Which will also spread around the writes. If you're writing a 4TB video across 10 disks, that's only 410GB to each, so you only get that much endurance used up.

Good luck with that.

The Intel 335 has a sequential write speed of about 350MB/s (the rest are around the same speed). Writing 700TB at that speed would take 24 days and change, with no breaks to do things like read any of that data.

This sounds like the action of a Congressman trying to discredit the NSA. The NSA obviously is not going to respond to this - if they did, they'd be inundated with requests from every small-town prosecutor wanting some more evidence (ironically, some might even get warrants for it). That would be worse than what will happen instead, which is that an anti-NSA legislator gets a talking point about how the NSA isn't using its data and isn't cooperating with the rest of the government (namely Congress).

Yes, it's just a political point being scored. But it's a point hopefully in our favor - or at the very least, one against our common enemy.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is the best way to get the NSA shut down. The general public has no control over it; trying to get them angry about it is pointless. The only way the general public could shut it down is by a revolution, and we're too well-fed and content to do that. But Congress could shut it down, so let's find every way to get Congressmen upset about the NSA. I wonder what a FOIA request for some congressional metadata would do...

You're arguing with the antecedent. I'm saying "if you care about X, the Titan is good", and you're accusing me of cherry-picking because the Titan is bad at Y and Z, even though I specifically called it out as not being good for anything except X in a performance-per-penny measure.

I am saying that one of the principal reasons to buy a Titan is if you have a heavy double-precision compute load. I then provided a benchmark showing that a Titan beats the 295X2 in such a load. It would be cherry-picking if I picked the one double-precision benchmark that showed the Titan in a good light, but a single-precision benchmark does not invalidate that.

If you are accusing me of cherry-picking, please provide a benchmark that shows a 290X beating a Titan in a double-precision workload. AFAIK the only double-precision benchmark Anandtech uses is the F@H benchmark I linked to originally.

I am not at all arguing that the results in the double-precision benchmark somehow invalidates the single-precision or integer results. If your workload isn't mostly double-precision, the Titan is not for you. But if your workload *is* mostly double-precision, the Titan is a viable card.

Don't worry, you can just download an e-goat. There's a good website for it, but they keep having to change the TLD for some reason and I can't keep track of which one it is.

Workstations, perhaps? There's a lot of scientific computing done using desktop-sized workstations, not supercomputers. And they're spending several grand on Xeon CPUs anyways, so a $3K GPU isn't that much more.

It's not cherry-picking if benchmarks like that are the primary reason to use a Titan. Particularly when I explicitly said so.

The Titan shouldn't be considered a top-end gaming card. It should be treated as a budget Tesla card - even at $3k, it's the cheapest card in Nvidia's lineup with full double-precision floating point performance (which no game uses, but is common for scientific computing, Tesla's market). And on tests using that, the single-gpu Titan and Titan Black outperform the 295X2 by a large amount. AT hasn't gotten to test a Titan Z yet, but you can tell it's going to wipe the floor with the 295X2.

Yes, Nvidia advertised the original Titan as a super-gaming card, and to be fair it was their top-performing gaming card for a while. But once the 780 Ti came out, that was over, and since everyone expects a 790 dual-GPU gaming card to be announced soon, buying any Titan for gaming is a fool's choice.

Nvidia seems to still be advertising it as a top-end gaming card, presumably trying to prove the old adage about fools and their money. It just comes off as a scam to me, but anyone willing to spend over a grand without doing some proper research probably deserves to be ripped off.

You forgot the USB port for keeping your phone charged.

When you've been getting your ass kicked for years, "not losing" can count as a major victory.

I think it's more "if you compile your game without Kinect, you will have access to that processing slice and Kinect won't". Whether the hardware is physically there or not is irrelevant to the reserved processor time.

I'd be keeping OS X on there - I would be switching from dual-boot OSX/W8 to OSX/Linux. I guess I could triple-boot, but that seems a bit excessive when I'd have a dedicated Windows machine as well.

I bought a 6870 as an upgrade to my Mac Pro, mainly because it was highly compatible with OS X (it only fails to show the grey apple screen during boot) and is far cheaper than officially-supported cards. It's also a good mid-tier card on Windows.

And according to this, the 6870 is also basically the best card for use under Linux using open-source drivers, so I guess it's just a very good card in general. When I do a new from-scratch build, I might put Linux on the old Mac so I can play around with Linux gaming more.

Also announced were an i5 and a Pentium-branded Devil's Canyon processors. All three have the same TIM upgrade and overclocking focus. The i5-4690K is similar to the i7-4690K, dropping hyperthreading, a bit of cache and some stock clock, but for $100 cheaper ($242 instead of $339, if reports are accurate).

The really interesting one is the Pentium G3258. Two cores, no hyperthreading, but with an unlocked multiplier, for $72. If you care more about single-threaded performance than multi-threaded, this might be a very cool thing. Buy one, and a good aftermarket cooler, and overclock it into the 4GHz range. If your load is mainly single-threaded, like far too many games are, that can give you the same performance but be much, much cheaper.

I have a laptop with both a Crucial M4 and a regular hard drive. It's been going strong for two years now (well, the display is dying but that's not really relevant). Going off history, I expect the hard drive to die first, but I admit that's a completely unscientific prediction.

You were right to be cautious, though - back in the early days of SSDs, there were many that were absolute crap (OCZ drives had horrible failure rates, and JMicron controllers were rubbish performance-wise). Intel was really the only one worth buying from. Nowadays there are plenty of good companies to buy from. Intel and Samsung are probably the best, but Crucial is up there in the lists.