blog for whoever

For the last year or so I’ve been wanting to get a new digital camera. Up until now our current Canon SD400 has been solely responsible for taking thousands of pictures of the kids, vacations, projects, speakers, computers, R/C cars, planes and everything else over the course of its life. It’s actually been a really great camera, so good that there’s been very little drive to buy a new one – until last week. My daughter turned 4 on Wednesday and my wife was throwing her a birthday party in which she found herself taking care of about ten kids all by herself. As she was juggling playing games, face painting and taking pictures of everybody there came a knock at the door. She was out on the patio in the backyard and she had set the camera in her lap but when she stood up suddenly to get the door, the camera went crashing down to the hard patio ground with a thud. She thought momentarily, crap, I broke the camera, I bet Dan will be thrilled.

Upon powering it up the lens did not want to retract back into the camera body and just beeped and shut off. I spent an hour or so messing with it trying to get it working again, even went so far as to tear the whole thing apart. It’s pretty amazing the complexity of a something like a digital camera, so many tiny pieces and parts that work together in perfect unison to do something as ‘simple’ as take a picture. I got all the way to the lens mechanism when I concluded it was probably was shot. It no longer would freely rotate in and out though I couldn’t tell exactly what had broken. But even if I could fix it at this point, or buy a new lens somehow, I’d probably never get the camera back together. So I figured it was time to say goodbye to the trusty point-and-shoot and pick up something bigger, something better, something like a digital SLR. So I bought a Nikon D40 and after taking only 30 or shots tonight, I couldn’t be happier.

There’s a lot of great DSLRs on the market these days and you can spend anything from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars without looking too far and from what I’ve read, just about any SLR is better than most point-and-shoots. Now I don’t consider myself a photographer by any means, but I really wanted to take a shot at getting a decent camera to see if photography was something I could really get into but I didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg for a super-fancy camera either. Ultimately I decided on the D40 because of it’s affordable price, numerous features, and great customer reviews.

The D40 came out in December of 2006, almost 2 years ago, but it continues to compare extremely well with even the newest cameras that are coming out. In spite of its relatively low pixel count by today’s standards, it’s got all the necessary features one would need in an SLR. Features I don’t even understand as of this writing, but hope to soon figure out. I bought a book to go along with the camera, because like they say, a camera is only as good as the photographer. Without learning how to use this camera, it probably won’t do me much good, or at least I won’t be getting all that I can out of it without learning how to set some basic functions and what they all mean. It’s all been very exciting. So far I’ve just taken a few shots of my 2-month old son on Auto, at night, inside the house, with the flash and they have all turned out 10x better than anything that old SD400 was capable of doing. My favorite part is the shallow depth of field that this thing has. Close-up shots show great detail on the face but everything else, like the background, are soft and out of focus. They make the pictures look so much more realistic with much more depth, rather than being just a flat 2-dimensional image, even though that’s still what they are.

I obviously have nowhere near the experience with the camera to give a decent review at this time, but with the many reviews that already exist, there’s nothing more I could say about the camera that hasn’t been said by seasoned professionals. Here’s just a few of the reviews that convinced me that even though this camera is probably the least expensive DSLR available today, it’s definitely worth looking into for anyone delving into the SLR world for the first time.

Ken Rockwell Raves about the D40
Steve’s Digicams D40 Review
Digital Photography Review – The D40
The Nikon D40 from Amazon

I bought the camera from Amazon for $431 and got a free $17 neck strap. I also picked up this book, the Nikon D40/D40x Digital Field Guide by David B. Busch and so far have made it through just the first chapter. It’s the best-reviewed, highest-rated book on Amazon for this camera, so it seemed like a logical choice of books to get. It seems like all my decisions these days are based solely on logic. Not sure what’s wrong with me. But according to Amazon the D40 the ranked #2 only behind the Canon Rebel XSi which costs $215 more than the D40. That’s just enough to pick up a decent 55-200mm VR zoom lens. Additionally the D40 is the least-expensive, highest-reviewed DSLR you can buy and gets a ‘Highly Recommended’ by all the major review sites that I came across. When it came to replacing my old (and now broken) point-and-shoot, the option of buying a new point-and-shoot did cross my mind briefly, but with the cost of the D40 being so reasonable, and the performance being so much better, it just didn’t make much sense to pick up anything else. I’ll be posting some pictures in the next few weeks so stay tuned.

Sometimes a good deal comes along that’s so good you need to jump on it whether you need the item or not. For me today that deal was an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice core CPU for $21.99 from Newegg with free shipping. A 24-hour deal that as of this writing ends in less than 2 hours and of the 99 desktop CPUs on Newegg it is the cheapest one available just beating out a vanilla Sempron LE-1100 by $1. It’s pretty amazing the kind of technology that can be bought for $22, less than what it takes to fill my car only halfway with gas. This 3-year old processor used to sell for over $350 and was once considered one of the best performing CPUs available with great overclocking potential. The 3800+ represented the highest stock-clocked Venice core from AMD and runs at a cool 2.40Ghz. Most people have been able to get this CPU up to 2.7-2.8GHz on air cooling and with only a marginal bump in Vcore. This 89W processor built on 90nm technology certainly can’t compete with today’s 65nm and 45nm processors in terms of power dissipation or performance, but for a mere $22, I’m not sure anything else comes close in terms of price-to-performance ratio.

Okay, so I’m sure I didn’t need to buy this aging hunk of transistors and silicon, but I figured Newegg wasn’t going to have these around for long (not a single 939-socket mobo can be found on their site) and once it was gone I’m sure it will be gone for good. And since I’ve got a 939-based system for my HTPC, I thought it would be good to just have on hand either as a backup, or as an upgrade to my 3200+ Venice core that’s in there now. Though the benefit may be marginal, since my 3200+ is already overclocked to 2.4GHz, essentially making it a 3800+, I am hoping to be able to squeak a few more MHz out of the OC and get it running at 2.6-2.7GHz, therefore in keeping in tune with AMDs naming convention, it would be somewhere around a 4100+ (which according to the way I remember AMD marketing these things, it should be comparable to a Pentium IV running at 4.1GHz).

I’m still on the fence with the whole Blu-ray DVD player, but feel that I may need a small bump in processing power for decent playback of Blu-ray DVDs without hiccups. This is my last ditch effort to keep an old PC around for at least a few more years and still have it do what I need it to do. I’m planning on keeping Windows XP on this machine for as long as humanly possible. Up until a month ago I was still running Windows 2000 on at least one my computers in the house, so I can imagine running XP for several years to come. Anyway, there’s tons of great articles on AMDs Venice CPUs and different systems people have thrown together with lots of benchmarks and results from overclocking. Though I can’t recommend jumping into the already-dead 939 socket, for $22 you could build a very capable HTPC or light gaming rig for cheaper than you could build almost any other system with any other CPU today.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/8327/1
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/3800Venice
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-venice.html
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2548&p=1

Update 11/22/2008 – I finally found some time tonight to pull out my old 3200 and install the new 3800. I remembered to drop the clock back down to the stock clock, so I wouldn’t have any issues booting up with the new CPU. The swap was a breeze. I cleaned up the HSF with some rubbing alcohol and put on a new thin layer of Arctic Silver heat sink compound and clamped it onto the CPU nice and tight. I definitely liked the way Socket 939 worked in that regard, way easier than Intel’s LGA 775 socket. Unbelievably Microsoft didn’t make me reactive Windows like I expected was going to happen. Apparently you have to change out more than just one major component to have to go through that. Thank goodness for small favors (though it only takes 6 minutes and a call to MS to get it reactivated, so it’s no big deal, but if you don’t have to do it, the better).

I immediately rebooted and went into the BIOS and started OC’ing. Not that I need to OC it, in fact it’s plenty fast for just a modest HTPC at the stock speed, but where’s the fun in running stock? I bumped it up 5% and everything ran fine, so I bumped it up 10% and added a bit of Vcore just to bring it up to 1.40V as read by CPU-Z. Everything was still running good and the CPU was running at 2.64 GHz with the bus at 220 MHz, HT at 880 MHz and my DDR400 running at 220 MHz (or 440 MHz). I tried going one step further to 225 and Windows wouldn’t boot. So I bumped the Vcore up to 1.45V and it still wouldn’t boot. So I called it good for now and dropped it back down to 220 MHz and set the Vcore for 1.425V. Things seem to work fine there. I was more curious as to how much higher the x12 multiplied 3800 CPU would go over the x10 multiplier of the 3200. I was running a 15% OC just to get to 2.30 GHz and now I’m running a modest 10% overclock and my CPU is at 2.64 GHz. I watched The Incredibles and there wasn’t a single hiccup and the audio didn’t drop out on me once. So I’d say it was a worthwhile investment. Windows loads in under 30 seconds and I can be on the Internet or watching a movie just a few seconds later. Additionally, windows shuts down in less than 10 seconds. I know it’s not a real merit for how fast your computer is, but I’m keeping this machine extremely light on software apps, so I don’t have any benchmarking suites installed. Other than Super PI, which this thing can calculate to 1M decimal places in 33 seconds. Slow by today’s standards, but still faster than it was! My 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 does it in 17 seconds. So, yeah.