TechInsight Magazine
Build Your PCs On Better Platforms
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Enabling More I/O. Intel’s P67 Express platform incorporates eight PCI Express lanes running at 5 GT/s to support high-bandwidth SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0 controllers without creating bottlenecks. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new processor microarchitecture. After all, that’s where fresh features and updated performance attributes come from. But you can’t forget that at the heart of every dependable PC is a chipset that facilitates communication between the components that compose it. Intel’s second-generation Core processors sit comfortably at the top of the mainstream desktop performance charts. After the company’s Z68 Express chipset launch, however, VARs now have a greater number of platform options available on which to build potent systems.
The Speed Of Gigabit: Intel's Ethernet Server Adapter I340 exposes four 1 Gb ports using a low-profile, passively-cooled PCI Express card.We constantly look at the fastest processors, chipsets with high-speed buses, and storage technologies able to move unprecedented amounts of data. The mission, of course, is to enhance performance, allowing your customers to get more work done in less time. In a revenue-generating application, that directly translates into making more money. But limiting our scope to the components inside servers and workstations would be ignoring the fact that we do business in a networked world. Once you venture outside of the box, where one machine has to talk to others, do you put the same emphasis on performance?
Here's a little-known fact: as NAND flash manufacturing shrinks to ever-smaller lithography nodes, getting the same write endurance out of SSDs becomes increasingly difficult. It's a true testament to Intel's engineering prowess, then, that the company's third-generation mainstream SSDs are the fastest and most reliable yet. Yes, they center on memory etched at 25 nm (compared to last generation's 34 nm flash). However, Intel is confident in their dependability. So confident, in fact, that it recently increased the SSD 320 family's warranty from three years up to five.
Intel's new Z68 Express platform introduces a feature called Smart Response Technology, which lets a solid-state drive operate as a caching device in front of a much larger hard disk. The concept makes perfect sense. We'd all love one of the company's new SSD 320 drives with 300 or even 600 GB of capacity. But an SSD large enough to be your primary storage repository is expensive. The enthusiasts who can afford those drives will buy them. For everyone else, Smart Response Technology facilitates SSD-like performance without the big up-front buy in.
