The difference?  about 0-10% depending on application.

So does L2 matter?  I guess that depends on the price you buy the chips at.  Currently, U.S. Street prices show that to upgrade from 1mb cache (E21xx chips) to 2mb (E4xxx), the price difference doesn’t correspond well with performance increase.  Using prices at one of my favorite online merchants, ZipZoomFly:

E2160 (1mb L2, 1.8ghz): $85 shipped.

E4300 (2mb l2, 1.8ghz):  $120.50 shipped.

Price difference: $35.50

For the extra mb of cache, you pay ~42% more.  For ~5% of extra performance, the E4xxx series are not worth the extra cost in my opinion.

Needless to say, to upgrade to an E6320 (frequency is not exactly the same, but similar, at 7*266 =  1862mhz), the performance difference increases to ~10%, but price also increases to $172.90, or more than twice the cost of the E2160.

So unless you need the Vanderpool/VT that comes on the E6xxx series, I would personally stick with the E21xx series chips.  Much like the Celerons of yore, these chips are the real value busters of the Conroe/Allendale lineup.
Does L2 Matter? Sure they do.  But price matters more– especially with Wolfdales and Yorkfields around the corner. 🙂

PS3 to finally become price-competitive: $399 PS3

The squatters definitely get the fatter worm when it comes to tech toys:  Rumors abound with a new 40gb PS3 that will retail for $399 this holiday season.  For the early birds that bit at the initial $599 price tag- consider starting a revolt like the early iPhone adopters– maybe you’ll get some of that money back.  🙂

Barcelona Performance Finally Revealed

So the cat is finally out of the bag.  Anandtech posted a comparison of AMD’s new Barcelona vs. its current X2 platforms, and the results are… not to surprising.  Alas, it wasn’t the super performance boost that we’ve all been expecting, but a ~15% increase is not bad at all.  Now let’s just see how they are priced…

AMD loses another exec

See this post.  Things sure aren’t looking too rosy for AMD.  When you get multiple execs jumping ships, you know something is wrong.

This not only casts doubt on the competitiveness of the upcoming products, but company’s general financial health.  Now I really can’t wait to see the performance numbers.  Should I be buying or shorting AMD??  🙂

And the iPhone firesale begins, Part 2

See my earlier post regarding this topic.  So today Steve announced the new pricing scheme for iPhones going forward.  $200 price reduction for the 8gb, 4gb model being dropped.  Looks like they really want to cast the success in stone.  Now that Apple is done gouging their most loyal fans, it is now time to guarantee that the iPhone gets adopted as fast as possible to ensure that the product will go down in Apple’s company history as a time-changing product.  Don’t worry, they still make money even with the new pricing scheme.

NOW I will consider the possibility of getting an iPhone… but not until I see the Gphone first. 🙂

Droolworthy: Epson’s New Projector

Looks like there is finally a worthy projector coming down the pipelines from Epson: Gizmodo covered a new PowerLite model that will be introduced to the market at the end of year, that is going to bring 1080p projection to affordable levels. This looks to be a worthy upgrade to my 5 year old Dell projector that is currently powering my home theater. Can’t wait to see what the actual street price will be. 🙂

AMD’s Comeback: Part 2. The speculation continues

In regards to my earlier post— the news had me really excited.  Then here’s another post that says K10 isn’t as fast as the first post claimed.  This is all beginning to sound very much like marketing to me.  Guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Finally found my E2180! Chip en route, overclock results to come

I’ve been doing sporadic checks on a few major vendors’ sites and on price comparison sites on when this mythical CPU may appear. As luck would have it, I finally found the CPU for sale at eWiz last night. Put in an order for the elusive thing, and hopefully I will have my hands on it sometime next week. For approx. $95 including shipping and CA tax, it wasn’t so bad a deal in my opinion.

Reports from many forums indicate that even the E2140 and E2160 are starting to show up with the M0 stepping. These things are supposed to be monster overclockers, with reports of them clocking just as well as their G0 siblings, providing the boards are capable. Now that I have my Q6600 dialed in comfortably at 3.6ghz as my workstation, it’s now time to build a new box to replace the aging home server, the Dell SC400 with a 2.0ghz Celeron Socket 478 inside. With 3gb of RAM, the CPU is practically pegged @ 100% utilization while running a multitude of services, in addition to 3 instances of VMs on VMWare. Hopefully, I can get the E2180 to the same 3.6ghz range without much trouble. Such a setup should have enough muscle to comfortably take over the same services, with maybe a few more VMs thrown in.

In any case, I am getting WAY ahead of myself here. I’ll report back next week with the results.