> On Oct 2, 2013, at 4:59 AM, Stan Hoeppner <s...@hardwarefreak.com> wrote
> 
> This is the limiting factor.  And this is why I implore people to buy
> the fastest dual core and forgo the quad, six, eight core models.  And
> in fact, for non gamer daily use, I recommend the single core AMD
> Sempron, because a dual core is wasted with Firefox, Thunderbird, Flash,
> Adobe Reader, etc.
> 
> I failed to make a convincing case before you purchased Catherine.  But
> at least you'll now be armed with this information when you make your
> next purchase.  Financially it's not a huge deal, maybe $50 more in this
> case, 10% of the system price, for the quad core.  But two cores will
> forever be wasted, and that $50 could have gone toward the discrete GPU
> you need.

I never suggested you were not correct about the CPU.  I observed the lack 
of utilization of multiple cores on my first dual-core machine in 2006. I got 
The Haswell for the speed, lower power consumption, and presumably less 
heat generation. And possible resale value later on.
> 
> 
> This was my mistake for not asking point blank early in the thread what
> res you were running instead of making assumptions based on your retired
> status.  If I had asked more questions up front we could have avoided
> the contention.  For that I apologize.

No apology needed. You did in fact peg my age correctly; I will be 61 next
month. And I too have known people who run less than the native resolution 
to make the fonts bigger. When I get to that point, though, I will simply 
increase 
the font size so I don't get jaggies and blurry letters. Right now my eyes need 
the sharpness of the image, not a size increase. 
> 
> You would be correct if the number you're looking at reflected
> application memory usage.  But it doesn't.  On any of the modern
> operating systems one must damn near be a computer scientist to see the
> actual memory usage.  The 5.22GB, this is on Debian, yes?  The system
> monitor?  This reports process and cache memory usage.  The buffer/cache
> will literally eat nearly all available memory all the time on Linux,
> then free some when an application process needs it.  I've never used
> OSX but it's probably similar in its desktop reporting tool.

This was in OS X. The memory use would be similar in Debian, I assume. About 
a quarter of the used memory was "inactive" which I assume was the cache. Still
too close for comfort for me, as WoW was not running, nor ventrilo, and WoW 
does background downloads of the almost-weekly patches while you play, so even 
more processes.
> 
> This will really throw you for a loop.  Open a shell window and execute
> 
> ~$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> 
> Wait a few seconds and see what happens to that 5.22GB number.  Then
> report back what you find.  You can do this while playing WOW as well.
> That number will drop like a rock and WOW will keep on going, because
> the memory you're freeing with that command is cache.  And again, Linux
> will eat nearly all RAM for cache if the system is up long enough.

It is the nature of *nix to gobble up memory, yes. It will use what is there 
whether it needs it or not. But my Debian box has not arrived yet, so I can't
run that command there. I could try it in terminal on my iMac, and it would 
probably work. 
> 
>> I do thank you for the advice pertaining to a 384 bit bus and a gig more
>> video ram than I was planning to get. That is advice that I will be
>> following.
> 
> You're welcome.  Keep in mind that at 2560x1440 the 7950/7970 may still
> not be fast enough for full detail in WOW with GPU settings on high.
> The extra GB of VRAM won't get utilized but you need the memory
> bandwidth of a 384bit bus.  Nobody sells, AFAICT, a 2GB model using
> these GPUs.
> 
> I can't tell you where the setting resides, or if you have to edit
> xorg.conf, but you will want to use double buffering, not triple
> buffering.  You'll also want to disable full screen antialiasing (FSAA)
> and anisotropic filtering, or set them to very low values such as 2x or
> 4x, or play with the settings until you strike the right balance.  They
> are variable from off to 16x.  These are driver settings for the GPU.
> They affect the image quality by smoothing the pixels of straight lines
> and the edges of objects in the scene, i.e. removing "jaggies", such as
> on the ears or dangling hair of characters, the tip of arrows sticking
> out of a quiver, etc.

Oddly enough, these are also WoW in-game settings. The Mac section of the
WoW forum has specific advice on how to set those for every model of Mac 
that can run the game. 
> 
> You may be able to tweak these on the MAC to get acceptable smoothness
> from your 6970 as well.  GPUs are infinitely tweakable to balance speed
> against image quality.

I usually have acceptable smoothness, but I might need to tweak my settings a 
bit more. I was getting lag and jerkiness in the newest raid. I strongly 
suspect it 
was my husband giving a piano lesson via Skype while I was in the raid, though.

Cg
> 


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