So much for P67/H67 urges to impulse buy

I had been waiting a while for Sandy Bridge to come out for several months.  My current PC is a 4 year old Core 2 Duo and runs pretty well with the tweaks I’ve made over the years, despite the seemingly broken output stage of the integrated sound card.  Seems like ASUS screwed something up there. 


I’ve been looking at Sandy Bridge and set my sights on the i5-2500k,  but could never find a motherboard that gave me exactly what I wanted. I wanted something that would serve me well in my desktop for 2-3 years and then work well as a HTPC. I wanted something in a Micro ATX form factor so that it could be passed down to my HTPC in a few years. I don’t have any burning desire for SLI graphics or anything needing more then the expansion slots provided on most mATX boards anyways.  I also wanted something with the a good EFI BIOS, and ASUS seems to be the only ones really doing that right. As for networking, I would really like the Intel Gigabit Ethernet PHY rather then the Realtek stuff.  Then add in the standard things that are hard not to get such as USB 3.0 and 4-6 SATA ports.  Oh, and it would be nice if when this board was demoted to HTPC duties it had embedded graphics, but that’s impossible, for now because I’d have to get a H67 and I wanted a P67 due to overclocking capabilities.


Then last week happened and Intel announced their $700 million USD recall.  Pretty big oops on a chipset that wasn’t even innovative or pushing any real new features.  Now, I’m stuck waiting for the Z68 chip set at minimum, which will promise to deliver on the embedded graphics and overclocking abilities, which is a win for the desktop use and a win for the HTPC use as well.  Hopefully someone will throw on 6 SATA ports and Intel PHY in a mATX form factor and I’m sold.  Most likely the only person who will do this will be Intel, and that’s fine, but I hope they spice up their BIOS a bit for Z68.


I guess it all boils down to a board with this:

1. The Z68 chipset
2. Micro ATX form factor
3. Intel Gigabit LAN PHY
4. Decent EFI BIOS
5. USB 3.0 and 6 SATA ports

And so I wait...  I’m begging someone to make something that fills my needs and takes my money.

Major Linux Speed Up

A few years ago I maxed out the RAM on my Intel Core 2 Duo system at 8GB.  RAM was super cheap for the time and why not?  Reality is that most of that RAM doesn't get used for much unless I'm running several virtual machines with large RAM allocations.

However, this past weekend I saw a post about using a RAM disk to speed-up your web browser.  Okay, cool idea, I read their post and it seemed over complicated.  Instead I figured I could do better, so It logged out of my Gnome desktop and logged in to a virtual terminal and added the following my /etc/fstab:

tmpfs      /home/user/.cache  tmpfs    size=1G     0   0

Followed  by mount /home/user/.cache and the so far the speed-up has been huge.  I've been itching to replace my 4 year old Core 2 Duo with a new Sandy Bridge setup, but this may let me hold out for a while longer at least until the Intel Z68 chipset comes out or even as long as the Intel Ivy Bridge debut.

What that simple line does is creates a 1GB tmpfs, aka RAM file system, for everything in the cache folder. Consequently Chromium keeps it's cache there as does Compiz.  I look forward to more programs just using the directory and speeding up everything a little bit.

Simple task, huge difference.