I’m also a fairly serious amateur photographer. I obsess over which lenses would be ideal, how fast they should be, ISO settings, which noise reduction app works best. I suppose you could call me a digital photo geek, but I’m a pale shade of some of the real pros out there.

Then there’s bicycles.

Right now, I’m looking at a spreadsheet I built comparing four different touring bikes. I’ve got the primary list of components, much like you’d list components for a potential PC I might build. However, that’s not the geekiest part.

Another part of the spreadsheet is the geometry data. Head angles, effective top tube lengths, wheelbase, chainstay angles, etc.

As with PCs, bikes are purpose built for certain types of applications. In my case, I’m looking for a steel frame touring bike. Right now, I own an five year old Giant OCR3. It’s a sport road bike with an aluminum frame and a 98-inch wheelbase. It’s very responsive, handles well but this middle-aged body of mine can feel every bump and bit of pea gravel the bike encounters.

Also, the OCR3 lacks good braze-ons for racks. I don’t plan on doing any long distance touring, but I’d like to haul stuff around town. That means I want a rack (or racks), panniers and the ability to attach all manner of gear. It’s not necessarily true that steel bikes are more forgiving. What is true is that most touring bikes have geometries that result in a more forgiving, if slightly less responsive, ride. I had a steel touring bike when I was in college, and loved the way it rode and handled.

What’s really interesting is that when I hit the various bike forums, like bikeforums.net and cyclingforums.com, I find myself reading some of the geekiest, most opinionated posts I’ve ever read. These guys make the people over at AVS Forums look pedestrian by comparison.

What’s really fun is how some of these guys are really into modding their bikes, or even taking a bare frame and building a bike from scratch. It appeals to the part of me that likes building my own PCs.

I won’t be building a bike up from scratch soon. But I plan on getting a decent, steel frame touring bike and gradually upgrading components on my own. That’s how I got started building PCs – getting a generic, white box system and eventually replacing every single component inside.

Right now, the choices are between a Trek 520 and a Surly Long Haul Trucker. The local dealer, Bicycle Outfitter, carry Treks and can get Surlys, but don’t carry them in the shop. What’s great about this store is that all the folks I’ve talked to are more the touring or commuter type of rider, rather than would-be racers. And they’re willing to listen to my neophyte questions. At this point, a really good dealer is worth more than going out of my way to find a different bike.

As for my two choices: the Trek 520 seems to be well liked, but no one seems to have particularly strong opinions about them. On the other hand, the Surlys seem to attract the same type of following you see with Apple products on the tech side. It’s fascinating to read through a thread, find someone talking about a particular bike they might be considering, only to have a hard core Surly fan pop up and talk about how a Long Haul Trucker is really the only possible choice.

This all brings me back to my initial point: being a passionate geek is really a state of mind. It’s not about tech, gaming or any one activity.

Now, excuse me, I have to go back and stare at my spreadsheet for a bit.

It pains me to think that I’ve contributed to Apple’s stellar quarter not once, not twice, but three times. I picked up an iPad (just a Wi-Fi version, but 64GB), bought the Macbook and recently upgraded to an iPhone 4.

No, I haven’t given up on PCs. As I noted, the first thing I did when the Macbook arrived was to open it up and upgrade the system to 4GB of RAM and a 500GB, 7,200RPM hard drive. That allowed me to fire it up, run Boot Camp and install Windows 7 Professional. And I’m still building gaming rigs. Honest.

Getting the Macbook was a culmination of a long process of finding a good laptop with long battery life that was light and not terribly expensive. I briefly owned an HP Envy 15, which I returned because I realized I didn’t really want a 16-inch notebook to lug around, even a thin and light one.

In the end, Apple’s hardware chops finally convinced me to pick up a laptop that doesn’t have a replaceable battery, doesn’t use the latest Intel processors and still runs at a somewhat anemic 1280×800 pixels. But it’s light, thin and has impressive battery life. After installing Windows 7, the Macbook would run for six plus hours (normal usage, not watching movies or other continuously running tasks.) In the back of my mind, I’m thinking I might spend some time learning MacOS, but in reality, I’ll probably be running Windows 7, particularly when I’m on the road and working.

The iPad is another matter. I find myself using it less and less, despite some cool games and apps. I’m on the cusp of unloading it, but I may keep it around to stay current.

Finally, I did jump in and upgraded my old iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4. It was time for an upgrade anyway, and for various reasons I won’t discuss here, I’m currently wedded to AT&T. Since I use a case, the brouhaha over the antenna problems isn’t an issue. The screen isn’t quite as magical as it’s been made out to be, but it is very good. And it’s certainly speedy.

Now that I’ve made my confession, I have to go do some penance. I just picked up another Coolermaster CM 690 II, so I’m going to go and build a P55 system running an Intel 875K. Then maybe I’ll feel a little less dirty.

It’s not the actual small form factor system that’s crazy. It’s what I want it to do. What I typically want is to build a high performance gaming system using a micro ATX motherboard, building it into a micro ATX chassis. I’m typically lured in by some cool looking micro ATX case. That happened to me with a couple of Silverstone SUGO models (SG01 and SG03). Most recently, it was the NZXT Vulcan, which I reviewed for Maximum PC. The Vulcan is actually a good looking case with an attractive feature set that makes it sound like a badass, high end case.

As I discovered, the Vulcan is really a normal micro-tower in the skin of a high end, badass case. I don’t want to talk about the Vulcan itself much, though. Go read the review if you want more detail on the Vulcan. I want to talk about the process of building a true micro ATX system.

The idea of building a small, powerful rig that can take on most modern PC games is an attractive idea, and when you see a good looking case like the Vulcan, it’s easy to be seduced.

What you can’t do is build a small form factor system the same way you build a typical mid or full tower PC. For one thing, the order of installation is critical. In some SFF cases, for example, you can’t install the power supply until everything else is in. In addition, the interior of these cases is often very, very cramped, so you’ll need to double-and triple-check that some stray wire or cable hasn’t crept underneath the motherboard. Routing wiring is also important, as its easier for wiring to drop onto a fan, resulting in a horrible sound and possible CPU overheating if it’s the CPU cooling fan.

At any rate, I had an early Gigabyte GA-H57M-UD3 motherboard. Given its layout and use of USB 3.0, I thought it would be an ideal motherboard for building a gaming rig.

Gigabyte's GA-H57M-UD3

The CPU would be a Core i7 870 I had leftover from an old test system, a Seagate 1TB 7200.12 hard drive would handle storage and a Radeon HD 5850 would take care of GPU chores. Installation was the usual painfully slow process (it always is with these tiny systems), but the system booted up just fine. Installing Windows 7 went swimmingly.

Then the stability problems began cropping up. Initially, warm reboots would always hang — I’d have to disconnect power before the system would boot. After installing all the drivers, the system would periodically crash with ugly blue screens. I tried different DDR3 modules and memory settings, but the crashes still occurred.

Even BIOS updates didn’t fix the problems,. What I suspect is that this board is actually an engineering sample, not a retail release, since Gigabyte had shipped it to me within days of its announcement. Note that this board had never been used, and is curiously lacking in markings, though it does have a serial number.

So I thought I’d try another board, an Asus P7H55D-M EVO.

Asus P7H55D-M EVO

I actually had this board working in a another small form factor system that I’d partially disassembled, so I thought it would be pretty simple to rip it out of the other case and slap it into the Vulcan.

By this time, I was in what may be charitably described as a “system building fugue.” You know the drill — you’re so into solving problems with a new build, so into getting it completed, that you start taking shortcut, and start getting careless.

The process of removing the P7H55D-M EVO was less gentle than it should have been. I also encountered several issues when trying to get it into the NZXT case. First, several of the mounting nuts had slipped out, and I didn’t notice them until I’d wiggled the motherboard into the case. So I wiggled the Asus board back out, and reinstalled the nuts.

In my haste, I’d replaced one of the nuts in the wrong hole. Out came the motherboard, then back it went. Oops, a piece of flashing on the ATX I/O plate had been pushed back down, blocking the Ethernet port. Out came the board again, and back in it went.

Somewhere in the process, I’m sure I killed the board. Note that the P7H55D-M EVO had been working perfectly when I removed it from its original case. When I got everything installed, the board wouldn’t POST. Fans would spin up, but no video would appear. I attached an external beeper to the speaker connector, and no beeps could be heard. The memory diagnostic light would stay bright red, no matter what DDR3 modules were installed. The board seemed completely hosed.

Out came the board one more time.

I had one more micro ATX board, an Intel DP55WB. This is by no means a high end board, but it was what I had available.

Intel DP55WB

This time, I realized I had just one more try at this. So I walked away from the whole affair until the following day. When I returned, I exercised extreme care during the installation — something I should have done with the Asus board. I made sure all the cables were cleared out of the way, all the mounting hardware properly installed and that the ATX I/O shield was pristine. The board went in as easily as it could — the interior is still pretty cramped, after all — but in it went.

The system POSTed just fine. Driver installation went smoothly, as did the BIOS update. The system burn-in tests completed without a hiccup.

In the end, what I had was still a pretty powerful system for gaming, but it won’t be particularly overclockable. But then, a small case with restricted airflow precludes any serious overclocking anyway.

There are lessons to be learned. One is to be sure to use actual retail gear, not engineering samples. Most users won’t run into this anyway, but it’s still worth stating. The second lesson is more important: if you find yourself frustrated and tempted to rush the building process, STOP. Walk away. Come back later, after the fever has abated. You should always approach the actual act of building as dispassionately as possible. Celebrate after everything is up and running, and get excited about how you plan on using the system. If you get too wound up during the building process, you’ll likely do something dumb, or overlook something obvious. It’s a lesson I need to re-learn once a year or so. I just wish the price this time wasn’t two motherboards.

I had fun writing an article on new graphics technology as it affects games. That ran in the August issue of Maximum PC, and is online now at MaximumPC.com. The real bummer is that I had lots of cool screen shots, most of which the magazine ran. But the need to reduce size for both print and online makes them less effective. Still, I think DirectX 11 will have the biggest impact on PC gaming since DX8.

Also up on Maximum PC is a review of Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 network interface card for gamers. It’s an interesting product, in that it works as advertised, reducing lag and ping times… but most people won’t notice any benefit. I’d class it as a luxury product, maybe useful to the 0.5% of gamers who compete online, care about winning and have the insanely fast reflexes to notice the small differences.

More stuff after the jump.

Another Maximum PC review: the MSI R5870 Lightning. It’s one of the latest generation of factory overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards meant to be tweaked. I find these sorts of cards interesting as engineering exercises, but ultimately too expensive with too little performance gain for most users.

Over at PC World, I wrote an article on painless motherboard upgrades — how to upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. I’ve also written a number of laptop reviews, including the Micro Express NBL60, a surprisingly good unit from a manufacturer that doesn’t get a lot of buzz. Also at PC World is the Clevo X8100 gaming notebook. Alas, that’s an earlier model, and lacks the new GeForce GTX 480 mobile GPUs.

I also had some fun appearing on a couple of Tekzilla episodes with Patrick Norton. I appeared on Episode 147, where I talk about Puget Systems Serenity quiet gaming system. It’s a reasonably high performance box, but only generates around 20dBA even under load. Patrick and I also go back and forth on how you might mod your system to make it less noisy.

In addition, I got to do a bit on their fifth anniversary show, where I doff my PC hardware cap and put on my geeky photographer hat and talk a bit about Adobe’s Lightroom 3 release.

Last, but not least (and maybe the most fun), was making a guest appearance on Troy Goodfellow’s Three Moves Ahead, a podcast focusing on strategy gaming (mostly PC, but Troy also delves into board games occasionally, and his regulars –Rob Zacny, Julian Murdoch and others — also take on console and handheld strategy games. We talked about the impact technology has had on strategy games.

So that’s what’s been going on inside and outside the basement lab recently. Hope you find it as much fun to read, watch and hear as I had working on them.

But SSDs make me nervous.

I’ve been reading some of the articles on SSDs at Anandtech recently, and what I’ve read hasn’t exactly filled me with confidence. Anand’s experience with Crucial’s C300 is a pretty good example of what makes me nervous: firmware updates that brick drives.

Then there’s OCZ, who has a deservedly good reputation for reliability. Yet buggy drives can still slip through their QA process.

The good old rotating media hard drive is tried and tested. I’ve had hard drives run for years, with no issues whatsoever. Still, they’re mechanical devices, so I upgrade my hard drives every 12-18 months. That’s partly for performance reasons – hard drive technology is still evolving, even though it’s a supposedly mature technology. But I also move data onto new drives fairly early in a hard drive’s life cycle to minimize the chance of reliability problems.

I have, on a couple of occasions, run into reliability problems with hard drives. Usually, though, those problems are predictable – the drive begins making weird noises, usually repetitive clicking or grinding. I’ve learned over the years to trust my instincts when I hear anything odd, and I immediately copy off the data on the drive. And, of course, I do run semi-regular backups.

SSDs are less predictable. When they fail, they fail spectacularly, and without warning. I’ve known people with SSDs who experience an SSD failure between system reboots. One moment, the PC is working like a champ. The user installs a driver, or other update, reboots the drive, and… nothing. No boot, no data, everything’s just… gone.

On the other hand, what’s interesting about the SSD business is how it holds the potential of reshaping the storage business as a whole. The traditional drive companies – particularly Seagate and Western Digital – have dipped their toes in the SSD waters, but their efforts have been somewhat anemic. Seagate’s SSDs are targeted almost exclusively at the enterprise market, while Western Digital’s SiliconEdge drives have <a href=http://www.anandtech.com/show/2954>trailed the competition</a> on the performance side.

What’s interesting is that the innovative products aren’t coming from the traditional storage companies. That’s was true from the beginning, with companies like Korea’s MTron, which entered the market early on. But it was Intel, a chip company, who really raised eyebrows with their X25 drives back in 2009. The X25’s quickly garnered a reputation for both high performance – particularly random write performance, which had been a weak spot with older solid state drives – and price/performance ratios.

As the price for NAND flash plummeted, other companies dove into the fray. The main players in the market now seem to be Intel, OCZ and Patriot, with companies like Crucial and Corsair diving into the fray. There are many other players in the market, too numerous to name. Back in the early days of LCD TVs, one pundit famously quipped that “anyone with a checkbook and a plane ticket to China could get into the LCD TV market.”

The same seems to be true with the solid state drive market.

Still, I don’t trust them enough to build one into my production system.

The issue with Crucial drives isn’t the first time we’ve seen firmware brick SSDs. You may recall the infamous Intel X25 SSE firmware update that also turned Intel’s SSDs into useless paperweights. On top of that, there remains the issue of capacity at a reasonable price.

Anand Shimpi  notes that his system consists of an SSD as the boot and applications drive, and a 1TB RAID 1 drive (2 x 1TB hard drives) as his data drive. I wish I could run so lean. Right now, I have a pair of two terabyte drives in my system. The boot and applications drive has 524GB of applications and other stuff on it, while the 2TB drive contains 1.25TB of data – mostly raw photo files, video and music.

I could free up 175GB by moving my Steam games folder to the data drive. But the space on the volume isn’t the only issue.

My boot and app drive tends to be very dynamic: I’m frequently installing new apps, uninstalling apps. So while I back up the partition on a regular basis, I don’t really want to trust a new technology if I’m going to need to take down my production system and restore partitions frequently – and here, “frequently” means more than twice a year. Cloning drive data to a new drive can take several hours — downtime I’d rather not have on my production system.

So I’m chugging along currently in my production system with good old fashioned, rotating media magnetic storage.

Still, I’m intrigued by SSDs. The technology is cool. Performance and capacity seems to be changing almost monthly. So I’ve got several SSDs running in the basement lab.

I’m just not quite ready to trust my mission critical production system to them quite yet.

Actually, I’ve been busy with other writing projects, consumed with Mass Effect / Mass Effect 2 and brought low by a bronchial infection. The good news is that I’m coming out of my Bioware addiction and at the tail end of this combination of cold and sinus infection.

This is just a quick post to point towards a few articles. I recently wrapped up several big projects for Maximum PC, including extensive benchmarking of Nvidia’s new 480 GTX, a review of Sapphire’s take on AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition and a roundup of Raw photo editors. Writing the article on editing raw images was great fun, but I’m not happy with the way it turned out. I waxed a little too enthusiastic, and got carried away writing it, so the fault was entirely mine — not the editors at MaxPC. That happens every now and then, if you write a lot. Not every article can be perfect, even when you have great editors. All you can do is learn from them and move on.

I’ve also been reviewing laptops for PC World, as well as several how-to articles. I’m also back in the throes of system building, too. I’ve been building a PC using an Asus P7P55D-E Pro motherboard and a Coolermaster CM 690 II case. I’m also experimenting with a CoolIt ECO sealed liquid cooler. I’ll have more on that, later, after I get it all up and running.

I’ve got another system building project that’s hardware complete. I’ll be writing that up for Anandtech. Part of that, however, also includes software. I’ve just installed Adobe’s Master Collection CS5. Unlike other system building projects, this one revolves around actually doing something with the system — in this case, authoring and mastering a Blu-ray disc. I shot some HD video and a lot of photos from my daughter’s Winter Guard season, so I’m putting together a compilation disc for the team.

Meanwhile, I have been micro-blogging about my latest system build on Twitter, so check out my twitter feed, loydcase, if you want to see what’s up with that.

One of the funnier bits I ran across was the dueling AMD / Nvidia booths in the North Hall foyer. I’m not sure if this was intentional, or an accident, but they’re almost right next to each other.

The potentially coolest thing I saw was Nvidia’s FG100 DX11 graphics card actually running in a PC. No word on final specs, pricing or power consumption, though. Now it’s off to CES Thursday and more meetings.

The timing is certainly interesting, coming so soon on the heels of New York State’s recent filing against Intel on that same topic. Toss in the European Union judgment, and you get a picture of a beleaguered Intel, fighting a battle on multiple fronts.

What does the settlement really mean for consumers and OEMs? How will it affect AMD going forward?

There are still a lot of unknowns from this brief announcement. In many ways, it’s a classic settlement – AMD gets cash, rights to some Intel patents and an agreement from Intel to stop it’s anti-competitive behavior. Intel, on the other hand, readily agrees to ceasing and desisting said behavior because, after all, both companies want “To avoid the time and expense of litigation, and without any admission of liability or fault…”

Intel is substantially larger than its arch-rival, generating around six times the revenue of its smaller competitor. It’s also very profitable, while AMD has only recently been able to pull itself closer to profitability. Still, all the litigation is a drain on Intel’s resources, a continuing pall on Intel’s reputation and a distraction from developing new technologies and products.

According to a conversation with AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie, the way to think of the agreement is as a logical extension of past agreements with Intel – and hence only applies to the CPU side of the equation. That’s an important point, which I’ll get to shortly.

Intel had recently complained that AMD’s split into a fabless semiconductor company – AMD – and a separate, manufacturing subsidiary – Global Foundries – was a violation of past patent agreements. Intel now drops that claim, which has two key implications:

• Global Foundries can now fully split with AMD, and isn’t required to be a subsidiary even in name.
• AMD can contract with any chip manufacturing company to build any AMD product.

While the legal wheels are still turning, this logically completes the split of AMD into two separate entities. This also means that Global Foundries really needs to stay competitive – it can’t rely on a captive AMD to give it business forever.

Now let’s get to the graphics question.

As I noted earlier, you can think of this settlement as a logical extension of past agreements between AMD and Intel. According to Prairie, this gives Intel no rights to AMD’s intellectual property on the graphics side. That’s pretty major, since Intel is trying to build its own GPU in Larrabee. If Intel violates any patents AMD might have that are purely graphics related, AMD would be free to pursue legal action.

There’s one other important point: AMD and Intel will continue their separate paths. There’s no bus licensing involved, so you won’t see AMD or Intel suddenly ship pin-compatible CPUs. This is by no means a return to the socket 370 era.

Consumers probably won’t see much of a difference at first. I’ve started to see an increasing number of interesting products built around AMD technologies, including the recently Dell’s recently announced Inspiron Zino HD. Given that increasing number of AMD-based PC products shipping recently, it’s likely that Intel had pulled back from whatever anti-competitive behavior it may have engaged in (that it doesn’t admit doing, mind you.)

OEMs will win, too, having a little more freedom to develop products that they see suit their own customer’s needs. AMD is pushing forward with its plans, including a renewed strategic approach that more tightly integrates GPU and CPU sides of the company. If AMD can just stick with a single core strategic message, OEMs will feel much more comfortable doing business.

If you get right down to it, though, Intel is a big winner, too. Sure, it’s out of pocket $1.25 billion, but it avoids losing to AMD in court, along with the potential of much larger punitive damages. In some ways, Intel is actually getting off cheap. And since Intel is so profitable, it can still use big discounts to lure OEMs to use Intel-based solutions.

Let’s hope that the playing field really is leveled. AMD still has a big chore ahead of it, building its Fusion products, keeping its feet in the server side and trying to keep Nvidia at bay in the GPU business. It’s a daunting task, but at least AMD can hope that this settlement means that it has a fair shot at the market now.

Most of them will be successful. Windows 7 setup is remarkable forgiving, but some users will still have issues. Even I had a problem with one older laptop based on the original Core 2 Duo, in which Windows 7 installed fine, but the HD audio device refuses to work even though the driver reports itself as working normally.

Of course, there will be people who have issues, sometimes serious ones. That’s the nature of the PC.

The PC Ecosystem

Let’s talk about Apple’s Macs for a moment. That may seem odd, but the Mac – specifically the iMac and the Mac Pro, illustrate a key point I’m going to make shortly.

If you buy a Mac from Apple, you can get a Macbook, iMac, Mac Mini or Mac Pro. With the sole exception of the Mac Pro, all Apple PCs are completely closed. With some effort, you can upgrade hard drives and add memory, but that’s about it. Any other expansion is through USB.

The exception is the Mac Pro, which starts at $2,499. In reality, the Mac Pro is a dual Xeon workstation – not really a desktop PC.

On the other hand, companies like Dell, HP and a host of smaller companies sell a host of expandable desktop PCs, for considerably less money than a Mac Pro. In some cases, they cost less than an iMac. That’s not to denigrate the iMac. Apple pushes useful technology forward in interesting ways. For example, the latest 27-inch iMacs offer a 2560×1440 resolution display – more pixels than the average 27-inch monitor, which is typically 1920×1200. Better yet, they’re LED backlit displays built on IPS panel technology, making them excellent for photographic work and video editing.

On the other hand, what you see is what you get. Want to upgrade that Radeon HD 4850? Sorry, you can’t. Want to build  RAID array? There’s no provision for even eSATA connections.

While the major manufacturers of Windows-based PCs also sell all-in-one systems, their desktop bread and butter is the standard PC with expansion slots. And, of course, you can build your own PCs; all of the systems here in the Case house are built from scratch.

That open hardware ecosystem evolved over time, and wasn’t intentional. It all began back in the 1980s, when several companies (Compaq being the first) reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS, and the world never looked back. IBM’s attempt to dominate using proprietary technology – Microchannel – proved to be an abject failure.

That evolution created a rich ecosystem of hardware and software manufacturers. The staggering variety of components that can be installed into any of a number of motherboards creates an infinite combination of hardware possibilities. No one, not even a company with the resources of a Microsoft, can test all the possible combinations.

So someone, somewhere, will have problems with Windows 7. It’s the nature of the PC. What will inevitably happen is that some blog or news organization will report these inevitable issues with undisguised glee, suggesting that the evil Microsoft has gotten it wrong again.

I also built one Intel Atom-based system, using a Travla C156 case. While compact, I could have used any mini-ITX motherboard with that, and the north bridge on the particular motherboard I used had a pretty noisy fan. So when Intel dropped off yet another Atom motherboard kit with me, I wasn’t initially very interested.

But It’s Really Small…

When I finally got around to opening up the box, I realized this kit was just a little different.

All You Need for a Slimline PC

According to Intel, the D945GSEJT, aka “Johnstown”, had a design goal of a 20mm maximum component height. Built around a 1.6GHz Atom N270, the board designers actually hit 20.5mm. It’s a completely fanless design that can fit inside very slim cases.

This motherboard is just 20.5mm tall.

Given the design parameters, the height of the ATX I/O panel was also necessarily limited.

The ATX I/O cluster is half height.

As you can see, the I/O stack is half-height. The real limitation, as we’ll see shortly, are the presence of only three USB ports. I do wish that Intel would give up on VGA for these sorts of systems, and go with DVI and HDMI, though. Power for auxiliary devices is on the motherboard itself, in the form of a four-pin, Molex-style connector. The motherboard also has the DC connector for the external power supply mounted on the motherboard; it’s actually part of the ATX I/O cluster.