Sunday, February 13, 2011

Deciding to Stick with Sandy Bridge

One of the hardest decisions to make is to stick with something after it has been recalled by the manufacturer. Do I still want to purchase a Toyota automobile after the throttle sticking during acceleration last fall? What about Chevy trucks after their side saddle gas tanks were deemed a fire hazard. Or even continue to use my Ford panther daily driver even though it also is considered a fire hazard in a certain type of collision. And such was the decision that I made to keep my Sandy Bridge based parts despite having the recall from Intel for a bad SATA II (3.0Gb/s) controller. It took many hours of work and trouble to determine that the machine I built would be worth effort and I would not be severely impacted by the choice.

I need to reference the most comprehensive article on the web as to the nature of the Sandy Bridge issue and what it means for the people that own this product. Special thanks needs to go out to Ryan Shrout for compiling the most informative source on the web as the news was breaking on January 31st. http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=9694 Other articles of note are also available on PC Perspective regarding the situation with the Chipsets and what is happening throughout the tech world to either solve the problem permanently or work around bug to keep the parts in the stream without customer impact.

So my new Sandy Bridge Beast has been built and I have to say that I have learned a few lessons along the way about everything from setting the bios to the effectiveness of CPU coolers when testing systems for reliability. In the end, it is an extremely fast PC that dramatically speeds up my photography workflow and I have high hopes that the 8 threads of overclocked calculating goodness will make quick work of pivot tables that are slicing and dicing a million lines of raw data for statistical research. When not running full bore, the system does seem to be on the radical side of overkill to type a blog post or read my Facebook feed. But when comparing this to other items that I own, do I not need 300 Ft/Lb lightly modified torque monster under the hood of my daily driver when I rarely run Milo at any level to take advantage of all those ponies and torques? Do I need a 21.1 megapixel full frame camera when my 12 megapixel 5D is just as capable of taking a stunning photograph? The resounding answer to all of these questions is a resounding "Yes!"