|
Advertisement:
|
Leo, Thuban and Raptor |
Join the community - in the OCAU Forums!
|
WD VelociRaptor 600GB, AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB
In the newly dawned age of the SSD, the trusty old magnetic disk hard drives are easily neglected whilst searching for a high performance system drive. Western Digital’s VelociRaptor series had this corner of the market to itself until the SSD’s recent, accelerating dive towards affordability.
Not long ago the 300GB VelociRaptor was reviewed on OCAU against a Kingston SSDNow V+. Whilst the Raptor lost the outright performance battle, it fought back with a superior dollar-per-gigabyte ratio.
Western Digital’s new model of the VelociRaptor comes in 450GB and 600GB varieties, thanks to the increased platter density of 200GB (previously 150GB). The buffer between the controller and the drive has doubled from 16MB to 32MB. Seek times remain static at 3.6ms - practically crawling compared to SSD seeks that are measured in micro, not milliseconds. The interface has jumped to SATA 6Gb/s, though other reviews have shown this to be of negligible importance. WD also included a few reliability updates in this new VelociRaptor, including something called “NoTouch” which ensures the read head doesn’t touch the disk.
Generally this is the point in the review where a stream of sequential throughput benchmarks and synthetic tests are undertaken, often leaving readers none the wiser about how the drive actually performs. The tests performed were specifically chosen to give an accurate representation of what can be expected when you’re actually using the drive.
Windows 7 started up approximately 11% faster on the new drive. DiRT 2 showed similar time attrition.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. load times showed a crushing 45% advantage in favour of the new Raptor; whilst Crysis revealed a more moderate 21% reduction in waiting time.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
There’s more to this new release than slapping a couple of cores onto the Phenom II series.
Firstly, there’s Turbo Core, an obvious response to Intel’s Turbo Boost. Whereas Intel’s implementation shuts off power to inactive cores, AMD’s simpler solution locks them into their Cool’n’Quiet idle frequency (800MHz by default), cranks up the voltage to all cores, then boosts the turbo cores by a fixed margin (400MHz by default on the 1090T). Thus, a 3.2GHz hexa-core CPU can flip to a 3.6GHz tri-core CPU as user demand dictates.
Secondly, the 45nm process used to manufacture these CPU’s has been tweaked, with the addition of a low-k dielectric which helps curb idle power leakage. Without this, the addition of two cores would have forced dramatically lower clock speeds to fit the processor into an acceptable thermal range.
Cache-wise, there’s nothing new to report. Still 512kB L2 cache per core, still 6MB shared L3 cache. Note where the diagram says DDR2 it should probably say DDR2 / DDR3.
|
|
Advertisement:
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
Interested in advertising on OCAU? Contact us for info.
|
|