Category Archives: Photography

Faster SSDs

Computing

Read/write speeds almost doubled.

A while back I explained some of the benefits of using a Solid State Drive in your computer. While SSDs remain very expensive, if restricted to running the operating system and applications, plus acting as a scratch disk for Photoshop and Lightroom, they make a lot of sense. Applications load faster, cached internet pages load faster, operating heat falls. Still, large data storage is best done on traditional Hard Disk Drives as the economics are favorable. A 1tB HDD runs $90. Two 480 gB SSD run ten times that.

And I do not accept that SSDs are ‘more reliable’. We have decades of data on HDDs which allow rational analysis of failure risk. We have no such data volumes on SSDs. The fact that you can drop an SSD on concrete and it will likely survive is irrelevant to the risk discussion in practical use. Meanwhile we are seeing ludicrous manufacturer claims of 2 million hours Mean Time Between Failures. That’s 228.3 years. And you tested that how, exactly? Make me Treasury Secretary and I’ll balance the budget in 6 months, too.

Over the past year or two SATA 3 drives have become increasingly common. Sure you may need to upgrade your motherboard or computer, but they offer twice the data transfer rates on paper of the earlier SATA 2 drives. This applies whether the drive is SSD or HDD. An alternative, if your motherboard has a short slot available, is to add a SATA 3 adapter card and plug the SATA 3 drive, in an external enclosure, into the card:

When a friend alerted me to an Amazon special on SanDisk SSDs, the price reduced from $230 to $120 for a 120gB SATA 3 version, I snapped one up. I have since seen them as low as $98.

I popped the drive in my Aluratek external drive cradle, a device which has paid for itself in time saved over and over, and after formatting used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the new Sandisk SSD from my regular Intel SATA 2 SSD inside the HackPro. This Hackintosh was upgraded a while back with a Sandy Bridge CPU and the related motherboard upgrade came with SATA 3 drive sockets.

A few minutes later the Sandisk was swapped with the Intel SSD inside the Hackster and after restarting I ran some tests.

First you want to check it is being recognized as a SATA 3 drive – meaning you are looking for a ‘Negotiated Link Speed’ of 6 gb/s in System Profiler (“About this Mac”):

The new SSD is correctly reported as 6gb/s.

Contrast this with the Intel SATA 2 SSD:

Having confirmed that the drive is connected to the correct socket on the motherboard (there are also SATA 2 sockets, so a check is essential), and making sure the motherboard’s BIOS was set to AHCI, I ran the disk test utility Xbench. As I live in the real world, not a flaky marketing-sponsored ‘test lab’, I kept all my usual apps running when doing this test – Mail, Safari, Firefox, Finder, Temperature Monitor, NetNewsWire and so on. Here are the results:

Restarting from the Intel SSD SATA 2 backup drive, with identical content, I ran Xbench again:

That’s a 60% overall speed gain, and a 79% speed gain in Uncached Random Read speeds – which would apply when an application is first loaded, for example.

How about a traditional SATA 2 3gb/s 1tb HDD, like the 7200 rpm Samsungs inside the HackPro?

Night and day, as you might expect.

I tend to distrust subjective tests – the sort which culminate in nonsense like “It feels faster” – as they are mostly polluted with confirmation bias. You just paid for it so it has to be better, right? Still, for pages I visit frequently on the web, I can confirm that the speed with which such cached pages load is noticeably faster. Does LR load faster? Maybe. It’s not easy to tell the difference between 4 seconds and 3. Same for PS CS5.

So what is the optimal drive topology? If you tinker with OS upgrades and hacks as I do, the two SSDs – boot and backup – make sense, especially when you blow it! The boot drive should be SATA 3 for fastest operation, the backup can be SATA 2 if it’s cheaper – no need to have fast backups. Alternatively, use a SATA 2 HDD notebook drive as the backup for the boot disk. Small ones run $70, a modest saving. Then keep your data – picture files, movies, etc. – on inexpensive large HDDs, in redundant pairs and be sure to also maintain an offsite backup.

Anyone contemplating a new computer, or building/upgrading a Hackintoh, should look seriously at SATA 3 drives. Apple, the self-proclaimed great imnovator, just added SATA 3 to its MacBook Air and Pro machines, a year after the competition. 2011 and later iMacs need a firmware upgrade to run SATA 3; you are out of luck on older machines. Meanwhile, SATA 3 remains notable for its absence from the MacPro, despite the $5,000 price tag. Amazing.

SSD technology will eventually obsolete HDDs, but don’t hold your breath. The price is not coming down especially quickly.

What about using that SATA 2 Intel SSD removed from the HackPro? Easy. It found a willing home in the Hack Mini, the machine which replaced one of the worst computers ever made by Apple, the Mac Mini, a machine which doubles as a toaster. The Hack Mini is now faster than ever and happy as can be. As for USB3 or SATA 3 on the Mac Mini, forget about it. Maybe next year? The Hack Mini, of course, has both.

To learn about TRIM (garbage management for SSDs) and how to enable it, click here. Arrogant Apple only enables TRIM by default for favored vendors, and San Disk is not one of those, so you have to go the extra mile.

MacBook Air 2012 update:

The 2012 MBA with its 128Gb SSD marginally improves on the SanDisk SSD, above. here are the results:

Xbench for the 2012 MacBook Air.

Walter Mandler

Photographs, Photography

The designer’s designer.

The names of great engineers are known to few. And that is sad. Who knows who designed the Golden Gate? Who cares? What do you mean who cares? What does that say about our educational system? Everyone should know and care.

And it’s the same with photographers. Ask the average fellow with $10k of the best in gear around his neck who Gauss, Bertele or Mandler (1922-2005) was and you will be met with a blank stare. And that saddens me. Because those are three of the lens designers without whose work the 12-400mm f/2.8 autofocus retractable zoom on that magical digital in your vest pocket would not exist.

Mandler’s primary design tool.

Back in 1973, I concluded my undergraduate dissertation, which happened to deal with the thrilling subject of the erosion of polymers. Until then, research had lacked understanding of a crucial variable. That was accurate determination of the speed of impact of abrasive particles (sand, grit) on the polymer (plastic) linings used to reduce wear in intake ducts for helicopter jet engines, essential for killing the innocents in Asia. Because the subject fascinated me no end (the erosion, not the killing part), I determined to solve for this missing variable and rooting around in the back of the lab at University College School of Engineering, UC London, I came across two tools of priceless value. A Perkin-Elmer stroboscope whose light duration was specified to great accuracy, and a Minolta SRT101 SLR with a 50mm f/2 Rokkor lens. Yes, you guessed it. Another rip off of Walter Mandler’s timeless Leica Summicron design. (By the way, this was my first serious inkling of America’s genius. Perkin-Elmer made the mirror which NASA placed on the moon, allowing us to determine its distance to, oh, a foot or two, when they bounced a timed light beam off it).

Now my first thought of the Minolta was that I could get to rack it out, no charge, given UC’s famously liberal culture, taking pictures of the many street protests of the time. “Honest, Dr. Jones, they grabbed me and smashed the camera. It wasn’t my fault!” But then I thought about it and the light went off, so to speak. I have a light of known duration, I have a camera which can photograph the intervening flying abrasive particles using Schlieren lighting with the strobe pointed directly into the lens and the rest is just exposure and some simple measurement of blur lengths and schoolboy mathematics. Heck, I even processed the film myself! (PlusX in Microphen if you must know – I was a loyal Kodak man even back then).

The dropped jaws occasioned by my insouciant presentation to the assembled dons, with the requisite anti-American incantations about ‘Nam and the efficiency of killing, said a First, and a First it was. “No, Doctor Jones, I want to go into the real world. Thanks for the offer of post-graduate study, anyway. I want to compete, not teach. And escaping poverty would be nice, too.”

What a First looks like. I had to type this on my mum’s old Remington ….

My tool of choice. RMP? Renata Maria Pindelski.

And thank you, Dr. Mandler.

Surprise fact, something other than Labatt’s and professional complainants was produced in the frozen North that passes for Canada, a nation with the longest contiguous border with the most powerful country on earth and little to show for it. A German company in Midland, Ontario, Canada, a subsidiary of Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar, West Germany, saw to it that Canada’s reputation in the optical pantheon would be secure, even if it was secured by a German mathematician and designer. Walter Mandler was that designer and few would dispute that he is one of the premier optical designers in history.

I am pleased to relate that I owned and used all of the following Walter Mandler designed lenses and not for one moment were they anything but the best. And every time I pressed the button I knew Mandler’s genius was on my side; all I had to do was to try to live up to his standards:

  • 35mm Summicron f/2
  • 50mm Summicron f/2
  • 90mm Elmar f/4
  • 90mm Summicron-R f/2
  • 90mm Elmarit f/2.8
  • 90mm Tele-Elmarit f/2.8
  • 135mm Elmar f/4
  • 135mm Tele Elmar f/4
  • 200mm Telyt f/4
  • 280mm Telyt f/4.8

…. and last, and by no means least, his masterpiece for NASA (and for you and me), the ….

  • 180mm f/3.4 Apo-Telyt-R f/3.4

Mandler’s 200mm f/4 Telyt for the Visoflex.

I owned maybe a half dozen other Leitz optics, non-Mandlers I admit, but clearly he dominated the output of the marque. And if you tell me that my 21mm Apo-Elmarit-M f/2.8, the 35mm Apo-Summicron-M f/2, the 90mm Apo-Summicron-M f/2 or the 400mm Telyt f/6.8 didn’t have Mandler’s genes all over them, well, you have no idea.

And each was special in its own way. Anything with that magic sobriquet ‘Summicron’ needs no explanation. It means ‘f/2 and beyond compare’. Maybe bad pictures can be taken with a Summicron, but I never went there. And while I could never afford a Mandler Summilux (f/1.4 and every bit as good, while twice as fast) I now revel in a 1969 Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 which was ‘borrowed’ from Mandler’s workbench. That and Nikon’s 50mm Nikkor-H f/2 of that era, a Summicron clone, are every bit as good as Mandler’s Summiluxes and Summicrons, respectively. Though I hate waste, I have no qualms about owning both. And the Nikon optics make no quality concessions. Today those facts would attract some serious patent litigation, but back then the king deigned not to sue his loyal supplicants.

So, unsung master that he may be, next time you snap a picture give a thought to the master lens designer of the past century.

Words are cheap. Here are some Mandlers:

Pelican, Morro Bay. Leica M2, 90mm Elmar, Kodak Gold 100.

Morning paper, Greenwich Village. Leica M3, 135mm Elmar. Kodachrome 64.

American whales. NY Museum of Natural History. Leica M3, 35mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

Amsterdam café. Leica M3, 50mm Summicron.

Lake Elizabeth. Leicaflex SL, 180mm Apo-Telyt-R, Kodachrome 64.

SoHo, NYC. Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R, Kodachrome 64.

San Diego downtown. Leica M2, 90mm Elmarit, Kodak Gold 100.

San Luis Obispo hard hat. Leicaflex SL, 90mm Summicron-R, Kodak Gold 100.

See what I mean?

The New Macs – 2012

Macintosh

A mixed bag.

Apple rolled out new MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros the other day. There is good news and bad news.

Overall: Current MBA, MBP or MP users have little reason to upgrade. Apple is making retrograde steps with regard to user upgradeability and has again started price gouging for extra RAM, like they used to a few years back. As there are no aftermarket solutions they presumably think they can get away with this. What I see is falling profit margins with an attempt to offset these with disingenuous design practice, not to mention a fair leavening of arrogance in the assumption that Windows users will continue to switch, regardless of price. Wrong.

For users with just the one computer, the MBP makes sense, but at a very high price. The MBA is far cheaper, lighter, slower and in the 13″ size will do as a photo-processing tool at a pinch, but I would hate to have to use it exclusively for this purpose.

The MP is for those with access to Other People’s Money only. A high end Hackintosh is a far better machine at 67% off the asking price of the MP.

MacBook Air:

The best news is that all but the $999 11″ base model have dropped $100 in price. All support turbo boost of the CPU from 1.7/1.8gHz to 2.6/2.8gHz, best used when connected to the mains owing to the increased power draw. RAM can be doubled to 8gB for $100, a 300% premium to the aftermarket ($25) and not user replaceable; likewise the SSD is 64/128/256 at purchase and cannot be changed. So get it right when you buy your MBA. For the budget conscious photographer, the optimum price point is the 13″ MBA with the 128gB SSD and 8gB of RAM for $1,299. Use an external 2.5″ notebook HDD for external high volume storage, some $75 for 500gB and another $5-10 for an USB enclosure. RAM is speedy 1600mHz.

The integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU is an excellent choice for still photography editing, the glossy screen does you no favors, the machine has a 7 hour battery life and weighs a scant 3lbs. My 11″ MBA (Oct 2010) has had 18 months’ moderate use and is holding up fine, with no signs of failing. The latest MBA is some three times as fast on CPU throughput.

Finally, the SSDs in the MBA are SATA3 6gb/s variants. That is a good thing.

MacBook Pro:

The big hue and cry, replete with all the usual increasingly tiresome Apple hype, is the Retina Display option. Whoever writes this crap most certainly did not read his adjective-free Hemingway.

More hype than most religions.

The Retina Display comes at a substantial premium for its 2880 x 1800 pixels – $300 more compared to the similar regular MBP. The photographer who has no other display handy may find this economically feasible, though 15″ is a small screen for long editing sessions. However, the RD’s maximum definition is only supported by two photo editing apps at present – iPhoto and Aperture. If you are a Photoshop or Lightroom maven, then until Adobe updates their apps you will not get the RD’s best definition. Adobe has said PS will take several months to adapt, with no news on LR yet. RD type displays would have to reach broad acceptance for this to make economic sense for Adobe. As there’s no love lost between the two businesses, it looks like a low priority project. If you use Aperture fine. I have found Aperture to impose extreme demands on hardware and abandoned it long ago for the speedy and far more logically designed Lightroom which pokes along just fine even on my slow, 2010 MacBook Air.

The RD MBP gets very costly if you max it out and it’s the only MBP which permits the use of 16gB of RAM. The regular display version only goes to 8gB. If you frequently round-trip from LR to PS and keep multiple PS files opened, you will notice the difference. Further, as the memory and SSD are soldered in, there is no possibility for the user to upgrade, and Apple will rip you off for $200 to go from 8 to 16gB, when comparably priced RAM sells for $50 in the aftermarket. That’s the same 300% premium as in the 4->8gB MBA upgrade. The good news is that RAM is speedy 1600mHz.

While the previous MacBook Pro permitted installation of a second disk drive – HDD or SSD – if the optical drive was removed, the new one offers no such option. The chassis has been slimmed down with the removal of the DVD player so the space for a second drive is no longer available. You will need to use an external drive.

How much? The 16gB RAM model with 768gB of SSD storage will run you $3,750. That’s a huge sum for an elegant portable which screams ‘steal me’. It comes in one size, 15″.

The regular MBP continues with HDD and SSD options. Same limitation on user replacement of the RAM, though the HDD should be possible, if not especially easy. A 15″ with a 1tB HDD and 8gB of RAM costs $2,550. That still seems awfully expensive to me. It should be easy to hack a comparable Dell laptop to run OS X for much less with identical screen definition and operating speed.

Both MBPs offer integrated or discrete GPUs but, once again, the integrated HD4000 is now so good that the separate GPU is really only required for video editing, so if you are a stills-only photographer you are paying for something you do not need. It is not an option.

All MBPs and MBAs boast Thunderbolt connectivity. Judging by the very slow takeup of this technology by peripeherals manufacturers this technology is a bust and the high price of the peripherals – displays and disk drives – will accelerate its demise. Not a selling feature as there’s very little out there using it. Be prepared to buy an adapter for your external display.

Turbo boost on all the MBPs takes stock speeds of 2.5/2.9gHz up to 3.1/3.6, which can be really worthwhile when connected to the mains. Battery life on regular and RD displays is limited to 7 hours, and Apple appears to be building a smaller battery into the regular display version so as not to cannibalize the RD one. The RD is much more power-hungry.

I tried the MBP with the RD at the local Apple Store and was underwhelmed. (The software was incomplete and I could only try the machine on maximum definition – the definition selector was missing). It’s less of an obvious jump in definition than going from iPad1 to iPad3. Mercifully, Apple doubles font sizes to resemble the size of those on a regular screen or else nothing would be readable. The glossy screen remains sub-optimal (the one I tried in the Apple Store had the sunny street behind me and had to be relocated to be useable) and at this time there’s no indication of a matte option. Another blow for photographers. But it’s the only way of getting 16gB of RAM so if this is to be your only machine, the premium may make sense if you are a heavy LR + PS user.

Mac Pro:

The purported update to this Xeon CPU workhorse is an exercise in cynicism. The machine may have a very capable multi-threading CPU but the rest continues to underwhelm. Maximum memory speed is 1333mHz, or 20% slower than the MBP, and drive connectivity is still SATA2, meaning 3gb/s compared to SATA3 and 6gb/s in the MBP and MBA. For movie makers moving large data files that’s awful. What’s worse is that later Xeon CPUs and disk drive chips supporting these technologies are available, yet Apple chose not to use the newer Xeon. It rather looks like the Mac Pro is finished and at the price asked any half competent geek should be building an Ivy Bridge Hackintosh.

Apple’s CEO has promised an improved MP 18 months hence, by which time every current MP will be a dinosaur. I don’t know that I believe him. Face it, the money for Apple is in iOS.

Conclusion:

The MacBook Airs represent excellent value and performance for the money coupled with light weight. Speeds are now adequate to use the latest MBA at home to drive a large external monitor for heavy photo processing. Memory is limited to 8gB which is a shame.

Apple is getting ahead of itself and building premium priced machines in the MacBook Pro which are answering questions – especially with the Retina Display – with technology no one is asking for and few can afford. Simply stated, it’s more definition than you need or can use. Serious photography users will use a larger external display with a matte screen and one whose gamut is far wider than the MBP’s, further making the Retina Display option pointless. Sadly, this costly display option is the only way to get 16gB of memory.

I would expect the MBA to materially cannibalize sales of the costlier MBP. The cost of upgrade options for both – none are user installable – represents an unwelcome return to Apple’s days of predatory pricing.

The Mac Pro is a waste of money using three-year old CPU, RAM and disk drive technologies. Newer high-end PCs provide a better alternative for those into heavy movie processing. If you are a Final Cut Pro user, a high end Hackintosh is better in every regard. It is, after all, nothing but a PC running OS X, meaning cheap and reliable hardware and software. And the Hack is 67% cheaper than the premium priced and dated MacPro. By comparison, repair costs, if any, are trivial and the user gets bog reliable operation and overnight parts availability at a fraction of the MP’s cost.

Ivy Bridge in the Hackintosh

Hackintosh

A modest improvement.

Readers will recall that my desktop Hackintosh was upgraded from a Core2Quad CPU to a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K, with CPU performance gains of the order of 25% and doubled RAM speed, late last year. This required a new motherboard and memory in addition to the CPU, but was a painless experience, substantially ‘future-proofing’ the machine as rates of change in CPUs and RAM have pretty much stalled.

Intel released a modest upgrade to the Sandy Bridge CPU, named Ivy Bridge, last month, and reading the performance data at Anandtech here is my advice to readers contemplating the construction of a new Hackintosh or an ugrade to an older machine.

Just a reminder that the goals of this bulky, desktop machine are simple. 90% of the highest performance available (the MacPro) at 30% of the price, with easy upgrades possible using inexpensive parts from the local computer store. In the 8 months since my Hackintosh was upgraded by FU Steve to Sandy Bridge it has been on 7/24 and has not locked up once. It has been restarted a couple of times when OS X Lion upgrades required that. Otherwise it runs all the time and is used hard all day. Thermal properties are outstanding. Except when compressing a large movie file when the CPU temperature rises to 135F, the prevailing temperature, regardless of load, is 108-115F compared with a safe operating limit of 170F. My i5 CPU is overclocked 25% to 4.0 gHz.

Should you build an Ivy Bridge machine?

The answer depends on what you are using now and what your needs are. If you use Photoshop with many files open and simultaneously run Lightroom and maybe a few other applications, a fast machine with a lot of RAM makes sense. Whether it makes sense for you is largely a function of the value of your time. If you like to smell the daisies and plonk along, it probably makes little sense. If, on the other hand, you regard all processing time as time wasted, then it’s worth considering an upgrade.

Cost: The i5 ‘K’ version is the best bet unless you do a lot of video processing, in which case the extra $100 for the i7 is money well spent. ‘K’ designates that the CPU can be overclocked with a few key strokes. Free speed. The i5 is easily and safely overclocked to equal the stills processing capability of the i7. Ivy Bridge 3570K – $240. Sandy Bridge 2500K – $215. No brainer. Use Ivy Bridge. The overall cost of a similarly spec’d Ivy Bridge Hackintosh will be similar to that of one using Sandy Bridge. FU Steve strongly recommends Gigabyte mobos as these are the easiest to hack with no issues. The many variations largely address the number of expansion sockets and rear panel connectors available.

Fit: These use identical LGA1155 sockets, but Sandy Bridge motherboards will need a BIOS update, so make sure you can do that if you are using a Sandy Bridge motherboard. If you are migrating from an LGA775 motherboard (Core2Duo and Core2Quad) simply buy a current Ivy Bridge motherboard.

GPU and RAM: For the first time it’s safe to say that even demanding users can go with the integrated GPU included with the Ivy Bridge CPU. The HD4000 GPU is now a very capable graphics processor, and Anand Tech’s specs confirm it will easily handle the needs of PS and LR. You save $60-200 on a separate GPU card, and can use a smaller motherboard and box. The HD4000 integrated GPU will need some RAM to do video processing, so make sure to max out RAM, which is very inexpensive in 1600MHz spec. Also, use a proper aftermarket cooler – FU Steve recommends the Coolermaster 212 at $26 – as heat kills, and Intel’s stock fan sucks. The 212 needs a big box to accommodate it.

However, if you are using more than one monitor and prefer those with very high pixel counts, then a separate GPU is recommended. For example, users of 27″ monitors with 2560 x 1440 pixel counts would be better off with a separate GPU. Spending more than $120 on a discrete GPU only makes sense if you are a gamer. FU Steve is a big fan of EVGA Nvidia GPU cards as no additional hacking is required for most of these.

Power needs: Irrelevant for a desktop. The most significant advantage of Ivy Bridge over Sandy Bridge is lower power consumption, of primary interest to laptop users. Ivy Bridge uses less power. Even if your box includes 2 SSDs, 2HDDs, 16gB or RAM and a separate GPU card, as does mine, a decent quality 500 watt power supply will easily cope. FU Steve likes Thermaltake power supplies because they are conservatively specified and reliable.

WiFi: The 802-11n protocol will be replaced by 802-11ac over the next few quarters, offering higher speed and better resistance to interference. It is not available on any aftermarket PCIe card or, for that matter, on any Mac, so it’s a question of ‘wait and see’ for now. The right way to enable 802-11n wi-fi in a Hackintosh with full AirDrop capability is described here. This provides full support for the 5gHz and 2.4gHz spectra. FU Steve built all of my three Hacks with these and they work perfectly, being recognized as native Airport cards by OS Lion.

Everything else: Check the Hackintosh article linked at the beginning of this piece. Everything else works unchanged. 16gB of RAM costs little more than 8gB, 1600Mhz RAM is barely costlier than 1333Mhz for a 20% speed boost, and just about every Ivy Bridge motherboard now supports USB3 and SATA3. SATA3, used with the latest HDDs and SSDs, doubles the rate at which data is read from or saved to disk, and will be especially noticeable for those photographers who splashed out on a Nikon D800/E only to find that they now have to process 75mB files!

Hacking tools: I’m no hacker, but my builder FU Steve (Going rate? One six-pack of imported beer per Hackintosh) says that Tonymac’s tools are fully up to date for both Ivy Bridge and HD4000 use with OS Lion.

iMac?: On paper the specs of the iMac look price competitive. If you want a machine with minimal ability to upgrade, sporting a display which cannot be properly calibrated for photographic use, a long turnaround time for repairs, impossible to dismantle for all but experts with special tools and one guaranteed to overheat in heavy, professional use, the iMac is the machine for you. And it looks nice too, as you contemplate your reflection in its high gloss screen. The Hackintosh is a Mack Truck, the iMac is a daily commuter with Cadillac glitz. For like specs, the iMac will cost you twice as much as the Hackintosh and there’s no alternative to the truly ghastly glossy display.

The proper comparison for the Hackintosh is the MacPro which gives you 10% more performance for three times the price and dictates the use of costly OEM upgrade and repair parts. But even the latest (6/2012) MacPro will not run 1600mHz Ram has no USB3 and will not support SATA3 6gb/s disk drives. Very disappointing for the money asked.

Build sheet: You have to add the wifi card/adapter ($40) and your display(s) of choice to this list which makes a 2 SSD, 2 HDD, 16gB Ivy Bridge machine for $1,300, with state of the art performance for any photographer, using the integrated GPU in the i5 CPU – all disk drives are fast 6gb/s SATA 3:

Ivy Bridge Hackintosh components.

Add a couple of Logitech speakers for $25 if you need sound.

A 1tB HDD will store 13,000 75mB Nikon D800/E files or 80,000 D700 files (you really need a D800?). A 2tB HDD costs $30 more, doubling capacity. SSDs are used for Mac OS and application files; picture files go on the HDDs. Disks are paired for full redundancy. The costliest part, the CPU, is also the most reliable.

FU Steve recommends Dell Ultrasharp monitors. Their 21.5″ 1920×1200 runs some $260 and comes with a matte surface and a three year warranty. It is easily profiled using a colorimeter like the EyeOne and has excellent build quality.

Updating a Sandy Bridge motherboard:

If you use a Sandy Bridge motherboard from Gigabyte, the maker provides a free BIOS update which will enable that board to use the later Ivy Bridge CPU. That’s for the Z68 (F12). H67 (F7) and P67 (F7) boards can also be updated, but no update has been released for the Q67; search for the appropriate page on the Gigabyte site. You may need a PC un-shrink the downloaded BIOS update, extracting the installable file. Read on.

  • Download the BIOS update; it downloads as a DOS .exe file so you will need to use Windows to run the file which uncompresses it. Alternatively, if you refuse to use Windows as I do, download FileJuicer and it will extract what you need from the .exe file.
  • Place the BIOS file on a flash drive (MS-DOS formatted in Apple’s Disk Utility).
  • Enter BIOS at startup.
  • First save your old BIOS to the flash drive, just in case, using the BIOS F8 (‘Q-flash’) function.
  • Make a picture of all the old BIOS screens as you will have to reinput the changes after the BIOS update.
  • Set your motherboard to ‘Optimized Defaults’.
  • Using F8 again, load the new BIOS from the flash drive (it’s some 4mB in size) while still running your Sandy Bridge CPU.
  • Now reload your preferred settings (Turbo, etc.) once done, using the pictures you took earlier.
  • Turn the Hack off, restart, test with Sandy Bridge.
  • Swap the Sandy Bridge for an Ivy Bridge – they use identical LGA1155 sockets – and restart.

The difference between an upgraded Z68 or similar Gigabyte Sandy Bridge Board and the later Z77 Ivy Bridge version is that the Z77 will support PCIe3, whereas the updated Z68 will go to PCIe2 only. New cards coming to market, probably Thunderbolt and others, may well be PCIe3 only. But the BIOS update on a Z68 board will allow use of an Ivy Bridge in every other respect.

I updated the BIOS in my Z68 UD3H from F9 (as shipped) to F12, and I continue to run a Sandy Bridge i5 CPU on it with no performance changes.

The Liberty Café

Dining

A fine dining spot in Bernal Heights.

On Cortland Street in Bernal Heights. Click the picture for details. 24mm.

The staff was uncertain as to the age of the building, but my guess is that it probably dates from the 1930s. The Café has been here since 1979. The interior is severity redefined, no glitz, and there are maybe a dozen small tables. None of that detracts from the food which is excellent.

While I had to give the waiter a bit of a prod to get on with it, that would not stop me returning. The cooking is excellent.

Lunch. iPhone 4S. Blur no charge.

The Atlantic shrimp, suffused with iodine (Pacific shrimp have none) were served over a bed of fettucine in a garlicky oil sauce, and the portion size was just right. The Peroni beer was actually on tap, a rarity, and the whole thing ran $27 with tip. The place also has a long-time bakery whose selections you can see by clicking the first image.

A severe interior. 24mm.