text:
NVIDIA's 1.4 Billion Transistor GPU: GT200 Arrives as the GeForce GTX 280 & 260by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on 6/16/2008 9:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- GPUs
108 Comments
Back to Article
elchanan - Monday, June 30, 2008 - linkVERY eye-opening discussion on TMT. Thank you for it.
I've been trying to understand how GPUs can be competitive for scientific applications which require lots of inter-process communication, and "local" memory, and this appears to be an elegant solution for both.
I can identify the weak points of it being hard to program for, as well as requiring many parallel threads to make it practical.
But are there other weak points?
Is there some memory-usage profile, or inter-process data bandwidth, where the trick doesn't work?
Perhaps some other algorithm characteristic which GPUs can't address well?
Think - Friday, June 20, 2008 - linkThis card is a junk bond when taking into consideration cost/perfomance/power consumption.
Reminds me of a 1976 Cadillac with a 7.7litre v8 with only 210 horsepower/3600 rpm.
It's a PIG. Reply
Margalus - Tuesday, June 24, 2008 - linkthis shows how many people don't run a dual monitor setup. I would snatch up one of these 260/280's over the gx2's anyday, gladly!!
The performance may not be quite as good as an sli setup, but it will be much better than a single card which is what a lot of us are stuck with since you CANNOT run a dual monitor setup with sli!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Reply
iamgud - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - link"I can has vertex data"
These look fine, but need to be moved to 55nm. By the time I save up for one they will . Reply
calyth - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkWell what the heck are they doing with 1.4B transistors, which is becoming the largest die that TMSC has been producing so far?
The larger the core, the more likely that an blemish would take out the core. As far as I know, didn't Phenom (4 cores on die) suffered low-yield problems?
gochichi - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkYou know, when you consider the price and you look at the benchmarks, you start looking for features and NVIDIA just doesn't have the features going on at all.
COD4 -- Ran perfect at 1920x1200 with last gen stuff (the HD3870 and 8800GT(S))so now the benchmarks have to be for outrageous resolutions that a handful of monitors can handle (and those customers already bought SLI or XFIRE, or GTX2 etc.)
Crysis is a pig of a game, but it's not that great (it is a good technical preview though, I admit), and I don't think even these new cards really satisfy this system hog... so maybe this is a win, but I doubt too many people care... if you had an 8800GT or whatever, you're already played this game "well enough" on medium settings and are plenty tired of it. Though we'll surely fire it up in the future once our video cards "happen to be able to run it on high" very few people are going to go out of their way $500+ for this silly title.
In any case, then you look at ATI, and they have the HDMI audio, the DX 10.1 support and all they have to do at this point is A) Get a good price out the door, B) Make a good profit (make them cheap, which these NVIDIA are expensive to make, no doubt) and C) handily beat the 8800GTS and many of us are going to be sold.
These cards are what I would call a next gen preview. Some overheated prototypes of things to come. I doubt AMD will be as fast, and in fact I hope they aren't just as long as they keep the power consumption in check, the price, and the value (HDMI, DX10.1, etc).
Today's release reminded me that NVIDIA is the underdog, they are the company that released the FX series (desperate technology, like these are). ATI has been around well before 3DFX made 3d-accelerators. They were down for a bit, and we all said it was over for ATI but this desperate release from NVIDIA makes me think that ATI is going to be quite tought to beat.
Brazofuerte - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkCan I go somewhere to find the exact settings used for these benchmarks? I appreciate the tech side of the write up but when it comes to determining whether I want one of these for my gaming machine (I ordered mine at midnight), I find HardOCP's numbers much more useful. Reply
woofermazing - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkAMD/ATI isn't going to abandon the high end like your article implies. Their plan is to make a really good mid range chip, and ductape to cores together ala the X2's. Nvidia goes from the high-end down, ATI from the mid-end up. From the look of it, ATI might have the right idea, atleast this time around. I seriously doubt we'll see a two core version of this monster anytime soon. Reply
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkthey are abandoning the high end single GPU ...
we did state that they are planning on competing in the high end space with multiGPU cards, but that there are drawbacks to that.
we'll certainly have another article coming out sometime soon that looks a little more closely at AMD's strategy. Reply
KeypoX - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linki dont like it, not impressed either :(. Hopefully my 8800gt last for a while, far past this crap atleast Reply
woofermazing - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkIsn't the R700 high-end model going to have a direct link between the two cores. Could be a false rumor, but i would think that would solve a lot of problems with having two GPU's on a single board, since games would see it as 1 chip instead of a Crossfire/SLI setup. And besides, why the heck does it matter what the card looks like under the cooler. If it delivers better performance than Nvidia's offering without driver headaches, I don't think most gamers are going to care. Reply
VooDooAddict - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkWhy am I the only one happy about this product?
Since the release of the 8800GTX top end single GPU performance has been a little stagnant... then came the refresh (8800GT/8800GTS-512) better prices came into effect.
Now we've got the new generation, and like in years prior, the new gen single GPU card has near performance of the previous gen in SLI. Price is also similar with when NVIDIA launched the first 8800GTX.
Sure, I wish they came in at a lower price point and at less power draw. (Same complaints that we had with the original 8800GTX). Lower power and lower price will come with a refresh.
Will I be getting one? ... nahh these cheap 9600GTs, overclocked 8800GT's and 8800GTSs will be the cards I recomend till i see the refresh. But I'm still happy there's progress.
I'm hoping the refresh hits around the same time as Intel's updated quad core. Reply
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linki think its neat and has very interesting technology under the hood.
but i'm not gonna spend that much money for something that doesn't deliver enough value (or even performance) compared to other solutions that are available. you pretty much reflect my own sentiment there: it's another step forward but not one that you're gonna buy.
i think people "don't like it" because of that though. it just isn't worth it right now and that's certainly valid. Reply
greenx - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkThere are two ways I can look at this article.
1)First an foremost at the heart of a real gamer ticks the need for good story lines fed by characters you will never forget, held by a gameplay you will fall in love with and finally covered by graphics that will transport you to another world (kinda like when I first played FF VII on my PC).
Within the context of the world we live in today I wonder what is really going through the minds of these people selling $600+ video cards. Kinda like those $10 000+ PCs. Madness. Sure they have their market up there but I shudder to think of how much money has been poured into appeasing a select few. Furthermore for what reason? Glory? I don't know but seeing as how the average gamer is what has made the PC/Gaming scene what it is, where does a $600+ video card fit into the grand scheme of things?
2) The possibilities that these new cards open up certainly seem exciting. The comparison with intel has been justified, but considering the other alternatives out there are much further ahead in development, who is going to bypass intel/amd/etc for a GPU technology based supercomputer?
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linktwo address point 2):
developers will bypass Intel, AMD, SUN, whoever owns Cray these days, and all other HPC developers when a technology comes along that can speed up their applications by two orders of magnitude immediately on hardware that costs thousands (and in large cases millions) less to build, run and develop for. Reply
evolucion8 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkLOL that was quite funny but incorrect as well, there's more than 4 Billion of people in China, in the future probably nVidia will launch a 4 Billion Transistors GPU hehe. It will require a Nuclear Reactor to turn it on, a and two of them to play games :D Reply
7Enigma - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - link4 Billion? Did you just make that out of thin air. Latest tabs show approximately 1.4 billion (give or take a couple hundred million). The world population is only estimated at 6.6 billion, so unless 60% of the people in the world are living in China, you're clueless.
http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/...">http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/... Reply
Bahadir - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkFirstly I must say I enjoyed reading the whole article written by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson. However, what does not make sense to me is the fact that "At most, 105 NVIDIA GT200 die can be produced on a single 300mm 65nm wafer from TSMC", but by looking at the wafer, only 95 full dies can be seen. Is this the wrong die?
Also, it is not fair to compare the die of the Penryn against the GTX 280die because Penryn's die was made in 45nm process and GTX280 was made in 65nm die. Maybe it would be fair to compare it with the Conroe (65nm) die. But well done folks for putting an excellent article together! Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkThanks for your kind words btw :) Both of us really appreciate it - same to everyone else in this thread, thanks for making a ridiculously long couple of weeks (and a VERY long night) worth it :)
-A Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkYou're right, there's actually a maximum of 94 usable die per wafer :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
skiboysteve - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkFANTASTIC write up on fine-grained TMT. I was unaware about this threading technique and was always thinking of this in class or whenever someone would talk about hyperthreading. this technique was literaly in my head for well over a year and I didn't know what it was called or that it even had a name. I always thought there had to be a more elegant way than hyperthreading to do multithreading down at the chip level without doing the OS style time slicing.
i was sitting there wondering how the hell the schedule and run these SPs and then bam whole page about it
really appreciate the effort that goes into researching the core of these chips. i know not everyone likes it but for guys that are educated and work in the field its really interesting Reply
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkremember though that this type of fine-grained TMT only has payoffs in systems running millions of threads concurrently.
on an OS you'll see hundreds or even thousands of threads on heavily used systems, but there still wouldn't be enough concurrent action to justify this type of architecture for general purpose computing.
of course, as developers push towards an effort to thread their code as much as possible, who knows what architectures might be worth exploring on the desktop ... Reply
coder0000 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkVery well written! A couple of points:
1) Last week at WWDC Apple announced OpenCL as an alternative to CUDA. It's a C99 based HLL for creating compute kernels that can be deployed to GPU's and CPU's. Today Khronos officially announced a working group for this, and NV is a part of the committee. As such, your wish for an industry standardized compute language similar to CUDA that runs on all platforms and vendors HW may not be so far off.
2) I believe your interpretation of how multiple threads simultaneously execute in an SM is incorrect. Per thread context switching is not free, and you would never be able to execute a different thread every cycle in the manner described. There is far too much context that needs to be swapped out, and there would be significant power implications for doing that, in addition to the latency. Instead, I believe what NV is claiming is that any given SP executes a single thread. All threads in the SM can all be a single warp, but you can also have multiple threads (one per SP) all executing simultaneously in an SM.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link1) I haven't had a good chance to look at OpenCL, but I certainly hope that if it's everything everyone is saying it is in the comments here that it takes off in a bigger way than CUDA :-)
2) it does not context switch per thread -- warps define a context, and you have 32 threads grouped together. these threads all share the same instruction stream, which is why if threads in a warp take different directions on a branch all 32 threds must follow both paths.
NVIDIA has flat out stated that every schedule clock a new warp is scheduled and that it takes 4 clock cycles to process one warp on an SM. For both of these to be true, we conclude that the scheduler alternates scheduling SPs and SFUs on altenating clocks which means the SPs would be scheduled every 4 clocks relative to itself.
On 8 SPs per SM, you some how need to execute 32 threads in 4 clock cycles. This makes sense if you execute 4 threads per SP in some way. The details at this point are fuzzy though.
regardless, if an SP executes 4 different threads from the same warp, there is no need to context switch to execute any of these threads -- again, threads in the same warp share context. Reply
skiboysteve - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkcould be a large explanation of the 2x register file size. and remember that the SP doesn't have to worry about the context switch, the SM handles having the data in the right place Reply
anandtech02148 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkFrom this conclusion, Amd seems to be the shrewd player, let nvidia and intel duke it out in the high voltage, heat, meaningless speed gpu while Amd can pull something like its first dualcore or athlon64 for the win.
this new beast from Nvidia will have how many developers making games for it right away? i'm guestimating maybe 2yrs-4yrs down the road we'll see a decent title that take full advantage of this hardware.
by then Amd will have something of a midrange that can more than handle the games.
2 things nvidia could work on that it already has, the ps3 market, and small graphic devices to improve profits. shrink the ps3 gpu further so Sony can shrink it's machinel and sell more.
PrinceGaz - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThe GT200 core may be a technical masterpeice in terms of actually making something that big which is fully functional on GTX280 cards, but it seems to me the penalty of fabbing it at 65nm negates much of the benefits of such a wide GPU.
They've had to drop the clock speeds throughout presumably because of the ridiculous amount of heat such a large core generates, which means the ~60% performance advantage in current games over the G80 core at similar clock-speeds is somewhat reduced.
Given that ATI are not producing their 55nm cores in AMD's fabs but instead are getting them churned out reliably elsewhere, nVidia have made a mistake this time around in having their high-end product rely on previous-generation fabrication as it makes it run too hot to allow the clock-speeds needed for it to be the product it should be. There is always a risk in transitioning to a smaller fab technology, and nVidia suffered badly in the past by doing so too early, but with a chip the size of the GT200, they really should have gone to 55nm even if it meant a delay of a month or three, whilst the smaller cut-down derivatives were rolled out first. Reply
ekpyr - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkGreat article, but what about the microstuttering issues present in Nvidia's 9800GX2 cards (both SLI and Quad-SLI)? There is very little discussion on this, but I've seen some benchmarks where the FPS floor is 4fps with the 9800GX2s. Can you add a subjective review of whether or not the actual gameplay is smoother with the GTX280s across these games? Aggregate numbers may say one thing, but I've returned a 9800 GX2 Quad-SLI setup because it was unable to handle the incredible amount of texture loading that was done in Age of Conan (2560x1600 4xAA 'High' settings = 4fps). The 8800 GTX Tri-SLI configuration I am currently using is more resilient to microstuttering with its increased bus and memory capacities, but I'm very curious about the GTX280s and their increased memory and bus on texture-heavy games like Age of Conan. Reply
DerekWilson - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkthe only game that came close to having this issue with quad sli for us was oblivion.
in that game at high res lag and stutter are unbearable and the game is unplayable.
we didn't notice any stuttering issues with a single GX2.
i'm working on some analysis tools to show details like this better in future articles. Reply
TheJian - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI find it humorous that nobody discusses the fact that the shrink has already taped out and will likely be out in two months or just after. This humongous chip was only released so that when AMD releases in the next few weeks they will be behind still in single GPU cards. This is basically what Intel does to AMD every time AMD has a better chip. For all intents and purposes this is a PAPER release of what will come in 2-2.5 months (In Intel's case they just show you what will be out 6 months from now, and a large portion of people don't buy an AMD because Intel might be ahead by xmas...LOL - works like a charm every time AMD is ahead). THE DIE SHRUNK CHIP! Most likely with faster speeds. I suspect they'll come with "ULTRA" version first (and stick it on top of the price heap, so as to not kill all FAT cards in the channel already) and then filter down as these big suckers leave the channel. That's if they even plan to sell more than a few of these to begin withat 65nm. It's only out there so AMD won't look any good in two weeks.
MIND SHARE is everything, which is why Intel's KING of the paper launch when behind strategy. They've even went to doing it for all chips no matter what now. Nehalem scores 6 months before availability. AMD's marketers have no clue an should be fired. You have to play the same DIRTY game as your enemy or you've already lost. If AMD had half a brain in their head they'd paper launch an ultra or 2x4870 version for the same reason...LOL. Then claim "our 4870x2 makes nvidia look like crap for $600"...ROFL. Who cares when it's available, just say it. Having said that, Nvidia will wipe the floor with them in 2 months anyway on a 2xGTX280 that's die shrunk. Which is all they are doing today...BUYING TIME! Reply
tkrushing - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - linkSay what you want about this guy but this is partially true which is why AMD/ATI is in the position they have been. They are slowly climbing out of that hole they've been in though. Would have been nice to see 4870x2 hit the market first. As we know competition = less prices for everyone! Reply
hk690 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
I would love to kick you hard in the face, breaking it. Then I'd cut your stomach open with a chainsaw, exposing your intestines. Then I'd cut your windpipe in two with a boxcutter. Then I'd tie you to the back of a pickup truck, and drag you, until your useless fucking corpse was torn to a million fucking useless, bloody, and gory pieces.
Hopefully you'll get what's coming to you. Fucking bitch
I wish you a truly painful, bloody, gory and agonizing death, cunt
7Enigma - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - linkAnand, I'm all for free speech and such, but this guy is going a bit far. I read these articles at work frequently and once the dreaded C-word is used I'm paranoid I'm being watched. Reply
Mr Roboto - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - linkI thought those comments would be deleted already. I'm sure no one cares if they are. I don't know what that person is so mad about . Reply
hk690 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
Die painfully okay? Prefearbly by getting crushed to death in a garbage compactor, by getting your face cut to ribbons with a pocketknife, your head cracked open with a baseball bat, your stomach sliced open and your entrails spilled out, and your eyeballs ripped out of their sockets. Fucking bitch
Mr Roboto - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - linkOuch.. Looks like you hit a nerve with AMD\ATI's marketing team! Reply
bobsmith1492 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThe main benefit from the 280 is the reduced power at idle! If I read the graph right, at idle the 9800 takes ~150W more than the 280 while at idle. Since that's where computers spend the majority of their time, depending on how much you game, that can be a significant cost. Reply
kilkennycat - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkMaybe you should look at the GT200 series from the point of view of nvidia's GPGPU customers - the academic researchers, technology companies requiring fast number-cruching available on the desktop, the professionals in graphics-effects and computer animation - not necessarily real-time, but as quick as possible... The CUDA-using crew. The Tesla initative. This is an explosively-expanding and highly profitable business for nVidia - far more profitable per unit than any home desktop graphics application. An in-depth analysis by Anandtech of what the GT200 architecture brings to these markets over and above the current G8xx/G9xx architecture would be highly appreciated. I have a very strong suspicion that sales of the GT2xx series to the (ultra-rich) home user who has to have the latest and greatest graphics card is just another way of paying the development bills and not the true focus for this particular architecture or product line.
nVidia is strongly rumored to be working on the true 2nd-gen Dx10.x product family, to be introduced early next year. Considering the size of the GTX280 silicon, I would expect them to transition the 65nm GTX280 GPU to either TSMC's 45nm or 55nm process before the end of 2008 to prove out the process with this size of device, then in 2009 introduce their true 2nd-gen GPU/GPGPU family on this latter process. A variant on the Intel "tic-toc" process strategy. Reply
strikeback03 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkBut look at the primary audience of this site. Whatever nvidia's intentions are for the GT280, I'm guessing more people here are interested in gaming than in subsidizing research. Reply
Wirmish - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link"...requiring fast number-cruching available on the desktop..."
Take a look here: http://tinyurl.com/5jwym5">http://tinyurl.com/5jwym5 Reply
gigahertz20 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI think these ridiculous prices and lackluster performance is just a way for them to sell more SLI motherboards, who would buy a $650 GTX 280 when you can buy two 8800GT's with a SLI mobo and get better performance? Especially now that the 8800GT's are approaching around $150. Reply
crimson117 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkIt's only worth riding the bleeding edge when you can afford to stay there with every release. Otherwise, 12 months down the line, you have no budget left for an upgrade, while everyone else is buying new $200 cards that beat your old $600 card.
So yeah you can buy an 8800GT or two right now, and you and me should probably do just that! But Richie Rich will be buying 2x GTX 280's, and by the time we could afford even one of those, he'll already have ordered a pair of whatever $600 cards are coming out next. Reply
7Enigma - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkNope, the majority of these cards go to Alienware/Falcon/etc. top of the line, overpriced pre-built systems. These are for the people that blow $5k on a system every couple years, don't upgrade, might not even seriously game, they just want the best TODAY.
They are the ones that blindly check the bottom box in every configuration for the "fastest" computer money can buy. Reply
gigahertz20 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkVery few people are richie rich and stay at the bleeding edge. People that are very wealthy tend not to be computer geeks and purchase their computers from Dell and what not. I'd say at least 96% of gamers out there are value oriented, these $650 cards will not sell much at all. If anything, you'll see people claim to have bought one or two of these in forums and other places, but their just lying. Reply
perzy - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWell I for one is waiting for Larabee. Maybee (probably) it isen' all that its cranked up to be, but I want to see.
And what about some real powersaving Nvidia? Reply
can - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI wonder if you can just flash the BIOS of the 260 to get it to operate as if it were a 280... Reply
7Enigma - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkYou haven't been able to do this for a long time....they learned their lessons the hard way. :) Reply
Nighteye2 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkIs it just me, or does this focus on compute power mean Nvidia is starting to get serious about using the GPU for physics, as well as graphics? It's also in-line with the Ageia acquisition.
will889 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkAt the point where NV has actually managed to position SLI mobos and GPU's where you actually need that much power to get decent FPS (above 30 average) from games gaming on the PC will be entirely dead to all those but the most esoteric. It would be different if there were any games worth playing or as many games as the console brethren have. I thought GPU's/cases/power supplies were supposed to become more efficient? EG smaller but faster sort of how the TV industry made TV's bigger yet smaller in footprint with way more features - not towering cases with 1200KW PSU's and 2X GTX 280 GPU's? All this in the face o drastically raised gas prices?
Wanna impress me? How about a single GPU with the PCB size of a 7600GT/GS that's 15-25% faster than a 9800GTX that can fit into a SFF case? needing a small power supply AND able to run passively @ moderate temps. THAT would be impressive. No, Seargent Tom and his TONKA_TRUCK crew just have to show how beefy his toys can be and yank your wallet chains for said. Hell, everyone needs a Boeing 747 in their case right? cause' that's progress for those 1-2 gaming titles per years that give you 3-4 hours of enjoyable PC gaming.....
/off box Reply
ChronoReverse - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkThe 4850 might actually hit that target... Reply
strikeback03 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkSo are you blaming nvidia for games that require powerful hardware, or just for enabling developers to write those games by making powerful hardware? Reply
InquiryZ - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWas AC tested with or without the patch? (the patch removes a lot of performance on the ATi cards..) Reply
DerekWilson - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkthe patch only affects performance with aa enabled.
since the game only allows aa at up to 1680x1050, we tested without aa.
we also tested with the patch installed. Reply
PrinceGaz - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linknVidia say they're not saying exactly what GT200 can and cannot do to prevent AMD bribing game developers to use DX10.1 features GT200 does not support, but you mention that
"It's useful to point out that, in spite of the fact that NVIDIA doesn't support DX10.1 and DX10 offers no caps bits, NVIDIA does enable developers to query their driver on support for a feature. This is how they can support multisample readback and any other DX10.1 feature that they chose to expose in this manner."
Now whilst it is driver dependent and additional features could be enabled (or disabled) in later drivers, it seems to me that all AMD or anyone else would have to do is go through the whole list of DX10.1 features and query the driver about each one. Voila- an accurate list of what is and isn't supported, at least with that driver. Reply
DerekWilson - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkthe problem is that they don't expose all the features they are capable of supporting. they won't mind if AMD gets some devs on board with something that they don't currently support but that they can enable support for if they need to.
what they don't want is for AMD to find out what they are incapable of supporting in any reasonable way. they don't want AMD to know what they won't be able to expose via the driver to developers.
knowing what they already expose to devs is one thing, but knowing what the hardware can actually do is not something nvidia is interested in shareing. Reply
emboss - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWell, yes and no. The G80 is capable of more than what is implemented in the driver, and also some of the implemented driver features are actually not natively implemented in the hardware. I assume the GT200 is the same. They only implement the bits that are actually being used, and emulate the operations that are not natively supported. If a game comes along that needs a particular feature, and the game is high-profile enough for NV to care, NV will implement it in the driver (either in hardware if it is capable of it, or emulated if it's not).
What they don't want to say is what the hardware is actually capable of. Of course, ATI can still get a reasonably good idea by looking at the pattern of performance anomalies and deducing which operations are emulated, so it's still just stupid paranoia that hurts developers. Reply
B3an - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link@ Derek - I'd really appreciate this if you could reply...
Games are tested at 2560x1600 in these benchmarks with the 9800GX2, and some games are even playable.
Now when i do this with my GX2 at this res, a lot of the time even the menu screen is a slide show (often under 10FPS). Epecially if any AA is enabled. Some games that do this are Crysis, GRID, UT3, Mass Effect, ET:QW... with older games it does not happen, only newer stuff with higher res textures.
This never happened on my 8800GTX to the same extent. So i put it down to the GX2 not having enough memory bandwidth and enough usable VRAM for such high resolution.
So could you explain how the GX2 is getting 64FPS @ 2560x1600 with 4x AA with ET:Quake Wars? Aswell as other games at that res + AA. Reply
DerekWilson - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linki really haven't noticed the same issue with menu screens ... except in black and white 2 ... that one sucked and i remember complaining about it.
to be fair i haven't tested this with mass effect, grid, or ut3.
as for menu screens, they tend to be less memory intensive than the game itself. i'm really not sure why it happens when it does, but it does suck.
i'll ask around and see if i can get an explaination of this problem and if i can i'll write about why and when it will happen.
Derek Reply
larson0699 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link"Massiveness" and "aggressiveness"?
I know the article is aimed to hit as hard as the product it's introducing us to, but put a little English into your English.
"Mass" and "aggression".
FWIW, the GTX's numbers are unreal. I can appreciate the power-saving capabilities during lesser load, but I agree, GT200 should've been 55nm. (6pin+8pin? There's a motherboard under that SLI setup??) Reply
jobrien2001 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkSeems Nvidia finally dropped the ball.
-Power consumption and the price tag are really bad.
-Performance isnt as expected.
-Huge Die
Im gonna wait for a die shrink or buy an ATI. The 4870 with ddr5 seems promising from the early benchmarks... and for $350? who in their right mind wouldnt buy one.
epobirs - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThere is an important precedent that gives Nvidia good reason to not rush to a new smaller process level. Recall when ATI first became a serious player in gaming GPUs with the 9700. It was for its time a big chip pushing the limits of the process level, while Nvidia at the time was concentrating on bleeding edge technology. Nvidia's chips got stomped by ATI's in that generation, in large part because the ATI chip had far better optimization of its transistors. Reply
anartik - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWe can agree the pricing sucks. But the point that seems to be missing is that Nvidia promised a 50% performance improvement and they delivered. The 280 delivers 45FPS vs 32FPS for the 9800GT in Assassins creed. Thats just shy of 50% (48FPS) which is a huge performance increase compared to what we have been getting the past couple years for a new card. Slap 2x280 on a card and it vaporizes the 9800 GX2 or any SLI/Xfire solution. The 9800 GX2 scales ~63% over the 9800GTX. So if you do that for a 280GX2 (or SLI) you get roughly 73 frames per second. Plus the new cards have more memory to deal with bandwidth and large textures vs the nuetered 512 on the 96/9800's and 8800GT... the reason I have held onto my 8800 GTX with 768mb. Granted I won't be rushing out and buying one tomorrow but the 280 is the fastest GPU and a x2 will be faster than any other x2 card. It's a little rediculous to think the single 280 sucks becuase it's not faster than multiple GPU's like the 9800 GX2 (although when memory counts it is). Reply
araczynski - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkthis is all they could spit out? all that noise and all those transistors and it gets its ass handed to it by the gx2 more often than not?
talk about fizzle, perhaps at best it'll lower the price of the gx2 a bit.
not to mention no built in hdmi, good lord, they must've had two seperate teams working on the gtx and gx2 at the same time and just wanted to see what they could come up with separately. Reply
Ananke - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI don't think many people at this forum tread understand that nVidia target is the supercomputer market. I was totally impressed from one post a month ago, where a software engineer managed to put and use 3 SLI system for magnetoresonance rendering. Nvidia and AMD /that's why they acquired ATI/ have already significant experience in multiprocessor and parallel calculation. nVidia is ahead though, since they have CUDA becoming more popular for complex calculation. A year ago Intel realized parallel processing from Sun is their biggest danger, now nVidia and Ati come too. Imagine, supercomputers build with thousands of G200 chips, and only some Intels used for mapping, instead of thousands of Xeons. nVidia thinks way more ahead just for the mere visual/gaming market. I am very very impressed, and very eager to see what ATI can do. Also, I hope Ati and Havoc will be able to offer competition to CUDA, or uniformity? Anyway, from a scientific point of view, recent developments in the graphic market make foundamental science more affordable than anytime before. Reply
Reflex - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkAnand/Derek -
I am not sure why you are comparing this chip to a Penryn or other general purpose CPU as the comparisons are meaningless. GPU's are designed very differently than CPU's, namely a high level descriptor language is used and the design is then created by a program, which is then hand tweaked by engineers. By contrast, a CPU may use a high level language, but the actual design is almost entirely done by hand, with large teams working on each sub component and literally years of tweaking. It takes Intel between five and ten years to bring a design to market, which is why there is such a push by them to keep adjusting the design and optimizing it to stretch its usefulness out as long as possible to maximize the initial investment. This simply does not happen with a GPU.
GPU's are designed to last 18-24 months as a competitive solution. nVidia and Ati cannot afford to spend even five years designing them. As a result the level of hand optimization is greatly reduced, and inefficiencies with transistors are tolerated. Typically they are produced on equipment that is already paid for by the previous, more optimized products, or contracted out to third parties(TSMC). Since the products are sold for a premium, the wasted die space is not very relevant. It is a diametrically opposed process to what you see with CPU development.
Despite how impressive it may seem to go on about 1.4 billion transisters, truthfully a modern CPU does more with far less than a modern GPU, and honestly neither nVidia nor Ati are in the same league as Intel and AMD, neither at the engineering level nor when comparing the products they put out. To an Intel engineer, this GPU is at least four times larger than it needs to be to get the performance you get out of it.
The maturation of the industry, either due to reaching a point where GPU's can do 90% of what anyone needs, or simply because power budgets get more restrictive, will come when the level of optimization required for a CPU is required for a GPU, and product cycles stretch out to 3-5 years. Then you will have a more direct comparison between the two, since the design parameters will be much more similiar.
I am not knocking nV here, btw, I'm simply calling into question why one would even compare a Penryn to a GPU, it makes no sense at all when they were designed from the ground up for different purposes, lifespans and with different transister budgets. Reply
7Enigma - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkI think what this shows is there a brute force way of doing something that while not necessarily pretty can get you to a goal. Yes compared to Intel's latest and greatest it is a grotesque abomination of wasted energy/transistors/die size, but the bottom line is it is pretty darn impressive from a CPU/GPU standpoint.
I think many of us long for the days of more than 2 major competetors for each race (CPU/GPU). We've been stuck in a rut with ATI and Nvidia, AMD and Intel. Yes you have some niche products by other companies, and budget pieces being made by a host of has-beens, but really tier 1 stuff is just not being fought over by more than 2 companies.
What I want to see (complete dreamland here) is a start up from some very savvy disgruntled employees of say AMD/ATI, Intel, IBM, etc. (and don't forget possibly the most important segment, the marketing team) with some clout and a LOT of dough to say, "Screw this, we're going balls to the wall and throw the kitchen sink at the market."
I mean let's be honest here, what's another 100 watts or a billion transistors anymore? I can guarantee you every geek out there would shell out more money for a product that devestates the current competition. I don't care if it's not as frugal with the power, or as small, or as pretty, I want the speed man, gimme the speed! Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWhile I'd normally agree with you, GPUs have been getting pretty complex to design. Much of the shader multiprocessors in G80 and GT200 were designed by hand, and remember that G80 (the original predecessor to GT200) was in development for four years before its launch.
The transistor comparison is a valid one, while Penryn is a very impressive design, it is so for different reasons than GT200. The size of GT200 also helps illustrate fundamental differences in approach to CPU vs. GPU design and really highlights why Intel is building Larrabee.
-A Reply
crimson117 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkBecause to non-engineers, they're two silicon computer chips, and 1.4 billion of anything is a lot!
It also helps me to visually understand why this thing gets so hot, since it's got so much more surface area packed with transistors.
You're right that CPUs and GPUs are designed for different tasks and shouldn't be considered pure apples to apples, but then you go against your own advice and start saying how CPUs are so much more advanced, and how Intel engineers could do that in 1/4 the size of a chip. So which is it - should they be compared, or should they not be compared?
And the authors did mention how simple it could be for either company to slap the other type of chip right in with their usual type; make a Intel CPU with added GPU capabilities, or make a nVidia GPU with CPU capabilities. So there's another point where they recognize the differences but do try to illustrate the sameness.
So I'm not really sure your criticisms hold water. Reply
Reflex - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkYou are looking for contradictions where there are none. A chip is a chip, but that does not mean that they are all designed with the same goals, budgets and time constraints. *IF* Intel devoted the resources to a GPU that they devote to a CPU, yes they could produce a product like this in a fraction of the transisters. That said, the product would take 5-10 years to design, would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and would need a lifespan of at least 5 years in the market to be worth the effort. Obviously this is not a reasonable approach in a market with such fast product turnover.
My post was not an attempt to diss nV or this product, it was pointing out that the comparison of a GPU to a CPU is inane as they have completely different design constraints. You may as well compare a CPU to cache memory, or RAM or a sound processor. All have transisters, right?
It especially bothered me when they implied that nVidia has the transister budget to toss a general purpose CPU on the die. The fact is that they may have the transister budget, but they do not have the time or money available to do so, and the product would be obsolete before it ever hit the market as a result of such an attempt. It would be marrying two completely different design philosophies, and this is why the combined CPU/GPU products that are upcoming are not likely to be the strongest performers. Reply
paydirt - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkYou all seem to be assuming that GPUs will only be used for games. If that's all you care about, then why do you whine when a GPU is made to perform well as a number cruncher (for science, for modeling/simulations)?
It's the best single GPU gaming card.
It's the best widely (?) available GPU number cruncher.
For a whole system gaming GPU solution, it isn't the most cost effective.
If you're all into numbers, then why are you assigning emotions to it. It simply is what it is. Reply
junkmonk - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI can has vertex data? LMFAO, hahha that was a good laugh. Reply
PrinceGaz - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWhen I looked at that, I assumed it must be a non-native English speaker who put that in the block. I'm still not entirely sure what it was trying to convey other than that the core will need to be fed with lots of vertices to keep it busy. Reply
Spoelie - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkhttp://icanhascheezburger.com/">http://icanhascheezburger.com/
http://icanhascheezburger.com/tag/cheezburger/">http://icanhascheezburger.com/tag/cheezburger/ Reply
chizow - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkIts going to take some time to digest it all, but you two have done it again with a massive but highly readable write-up of a new complex microchip. You guys are still the best at what you do, but a few points I wanted to make:
1) THANK YOU for the clock-for-clock comparo with G80. I haven't fully digested the results, but I disagree with your high-low increase thresholds being dependent on solely TMU and SP. You don't mention GT200 has 33% more ROP as well which I think was the most important addition to GT200.
2) The SP pipeline discussion was very interesting, I read through 3/4 of it and glanced over the last few paragraphs and it didn't seem like you really concluded the discussion by drawing on the relevance of NV's pipeline design. Is that why NV's SPs are so much better than ATI's, and why they perform so well compared to deep piped traditional CPUs? What I gathered was that NV's pipeline isn't nearly as rigid or static as traditional pipelines, meaning they're more efficient and less dependent on other data in the pipe.
3) I could've lived without the DX10.1 discussion and more hints at some DX10.1 AC/TWIMTBP conspiracy. You hinted at the main reason NV wouldn't include DX10.1 on this generation (ROI) then discount it in the same breath and make the leap to conspiracy theory. There's no doubt NV is throwing around market share/marketing muscle to make 10.1 irrelevant but does that come as any surprise if their best interest is maximizing ROI and their current gen parts already outperform the competition without DX10.1?
4) CPU bottlenecking seems to be a major issue in this high-end of GPUs with the X2/SLI solutions and now GT200 single-GPUs. I noticed this in a few of the other reviews where FPS results were flattening out at even 16x12 and 19x12 resolutions with 4GHz C2D/Qs. You'll even see it in a few of your benches at those higher (16/19x12) resolutions in QW:ET and even COD4 and those were with 4x AA. I'm sure the results would be very close to flat without AA.
That's all I can think of for now, but again another great job. I'll be reading/referencing it for the next few days I'm sure. Thanks again! Reply
OccamsAftershave - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link"If NVIDIA put the time in (or enlisted help) to make CUDA an ANSI or ISO standard extention to a programming language, we would could really start to get excited."
Open standards are coming. For example, see Apple's OpenCL, coming in their next OS release.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080612/bs_nf/60250">http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080612/bs_nf/60250 Reply
ltcommanderdata - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkAt least AMD seems to be moving toward standardizing their GPGPU support.
AMD has officially joined Apple's OpenCL initiative under the Khronos Compute Working Group.
Truthfully, with nVidia's statements about working with Apple on CUDA in the days leading up to WWDC, nVidia is probably on board with OpenCL too. It's just that their marketing people probably want to stick with their own CUDA branding for now, especially for the GT200 launch.
Oh, and with AMD's launch of the FireStream 9250, I don't suppose we could see benchmarks of it against the new Tesla? Reply
paydirt - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linktons of people reading this article and thinking "well, performance per cost, it's underwhelming (as a gaming graphics card)." What people are missing is that GPUs are quickly becoming the new supercomputers. Reply
ScythedBlade - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkLol ... anyone else catch that? Reply
Griswold - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkToo expensive, too power hungry and according to other reviews, too loud for too little gain.
The GT200 could become Nvidias R600.
Bring it on AMD, this is your big chance! Reply
mczak - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkG92 does not have 6 rop partitions - only 4 (this is also wrong in the diagram). Only G80 had 6.
And please correct that history rewriting - that the FX failed against radeon 9700 had NOTHING to do with the "powerful compute core" vs. the high bandwidth (ok the high bandwidth did help), in fact quite the opposite - it was slow because the "powerful compute core" was wimpy compared to the r300 core. It definitely had a lot more flexibility but the compute throughput simply was more or less nonexistent, unless you used it with pre-ps20 shaders (where it could use its fx12 texture combiners). Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThanks for the heads up, you're right about G92 only having 4 ROPs, I've corrected the image and references in the article. I also clarified the GeForce FX statement, it definitely fell behind for more reasons than just memory bandwidth, but the point was that NVIDIA has been trying to go down this path for a while now.
Take care,
Anand Reply
mczak - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThanks for correcting. Still, the paragraph about the FX is a bit odd imho. Lack of bandwidth really was the least of its problem, it was a too complicated core with actually lots of texturing power, and sacrificed raw compute power for more programmability in the compute core (which was its biggest problem). Reply
Arbie - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI appreciate the in-depth look at the architecture, but what really matters to me are graphics performance, heat, and noise. You addressed the card's idle power dissipation but only in full-system terms, which masks a lot. Will it really draw 25W in idle under WinXP?
And this highly detailed review does not even mention noise! That's very disappointing. I'm ready to buy this card, but Tom's finds their samples terribly noisy. I was hoping and expecting Anandtech to talk about this.
Arbie Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI've updated the article with some thoughts on noise. It's definitely loud under load, not GeForce FX loud but the fan does move a lot of air. It's the loudest thing in my office by far once you get the GPU temps high enough.
From the updated article:
"Cooling NVIDIA's hottest card isn't easy and you can definitely hear the beast moving air. At idle, the GPU is as quiet as any other high-end NVIDIA GPU. Under load, as the GTX 280 heats up the fan spins faster and moves much more air, which quickly becomes audible. It's not GeForce FX annoying, but it's not as quiet as other high-end NVIDIA GPUs; then again, there are 1.4 billion transistors switching in there. If you have a silent PC, the GTX 280 will definitely un-silence it and put out enough heat to make the rest of your fans work harder. If you're used to a GeForce 8800 GTX, GTS or GT, the noise will bother you. The problem is that returning to idle from gaming for a couple of hours results in a fan that doesn't want to spin down as low as when you first turned your machine on.
While it's impressive that NVIDIA built this chip on a 65nm process, it desperately needs to move to 55nm." Reply
Mr Roboto - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI agree with what Darkryft said about wanting a card that absolutely without a doubt, stomps the 8800GTX. So far that hasn't happened as the GX2 and GT200 hardly do either. The only thing they proved with the G90 and G92 is that they know how to cut costs.
Well thanks for making me feel like such a smart consumer as it's going on 2 years with my 8800GTX and it still owns 90% of the games I play.
P.S. It looks like Nvidia has quietly discontinued the 8800GTX as it's no longer on major retail sites.
Rev1 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkYa the 640 8800 gts also. No Sli for me lol. Reply
wiper - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWhat about noise ? Other reviews show mixed data. One says it's another dustblower, others says the noise level is ok. Reply
Zak - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkFirst thing though, don't rely entirely on spell checker:)) Page 4 "Derek Gets Technical": "borrowing terminology from weaving was cleaver" I believe you meant "clever"?
As darkryft pointed out:
"In my opinion, for $650, I want to see some f-ing God-like performance."
Why would anyone pay $650 for this? Ugh? This is probably THE disappointment of the year:(((
Z. Reply
js01 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkOn techpowerups review it seemed to pull much bigger numbers but they were using xp sp2.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Point_Of_View/G...">http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Point_Of_View/G... Reply
NickelPlate - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkPfft, title says it all. Let's hope that driver updates widen the gap between previous high end products. Otherwise, I'll pass on this one. Reply
Spoelie - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkOn first page alone:
*Use of the acronym TPC but no clue what it stands for
*999 * 2 != 1198 Reply
Spoelie - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkpage 3:
"An Increase in Rasertization Throughput" -t Reply
knitecrow - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI am dying to find out what AMD is bringing to the table its new cards i.e. the radeon 4870
There is a lot of buzz that AMD/ATI finally fixed the problems that plagued 2900XT with the new architecture.
JWalk - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThe new ATI cards should be very nice performance for the money, but they aren't going to be competitors for these new GTX-200 series cards.
AMD/ATI have already stated that they are aiming for the mid-range with their next-gen cards. I expect the new 4850 to perform between the G92 8800 GTS and 8800 GTX. And the 4870 will probably be in the 8800 GTX to 9800 GTX range. Maybe a bit faster. But the big draw for these cards will be the pricing. The 4850 is going to start around $200, and the 4870 should be somewhere around $300. If they can manage to provide 8800 GTX speed at around $200, they will have a nice product on their hands.
Time will tell. :) Reply
FITCamaro - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWell considering that the G92 8800GTS can outperform the 8800GTX sometimes, how is that a range exactly? And the 9800GTX is nothing more than a G92 8800GTS as well. Reply
AmbroseAthan - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkI know you guys were unable to provide numbers between the various clients, but could you guys give some numbers on how the 9800GX2/GTX & new G200's compare? They should all be running the same client if I understand correctly. Reply
DerekWilson - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkyes, G80 and GT200 will be comparable.
but the beta client we had only ran on GT200 (177 series nvidia driver). Reply
leexgx - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - linkget this it works with all 8xxx and newer cards or just modify your own 177.35 driver so it works you get alot more PPD as well
http://rapidshare.com/files/123083450/177.35_gefor...">http://rapidshare.com/files/123083450/177.35_gefor... Reply
darkryft - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWhile I don't wish to simply another person who complains on the Internet, I guess there's just no way to get around the fact that I am utterly NOT impressed with this product, provided Anandtech has given an accurate review.
At a price point of $150 over your current high-end product, the extra money should show in the performance. From what Anandtech has shown us, this is not the case. Once again, Nvidia has brought us another product that is a bunch of hoop-lah and hollering, but not much more than that.
In my opinion, for $650, I want to see some f-ing God-like performance. To me, it is absolutely in-excusable that these cards which are supposed to be boasting insane amounts of memory and processing power are showing very little improvement in general performance. I want to see something that can stomp the living crap out of my 8800GTX. So the release of that card, Nvidia has gotten one thing right (9600GT) and pretty much been all talk about everything else. So far, the GTX 280 is more of the same. Reply
Regs - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThey just keep making these cards bigger and bigger. More transistors, more heat, more juice. All for performance. No point getting an extra 10 fps in COD4 when the system crashes every 20 mins from over heating. Reply
Chaser - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkMaybe I'm behind the loop here. The only competition this article refers to is some up coming new INTEL product in contrast to an announced hard release of the next AMD GPU series a week from now?
BPB - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkWell nVidia is starting with the hi end, hi proced items. Now we wait to see what ATI has and decide. I'm very much looking forward to the ATI release this week. Reply
FITCamaro - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkYeah but for the performance of these cards, the price isn't quite right. I mean you can get two 8800GTs for under $400 and they typically outperform both the 260 and the 280. Yes if you want a single card, these aren't too bad a deal. But even the 9800GX2 outperforms the 280 normally.
So really I have to question the pricing on them. High end for a single GPU card yes. Better price/performance than last generations card, no. I just bought two G92 8800GTSs and now I don't feel dumb about it because my two cards that I paid $170 for each will still outperform the latest and greatest which cost more. Reply
Rev1 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkMaybe lack of any real competition from ATI? Reply
hadifa - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
No, The reason is high cost to produce. over a Billion transistors, low yields, 512 bit bus ...
Unfortunately the high cost and the advance tech doesn't translate to equally impressive performance at this stage. For example, if the card had much lower power usage under load, still it would have been considered a good move forward for having comparable performance to a dual GPU solution but with much cooler running and less demanding hardware.
As the review mentions, this card begs for a die shrink. It will make it use less power, be cheaper, run cooler and even have a higher clock. Reply
Warren21 - Monday, June 16, 2008 - linkThat competition won't come for another two weeks, but when it does -- rumour has it NV plan to lower their prices. Most preliminary info has HD 4870 at 299-329 and pretty much GTX 260 performance, if not, then biting at it's heels. Reply
smn198 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - linkYou haven't seen anything yet. check out this picture of the GTX2 290!! http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=350t4rt&s=3">http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=350t4rt&s=3 Reply
Mr Roboto - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - linkSoon it will be that way if Nvidia has their way. Reply


text:
Contact Us Rights & Permissions
MyC-SPAN Log In | Sign Up
The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle is a comprehensive resource of the United States Congress. Watch C-SPAN video recordings of House and Senate proceedings. Follow the Congressional Record while watching House and Senate proceedings to read each speaker's official remarks. Find Representatives for every district, Senators for every state, and members for every Congressional Committee. View detailed information about bills debated and votes taken.
More Info
Click a category within the legend to toggle its visibility.
Blog|About C-SPAN Video Library|Contact Us|TOS|Privacy Statement

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Your Cart Contains:
0 item(s)
Sub Total: £0.00
Finance is available but the minimum total spend is £499.00.
You would need to add a further £309.00 of goods to your basket to be able to apply for online finance.
More information about finance
2015 Rockwell MX Apostle Watch - Black Metal / Black
© 2016 DirtBikeBitz.
Wheels Wings & Water Ltd.
All Rights Reserved.


text:
NEW YORK — In what will surely be another public relations nightmare for Anthony Weiner's mayoral campaign, his spokeswoman went off on an epic, obscenity-laced rant against a former intern who wrote an unflattering article about her time working for the ex-congressman.
Olivia Nuzzi, who briefly worked for Weiner's mayoral campaign, wrote a tell-all piece for the New York Daily News describing Weiner's staff as inexperienced and criticizing the candidate for, among other things, referring to female interns as "Monica."
The article enraged Barbara Morgan, Weiner's communications director, who went off on Nuzzi during an interview with Talking Points Memo. Her profanity-laced tirade, which TPM reports was unprompted, immediately caused a sensation on Twitter, where it was compared to the infamous meltdown of a University of Maryland student who went postal on her sorority sisters for not being social enough.
In a statement, Morgan offered her apologies to Nuzzi and said she had thought her comments to TPM were off the record.
"In a moment of frustration, I used inappropriate language in what I thought was an off the record conversation," Morgan said. "It was wrong and I am very sorry, which is what I said tonight when I called and emailed Olivia to apologize."
But TPM editor Josh Marshall disputed Morgan's account, saying in a message on Twitter the interview was clearly on the record.


text:
Vice President for Marketing
& Public Relations
412-397-5291 Phone
Lafayette Center 204
Moon Campus
Public Relations & Marketing
412-397-5298 (phone)
412-397-5871 (fax)
Lafayette Center 202
The Office of Public Relations and Marketing, located on the first floor of Lafayette Hall, exists for the primary purpose of monitoring and maintaining the image of Robert Morris University to external and internal audiences through media, advertising, public relations and publications programs. The Public Relations Office supports the marketing plans of the university and is responsible for developing and approving all external publications and advertising programs for the university.
If you require publication services from the PR department, please use this form to initiate your request.
All RMU stationery, including business cards, letterhead, pocket folders, notepads, notecards, and campus maps can now be ordered directly from the printer, Allegra, via their convenient online ordering system, AD3. Please download a copy of the AD3 RMU user's manual below and simply follow the instructions on how to place your order.
All new users will have to create a login as the first step. Instructions for creating a login are in the User Manual. Be sure to check your spam message for the registration confirmation email. PLEASE NOTE, order placers will need to enter their department code in the PO# field at check out.
Allegra will handle all training, site management, and customer service calls for the university. David Barringer is the primary point of contact via email email@example.com or phone 412-922-0422.
All envelopes and mailing labels are printed through the RMU Mail and Print Center. Please contact the Print Center at 412-397-6344 or firstname.lastname@example.com with any questions.
A Microsoft Word template for setting up RMU mailing labels and letterhead for your laser printer are available below:
A Microsoft powerpoint template is available below:
To purchase any of the above items please click here.
For login instructions please click here.
Please contact Tamaira Binion with any questions at firstname.lastname@example.com or ext. 5298


text:
QNAP TS-659 Pro II Reviewby Ganesh T S on 9/19/2011 8:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- IT Computing
69 Comments
Back to Article
Death666Angel - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkHey! I just wanted to post a quick comment regarding this:
"The redundancy helps in data recovery, in case of media failure of any other unforeseen circumstances."
Really, RAID only helps in case of a media failure. Most other "unforeseen circumstances" (which btw really aren't unforeseen...) cannot be helped by a RAID:
- unintentional deletion of a file
- virus
- power black out
- mainboard/PSU failure which fries the system
There are a lot of things that a RAID can do nothing about and need to be taken care of separately. I'm sure you know that, but the statement above made it sound differently. :-) Reply
geniekid - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link++
Better to have data on two separate machines running no RAID than on one machine running RAID if data backup is your goal. RAID was designed primarily for enterprise use to minimize downtime when a drive fails - and even then, any serious business will have an offsite backup. In home use, the time-cost for replacing the hard drive on a non-RAIDed machine and then copying data from your backup machine is well worth the data safety you get from having that backup machine.
That said, external AND internal hard drives are both *relatively* cheap, so should be not-too-hard to get the benefits of both RAID and backup in home use :) Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkI agree with your points :) But, the mainboard / PSU failure doesn't mean that data is lost. Please check out my LG N2A2 review, where I recovered data from a 'fried' system using UFS Explorer.
I believe UFS Explorer can still be used here, but one needs to feed each disk into the rebuilding computer, make an image, and then recover after making UFS Explorer recognize all the images. I didn't check this out because I don't have a test system handy with ~6 TB worth of free space. Will try to redress in future :) Reply
mino - Monday, September 26, 2011 - linkMoBo/PSU failure might easily take the disks with itself either by corrupting data or physicaly damaging them.
Not to mention no way ofe getting them back withou getting identical mobo even if data was not touched AND hoping the new firmware will not zero them on sight ... Reply
DeviousDog - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkTrue!!! But data storage and backup are two different things. As the article states RAID helps with media falure.
Just need to correct this
» unintentional deletion of a file - QNAP has a network recycle bin, so if you do delete a file it is not deleted. Only the soft link is deleted until you empty the recycle bin.
» virus - QNAP has an addon AntiVirus product, but then you should use Access Control Lists to protect data from virus and deletions.
» Power Black Out - Anyone that has a NAS, and does not have a UPS attached is a fool!!
» mainboard/PSU failure which fries the system - Use a UPS which has a clean line filter so the main board does not get a spike, even if it did fry the system. QNAP uses a software RAID so pull it out and put in another QNAP and re-apply the firmware and you are up and running again.
I agree though.. RAID is RAID it is not data protection (too a point) it is physical media protection for the RAID volume if a hard drive fails. That being said, there is nothing stopping you from making a 4 bay RAID 5 and then having a 1 or 2 bay RAID 0 on the same box for backup.
I have a TS-859 Pro + for personal use, I have a 5 Bay RAID 5 which is backed up onto the same QNAP which has 2 Bays holding 2 x 3TB drives in a RAID 0 for backup. Reply
DeviousDog - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkOh.. forgot to also state, I then backup my box to another rsync server located at my brothers house through a VPN. Additionally I backup data to a cloud service for highly important stuff (photos), all of which the QNAP OS supports. Reply
Death666Angel - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkAll your points are very valid, as well. :D
But the article made it sound as though just having the redundancy is all you need. That was my main beef, as such a statement might lead the uninformed to set up a RAID array, put all their beloved old childhood photos and videos on it and then be surprise when there is a power outage which messes up all their data.
Yes, you can protect against black out, electrical spikes, viruses, unintentional deletion etc. But by other means than a RAID.
That was my point. Not that RAID is inherently dangerous. But that such a broadly worded statement is false and can lead uninformed people into dangerous situations. A brief 2 - 3 sentence paragraph about this stuff would suffice to enlighten most people to the problem, I think. :D Reply
DeviousDog - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - linkRAID is good (except RAID 0), the article does state it protects against media failure, meaning the physical disk. With the size of Hard Drives increasing any NAS in a RAID is a good choice, keep your data off your desktop or laptop, how many times have I seen people loose all the family photos due to a Drive Fault, this alone is a good reason to buy a NAS.
However you shoud be Paranoid about your Data, back it up and store it out of your house. Its all good having a 6 Bay unit filled with 3TB drives, but then how do you back that data up... another NAS or rsync server.
You should always think that someone will break in and steal your NAS, or even fire or flood. Reply
mino - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link... in beef, as such a statement WILL lead the uninformed to...
Fixed for ya! Reply
CherryBOMB - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkI have two QNAP;s as well 809's.
for those who do not know the three latest firmwares have been 3.3 , 3.4 , and 3.5 In 3.4 they implemented RAID 10 capability.
Details of the firmware updates below.
3.3> http://www.qnap.com/fw_v3/
3.4> http://www.qnap.com/fw_v34/Default.aspx?lang=eng
3.5> http://www.qnap.com/fw_v35/features.asp
IMO QNAP is the way to go. Reply
Sivar - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkThis is always a good point to bring up. The mantra on StorageReview.com has long been, "RAID is for uptime. Backups are for disaster recovery." Reply
Visual - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkHow quiet is this thing?
The only reason I would go for something like this is if it is really quieter than any file server I can build myself. It will need to be literally inaudible running 24/7 in my living room or else it will annoy me to hell some night when I decide to sleep on the sofa.
And what are the chances for mods adding torrent clients, web/db server and other gizmos to the OS without complete wipe, keeping the current admin interface for the RAID itself? Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkVery quiet during periods of sporadic data access. But, putting it through the NASPT benchmarks would cause it to whirr up and create a ruckus of sorts for some time (Around 2 - 3 minutes) before going back to the quiet period again. This would would repeat every 5 minutes or so. This is what one expects when there are 3 fans in the system in such a small enclosure.
Final word on noise: If you are sensitive to it, don't buy it.. I think the main target of this system is at enterprise and SMB/SOHO users who don't care about noise / keep the NAS in a server room. Reply
bobbozzo - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkAt least some of their models seem to support bittorrent:
http://www.qnap.com/faq_detail.asp?faq_id=547 Reply
chris1317 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkThanks for the review. I have been using a QNAP 509 Pro for a few years now and it is a great performer. I have been looking for an upgrade though.
It would be good if you could get a hold of the newly released models TS-879 or TS-1079. They support 10 GbE which I am really interested in.
Also its worth pointing out about the limitations of raid5 with regard to the unrecoverable read error during rebuild that can present itself and result in a loss of data http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops... which is why I want to go for a larger model. Allthough these models support raid 6 its tough to sacrafice 2 drives out 6 (5 in my case) for parity. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkWith the $1k price premium (859 vs 879), several hundred dollars/computer for 10GB cards, and >$10k price for a 10GB router; I'm not sure if 10GB hardware really qualifies for the small office yet. Reply
chris1317 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linklol, its for my house :) I like my gadgets, I do worry about the URE problem though. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkURE? Reply
chris1317 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkURE (unrecoverable read error) from the article that I linked to in my first post. With drive size increasing there is going to become increasingly likely that when a drive fails and a rebuild is in progress that a seccond drive will experience an unrecoverable read error bricking the raid. The article points out that a 7 drive RAID 5 with 1 TB disks has a 50% chance of a rebuild failure due to ure with a standard 10-14 manufacturer spec for failure. Higher spec drives are available and Raid 6 helps with this as it has a 2 drive redundancy. Reply
Spazweasel - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkVery true about reconstruction issues. RAID rebuilding hammers a drive like little else can.
Fortunately, the reviewed NAS supports RAID6, as well as RAID5 + hot spare and RAID6 + hot spare. Reply
chris1317 - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkYeah it is good that there is also RADI6 support. QNAP My TS-509 supports RAID6 but I am unwilling to sacrafice 2/5 drives for raid thats why im holding out and saving up for either the 8 bay or 10 bay model. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkI don't agree with your conclusions about the non-usefulness of USB3 vs eSata. Granted supporting quick copy on both would be best; but among non-technical users USB drives are significantly more common than eSata and over the next year or two I expect most of them to become USB3 enabled. Backing up to an external HD is a common pattern, so a lot of 1st time NAS users will probably have data to import this way. Reply
Kevin G - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkMinor differences between the chart and the article on the first page. "Internally, the dual core Atom D525 runs at 1.73 GHz and has four execution threads..." while the chart indicates a flat 1.8 Ghz. Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkThe 1.73 GHz is from /proc/cpuinfo ; Any other claim is just marketing specs (which I clearly mention before putting up the specs). Reply
schumaku - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - linkTS-459 Pro II, V3.5.0 Build 0815T
[~] # cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D525 @ 1.80GHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1795.701
processor : 1
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D525 @ 1.80GHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1795.701
processor : 2
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D525 @ 1.80GHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1795.701
processor : 3
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D525 @ 1.80GHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1795.701 Reply
ganeshts - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - linkI rechecked the NAS, and it is indeed 1795 MHz. Sorry, fixed. Reply
XZerg - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkI don't find NAS at all worthy and their performance/price are even worse than what you can do with a 10 years old computer and a gigabit card. Maybe not 10 years old but 6-7 years would be great instead. I have had a NAS, DLink DNS-323, which I sold after a year of not much of a great use for $100 ($130+6% tax originally paid). Even though it was a Gigabit NAS the performance on that was just pathetic, think in 3-4MBps for most tasks, including copying movies which would go up to 10 or so MBps. Once I bought my new laptop, I basically converted my old computer (Sempron 3100+ 32bit system) into my NAS and I easily got 40-50MBps over LAN. I upgraded that after to something newer (X2 4600 with 785G chipset) and now it servers as a media center too replacing my DVD player as well.
Given their performance and their price, why would anyone want to get a NAS over say even a nettop systems which will too easily outpace them? Some of these NAS, take QNAP TS-659 Pro II for example, cost $1000+. Hell for that price I can easily setup a very decent low-end system with 5x2TB drives and some SSDs too and still have money to add more. So why? Reply
DanNeely - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkQuality NAS hardware, as opposed to cheap junk like your $100 Dlink box, are full fledged computers in SFF cases and can be more compact than anything you can build yourself. eg HPs 4 drive WHS boxes are half the size of the smallest 4 bay MiniITX case I could find.
If the size of the device isn't a concern, you can build your own hardware, and install/configure/admin a linux file server yourself then there's really not any reason for you to buy a NAS. OTOH if you want something that just works out of the box because you value your free time highly, or are a SMB without a dedicated geek (or your geek is already swamped and you can't afford a second) then the cost of a good prebuilt NAS with idiot friendly web config pages, is less than hiring a contractor/etc to build and maintain a homebuilt server for you. Reply
MTN Ranger - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkStepping up to a better quality NAS such as a Synology DS210 offers much higher performance. I regularly get over 60MBps on my gigabit LAN. Reply
jmelgaard - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkDid you actually read the article?... Did you miss the page where they measured performance, or did you just assume it was impossible to reproduce those numbers under real life situations?
Have a QNAP 859 Pro my self, chosen for pure convenience as putting together a NAS box that would fill the same set of requirements would be a picky task not to mention the time put in to it in terms of build and installation...
Copying a ~10GB directory, a VMWare virtual machine in my case, gives me the following (Large files, 1GB-2GB pr file for most of the 10GB):
- NAS to Workstation: 86MB/s
- Workstation to NAS: 55MB/s
Copying ~9GB directory with images (small Files, 2-5MB):
- NAS to Workstation: 45MB/s
- Workstation to NAS: 44MB/s
My workstation has 3 x 240GB Vertex 3 SSD's hooked up to a LSI MegaRaid 9265-8i controller, so there should be absolutely no bottleneck there, I run with Dual 1Gbit link for the NAS in fail-over mode, and only a single 1Gbit link in the Workstation, The NAS has 8 x SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3EG (Green, HD203WI 1AN1) in RAID 5...
As expected It can't give the same throughput when writing to it as reading, has to calculate parity after all, also dealing with lots of small files has it's penalties compared to large files, also something I did expect.
But building your own NAS does have advantages for sure, so if one bothers there is gains like the flexibility you can give it and that you have a more "limitless" ability to expand, well to a certain degree but properly far beyond your needs, also 10Gbit links are more available although QNAP has just release a new series that can be upgraded to 10Gbit, but to utilize that we are talking SSD's and uhm... that will become rather expensive and I would have to say that I could not see the case for it...
But these "In a box" solutions is far from as bad as you seem to think of them... Reply
Toadster - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkthe specs on page #1 show 43W max power, but in the SMB, ISCSI and NFS page - you show 72.3W usage - which is it?
also - why the heck are they using a 350W PSU when only 72.3W max? I could see maybe a 100W PSU which may remove the need for the PSU fan (thereby reducing noise?)
overall, very tempted to get this device! Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkThat spec on page #1 is QNAP's claims (and that is with 500 GB hard drives -- mentioned somewhere else). We measured 72.3W and stand by it :)
Echo your sentiments on the PSU.. And QNAP claims 350 W PSU when the internal PSU is just 250W (not that it matters when the max power consumption is around 70 W only) Reply
MichaelD - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkIt's sad that a state-of-the-art, $1K+, SMB NAS device still is unreliable when it comes to rebuilds. I stopped using my D-Link DNS-343 (not in the same class as the QNAP) because of all the issues I had with it. Dog slow access speeds, lockups, you name. FW flashes fixed nothing.
Granted, the web interface is very attractive and it has a lot of high-end features (and the display is nice looking) but when it comes down to brass tacks, data integrity and availability are all that matters. If I can't rely on this device to successfully rebuild after a drive failure, what good is it?
I built my own NAS (server) out of a mATX mobo/RAM/CPU/HW RAID card I had laying around. I own a copy of Server 2003. I also owned the 5-drive SATA enclosure. Been up for almost 18 months now with a reboot roughly monthly for Windows updates. Zero issues.
These "shoebox NASs" just aren't ready for prime time. STILL. Reply
saiga6360 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkWindows updates? LOL Reply
jimr1234567890 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkWhat are the effects of going from 1 GB to 3 GB memory? Any better performance? Faster rebuild time? Is there any benefit and if so what are they?
BTW: like the article I like the fact you took out a drive and made the system rebuild a disk. Most articles I have read just gloss over any real world test and just regurgitate the products propaganda.
I wonder how well this would work as source of video files from my DNLA complainant TV? Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkuPnP media server works fine as a source for your DLNA TV.. But, this one doesn't do transcoding.. so hopefully your TV's DLNA profile is good enough for your videos. Reply
jimr1234567890 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkWhat would be a good one that can effectively handle transcoding then? Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkI am evaluating something in the ReadyNAS lineup which has Orb inbuilt. This is supposed to have a transcoding engine, but I am yet to test its effectiveness. Reply
saiga6360 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkWhy transcode at all? Get a proper media player. TV media players are crap. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkEven if the box on your TV has enough computational power to play arbitrary modern formats without special purpose hardware low power handheld devices (phones, and tablets) are unlikely to be able to do so any time soon. Over longer terms unless we eventually reach a point where throwing more hardware at the problem stops yielding better quality images for a given file size I don't expect this to change.
Also the number of playback points you have is also a factor. If you only need to stream to one or two TVs spending an extra hundred bucks per screen for more powerful decode isn't a big deal; if your McMansion has a tv in each of a dozen+ rooms then consolidating all of your transcoding into a single location and using dumb hardware at each TV will save significant amounts of money. Reply
jmelgaard - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkI Use the PS3 Media Server instead of the built-in one to stream to a PS3.
I must admit I have not tried streaming directly to my Sony DLNA enabled TV as I have gotten to use to using the PS3.
But it might be worth trying to see if it narrows the cases where the format is unsupported. Reply
saiga6360 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkYou will probably run into the same issue, which is really a Sony issue not supporting media formats. In which case, you will be stuck with a PC in between your storage and media player. As NAS hardware continue to upgrade to more powerful CPUs then maybe a better integrated DLNA media server can become possible. Reply
jmelgaard - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkThe point is that the PS3 has the same issue, many formats are unsupported by the PS3.
The PS3 media server is therefore aimed to transcode unsupported medias to a format that the PS3 supports, so this should narrow the cases unless it chooses to transcode into a format that a TV does not support.
There is a bunch of settings for the various encoders, but to what degree you can control what is transcoded by default and what the output is I don't know. Reply
jmelgaard - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkOh and the whole point of choosing the PS3 media server over any others was just that it already has a Pre-build QPKG for QNAP users making the installation a blizz...
For other NAS types it's a different story. Reply
jwcalla - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkI'm somewhat surprised by the (relatively) poor NFS performance. Were the hard disks left in ext4 configuration or formatted to NTFS before the tests? Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkNFS performance could be improved by playing around with the mount options. We just tabulated the values at the default settings. The disks were in EXT4 only. Reply
Sivar - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkA know of several businesses looking for something just like this. Your article was not only well-written and informative, you also have a clue about image formats so didn't use JPEG, which is horribly inefficient for screen shots like the ones in the article. Reply
SeeManRun - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkHi Ganesh,
I read the article as I am very interested in getting a NAS or building my own. One thing that appears to be a limit for all of these machines is the speed at which you can transfer data from them. It seems to me with dual gigabit ethernet ports bonded, you should be able to see above 110 megabytes per second. I have read on smallnetbuilder that almost no NAS can get above this limit. Do you happen to know why, or care to explore this?
Thanks Reply
tbutler - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkQuestion that wasn't answered in the review: are the eSATA ports on this box compatible with port multipliers? Reply
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - linkThanks for bringing this to my attention.
I just checked it out myself and am able to confirm that the eSATA ports are compatible with port multipliers. Reply
bobbozzo - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkSo can you add more drives to the RAID using eSATA? How many?
Thanks! Reply
ganeshts - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkIt supports port multipliers in the sense that you can configure share folders on it. However, I don't think RAID expansion is supported: http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?p=158110 : Note that I am unable to test this out right now because the review unit is being put under stress for one of the bugs reported elsewhere in this comments section. Reply
beginner99 - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkIMHO only makes sense for business use. Only advantage to a DIY build is the small case with hot-swap. Have not seen such a case anywhere for a DIY build.
But besides the case size you can get better hardware for half the price with DIY.
I'm quite astonished by the 72 watt. Do hdd's need that much power? Reply
jmelgaard - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkI Disagree that the only advantage is the small case, a DIY solution might not even be possible for some consumers as they simply won't know "how to" build your own, these boxes has a high level of convenience to them and putting together components to hit the same low power consumption could be a picky task.
But ofc. it's your opinion so I can't but say mine is different.
The drives is rated at 7.4 Watts typical under read/write according to specs the Processor is according to Intel rated around 13 Watts.. that sums to 57,4 Watts... Add the rest of the components and I think it sounds fairly realistic... Reply
DanNeely - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkMost of the remainder is probably PSU inefficiency. Assuming 80% efficiency you get 71W of power in for the components you listed. Reply
asakharov - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkNot long ago I had a chance to test I/O performance of QNAP TS-459 Pro II (the same generation as at article) and older TS-439 Pro II. Looks like not my, not TS-659 Pro II could really use Ethernet load balancing - no I/O performance change according to NASPT. All available Ethernet teaming type was tested. All disks are in RAID0
The best I/O performance I received with one Ethernet connected to NAS.
The simplest is the fastest? Reply
meesterlars - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkI would urge you, Anand, to consider making readers of your site aware of an undisclosed but critical bug affecting QNAPs with newer firmware versions; it seems a certain combination of free space and number of files stored on the NAS can cause anything from appalling performance to data corruption and eventually data loss.
The following link documents the failure of a 10TB storage node.
According to their forums, QNAP are investigating...
It seems we too might be showing symptoms of this bug at one of our customer's installations where we had two freezes last week alone, requiring customer interaction (i.e., "pull power, please"). Not ideal. Reply
rancid-lemon - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkOuch, I've just read through this thread and seems to be a show stopper.
I was looking at buying a QNAP device but this may have to go on hold.
There does seem to be some qnap support on the subject but that haven't revealed any details of a fix, time frame to solution or anything. Plus they seem to be no closer to a solution (or indeed know generally what is going on with their own system!)
Thanks for the heads up! Reply
ganeshts - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkThanks for posting this. I am trying to recreate the issue in the unit we have, and if I am successful in doing it, I will post an addendum to the review. Reply
rancid-lemon - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkJust so you are aware, having read the entire thread it seems to affect larger hard drives, 2TB+. I notice that your review system was using 1TB drives.
The issue may still occur with 1TB drives though since according to that thread there seems to be an amount of uncertainty involved as to the cause. Reply
meesterlars - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkSorry, Ganesh, I must have not seen that you had written the review.
Yes, please do try and recreate the issues documented in the forum. Perhaps a little publicity from you guys would pressure QNAP into action. Reply
IaninKL - Friday, May 25, 2012 - linkHi Ganesh,
I've just bought a TS-559Pro-II, so far just using it for a short-term project so have configured as JBOD and loaded about 6TB of data. 5*2TB Enterprise-grade drives.
I am wondering if the issue raised here was ever resolved?
The linked-page on the QNAP Forums has been taken down and there is no follow-up info on this thread either.
Cheers - keep up the great work! Reply
QNAPSimon - Friday, September 23, 2011 - linkThanks for bring this to our attention. We at QNAP are aware of the problem and have allocated dedicated resources to look into this. I will follow up on this and provide updates on our forum. If you have related concerns please email me.
Thanks Reply
Hrel - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - linkQuick search found 940 online. No hard drives inluded. Bahaha, no. Reply
MobiusStrip - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - linkThat's just ridiculous. There's no reason you should have to put drives in sleds. They should go in like cartridges, with a simple Eject button to remove them. Like these toaster-style drive docks:
If locks are all that important, the lock could be above each slot and simply move a bar down to lock the drive in. Reply
ZPrime - Friday, September 23, 2011 - linkIn many systems, caddies help with noise isolation. I have several HP Home Servers and the caddies are plastic, but they have silicone/rubber grommets around a metal peg that attaches to the drives. They are tool-less, FWIW.
Caddies can also help insure proper grounding. Depending on your chassis composition (some are plastic or have plastic rails), you might need some other way to get the body of the drive to ground to the chassis. Plastic caddy + metal inserts that connect to a metal latch or similar can solve this problem. Reply
ZPrime - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - linkJust because you have an LACP bonded connection between two machines does *NOT* mean that transfers will take full advantage of this. When you were testing for performance, did you run multiple simultaneous transfers?
LACP / 802.3ad load balancing isn't as simple as people think. Bonding a pair of 1GB NICs doesn't give you "2GB of bandwidth." Reply
Nenad - Friday, September 23, 2011 - linkIn short: iSCSI >> SMB for small files and when file-cache can be used
I have QNAP TS-459 Pro+ and QNAP TS-419P , and I use them both with SMB and iSCSI.
In your test, performance of iSCSI is similar to SMB, even with write cache disabled in most parts.
But in my practice I find iSCSI has noticeably better performance in many cases, especially when you work with many small files. That can be seen on your test in 'DIR copy', but as just one number among dozen other it does not stand out. Unfortunately, it is mostly DIR copy where you need or notice speeds - copying single file will usually end fast regardless of SMB/iSCSI, video playback needs much smaller bandwith anyway etc ... it is copy of large folders with subfolders you need (and notice) speed.
Another area where iSCSI seems to have advantage is with using file-cache on windows. I'm not precisely certain how that works, but it appears that windows do not use caches so efficiently for networked/remote disk, as it does for 'local' iSCSI disk.
One practical application of this is anti-virus scanners, who tend to scan 'other' disk when you copy files - resulting in almost double time needed to copy file to/from QNAP, since for example first Norton read file from SMB share to scan, and then allows Windows to copy it locally. With iSCSI I see much smaller impact , and I believe that while Norton probably work same with reading file to scan, Windows can better use file cache to skip another reading when it needs to copy. Reply
Carlu - Monday, October 03, 2011 - linkI love this small boxes, good power-performance ratio, but it sux when it comes to fulldisk crypto. nether the CPU has any good support for it, nor does it handles harddrives with inbuilt disk crypto. And for the same amount of money you get a 20W Xeon 20L, and a micro atx motherboard/chassi etc... and the Xeon has support for AES-IN instruction set... Reply


text:
Why Choose Heat USA?
Average savings of 15-20 cents per gallon on heating oil
Free annual cleaning and tune-up of your system
24-hour emergency heating system service
Top rated local heating oil service providers
Lifetime free or discounted full service contract including parts and labor coverage*
Heat USA member services available to assist you in any way
*Free or discounted service contract, contract coverage and cleaning coverage requires minimum consumption of 600 gallons per year.
Get Started
Learn More:
Fill in the form below and one of our new membership reps will contact you to discuss the benefits of the program.


text:
If you live in Ringwood New Jersey, Park Avenue Acura, a leading Acura dealer in NJ is just a short drive from your home; savings and factory authorized Acura service are closer than you think.
In fact, Park Ave Acura goes the extra mile to ensure that Ringwood residents who drive to our location in Maywood are rewarded with:
Let us assist you in maintaining your Acura investment and to make sure it is maintained properly to keep your warranty intact. Park Ave Acura has been helping Ringwood Acura owners, just like you for a very long time.
When it's time to service your Acura car in Passaic County, Park Ave Acura should be you first destination for factory trained technicians and genuine Acura parts. In fact, each month we have a number of Acura service promotions that allow Ringwood Acura owners to save you money on popular service and parts.
Click on the links below to view our promotions and to schedule your Acura service today:
There are many choices in Northern New Jersey area to service an Acura car. We also understand the attraction of "saving" by looking to service your car by a local Ringwood mechanic. We can't emphasize enough the risk of servicing your car from an independent service center that may not be trained properly or that may use aftermarket parts.
Your factory warranty can be voided if mechanical failure was caused by third party parts and repairs that were not up to factory specifications. You will be surprised to know that our shop rates are industry standard so that in most cases, your repairs will actually be cheaper than a local Ringwood Auto Repair center.
It starts with a phone call or email. You should choose what is best way to schedule your next service appointment. We are proud to say that we have customers in Ringwood New Jersey that come and service their car on a regular basis. If you need directions to our service center from Ringwood, use the Google Map below.


text:
Get Well
An apple a day can keep the doctor away, but we're sure any gift from CandyDirect.com's Get Well candy selection will make every patient get back to normal in a snap! If you know someone who is under the weather and needs a sweet surprise to lift their spirits, then this is a great section for you. From truffles, to flower shaped lollipops, to smiley face candy, ladybug chocolates, and many more cheerful treats, you'll be sure to put a smile on the face of anyone who isn't' feeling so hot. Help your friends and family feel better today when you bring home some of these happy candies.
1 Item(s)
Big Hunk Bars - 24ct Box$28.99
1 Item(s)


text:
on orders $75+
Even with their fur, cold weather to dogs is still just that: cold! A cute, comfortable sweater is the perfect accessory to keep your pooch warm and snuggly from the first breeze of fall to the last snowflake of winter. Dog sweaters come in all shapes, sizes and styles, from thick, fleecy knit sweaters to lighter pullovers to sophisticated turtlenecks and button-ups. Choose the sweater that perfectly suits your dog and get ready for some serious cuddling.Pet Mountain's Dog Dog Sweater store features top quality sweaters from Fashion Pet's massive catalog of original designs. Whether you're looking to get your dog ready for curling up by the fire, or for cuddling up with you on the couch or in bed, Fashion Pet's durable, comfortable, adorable sweaters have your pooch covered.
Pet Mountain carries thousands of quality pet products at low, low prices. Feel free to browse through any of our specialized stores to find the exact item you need!Pet Mountain products are guaranteed to meet your satisfaction. We do everything we can to work with our manufacturers to ensure that you get the quality you expect, the service you deserve and the best prices in the industry. At Pet Mountain, we buy in bulk and develop programs with our network of suppliers that focus on giving you more for your money. Like you, we care about our pets. Its all about giving our dogs, cats, birds and other pets a good life!At Pet Mountain we know that your pet is one of the most important things in your life. How? Because ours are too! Your pet deserves to have the very best the industry has to offer, and we are committed to making sure you have it at crazy low prices. Providing you with the very best supplies for your dog, cat, reptile, bird or small critter is our privilege. Keeping a pet should be fun - let us help you keep it that way!
Free shipping on all orders over $75, even the BIG STUFF that weighs a ton. No code. No hassle.
We want you to be happy with all your purchases at PetMountain. If not, we will make things right.
We won't be beat on price. Always shop with confidence with our low price guarantee.
We guarantee that every brand we sell is new and 100% authentic. Shop over 300 trusted pet brands.
We're confirming your subscription now. We want to make sure your email isn't already on the list.