Category Archives: Hardware

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Apple announces toaster

Macintosh

Get ready to fry.

Earlier this week Apple announced the new iMacs in 21.5″ and 27″ screen sizes. The usual Cupertino Hype tells us there’s lots to like – bigger screens, slimmer, faster, etc. So it has an unusable high gloss mirror for a screen. A minor inconvenience for jewelry buyers.

But a moment’s review of the internal design gives one pause – and I’m speaking from expertise gleaned from having lost one iMac (a 20″) and almost lost another (24″) to bad thermal engineering.

Here’s how the new iMacs look under the skin:


The new 27″ iMac’s guts

Even those of you reading this without an honors degree in Mechanical Engineering (yes, I have one of those) who did not graduate at the top of your class (I did that too, around the time I took yesterday’s snap) can see the obvious design error in the older iMacs has been carried over to the latest iteration. The hot running CPU (because it is from a laptop, not built for desktop use) and the fan below are circled in red. The direction of the blast of superheated air emanating from this assembly is indicated by the green arrow. That hot air toasts the motherboard which is a seriously cramped and compromised design lifted from a laptop to ensure everything fits with Mr. Jobs’s thinness obsession.

I don’t think I need say more, even to readers who don’t know Farenheit from Celsius.

But wait, you exclaim. You said something about a toaster?

Why, yes. The bread goes in the right hand side, denoted by the yellow arrow. It has to be super slim, of course.

The HackPro – Part II

Hackintosh

Successful completion.

This concludes the piece on the HackPro built by a friend of the blog, the pseudonymous FU Steve. Part I appears here.

TP: FU, when we last spoke you were just embarking on assembly of your HackPro, whose goal is to perform like a MacPro with none of the reliability and repair issues common to poorly cooled iMacs, while offering substantial upgrade capabilities at modest cost. How did the assembly go?

FU: Please, ‘build’ not ‘assembly’. If you are into hacking, that’s the teenage vernacular, you know! It was just as I expected – easier than a Lego kit. The only tricky part was plugging in the four small front panel connectors to the mobo (that’s hacker talk for ‘motherboard’ if you must know). The space on the mobo for these is crowded out by the graphics card, so it’s easier to connect them before installing the graphics card. These connectors are for on/off, reset, and the power and HDD activity LEDs. They are the only connectors which are not keyed, meaning they can be inserted over the wrong mobo pins, meaning your computer will not work, so it’s an area repaying attention to detail. And those pins are delicate – the heavy handed have no place here.

TP: Any other hardware issues?

FU: One big snag – the first mobo shipped by Amazon was faulty – the CPU temperature sensor would report 99C when cold and would shut the machine down. I noticed one of the CPU fan pins was bent on receipt and suspect Amazon may have sent me a used board. The board is made by Foxconn in Taiwan and there’s no way they would allow bent pins to ship. (Foxconn, surprise, makes most of Apple’s boards). Anyway, I can’t grumble as Amazon had the replacement in my hands before the original was even shipped back.

It is striking to see how beautifully made all the components are. Toyota not GM, with none of the cost cutting, design compromise and overcrowding you get in the iMac. The Antec case is superb. Properly finished, and I have not one cut on my hands. I expected assembly to take 2 hours but had to add 30 minutes for the insanely poor instructions Intel provides for the correct installation of its CPU fan. Amazing, really. The only part made in the US – figures. I finally found Intel’s own video on YouTube and it can be seen here, and does what the miserable instruction book fails to do, which is to show how to properly clip the cooler to the CPU. Surely, proper CPU cooling is one of the most important aspects of any computer design?

The only tools I used were a Philips screwdriver and a pair of cutters to remove excess length from cable ties used to keep the wires away from fans inside the case.

I originally expected to defer installation of the DVD burner (I installed Snow Leopard from a small USB drive) and a Sony card reader (CF, SD, SDHC, you name it) until later, but Antec does such a fine job to make this simple that I installed both in the first pass. You screw small rails to the reader (which occupies one of the 3.5″ drive slots in the front behind the door) and the DVD burner, connect power and data cables then slide both in until they click. The internal HDDs are mounted similarly except that they are screwed to a plate using soft silicone bumpers for isolation of vibration. The Antec Sonata III case can accommodate up to four 3.5″ SATA drives. As I will be running two 1 tB Samsung drives, I spent an additional $15 on a second Antec TriCool case fan – the case comes with one installed – to cool the HDDs. After my iMac started to fry, just like yours, it seemed like a modest additional cost.


Interior of the HackPro

TP: You are running no fewer than five large fans? Is it noisy?

FU: Five, yes. CPU, GPU, power supply and two case monsters – 120mm in diameter (4.7″). Those things can move some air. I have the two case fans on the middle setting and, with the case closed and underneath my desk, the box is silent. Much quieter than the iMac with the fans turned up.

Now while my experience with computer gamers is that most couldn’t give a gnat much competition in the intelligence stakes, the one thing I have learned from that community is its focus on cooling. Many gamers over-clock their CPUs to make games run better and apply exotic cooling solutions.

For example, there is a large aftermarket in enhanced CPU coolers to fit the Intel 775 socket used by the Core2 Quad, and many are a drop-in replacement for the stock Intel cooler/fan, offering 10-20C more cooling for $20-50. I’m not over-clocking but it’s nice to know that should I ever get the urge, enhanced cooling is a simple upgrade.

It’s common to read of gamers running the 2.83gHz CPU (Intel model Q9550) I am using at 4.0 gHz without damage, owing to enhanced cooling solutions. That is a significant speed increase which may make sense for video processing, and it’s much cheaper than buying a natively faster CPU.

TP: How warm does it run?

FU: Once warmed up the CPU never exceeds 120F (49C) no matter what I am doing. For reference, the service limit of the Core2 Quad CPU is 160.5F (71.4C) so you have lots of headroom. I noted with alarm that my iMac’s CPU reported 163F when I was using Migration Utility to move all my applications and data over – I could smell the difference ….. Mercifully, it survived long enough to move everything over. As for the HDDs, they run close to room temperature, in no small part thanks to the huge adjacent fan drawing air over them. Best $15 I have ever spent – I would rather lose the CPU than my data!

TP: How was the software install?

FU: Piece of cake. Rather than using an SDHC card as all the web sites suggest, I loaded Snow Leopard and the requisite boot loader (SL is not tampered with in any way) on a self-powered USB drive. Much faster – SDHC is a very slow medium compared to a small hard disk. The boot loader takes the place of code on a chip in Macs and bypasses the traditional BIOS used by Windows when loading. On your first boot you still need to enter the BIOS to set it up and dictate the boot order of the various devices, all of which is explained on hacking sites via Google. On this first trip to the BIOS (by holding the ‘Delete-to-the-right’ key depressed during start-up until you see ‘Prepare to enter Setup…’ at the base of the display) you are telling the computer to boot from your external drive on which the OS resides.

I found that the easiest solution was to delete all boot drives in the BIOS (‘Advanced BIOS Features’ screen) and simply tell the system to boot from an attached USB drive first (my OS and boot loader source), and then from the internal drive.

Thereafter you never need to look at the BIOS screens again which is just as well, given how ugly they are.

TP: How did you get your applicatons and data over to the HackPro?

FU: Once I had SL running I migrated all the apps and data from my failing iMac using Apple’s Migration Utility. You can do this by connecting your Mac to the HackPro using an ethernet cable or by simply connecting your bootable back-up drive to the HackPro using Firewire – USB will not work. Migration Utility will ‘see’ another Mac in both instances and you just need to tell it to move all your user settings, applications and data over. There’s no need to reload applications or to reinput serial numbers using this approach. In a couple of days I’ll remove the HDD from my iMac and install it in the Antec case where it will become a back-up drive.

If all you have is USB use Time Machine to create a backup then restore from it.

TP: OK, so this is where the rubber meets the road. Tell us about comparative performance.

FU: Easy. The best approach is with objective measurements. I always suspect the subjective approach in these things – when I read it ‘…. feels faster ….’ I ask myself what part of himself the fool writing this was feeling and turn the page. Remember, buyers tend to defend what they bought. It’s human nature.

I ran two sets of tests to get objective data. Geekbench, which focuses on the CPU and Xbench which looks at GPU-intensive tasks. These metrics give you a rough idea of relative speed between computers. Of course neither addresses broadband speed which is increasingly the slowest part.

For purposes of comparison, my iMac has a 2.16gHz C2D CPU, the nVidia 7600 GPU with 256mB of RAM, and 3gB of 667 mHz DDR RAM and is running Leopard 10.5.7.

The HackPro has a 2.83gHz Core2 Quad CPU, the nVidia 9800GTX+ GPU with 512mB of RAM, and 4 or 8gB of 800 mHz DDR2 RAM and is running Snow Leopard 10.6.1. (I ran the tests with first 4gB then 8gB of RAM in the HackPro to see if the added RAM made any difference). These are all in 32-bit mode as I do not have 64-bit versions of the applications plus 32-bit under Snow Leopard is a fair comparison to 32-bit with the iMac’s Leopard OS. Expect 64-bit to be even better on the HackPro.

Geekbench (CPU):

HackPro – 4gB RAM: 6119 (215% of iMac)
HackPro – 8gB RAM: 6250 (219%)
iMac – 3gB max. usable RAM: 2848

Xbench – Quartz graphics:

HackPro – 4gB RAM: 254 (172%)
HackPro – 8gB RAM: 261 (176%)
iMac – 3gB max. usable RAM: 148

These readings were made with the motherboard RAM voltage set to the default of 1.8v. Adjusting it to 2.1v, the manufacturer’s recommended setting, with 8gB returns Geekbench of 6211 and xBench of 259 – both worse – so it makes sense to stay with the lower, conservative, default setting.

If you want to see the readings from Geekbench for the current most comparable MacPro, the four core 2.66gHz, they can be found here. As you can see, the HackPro is some 12% faster!

Finally, for the jerk who wrote you (Jerk’s comment not published. Ed.) that this machine is seriously dated, here are video processing scores generated using Cinebench. These compare an 8-core 2008 MacPro with the 4-core HackPro, and test how long it takes to render a graphic image in various circumstances:

Single CPU core:

MacPro: 3233
HackPro: 3229 (3281 with 10.6.4)

Multi CPU core:

MacPro: 18811
HackPro: 10568 (10728 with 10.6.4)

Open GL rendering:

MacPro: 5995
HackPro: 6184 (6428 with 10.6.4)

Seriously dated, my rear. But like you said when you called me with that comment, Thomas, for every person who gets off his duff and does something, there are a hundred jerks more than happy to sit on their ample behinds. We call them losers, where I come from.

(To see the full reports which FU Steve made available to me, click the links above. Ed.)

The data speak louder than words while also suggesting that much over 4gB of RAM does’t improve theoretical performance. (In practice, more RAM does allow more applications to be open simultaneously without slowing down performance). The real world feel (ooops!) is that of a snappier machine – not dramatically faster but noticeably so. As for legacy G3/4/5 PPC applications like Photoshop CS2, they run fine so long as you remember to click the ‘Customize’ button when installing and checking the ‘Rosetta’ box – why Apple left this unchecked by default beats me. It will be the cause of endless frustration for many users unaware of it.

TP: How about performance with Lightroom, an issue of particular interest to my readers?

FU: I’m using LR 2.5 and the default installation is 32-bit. There didn’t appear to be that much difference, frankly. Even though I generate 1:1 previews when importing the RAW files form my Pentax DSLRs I would still get the “Generating larger preview” message for a second or two on many images (it’s not consistent) when going from thumbnail to loupe mode. Then I closed LR, highlighted it in Finder, hit Command-I (the letter after H, not the number 1), clicked on ‘Get Info’ and unchecked the ‘Open in 32-bit mode’ box.

Restarting LR I could briefly see the words ’64-bit’ on the splash screen at start-up and the difference was night-and-day compared to 32-bit. No matter how fast I page through my images in full screen loupe mode I never get any delay message. That’s the awesome nVidia 9800GTX+ video card doing its magic, compared to the dated (and overheated) nVidia 7600 card in my iMac. Right there I knew I had made the right decision in building the HackPro. The difference is far more striking than suggested by the statistics, above.

For the more technical among your readers, the HackPro fully implements Apple’s Quartz Extreme hardware acceleration technology to render images faster. To confirm you are running an application in 64-bit mode just fire up Utilities->Application Monitor and you can find out.

TP: How about sound?

FU: As configured the HackPro has none, but the motherboard has all the outlets you need. I bought a pair of Logitech LS-11 powered speakers for all of $20 and they have excellent sound, far superior to the dorky downward facing ones in the iMac. You connect the power and plug in the speaker cord to the green receptacle on the mobo. If you listen to music in iTunes, you can tailor the speakers’ response using Window->Equalizer in iTunes and get a nice smooth response with these. Just don’t expect massive bass with small speakers. And do avoid USB-powered speakers – USB cannot provide much current so your sound output will be limited.

TP: So what’s the real price comparison?

FU: It’s pretty shocking really. Here’s the current 4-core MacPro:

It’s a very close feature comparison to the HackPro. Both have two 1tB drives, the MacPro has a slower clock speed but superior performance quad core CPU for no net difference, and the ghastly 24″ Mac glossy screen. As the base nVidia GT120 (a rebranded 9500 to catch the suckers) is significantly inferior to the 9800GTX+ in the HackPro, I have priced the MacPro with the comparable ATI Radeon 4870. Further, the MacPro needs the AppleCare rip-off warranty to get insurance coverage, whereas all the HackPro’s parts, have warranties of 3-5 years or more at no extra cost. Apple charges you another $249 for that – greedy, greedy, greedy.

The comparable price for the HackPro with the marginally smaller – but matte – Dell 2209WA 22″ IPS display – is $1,368. That’s $3,129, or 70%, less. Buy AAPL stock with that sort of margin, not their compromised hardware.

TP: Any final thoughts?

FU: I recommend this to anyone with a bit of patience looking to create a state-of-the-art Lightroom (or Aperture) machine – anything more exotic is a waste of money for still photographers, though it may make sense for video processing. The result is easily upgraded as technologies improve (meaning as software gets ever more bloated), will run as cool as you want and divorces the monitor from the computer’s circuitry, meaning less heat in the box and a far cheaper repair or upgrade cycle – no need to throw out the display like you do with a fried iMac. Heat and life are inversely proportional to one another which, Thomas, I know will be hard for you to accept given your English upbringing.


About FU’s HackPro

Most importantly, you are removed from the tyranny of the ‘closed box’ philosophy adopted by Apple, a cleverly contrived approach intended to keep you buying overpriced, mediocre performing hardware every two years or so. Even if your iMac survives heat issues, it cannot be upgraded absent the most complex and extraordinary efforts. For all of Apple’s spin about how ‘green’ it is, the iMac is an environmental abomination – when it goes wrong, you have to throw out the whole thing. When your PC or HackPro blows, you replace a faulty card.

Best of all, when something does fail, the most expensive part in the box costs $220 (the CPU) with nothing else over $125 or so, and a replacement can be had at your doorstep in a day or two rather than having your Mac moldering at the local Apple store. And if you read of all the botched repairs of iMacs which have fried, well, life’s just too short to have to put up with Apple’s poor hardware and service. DIY is so fast and simple, there’s no rational alternative.

And it bears repeating that assembly of your own computer is substantially easier than making a Lego toy** or connecting the parts in a piece of home exercise gear, not to mention a lot more fun. Plus, unlike in either of those two fields of endeavor, you are left with $2,000 or more burning a hole in your pocket – had you elected a similarly capable MacPro.

TP: Reality check time, FU. You know, you could have bought a 2.93 gHz iMac with a 24″ screen for $1,600 – just a little more than you paid.

FU: True. And I would be replacing it two years hence when it was dead.

The iMac Just Fries. The HackPro Just Flies.


“Thou shalt not run Apple’s OS on non-Apple branded hardware”. Easily fixed.

** Postscript: “…. easier than a Lego toy”? FU Steve has kindly provided me with a slide show for readers showing the whole process and you can view it by clicking here. Thank you, FU Steve.

Cooling update – November, 2009:

FU Steve sent along some details of an update he made to CPU cooling in his HackPro. Dissatisfied with the cooling from the stock Intel cooler which simply clips into the motherboard from above, offering a mediocre contact force between cooler and CPU case, he removed the motherboard (!) and fitted a Coolermaster 212 Plus bolt-through design. This allows for proper clamping force between the cooler and case and the whole thing comes with a 120mm fan (a 4 pin variable speed like the Intel one, so that fan speed varies with CPU case temperature) for the princely sum of $30, including thermal paste.

Coolermaster 212 Plus in place, fan not yet fitted. Note the huge cooling area. The top of the fins just clears the Antec Sonata III case used.

FU told me the fan is sheer hell to install and can only be installed once the cooling fin tower is in place, as the clamping screws are not accessible with the fan in place.

Coolermaster 120mm variable speed fan in place. The red circle denotes the proper installation point for the fan clips.

Talk is cheap. Data tell the story. Take a look at the large and instantaneous drop in CPU temperatures once the fan is up an running:

Before and after. A 27-30F temperature drop for the CPU internals.

The case temperature is 25F lower than the internal temperatures shown in the graph, meaning that the warmest core – #1 – is actually running at a case temperature of 90F (32C), compared with the 160.5F (71.4C) maximum case temperature specified by Intel. Now that’s headroom!

Thanks, FU. That is very cool! Nice to see how flexible the HackPro is when it comes to enhancements.

Dell 2209WA monitor

Displays

Adding dual monitor display to Lightroom.

The 24″ iMac can drive an external monitor in addition to its own. Lightroom has built in dual monitor display support so that, for example, you can have the Grid view on one and the Loupe view on the other. This makes for very easy use if you are processing a lot of pictures. The dual monitor setup is not limited to Lightroom. Apple’s OS Leopard supports dual monitors, allowing you to spread your open applications and files over two monitors. If you are a data and information intensive user, a second monitor can make a lot of sense.

I had long wanted to add a second monitor but really wanted to use the same IPS screen technology used in the iMac’s splendid display. However, the cheapest IPS display I could find, the HP2475W, runs some $525 which was more than I cared to spend.

Well, Dell has released a marginally smaller 22″ IPS display named the Dell Ultrasharp 2209WA (not the cheaper 2209W) and occasionally run discounts which can see the price as low as $210. I wasn’t that lucky but did find a new one, with 3 year Dell warranty, for $270 shipped to my home in CA. If you go the eBay route, make sure you get written representations from the seller that the warranty is a 3 year Dell one and that they will transfer this warranty, with full documentation, to you. I did, adopting the old fail safe assumption that every seller on eBay is ethically challenged.

If you think 22″ is a lot smaller than 24″, it’s not. Here are the comparisons – width, height, diagonal, in inches:

iMac 24″: 20.5 x 12.7 x 23.9
Dell 2209WA 22″: 18.7 x 11.7 x 22.0

So you lose 1.8″ in width and 1 inch in height. Not a deal breaker for me, given the almost $300 saved compared to the HP. I suppose you could always buy the Apple 24″ external display with its wretched glossy screen for $800+ but this blog is not for the insane.

I connected the monitor to the iMac using the DVI-D connector, provided, plus the DVI-MiniDVI adapter borrowed from the Mac Mini to make it fit the back of the iMac 24″. The adapter is poorly engineered as it’s non-captive (no screws to hold it in place) and runs $19 at your favorite fruit store, where it’s known as a MiniDVI-to-DVI cable. The Dell also comes with a VGA cable – obsolete and a USB cable to provide power to its USB outlets from your iMac.

Mechanical quality is outstanding. The screen clips into the stand (one button release), no tools, and the stand has a beautifully counterweighted vertical slider to permit height adjustment with no lock needed. Tilt is built in, too. Remove the stand and you have standard 100mm VESA mounting holes for a wall mount.

The Dell’s USB sockets accepted my USB card reader and worked properly. There are 4 USB outlets on the monitor – two on the side, two in back.

I work in a bright room with a window behind me, and used the Apple utility (Sys Prefs->Displays) for a first calibration – easy match to the iMac.

Brightness 82, Contrast 57, Custom RGB (R 100, G 94, B 80) – your setting will doubtless differ. In a darkened room I would turn the brightness way down.

The iMac recognized the second monitor so I could use it in dual monitor mode. I ran PixelCheck (a free download) and there’s not one bad pixel.

Here are two LR snaps – grid and loupe settings:


iMac in Grid view


iMac in Loupe view

Here’s how the cables are routed through the slot in the stand:

Here’s the dual monitor setup in use with NetNewsWire – a free and excellent news feed reader for the Mac – summary on left, detail on the right:

Text reproduced best at a Sharpness setting of 40 (the default is 50).

How does the Dell’s 1680 x 1050 compare with the iMac’s 1920 x 1200 pixels? The iMac’s 24″screen is marginally sharper but in practice you don’t notice the difference unless you have your nose in the display. Side to side and up and down light fall off and color changes are minimal for both displays – that’s the key advantage of IPS screen technology.

The Dell’s screen is, if anything, slightly more matte than the iMac’s – a minor difference and in the right direction. Some users have complained about the polished inner bezel on the Dell – mine is matte. The box says ‘REV A01 – Assembled in Mexico’. The screen puts out a little more heat than the iMac (which has massive external auxiliary cooling to stop it from frying) but as the Dell is separate from the rest of the computer that should not matter.

Last, but not least, here’s one thing you definitely will not be doing with your iMac display – I’m using Leopard 10.5.7 – text is slightly less clear in this mode but it’s a nice party trick, I suppose:

OS Leopard allows this trick thanks to a setting in System Preferences – Displays.

Highly recommended based on my brief use – reliability can only be gauged over time, but that three year warranty helps. Adjustments are by easy to see and use buttons on the bottom right of the matte black bezel. I think I’m right in saying that this is the least expensive IPS monitor on the market right now.

Proper calibration of this monitor is discussed here.

Update May 2014:

In the event I got 5 happy years from my three Dell 2209WA displays, until they ceded desk space to two magnificent Apple 30″ Cinema Displays. You can read about that here. The Dells were perfect when I sold them.

The HackPro – Part I

Hackintosh

With thanks to FU Steve.

Having earlier explained how he hacked an MSI Wind netbook for portable computing (“The netbook Apple will not make”), the pseudonymous FU Steve touched base with me last week to mention that his iMac 24″ – a late-2006 white model, like mine – was beginning to show screen artifacts which indicate imminent failure of the graphics card. I mentioned that Apple wanted $900 to repair mine, a ridiculous sum, and that put FU over the top. He decided to build a Hackintosh. More specifically a machine to equal the performance of the ridiculously overpriced MacPro, naming his ‘build’ the HackPro.

Here are extracts of the interview I held with him.

TP: I understand you are getting all the parts for your HackPro. Could you share the details with my readers?

FU: Glad to. By the way the machine will run Snow Leopard and because all the components can be shipped overnight and come with a three year warranty, if something goes wrong I can simply replace a faulty part in 24 hours, rather than losing my machine to Apple for weeks. The single costliest component is the CPU at $220.

My component list excludes a monitor but includes a keyboard, mouse and hard drive, but if you have these already, the cost obviously drops. I’m including the long form descriptions below so that there is absolutely no question about the parts used.

  • EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ Video Card – 512MB GDDR3, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Ready, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV
  • Antec Sonata III 500 Quiet Super Mini Tower ATX Case (Black)
  • Antec TriCool 120 3-speed fan for HDD cooling
  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Quad-Core Processor, 2.83 GHz, 12M L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA775
  • Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
  • Sony AD-7240S-0B Optiarc DVDRW Drive – DVD+R 24X, DVD-R 24X, DVD+RW 8X, DVD-RW 6X, DVD-RAM 12X, SATA
  • Sony Multi-Card Reader/Writer MRW620-U1
  • 8gB (4 x 2gB) Patriot Extreme Performance Viper Series 4 GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit nVidia EPP Certified – PVS28G6400ELK
  • IOGear USB 2.0 Bluetooth Micro Adapter GBU421
  • 1.0TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200RPM 32MB Cache SATA II HD
  • Apple keyboard and mouse – both wireless
  • Arctic Silver thermal paste

All told that lot ran me $930 without a monitor. The only tools you need are a Philips screwdriver and a modicum of grey matter. Between the Antec case and the motherboard you have all the connecting cables you need. You could do without the Sony Card Reader if you already have a card reader, but installing it in the box cuts clutter and the cost is only $18. Likewise, you don’t need 8gB of RAM (though Snow Leopard can use all of it) as the speed increase in Lightroom is some 8-12% compared to using 4gB, but RAM is now getting so inexpensive, especially if you watch out for rebate deals, that it’s not a lot more if you use 8gB. There is faster (and costlier) DDR3 memory available, but you trade speed for stability. Not good. It never does to be at the bleeding edge of technology if you are paying for hardware with your own money.

If you prefer to use a wired keyboard and mouse you can delete the IOGear Bluetooth adapter ($18), but may need to add USB A-to-A extension cables if your monitor does not have any USB sockets, as the Antec case will likely make its home below your work desk. That can be a bit of a stretch. Either way, you will need to borrow an USB wired keyboard and mouse for the setup. Your system will be unable to recognize bluetooth wireless devices until …. you have accessed the system, and you cannot access the system without a keyboard! It’s a Catch22.

If you feel spendy, you can upgrade the CPU to a 3.0gHz (Q9650) Intel Core2 Quad for $50 more, but that seems a lot to pay for so modest a speed increase – 23% more for a 6% speed bump doesn’t solve, in my book.

TP: Do you have preferred vendors?

FU: (Laughing). Yes. Anyone who is cheap and charges me no sales tax! I used Amazon and Tigerdirect.com. Both are easy to deal with in the event a faulty component needs to be replaced. Those residing outside CA may prefer Newegg.com which charges sales tax to CA residents.

TP: But the MacPro uses the Intel Xeon ‘Nehalem’ CPU (i7 socket) with 8 cores whereas you are using the older 4 core ‘Yorkfield’ (LGA775 socket)?

FU: Yes. The key advantage of the 8 core in the MacPro is faster video processing. My primary use is with Lightroom and Photoshop – I am a still photographer – so the added cost of the 8 core makes no sense as these applications do not take advantage of it.

TP: Don’t you have to be an engineer to build this thing?

FU: (Laughing). You have to be kidding me! A 12 year old could put this together – it’s easier than Lego. All the connectors are keyed so you cannot get it wrong. You install the motherboard in the case which already has a power supply installed by the manufacturer, plug the memory and graphics card into the motherboard, connect the power supply, graphics card, HDD and dvd burner cables to the motherboard and plug in the fans. There are no fewer than four fans, by the way – GPU, CPU, power supply and case. And the case one is no less than 4.5″ in diameter – quite a change from the toy ones in the iMac. You can add a fifth to cool the HDD for all of $15 if you use several hard drives – the case will accommodate four HDDs. And the whole thing is dead quiet. And did I mention the removable, washable air filter?

TP: Ok, so the assembly is easy. How about the software part?

FU: Just Google for the fix. It’s super easy and the installation allows fully automated system updates. I bought my Snow Leopard update disk from Apple for $29 and that’s what I used.

TP: Legality?

FU: Look, Apple has stolen from me for years. Every single piece of Apple hardware I have owned has broken after two or three years and proved impossible or uneconomical to fix. How on earth can Apple’s false advertising (“It Just works”) be any more legal than what I am doing? That should read “It Just Breaks”. And now my iPhone consistently drops calls – in San Francisco of all places – because Apple’s and AT&T’s greed has resulted in so many sales that AT&T’s systems are simply overloaded.

Apple maintains that its OS can only be run on Apple branded hardware but that has yet to be tested in the courts. Further, the fact that Apple has not gone after the hacker community suggests they have concerns that they might not legally prevail. And I paid them for their software, many times over, if you look at all the hardware failures I have suffered over the years.

No, given that the little guy like me has no possible redress against Apple’s consumer fraud, it’s more than a little ‘holier than thou’ to argue the legality case here.

TP: So what’s the performance like?

FU: No idea as I haven’t assembled everything yet. But I can give you some meaningful predictions. Geekbench on my iMac (2.16gHz, ATI7300, 3gB RAM) reports a reading of 2850 and I expect that the HackPro will come in at 6000 or so, so roughly twice as fast on CPU intensive tasks like converting RAW files. On video I would expect a similar performance increase as the nVidia 9800 GTX+ card I’m using is a rebadged GT150. The current HackPro uses the GT120 which is a rebadged, and more modest, 9500GT. More Apple and nVidia spin. So the HackPro will be better as regards graphics capability. The card has dual DVI outputs, by the way, meaning it can drive two regular 24″ or smaller monitors or one 30″ dual-DVI display at full 2560 x 1600 definition.

I could overclock the CPU and GPU and get even more performance, but I’m conservative by nature and prefer to trade speed for reliability.

TP: And the case?

FU: Can you say elegant? No boy racer looks or neon lights here:


Antec Sonata III case

Antec has been making high quality cases for years and this one is as good as they get. HDDs slide in on rails and there are several externally accessible bays behind the top door for things like DVD burners, card readers, etc.

TP: Thanks, FU. When can we expect results?

FU: Give me a couple of weeks or so. One final thought. For Windows users, this machine will run Windows with no hacking, and will run it faster than all but the costliest gaming machines.

The results can be seen in Part II here.

Panasonic Lumix 20mm Micro Four-Thirds lens

Micro Four-Thirds

State of the art.

A couple of years ago I wrote that the real digital revolution in photography gear would be fomented not by traditional manufacturers but rather by the new breed of companies specializing in electronics and modern design, unshackled by historical investments and conventions.

Never has this proved more true than with the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 ‘standard’ lens for the G1/GH1/GF1 micro four-thirds camera range. As the excellent piece at DPReview discloses, this 40mm equivalent lens is simply state of the art, a superb marriage of hardware and corrective software design. I would go as far as to say that it is to digital what the 35mm SummicronM, in its aspherical final version, was to film. I used one of those for years and, suffice it to say, you could buy no fewer than seven of the Pannys for the ridiculous price asked for the Leica optic today, so it’s hard to complain that the Panasonic lens is expensive.

The new Panny lens peaks at f/4, just like the Leica Summicron of old (both in its 35mm and 50mm guises) and, unlike the kit zoom, does not include shake reduction. Perhaps the shake reduction on the Olympus EP1, which is built in to the body of that camera, works, but frankly the EP1 is such a poorly executed camera for street snaps (slow focus, awful shutter lag, no proper viewfinder, mediocre optics, etc. – a joke from such a great manufacturer) that it’s not like I will ever be trying it.

So why am I not rushing out to buy one? Well, I very much intended to when it was first announced but, frankly, I have become so enamored of the kit lens with its exceptionally useful 14-45mm (28-90mm on full frame) zoom range in a very small package that I no longer want to be burdened with the task of swapping lenses when snapping on the street. Or, for that matter, carrying more clutter. While f/1.7 is nice to have, the f/3.5-5.6 maximum on the kit lens is fine for my purposes, as I am not an available light maven. And the kit lens is so good I find that I am using it at or near full aperture nearly all the time, with the built in shake reduction adding 2-3 stops, effectively, in low light, making the effective aperture range more like f/1.4 to f/2.5. The only thing I miss is the shallower depth of field that a true f/1.7 offers, but the compromise more than works for me.

March 31, 2011 update: I ended up buying one of these and you can read about it here. I returned it on April 1, 2011, as this is one of the least competent street snapper lenses I have ever used – to add insult to injury the very slow autofocus comes with extreme flare, incorrect exposure on my G1 in auto mode and an inability to orient imported pictures properly in Lightroom. Other than that its great ….