Loved the podcast. When is the next one out? I need my fix!

Man the 4850 is a perfect example of CF/SLI tech. Awesome cheap cards and great performance. Plus the upgrade (CF) is inexpensive for the increased speed.

I am saying this because I just picked up a second 4850 and while listening to this podcast I realized (again) just how well DAAMIT pulled off this video card.

Awesome performance, cheap price and CF a reality without breaking the bank.

Great podcast BTW guys.

PowerColor already has a 4870 1 GiB announced. [1] ATI's also announced [2] so-called "Super RV770" based cards that will come with higher clock rates.

[1] http://www.productwiki.com/powercolor-hd-4870-1gb/
[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ATI-AMD-RV770,5796.html

Re the Eee Box, the appeal is that it's so small for a reasonable price. It's smaller than even a Shuttle, more comparable to a Nintendo Wii. That said, it isn't the first or only such thing. For instance, AOpen sells the XC mini [3] that takes a Socket P processor (such as a mobile Celeron [4] or mobile Pentium Dual-Core [5]) for not much money, and a lot more processing power. Similarly there are the MicroClient line from Norhtec [6] that are even cheaper ($85-260) that would also be useful for low-cost, low-power, low-performance computing (e.g. see this project [7]).

[3] http://usa.aopen.com/Products.aspx?id=74
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_microprocessors#...
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_Dual-Core_microp...
[6] http://www.norhtec.com/products/index.html
[7] http://weill.org/2007/09/23/how-i-built-an-led-confession-board/

Re backups, just get a cheap NAS device such as D-Link's DNS-343 and be done with it. Those things can even do RAID 5. Stick in four 1 TB drives and use the Memeo software that comes with them.

(Myself, I just use an external USB 2.0 drive along with a nightly scheduled task for storeBackup [8], which is unfortunately *nix-specific, and I turn the drive on, let the job run to automatically mount the external volume, automatically do an incremental set [that tracks things like file renames and moves], and let it automatically unmount it after, then turn the external off in the morning. I have storeBackup configured to retain 45 days' worth of backups.)

[8] http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/January2004/article321.shtml

tried playing it through FF3 while I was designing some primers, but it just sat there buffering for 30min, so eventually gave up. I'm sure there's some otherway a non-MP3 player owner can listen to it, but I don't have time to look into it.

Those guys working on the folding client... weird decisions...
So I finally manage to get the Windows SMP client installed and working, to then notice a few oddities. I would have imagined the easiest way to handle multi-cores would be to detect the amount of cores, and run a WU on each (or fewer if so asked in config), sortof like dnetc does. It doesn't need any difficult thread-coding, scales essentially unlimited, and might make it easy to integrate GPU and CPU cores from the same managing-interface. Instead I find the SMP-client not even bothering to count the cores, just firing up 4 processes. As they are processes, not threads of the same process, I'm apparently in need of an extra service that request web-access to manage these 4 processes to work together. This appears to have come with the added drawback of ~20-25% of CPU-time spent in kernel to handle the processes instead of work being crunched. More points, less science?
I'm left scratching my head :/...

I couldn't get past the first couple of segments as the file would just restart....

Would it be possible to post a transcript for those of us who don't want to listen in?

it's great to cover all of the bases but for me at least this episode was really weak, I didn't make it past the 40 minute mark.

I'm sure you guys are looking into optimising your format and such so good luck.

you might want to take a look at future product spotlighting, will computers come with optical drives or are they near done, hard drive tech eventualities and evidence of such, memory directions, cpu, video, chassis design optimisations and powersupply directions.... also you may want to highlight a system maybe like once every 3 months.... get into a routine for your format, a general direction that may not initially be clear but will show in the long run...... something anyway.

I wish I could offer constructive criticism but I don't have any answers to improve what was really a weak episode.

For the intel people. If they wanted a 4870X3, couldn't they use 4870X2 and another 4870? Great cast BTW!

I've been watching too much anime/ Naruto. I thought he said "just brew it" 's name was "Uchiha". :D

Me and a friend have got an HDD in a magnetically shielded bank-vault...
That's safe backup!!!
OK, costs a little to rent the box but it really is "a little" and Considering the time I have spent building up the collection on the disk it is worth an insane amount of money even discounting the accual value of the content... (Which is a lot in it self).
Not very accessible and backups are quite far apart but it'd more or less suvive a nuke as well so...
In other cases, I just put important data on multiple HDDs in my computer, like an archive of "My Documents" on G:. I have lost all HDDs due to virus before but the risk of faliure in more than one drive is still minimal. I do have 5 HDDs with 7 partitions though...

(We do have a superior electrical system here compared to the US so lightning strikes are an exremely small risk here).

I gave my best effort. Made it about half way through.

These things are not for me.

Maybe we could rename The Tech Report to The Damage Report.

Hmm, that's actually a catchy title...

FYI Jordan:

The ENTIRE end of the M4A file is corrupted for me. At the end of that Thinkpad W700 discussion it just dies.

ignore, didn't click reply

The link for farmpuma's profile is actually notfred's.

At roughly 10min, 54sec, WTH is that sound? Uncorking bottle?

FINALLY somebody realizes they can, and probably should, test some of these Crossfire configurations on a PHENOM system. There's already a 790FX+SB750 board out on Newegg.com that can show us what REAL bandwidth can do.

Also, where are the 790FX+SB750 reviews? A few of the boards are actually out.

It was great just having a 1v1 chat session there with Jordan and Scott. I got a great feel for CrossfireX and SLI, etc.

w00t! Go the Damage Cast.