Are you upgrading to Haswell? Improved iGPU will be the killer feature.

Would you upgrade especially if you are already running a 2nd generation or 3rd generation Core i-series CPU? The leaked benchmark scores aren't that great. They maybe for early engineering samples but I don't think the final chip will be much faster than the chips used in the leaked results. Intel won't be making big last minute changes.

I'm running a 2nd generation Core i7 2600K CPU and it's overclocked to 4.5GHz. We don't know how high Haswell CPUs will clock. You would expect an increase in overclock potential because of process shrink but IvyBridge didn't work that way. So you won't know until the full reviews are out. But if these CPUs can hit 5GHz easily, the increase on IPC will carry the performance delta past 30% mark. That's a healthy increase in performance these days.

(Image courtesy of Anandtech) 

One more issue I have with the leaked specs is that the TDP has increased from IvyBridge (84W vs. 77W) contrary to the popular belief. Haswell was supposed to bring significant power savings to the table. Why has the TDP gone up by 7W? I wonder if most of that power is resident in the iGPU. The biggest performance improvements in Haswell will come from the iGPU which doesn't mean much to most enthusiasts. The only thing you might want to do with the iGPU is video transcoding using Intel's QuickSync technology. Even then, the options are pretty limited. The application support for QuickSync sucks at best.

BUT...but...it looks like the drought is going away. You know what Handbrake is, right? Anandtech just reported that Handbrake is about to get QuickSync support. That would be awesome!!! That would be the reason to upgrade to Haswell, especially I'm only using a 2nd generation Core i-series CPU.

(Image courtesy of  wccftech.com)

Samsung 840 series 250GB SSD–after couple of months

So I’ve been happily using my new SSD without any hiccups….wait! There was one hiccup where the Windows Experience Index score dropped from 8.1 to 7.9. That sucked, because that was what I was getting with my old Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD too. I was expecting this SSD to perform faster throughout the entire lifespan. Dropping to the same grounds obviously made me feel very sad.

But luckily, I was able to get back the lost performance by running the Performance Optimization function of Samsung Magician software. I don’t know exactly what it does, but it should not be something extensive because whatever it did finished within few seconds.

According to the health monitor, I have written 0.8TB of data to this drive. That’s a little of 11GB per day. That’s a lot, right? Maybe I should stop using the fast start functionality of Windows 8 which saves the kernel to the hiberfile.sys when you turn the PC off. That means, you don’t have to reload everything from the scratch. That would save like 1-2 seconds of Windows boot time – no big deal – the SSD is more important, right?

Drive health status in Samsung Magician software

Wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. So, 11GB per day means, it takes about 14 days to completely fill the “remaining” cells (the actual capacity of 256GB – 100GB used = 156GB remaining / 11GB per day). Two weeks. TLC flash on this drive can be rewritten up to 3000 times. At the current state, the drive should be able to live for 3000 of two weeks, meaning more than 100 years!!!

OK, I’m gonna keep Fast Start enabled because time matters…even those couple of seconds which you won’t even notice because the PC would be already booted up by the time you come back to the PC.

S.M.A.R.T information

I have no idea how to read these values, but since everything is OK, I’d not worry about it any further.

Carbonite backup status as at 2013-03-26

I am using Carbonite as my off-site backup solution. I subscribed to Carbonite Home Backup in December last year and now I’ve backed up my data for almost 3 months. (I was in Sri Lanka for 3 weeks, so the PC wasn’t backing up during that period.)

I updated where I stood a month ago. The amount of data uploaded by 26th of February 2013 was 113GB. After a whole month, Carbonite has managed to increase the size of my backup to 206GB. That’s a 93GB increase in a month. 3GB/day on average. Not bad right?

But now I have gone beyond 200GB, I think the speed will throttle back significantly. Let’s hope it doesn’t penalize too much. I will update in a month.

BTW, Carbonite recommended me to upgrade to Home Premium because my backup size was large. Downloading everything in case something happens is not feasible. Home Premium supports Courier Recovery, which means that they will send me a hard drive with the data for faster recovery. But I have to pay an extra $90 annually. Well, that’s not a LOT, considering how valuable your data is. But I already have a local backup, so I would stick to Home for the time being.