My Weekend

I actually had a dream earlier today .. that they were introducing the new i7 Intels onto the iPhone...wouldn't that be so extra sweet? :)) Anyway here's my weekend. On saturday after visiting a cousin for his birthday I was asked to fix 2 PCs. Both of them AMD's one has an AM2 socket proccessor I don't really know what it is and the other has a 754 socket Sempron. Both of them were supposedly working at some point.

So I take on the AM2 one. Plug it in try to power it up ..nothing happens. Opened it, took at look at the cables and power source, everything seemed to be ok, turn it back on again still nothing. And by nothing I mean the state in which the computer powers up but doesn't even load it's BIOS or anything. So I start taking it apart, trying to change each part at a time to find out what the problem was. At one point when I reassembled it on the floor ( basically had the power source connected to the motherboard which was placed on a cardboard thing, and then I stuck some RAM into it ) it actually booted. And though the HDD wasn't connected the computer itself was working fine, I was able to look around the BIOS but there was nothing weird there. When I tried to restart it, it went back to it's original "stupidly do nothing" stage. And I haven't been able to figure it out. The thing is I don't have another AM2 socketed proccessor, nor AM2 socketed motherboard, cause then I could have changed between them.

Next I tried the other PC, the Sempron 3100+ ( i think). This one would boot up no problem, even boot windows, but after a few minutes of usage it would restart itself and keep restarting until you took the power cable out. First thing I thought was that the CPU was overheating. But after a few tries and tests that was no the problem. Next I thought that it might be the power source, because a weird buzzing sound came from it. So I changed it. Still nothing. I said what the hell ..let's try the RAM. This is the point when things got screwed. I took out the RAM card, and replaced it with another one (it's DDR1~400). The computer wouldn't do anything, got into the exact state that the other PC was in. Meaning powering up but doing nothing else. I changed back to the original RAM card but still nothing happened. So now I have 2 PCs with the same symptoms, different builds and no ideea on what is really wrong.

I would appreciate any suggestions you might have. Cheers, Geeky

AMD Phenom™ Processor

I was trying to decide what to write: the already way-to-late article on Browsers, or an article on the great and fabulous Adobe Creative Suite 3 at which I finally got a look last week, when suddenly I decided not to write about any of them ( that Browsers article will probably become my own goal in life :P ). So this week I'm writing about the (almost) All New AMD Phenom™ Quad-Core Processor.

The news about it started pouring as early as July when AMD unveiled it at its 2007 Technology Analyst Day and ever since then, there's been much anticipation. Well it is ( or has been for a few days now ) out on the market, and it does have a complete tech profile on their site here .

What I can quickly say about it ( I haven't had the chance to actually use it yet ) is that it sounds absolutely great. AMD took a fresh start on this one, abandoning their classical chip architecture. Instead the Phenom is based on the new k10 microarchitecture technology. This results in excellent performance and you can actually see a list of all the features and benefits here.

Phenom processors will use the same X2 and X4 suffixes used in the Athlon line to differentiate between dual- and quad-core processor variants, and the flagship FX moniker will move over to the top-performing Phenom processor.

The perfect combination ( or at least the one AMD put out for the Technology Analyst Day event) is a 3GHz Phenom FX system running three Radeo HD 2900XT GPU's everything working on the RD790 Chipset, which can support up to 4 , yes that's 4, GPU's in Crossfire. That was just in case you had some money and you were wandering how you could spend it to play Crysis as smoothly as you can play Starcraft 1 now :)). By the way Phenom supports AM2 sockets so no need to worry about that.

The last thing ( and this is probably one of the greatest ) that I will say is about the price. AMD promised to cut down ( a lot )on it, and they kept that promise. The Phenom 9600 processor is at about 245$, which is a reasonable price for it.

Now what I am really wondering is if there will be a response from Intel. I really am waiting on some giant battle between the two that will result in Quad-Core processors to cost less than 20$ :)). Oh well I can always keep dreaming. But seriously Intel will probably respond somehow and everyone's expecting a new extraordinary processor from them.

Disclaimer: Yes yes it's true. I prefer Intel to AMD and Nvidia to Ati :D

Cheers, Geeky.