Thursday, November 15, 2007
6-slot Butterfly Backplane; 1 Segment; One CPU Card, One PCIe x16, Four 32/33 PCI Slots
Complying with System Host Board (SHB Express; also called PICMG 1.3) standards, these SHBs feature the latest PCI Express technology, offering scalable I/O bandwidth of more than 10 GB/s. They maintain compatibility with PCIe, PCI-X, PCI and ISA, and allow customers to leverage commercial I/O cards. Advantech's SHBs empower system designers to create a new generation of servers, workstations and industrial platforms.
Complying with System Host Board (SHB Express; also called PICMG 1.3) standards, these SHBs feature the latest PCI Express technology, offering scalable I/O bandwidth of more than 10 GB/s. They maintain compatibility with PCIe, PCI-X, PCI and ISA, and allow customers to leverage commercial I/O cards. Advantech's SHBs empower system designers to create a new generation of servers, workstations and industrial platforms.
The Latest Motherboard
The Intel® Desktop Board D945PLNM supports the Intel® Pentium® 4, Intel® Pentium® D processor and Intel® Celeron® D processor in the LGA775 package. This is a discrete graphics solution featuring the Intel® Platform Administration Technology for enhanced manageability capabilities. This platform also features the Intel® Platform Innovation Framework for Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) that provides users with the next-generation firmware technology.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The Latest Memory
Today we confront the claim that computers running the latest Microsoft operating system Windows Vista require 4GB of memory, particularly when gaming. For quite some time now I have been using the 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate on my gaming system and have noticed a few performance issues when using just 2GB of memory. However, the question still remains “How much faster does 4GB of memory allow Vista to run?”...
Thankfully there is not a wide range of memory standards to choose from, with DDR (Double Data Rate) memory being the only real option for desktop computers. However, this does not necessarily mean buying memory is an easy task as the price, frequency, capacity and timings of DDR memory vary greatly from one module to the next. For the moment DDR2 is the most widely used DDR specification, offering speeds between 533MHz and 800MHz. Although DDR3 memory is starting to become available, it will be some time before DDR3 replaces DDR2 on the mainstream market.
Therefore price wise the smartest and most obvious option at this point in time is DDR2, the question is how much do you need? Recently we ran a number of tests comparing DDR2 on the Intel Core 2 Duo platform using a range of frequencies and timings. The end result was that DDR2 memory when paired with a Core 2 Duo processor only needs to work at 800MHz, anything more and it is a waste of bandwidth. Furthermore timings seem to be somewhat irrelevant as CAS6 memory timings were not a great deal slower than CAS3 timings, which was a surprise.
The fact that the Core 2 Duo platform does not need memory faster than 800MHz is no surprise really. If you do the math it all makes sense and I think where a lot of confusion surrounds, is the quad-pumped 1066MHz FSB of the original Core 2 Duo processors. The memory FSB needs to match the processor FSB in order for the peak memory bandwidth to be achieved. However the Core 2 Duo E6700 processor for example, really only uses a 266MHz FSB, while DDR2-800 features a 400MHz FSB.
Thankfully there is not a wide range of memory standards to choose from, with DDR (Double Data Rate) memory being the only real option for desktop computers. However, this does not necessarily mean buying memory is an easy task as the price, frequency, capacity and timings of DDR memory vary greatly from one module to the next. For the moment DDR2 is the most widely used DDR specification, offering speeds between 533MHz and 800MHz. Although DDR3 memory is starting to become available, it will be some time before DDR3 replaces DDR2 on the mainstream market.
Therefore price wise the smartest and most obvious option at this point in time is DDR2, the question is how much do you need? Recently we ran a number of tests comparing DDR2 on the Intel Core 2 Duo platform using a range of frequencies and timings. The end result was that DDR2 memory when paired with a Core 2 Duo processor only needs to work at 800MHz, anything more and it is a waste of bandwidth. Furthermore timings seem to be somewhat irrelevant as CAS6 memory timings were not a great deal slower than CAS3 timings, which was a surprise.
The fact that the Core 2 Duo platform does not need memory faster than 800MHz is no surprise really. If you do the math it all makes sense and I think where a lot of confusion surrounds, is the quad-pumped 1066MHz FSB of the original Core 2 Duo processors. The memory FSB needs to match the processor FSB in order for the peak memory bandwidth to be achieved. However the Core 2 Duo E6700 processor for example, really only uses a 266MHz FSB, while DDR2-800 features a 400MHz FSB.
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