PCI Express Archives - The Silicon Underground

Save money on a PCIe dual NIC

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:00:29 +0000

I’ve written before how to get a standard PCI dual NIC for a low, low price–but what about a PCIe dual NIC? PCI Express needs love too, of course. It turns out it’s not hard to find a good, cheap

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What to look for in a performance SSD

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 11:00:35 +0000

The Register has a nice writeup on performance SSDs. The only problem is that performance is really a matter of diminishing returns, and The Reg didn’t report on random I/O. The problem we run into is that modern SSDs under

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How hard-coding your DNS can improve your security

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 27 May 2015 11:00:47 +0000

I’ve long recommended hard-coding your DNS settings as a performance and reliability enhancement–here’s my guide for that–but it turns out it can be a security enhancement too. Botnets targetting routers aren’t new at all, but there’s a particularly nasty one

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The world’s fastest budget PC

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 11:00:04 +0000

So, a relative’s PC was getting a bit aged, and runs Windows XP, barely, so I talked them into an upgrade. I noticed that Micro Center had HP/Compaq DC5700s for $99. They were standard issue office PCs a few years

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More about Pfsense, the alternative to the crappy consumer router

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:00:36 +0000

I spent some time over the weekend playing with Pfsense, and I can’t say much about it other than it does what it says. I didn’t throw a ton of hardware at it–the best motherboard I have laying around is

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Consumer routers are the security vulnerability of the year, so far

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 11:00:38 +0000

Today I found an article in PC World that gives a somber assessment of the state of consumer routers, like the device that probably sits between you and the Internet. I’m glad this is getting attention. There’s a lot more

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SSDs are getting a boost

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:00:59 +0000

This year’s high-end laptops (such as the Macbook and Intel Ultrabooks) are going to be sporting SSDs that connect straight to the PCI Express bus, bypassing SATA altogether. Although the speed increase will be less jarring than the move from

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Hybrid drive options roll in

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 02:26:31 +0000

OCZ introduced a hybrid hard drive, featuring 60 GB of solid state storage caching a 500 GB conventional hard drive, priced at around $350 and due in July. It’s on a plug-in PCI Express x4 card. The idea has some

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We’ll have to wait longer for PCI RAMdisks

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 00:28:40 +0000

In case nobody noticed, it's August. July came and went, and there's no Gigabyte I-RAM on the market yet.

But there are a few benchmarks out there, and Anandtech has an article that, once you get past the usual rambling and over-the-top introduction, has some useful insights.

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