Had the wife move this cruncher to the table so I could work on it. Replaced the thermal paste to see if I can get the temps under control. Got it back down some but still think it's not where it should be. Once all my wu's are completed, going to reinstall ubuntu but drop back to 10.4. Seems since I upgraded to 10.10, issues started to arise.

I was given as a present two tickets to see Red Green last night at College of St. Catherine's O'Shaughnessy Auditorium. I am not much for going out to these kinds of things, but it was a present and a fund raiser for public television. So I went with my wife. Some of his material I had heard before from seeing his show, but some of it was new. All of it was funny. He has a good delivery and did two hours of comedy with only one instance of the word h*** in the whole two hours. Most of it was funny because his observations have so much truth in them. It turned out to be a pretty good show. From the way the audience laughed I think most everybody enjoyed themselves.

One of his observations was there are 4 ways to get a man to eat some foods. Put salt on it, put sugar on it, put barbecue sauce on it or say that it will be thrown out tomorrow . My wife just looked at me when he said that because I am in the fourth category because I don't want to waste anything.

It is good to get out and have a good laugh.

Cheers

Well, my experience so far with the netbook with the AMD Fusion E-350 chip makes me think that AMD's Bulldozer machines are very much worth watching for.

This little guy draws 22 watts at the wall when both CPU cores and the GPU are going full tilt. The E-350 chip is supposed to be the "Atom killer." So I will compare it to my D525/Ion 2 home theater machine, which draws 35 watts at the wall when going full tilt. Both machines have 64-bit CPUs and 64-bit OS. The E-350 is a 1.6 GHz CPU, the D525 Atom 1.8 GHz. The E-350 is comparable or slightly faster running 32-bit CPU jobs. It is nearly twice as fast as the Atom when running 64-bit jobs! And it's twice as fast running Collatz on the AMD GPU than on the ION 2.

The Atom can hyperthread and the E-350 can't. Running 32-bit jobs, the Atom with HT on would get more done per hour than the E-350. But with 64-bit jobs, the E-350 does more computing in an hour even when the Atom is running 4 jobs to its 2.

My E-350 netbook came with Windows. I've also run it off flashdrives under Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 11.04 beta 1. In 11.04, there's already an open-source driver for the Fusion chip, although I would still have to install a proprietary Catalyst driver to do GPU computing in Linux.

AMD is supposed to be coming out with several mainstream Bulldozer desktop chips in June, including an 8-core 95-watt TDP version. I don't know what the clock speeds will be. Then in late fall, they're supposed to introduce their higher-performance Bulldozer chips. I am very curious to see how all these will stack up against Sandy Bridge.

I built my AMD Phenom II X4 cruncher this Jan. so I'd have one halfway decent crunching machine while waiting and watching to see how the Intel/AMD scene unfolds over the rest of this year. I'm very happy with the Phenom in terms of performance for both price and electricity consumption. But I'm looking froward to what will be available over the next few months!

Hopefully the talk is not all hype. Based on the feedback I have seen for the SB chips, the bar is set pretty high. I think we are all waiting to see if Bulldozer can compete effectively. Good competition pushes both companies.

Cheers

Sounds like your handling it. Bravo. It's sad when those who do have this and don't get help before it's to late. How much for the blazer? Can you list the specs? Much rust or other issues?