Peter's Blog

Was looking for a new computer. Had a windfall and decided to treat myself to something awesome.

Found this:

• Dell Precision 390
• Intel Core Duo E6600 2.4GHz, 4M cache
• 4G 667MHz Ram
• 2x146G 10,000rpm Serial SCSI disks (SAS Raid 2).
• XP Pro, Vista Capable
• 3 year on site warranty.

Which I think should do the trick. The good part? I found it on the Dell Outlet site and it's about £1000 cheaper than ordering one with similar spec through the usual Dell order form. Yes ONE THOUSAND POUNDS. And the order form didn't have the option of 2x146G 10,000 rpm disks (I do find those forms quite a pain: why can some systems be bought with no monitor and not others???).

My research told me the Core Duo E6600 is superior to the ok sounding 2.14GHz E6400 not just because of the increased clock speed (12% faster which would probably be subjectively barely noticable) but also because of the subtle doubling of the internal cache to 4M.

I am slightly cynical about the advantages of a Core Duo: two CPUs is all very well if you are using well-written multi-threaded software. Most multi-threaded software I come across is only multi-threaded because the author thought it was cool and the threads spend most of their time either waiting for the other threads or for the cancel button in the UI. When iTunes is ripping, playing music, syncing my Nano and downloading podcasts at the same time is it using multiple threads? Must put procexplorer on it. Ripping does slow down noticably but this is on a 2G Celeron with 1/8th the memory of The Beast.

Got to wait a week for it