At the initial Ivy Bridge launch in Q2 2012, Intel released both the Intel Core i5-3470 and Core i5-3450. The latter model suffered a 100MHz clock speed disadvantage over the Core i5-3470. Pricing was set very interestingly, both chips would retail in the $190 to $200 range. Personally, I would chose the Intel Core i5-3470 every time. given the...
Many of this site's readers work in the field of IT and come here looking to build home labs. Highly parallel computing is something that has become more prevalent as each quarter passes, but there is still a relatively high barrier to entry. Parallella is a Kickstarter project that is looking to raise a not-so-insignificant amount of $750,000 with...
Today we follow-up on the Synology DS1812+ unboxing and exterior look with a view of the 8-bay NAS unit's internals. One major question we like to answer is what is inside these pre-built units. Before we get into this, I would highly discourage you to do the same. Think of this as we are disassembling the Synology DS1812+ so you...
Patrick took a first look at the LSI SAS 9207-8e host bus adapter recently. Now it’s time to see if the new card can deliver the performance we expect. In this article, we test throughput and IOPS performance in an attempt to answer the age old question: How much faster is this little guy compared to its predecessors? It’s...
The Icy Dock MB994IPO-3SB is a really cool product. Here's the basic idea - take a standard 5.25" optical drive bay and make it more useful. Useful in the sense that it allows one to still use the 5.25" space for an optical drive, but also allows one to add two 2.5" SAS drives or SSDs in the same space....
Today we are looking at the Intel Core i3-3240. With Hyper-Threading, the Intel Core i3-3240 is a dual core four thread CPU. Cache is 3MB, much lower than quad core parts. At 3.4GHz is is quick, but a power user really wants to think Intel Core i5-3450 or better. Here's why, Turbo Boost which increases clock speed, is not supported, even though...
Recently Synology sent their DS1812+ unit for a thorough review. We will be breaking this piece into several parts. This one will cover the initial unboxing as well as the exterior of the unit. Unless you open up the case, this review will cover what you will see as a user of the Synology DS1812+. Overall, I have been...
Today we are going to look at how to make a UEFI bootable USB drive for Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012. Now that I've finally joined the UEFI world with the ASUS P8z77 WS motherboard, I've been trying to get UEFI to actually work. UEFI is supposed to be the replacement for the venerable BIOS that has been...
This small business server buyer's guide is an evolution of the mid-range server buyer's guide. For many web applications, moving physical small business servers to the cloud may make sense. At the same time, there are tasks that are simply better served locally. One great example is restoring a computer with 200GB+ of data during working hours from a...
After months of waiting, September saw the release of the Intel Core i3-3220 and other Ivy Bridge based Core i3 and Pentium CPUs. This is significant in the marketplace because Intel sells an absolute ton of these CPUs both in the consumer desktop space, but also with low-end servers. Frankly, these days a Core i3-3220 with its onboard Intel...