[Nottingham] Buying advice sought

[Martin]

On 06/02/13 12:58, Jason Irwin wrote:
> On 06/02/13 12:36, Matthew Sackman wrote:
>> If you do go down the self build route, I'd recommend paying attention
>> to http://silentpcreview.com/. IME, finding a heat-friendly-enough GPU
>> is often the biggest issue.
> Liquid cooling - although this will probably bump the price up a bit.

That's very good for quiet operation but care is needed for quietening
CPUs to ensure the motherboard bits still get cooled. There's a lot of
cooling utilised from the CPU heatsink air exhaust on fan-cooled CPU
systems...

For quiet GPUs, there's various *passively* cooled graphics cards that
are more than powerful enough for everyday use.


> Could audio get pushed through a GPU for processing?  Make use of all
> that parallel grunt?

There's GPU super-fast FFT processing if you want to go really weird
with your sound... :-)

Various encoders/transcoders are already multithreaded... Are there any
to take advantage of CUDA or OpenCL processing on GPUs? Worthwhile or
are the CPU versions IO limited already?

My bias is to go nVidia despite them giving 'the finger' to God Torvalds
for their non-support for code. However so far, they have a good lead in
enabling CUDA (proprietary) and OpenCL (multi-vendor supported) parallel
processing on their GPUs.


> low-quality parts (e.g capacitors) etc.  Their monitors are pretty
> decent for some reason.

Yep... I'd say that they are well known for PSU blow-outs... I wonder if
their good monitors are just to make them 'look good'? :-(

(In Marketing, appearance is everything...)

More seriously, a good LED widescreen full HD resolution or greater HDMI
monitor is a must.



See ya later,

Cheers,
Martin


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