Compaq C762NR Review Ep. 3

Here comes another bench. This time it's 7-Zip and comparisons are based on Xbitlabs.

This time the T2370 pulls ahead of the E2140. I think it's safe to say both are evenly matched. The E2140 pulls ahead sometimes because of its higher FSB while the T2370 wins a few where clock speed matters.

My Recommended Builds - March 2009

One of my friends is buying a new PC for gaming and video editing and asked what I would buy. Here's my recommendation.

Intel Q8200 Php7,600.00
MSI P43 Neo-F Php3,900.00
Powercolor 4830 Php5,300.00
Western Digital Caviar Green 640gb Php3,300.00
Kingston 2gb Php1,200.00
Liteon DVD writer Php1,500.00
Corsair 400CX PSU Php2,600.00
Antec 300 case Php3,200.00
Total Php28,600.00

Also an officemate asked me for a budget gaming build. Here's what I'm recommending. I have an AMD CPU there because the guy is obtuse and would not have an Intel CPU not for all the sensible reasons in the world. The only reason one should have an AMD CPU is if they must have integrated graphics only.

Athlon X2 5000+ Php2,900.00
Asus M2N-MX/SE Plus or Asus M2N-VM/DVI or MSI K9N6PGM2-V Php2,500.00
Powercolor 4830 Php5,300.00
Western Digital 160gb Php1,800.00
Kingston 2gb Php1,200.00
Liteon DVDwriter Php1,500.00
Generic case w/ PSU Php1,500.00
Total Php16,700.00

*The recommendations are mostly ripped off from TechReport. Prices are from PCHub.

Compaq C762NR Review Ep. 2

So my benchmarks would be more useful, I will be mirroring the results from various hardware review sites. First up is Cinebench R10. My results (in red) can be compared with Anandtech bench beta here.

Compaq C762NR Review Ep. 1

Here is the first of a series of benchmarks on my laptop which is powered by an Intel T2370. FYI I've upgraded the ram to 2gb from the factory bundled 1gb. The first benchmark is LAME 3.98.2. I pre-ripped Jeff Buckley's album Grace to a single wav file before using LAME to encode. The file was encoded in 2.34 seconds at a speed of 20.122x. Here are the screenshots for reference.

Francis M - Freeman

Here's a copy of the late great Francis Magalona's album Freeman. If we ever have to replace Lupang Hinirang as the national anthem, Three Stars and a Sun would get my vote.

Up Dharma Down - Bipolar Album Review

I suck at describing music that I love. This album is exactly that--music that I love. And love is a word I don't throw around easily.

So instead of failing miserably to describe how this album sounds, I'll share what I think of it. Very few sophomore albums can say that they are better than their critically acclaimed and commercially successful predecessors. This is one such album. But this one doesn't edge out like Pinkerton did against The Blue Album. It demolishes Fragmented like it was an amateur effort. And Fragmented was no amateur effort. It WAS the best Filipino musical achievement of this millennium.

Bipolar is modern. It is brave. It is emotional yet brilliant. Shut yourself in a room and turn the volume up.

New iPod classic, Same Old Shit

This will be my last iPod. I've had it with Apple's quality control or more appropriately Apple's LACK of quality control.

Last year's iPod classic at launch was slow as a rock. This was fixed in a few months but was replaced with a new problem. Its hard drive would not turn off and would drain its battery even when it was off.

Now the problem is random skipping. Several people have reported the same problem on the Apple support forums in this thread.