New Toys & Gadgets 新玩具

[chin]

I think the machine is a server grade and is for running server, i.e. the serial port should be a connection to a dumb term.

Maybe you are right.

Anyway I bought a powerful graphic card (Nvidia GTX295) that needs a 6-pin PCIe & 8-pin PCIe2 power supply. Then we found out that for all its 840W power supply, the HP only provide the 6-pin type connections. So I ended up swapping the lower grade GTX275 from my home to use with the HP. 

[chin]

No picture...

But I just got a Dell U3011 30" display. The main reason to buy is the 2560x1600 resolution. I have been using an Apple monitor of the same size and resolution with my Mac Pro. Now one of the PCs is hooked up to this new Delll monitor.

When I install the monitor, it couldn't display at the native 2560x1600 properly, with some missing or messed up pixels, etc... But once I switched to the DVI cable that came with the monitor, then everything worked beautifully. So the DVI cable I had before was too shitty!!!

[kido]

View of the mother board:

- on top 12 triple channel memory slots, only used 6 with 12G RAM.
- in the middle 2 Xeon quad-core CPUs, running at 2.66GHz each core.
- the Radeon 4890 turned out does not work well with Win 7, will change to a Nvidia GTX295.

Recently I needed to buy a new desktop, so I do some little research of CPU performance. And found that the performance of CPU is much much better than I thought.   And not until now I check out the speed of your little 2 years old bastard : assuming it's CPU is  2 X Intel® Xeon® processor E5640 2.66 GHz, 12MB cache 1066 MHz memory, 4-Core.

I want to compare to i7-2600K CPU which is the top gaming computer in Golden Center and is readily available now.

CPU	CPU benchmark
2 X Intel® Xeon® processor E5640 2.66 GHz	5204 x 2 =10408
Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.40GHz	10019

And it looks like the 2 x Xeon is still leaving the majority of CPUs in dust.  

[chin]

Well, at the time of the purchase, I can see the performance of some of my very large spreadsheet improved very substantially. Some of the computations from ~1 min to a few seconds. I don't know it's the number of cores or Xeon.

[chin]

After living right next to a seaside bike trail for so many years, I finally buy myself a bicycle.

It was eye opening for me in the bike shop. Many bikes there cost >HK$10,000 with the highest I saw was about $40k. The expensive ones look nice and are very light. I can lift one up easily with 2 or 3 fingers.

Before today, I did not even know bicycles have suspensions, or brake disc like a car. My new $3000 bike has both.

I took it out for a good 1-hour cardiovascular exercise. Now I can invite Grease Chan for a ride along.  

[hangchoi]

Good.

Sooner or later, there will have ABS, twin cam, etc for a bike..... 

[oo8]

Good.

Sooner or later, there will have ABS, twin cam, etc for a bike..... 

I'm not sure about the twin cams, but there are ABS for bicycles . . . . .   

http://www.budbrake.com/index.html

[chin]

After living right next to a seaside bike trail for so many years, I finally buy myself a bicycle.

It was eye opening for me in the bike shop. Many bikes there cost >HK$10,000 with the highest I saw was about $40k. The expensive ones look nice and are very light. I can lift one up easily with 2 or 3 fingers.

Before today, I did not even know bicycles have suspensions, or brake disc like a car. My new $3000 bike has both.

I took it out for a good 1-hour cardiovascular exercise. Now I can invite Grease Chan for a ride along.  

Just to report back that after 6 months of biking, about 3 times a week, 45 min to 90 min each time, I lost ~15lb and 10cm in the middle section. 

[chin]

New toys. For the F3 racing in Macau next week.

Sony a99 body
Sony 70-200mm/F2.8
1.4x Teleconverter (not shown)

[hangchoi]

  Nice