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Archive for the ‘performance’ tag

SSD performance tips for Intel chipsets and RAID-0

Posted on 16th Oct 2009 at 20:02 by Richard Swinburne with 4 comments

Richard Swinburne
We had a chat with the Kingston labs team this week in California and noted down some free performance improvements, and limitations, you should be aware of if you own one or more SSDs:
  • The Intel SATA ICH9R/10R/P55 controller under RAID-0 has a maximum real world performance capacity of about 600MB/s in total between it and the CPU.

    Despite the fact you'll need several (four+) SSDs to hit this limit at the moment, it's worth bearing in mind that to get ludicrous performance you'll need at least a PCI-Express x8 card.

    Until Intel increases its DMI and/or SATA controller bandwidth, this could prove a more regular limiting issue when future SATA 6Gbps parts arrive.

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Tags ich10r, intel, kingston, p55, performance, raid, sata, ssd

Noise versus performance

Posted on 20th Jul 2009 at 08:59 by Antony Leather with 34 comments

Antony Leather
With the hot but undoubtedly brief summer finally making an appearance here in the UK, I imagine that plenty of bit-tech and Custom PC readers have had to ramp up their PC's fan speeds to keep the machine cool. Maybe you've even had to buy new cooling hardware to keep that shiny new overclocked Intel Core i7 system under control?

In any case, most of us have had to alter our PC's cooling at one time or another but what's always surprised me is how varied noise tolerance is from person to person and how different their goals are when tweaking their PC to enhance its cooling capability.

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Tags cooling, cpu, fan controller, fans, gpu, noise, performance, radiators, rpm, watercooling

Empire: Total War demo on Steam - it's a slice of win-cake

Posted on 25th Feb 2009 at 08:41 by Clive Webster with 2 comments

I’m not sure how I missed the Empire demo going on Steam last Friday, but somehow I did. I suspect Harry did too, as I’m sure we would’ve heard him saying "I’m leaving at six on the dot to go play Empire" last Friday. Cliff clearly didn’t miss the news but I only stumbled across it by accident when wondering whether to buy Dawn of War II through Steam or Play (why does it cost £11 more through Steam, by the way?). Anyhoo, I saw the ad for the Empire demo and started it downloading immediately.

Empire: Total War demo on Steam - it's a slice of win-cake <i>Empire: Total War</i> demo on Steam – it’s a slice of win-cake

The following are my initial thoughts on the two tutorials and the land battle that I had time to play before heading off for family funeral. (I’m not pitching for sympathy messages there btw, just explaining why I’ve only had time for a quick initial thoughts blog).

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Tags demo, empire, first thoughts, fps, frame rate, initial, performance, preview, total war
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