Dragon NaturallySpeaking

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by onewecallgod

i dunno about upgrading.... he's already got a sweet rig, if he goes to 939, the performance increase wont be high enough to justify the cost.

For DNS maybe, his CPU is fine & we OC it to 2.4Ghz to 2.5GHz.

But DNS is VERY memory intensive, he will see an improvenment with duel channel RAM &

SATA II RAID 0 would make a real improvenment, where dual Raptors would not.

Dave

[onewecallgod]

SATA II just has a higher theoretical bandwith limit, like all other theoretical limits, it wont be reached until long after its release, hell SATA 1's theoretical limit hasnt been reached yet....

[Bryan Crow]

My wife never does anything to push her old Dell in the kitchen. It easily handles everything she asks it to do, so she doesn't need the Athlon 2400 that I call the jukebox. Actually, it's a backup computer too. Sometimes the Athlon 64 is tied up doing stuff like Dragon NaturallySpeaking's Acoustic Optimizer and can't be used for anything else while it's processing. At times like that, I use Cybex SwitchView to go to the 2400. It can handle most applications, even AutoCAD, without a problem. I really don't need an Athlon 64 to serve as a jukebox and backup, do I?

What's all that got to do with overclocking the 64? It has everything to do with the decision to replace it—with whether I just keep it and overclock it and take advantage of the extra RAM I just ordered—or go to the 4000+, along with some motherboard you guys recommend.

I hope I don't sound rich. I don't mean to mislead you. One of the advantages of being old and retired and not having any children at home is that you can spend your money the way you want to. Believe me, that doesn't mean I have a ton of it, and it would be foolish of me to replace this computer unless I could salvage some money by selling it. If I'm going to virtually give a computer away, it would be Dawn's Dell, not this wonderful Athlon 64.

Despite everything I've said about the futility of chasing the latest and greatest, I have to admit it's tempting to go to the 4000+. I probably won't, at least not until, say, next year. The single factor that might tip me toward the 4000+, however, would be to get enough out of this tower to help defray the cost. When the two 1024 MB DIMMs get here tomorrow or the next day, I'll be forced to haul the tower from under a stack of equipment under my desk. Then I'll open the case and find out what kind of power supply and fans it has.

Or I could dig up the receipts from last June or July. I think that's the only information about this system that wasn't included in the Belarc Advisor report I posted last night. Now that you know most of what it consists of, would somebody please hazard a guess about its salability? Do I have something that would bring enough on eBay to justify selling it? (There's an individual who would have first dibs, but he may not be a serious prospect anytime soon.)

Overclocked and with the additional gigabyte of RAM, I'm sure I could be content with this 754-pin Athlon 64. I'm just exploring options and wondering how much of the cost of the 4000+ and a new motherboard I could get out of this thing.


Meanwhile, gang, I'm reading, reading, reading. This stuff is sinking in, albeit slowly. It's going to take several hours of concentrated study even to get the hang of the basic concepts. I'm afraid I came into this too ignorant. I didn't even realize that the new Athlon CPUs don't have front buses. Wait. It's worse than that. I'm still not sure I understand enough about how computers work. My copy of How Computers Work is three years old, up-to-date enough, I hope. I'm going to go back to it this morning. I hope it'll help me understand these overclocking manuals. On the other hand, I guess you can treat the manuals simply as recipe books and follow the directions without fully understanding their implications.

I didn't realize what I was getting into!

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by onewecallgod

SATA II just has a higher theoretical bandwith limit, like all other theoretical limits, it wont be reached until long after its release, hell SATA 1's theoretical limit hasnt been reached yet....

No, it has nothing to do with bandwidth,

ELL we haven't really used up all of the bandwidth in the old ATA66 spec!

NCQ, (Native Command Queuing) is a SCSI like property that intelligently orders the data sequences for transfer,

thus greatly reducing the seek time for non-random seeks.

This helps to overcome the biggest draw back to non-SCSI RAID and

is the first non-SCSI RAID to offer real life improvements for desktop apps &

games as well as for large data transfers like 200MB Photoshop files.

Dave

[BOUNCIN]

The 2x1gb of ram was still a good idea. Because their oare only 3 dimms on the skt 754 boards. When filling the third dimm it would still revert back to 333. And the advantage of dual channel was very small between 754 and 939.

So just to make u feel a bit better was still a great choice of upgrade and the timings should help a lot. As far as the ram go's it was still the best recommendation that could be made in this project.

And as far as Raptors go keep away form the 36 gb on this 1 and go for a 74gb Because as well as offering slightly better performance the 74gb are also more effecient with data.

my suggestion if ur thinking of ovrclocking that chip is too get the airflow sorted in ur case and to get a nice cpu heatsink and fan. which is davids specialist subject so u are sorted for all the info u need on that.

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by BOUNCIN

my suggestion if ur thinking of ovrclocking that chip is too get the airflow sorted in ur case and to get a nice cpu heatsink and fan. which is davids specialist subject so u are sorted for all the info u need on that.

Good point the clawhammers can easily get warm with even mild OC'ing,

an XP-90 with a 92mm 60CFM to 80CFM fan is going to be required.

[BOUNCIN]

Yeah i should expect the chip to do around 2.4.

But the worst point of me actually knowing about these cpu,s is the bad news
im thinking as ur mobo is an nforce 150 chipset it most prolly hasnt got a [pci/agp lock which will affect ur overclocking quite a bit

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by BOUNCIN

Yeah i should expect the chip to do around 2.4.

But the worst point of me actually knowing about these cpu,s is the bad news
im thinking as ur mobo is an nforce 150 chipset it most prolly hasnt got a [pci/agp lock which will affect ur overclocking quite a bit

No Lock = No OC!

Can you confirm that it doesn't have an AGP/PCI lock? Please.

[BOUNCIN]

ill look into it now and see ill also look around for any bios,s that might improve things.

Edit
i cnat find a mention of pci/agp lock but the board does offer the agp setting so it might be ok this review managed an overclock to 227 fsb which looks promising though.

can u confirm this is the right board?
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1483

[BOUNCIN]

It does carry an agp/pci lock. On that review they use it through the nv tweaking system so its there.

[amilian]

Bryan, you're welcome.

Simply said, if you have the money, get scsi.

One of the respected members (wizwill) over at http://forum.knowbrainer.com/list.php?f=2&r=1 will tell you ultra320 scsi (with Adaptec SCSI 320 card) is the bomb. He's tried raid0 and other setups over the years, and has settled with scsi as the fastest for DNS. The great thing about scsi for DNS are the faster access times (IDE = 8.5 to 12.5 milliseconds and RAID0 14ms whereas SCSI is 3.2 to 4.5 milliseconds). Those faster times really make a difference. And yes, that software I showed you would work better on a scsi drive as well. Also, consider those low hard drive access times relative to your Windows pagefile, where a portion of the DNS data (not held in or flushed from the supercache) may be waiting to be accessed. Supercache is a tricky thing to configure correctly (depending on which version you are trialing) so you may be able to improve its performance still. But if I were you I'd get scsi and use supercacheNT (the one with the tuning engine). The tuning engine lets you set the size of the supercache paging file (as distinct from the Windows pagefile). The default setting doesn't optimize it, and it WILL improve when you configure the settings yourself.

You should probably post your questions at the knowbrainer forum too, since the people there are all DNS users and it's a good resource.

Questions that come to mind are which mic are you using? For mic setup, I highly recommend a Andrea USB pod and a Sennheiser 430 II microphone. With that mic setup and a scsi you should get almost instantaneous appearance of dictated speech and extremely good accuracy! If you can't afford the Sennheiser 430 II another great mic option is the Sennheiser ME3 ($110)

So with a budget of 500 to 1500 I would buy:

1) this http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...116-140&depa=0
or this http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...116-152&depa=0
(Average seek times are 3.3 milliseconds)
2) this http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...103-172&depa=0
more details here http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/prodfamilymatrix.html?sess=no&language=English+US& cat=%2FTechnology%2FSCSI%2FNew+Ultra320+SCSI!
and here http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/pro...+Ultra320+SCSI
3) SuperCache NT Server software version 4.3 with the tuning engine for the pagefile (it works on my windows XP and XP Pro no problem) I THINK FROM HERE BUT YOU SHOULD CHECK IT's THE RIGHT VERSION http://order.store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin..._Riwk1kUGEs3Q-
4) this: http://www.mvpaudiovideo.com/index.p...urce=nextag%22

That adds up to $905 (36.7gb scsi)
or $1178 (73gb scsi)

I think you've already got a decent sound card Audigy?? but you may need the andrea USB pod which is an extra $40 http://www.pcaspeech.com/onlinestore/item34.htm

Other stuff: in your post you say you keep the slider to the right for maximum accuracy. This may surprise you, but if I have it all the way to the right I get worse results - with the method of dictating I use (i.e. half sentences). I check as I dictate too remember!! so speed is important to me. What you must trade off against is what you perceive as greater accuracy but slower times and poorer accuracy and faster times. I would rather an extra percent worse if it saves me time. Plus, every time I correct a mistake, it should be learning, so correcting is a constructive thing. My user files have been trained so well now that I'm getting 99% accuracy even with it all the way to the left, and most of the time any error is caused because I have the accuracy slider all the way to the left and might be dictating half a sentence so it doesn't get the 'context' right and puts the wrong word. If I get a persistent error that isn't context related I actually add a word to my vocabulary and train that word until it gets it right when dicating. Sometimes Dragon is persistently 'dumb' about a particular word and that's a frustrating thing, but eventually with extra training it will resolve it, or I might have to modify the way I pronounce that word, or the grouping of words I choose to dictate. I might need to pause a little longer before or after the word or group of words to get it to do it right. Trial and error the only way to find the solution.

Also, on overclocking, I encourage you BUT, and this is important.....but when you overclock it opens the world of instability to you. The last thing you want is for you to be mid document, dictating something important, when you're on a deadline, and for your PC to crash or freeze on you due to overclocking. So whatever you do, make sure your OCed system is 100% rock stable (test by folding or prime95 over 24 hours without failure).

I've attached an image of the supercache tuning engine from version 4.3 that I speak of.

[davidhammock200]

Have you seen any test/reviews of RAID 0 using SATA II with NCQ?

[amilian]

Originally Posted by davidhammock200

Have you seen any test/reviews of RAID 0 using SATA II with NCQ?

Is this question directed at me? If so, I've seen some reviews, but haven't seen anyone reporting DNS works better with them. SCSI still have the lower access times, which is where I understand it to make the difference.

NB: This is why the supercache software is so good for DNS - the access time to the data via I/Os is so much lower, in additon to the amount of transfer being so much higher. If those new SATA IIs with NCQ have transfer performance, but the access times are still high then they may not perform as well for DNS specifically. I'm no expert, but have worked with DNS and know the software and how it performs with SATA RAIDO vs SATA and IDE, as well as the the superspeed software so if any of that's helpful then great. If SATA II raid0 with NCQ is the bomb for DNS, show me how.

[amilian]

While I'm thinking about the whole question of data transfer rates and seek times here are some thoughts:

Attached is my ATTO Disk Benchmarks done today. I have 64kb striped RAID0 with 64kb clusters on NTFS c:
The ATTO on the left is my c: running SupercacheNT software on my RAID0, and the one on the right is RAID0 without Supercache. You can clearly see the huge transfer rate differences. SupercacheNT is wickedly faster (i.e transfers more data per second than my SATA RAID0). Now I'm only running SATA RAID0 with 2 x 40GB WD400JB s (using SATA converters) which has an average seek time of 14ms (non-raid the drives seek at 8.9ms so seek time wise RAID0 is actually performance hindering). Real life performance with DNS with RAID0 however, I perceive RAID0 to be faster. With Supercache enabled, DNS flys. Near instantaneous words on the page. Clearly SupercacheNT is the bomb as far as transfer rates/read/write times.

Now the question remains, does the lower seek times of SCSI result in faster words on the page with DNS.

By the way, anyone got an ATTO test with SATA II with NCQ? or an ATTO test with SCSI? I'm googling right now.

I'm also going to eventually test different stripe sizes and cluster sizes, but I really don't think it's going to make a huge amount of difference as far as DNS goes.

[amilian]

And I just did a HD Speed 'test burst rate' on my c: with supercache enabled and see 2088 MB/s average speed. How do SATA II with NCQ hard drives compare to this?

[davidhammock200]

The NCQ give SCSI like intellegent control over the read order,

thus greatly reducing seek times for non-random (but non-sequenical) reads. It should do the same for writes.

I would love some hard data on this.

Dave

[Bryan Crow]

Bicycling, the Tennessee Titans, and NASCAR—not computers—are my real passions, so you know what I was doing this afternoon. It was one of the most exciting Daytona 500s ever, no matter whom you were rooting for. I just checked the forum for the first time since yesterday evening, so the first thing I want to do is thank everybody who has written in the meantime and assure you I'll get back to all of you.

amilian:

Thanks for all the thought, research, and writing you've put into helping me. Naturally, I'm going to go to all the web sites you gave me links for and give your recommendations a lot of thought, but I'm already pretty sure I'm going to follow them. I'll be getting back to you about them as soon as I check them out.

In the meanwhile, thanks for the advice about Dragon NaturallySpeaking's accuracy/speed slider. I am at this very moment stopping to ease mine back toward the left. There. It's smack in the middle now. One thing that inclines me to take your advice about DNS is that your experience with it is practically identical to mine, and I agree with all your comments. (Hey! The words are really popping up fast now, and I haven't had to correct an error yet.)

The people I respect most on the VoiceRecognition Forum advocate speaking as continuously as possible with as few pauses as possible. Some of them advocate dictating a page at a time or entire documents without looking at the screen. I've tried that, and there really are advantages, now that we have Version 8. It's accurate enough to produce recognizable results. I made extra money in graduate school as a radio news reader, and despite my Southern roots, I think people think of me as a clear speaker. Nevertheless, before the advent of Version 8, I used to go back to correct pages I'd dictated without looking at the screen, and guess what? Sometimes, I couldn't figure out what I'd said. I keep coming back to the ostensibly bad habit of dictating the way you do—in bursts so I can correct as I go (Hey, the Dragon hasn't stumbled yet. No errors so far. I think I'm a believer.)

Sennheiser 430 II and Andrea USB pod? You're reading the product of that very microphone right now—and that very USB pod too. The Sennheiser gave me a nice boost in accuracy. This computer gave me a bigger one, and Version 8 gave me a bigger one yet. I'm a terrible typist. Maybe you noticed that one of my applications is Acoustica Beatcraft, a drum simulator. I was tapping on my desk during first during first-period typing class on the first day of my junior semester in high school. The typing teacher said, "Somebody in here needs to get out of this class and join the band [which practiced during first period]." That's why I ended up playing with a lot of famous Nashville singers and musicians (even though I preferred jazz and rhythm and blues), and that's why I never learned to type properly. And that's why my posts are so long. I'm too lazy to type all this stuff, but it's a cinch to dictate it, isn't it?

Here I go to check out all your links. I'll get back to you and everyone else shortly.

Thanks again.

Bryan

[dbase]

as a comparison i ran ATTO on my raptors with a 128k stripe, sadly not SATA2 and got some strange numbers. I think i got the settings the same as amilian

[Bryan Crow]

I just visited the sites you recommended, amilian. I read reviews of the Fujitsu hard drives and the Adaptec SCSI card at other sites too. Okay, I'm gonna go with your recommendations. I found everything you recommended at other online stores. Two of them offered the same stuff at very slightly lower prices, but I've dealt with newegg, and have confidence in them. In fact, that's where I'm getting the Patriot DIMMs. David posted a link to newegg for them.

Let me make sure I understand what I'll be getting. These bad boys turn 15,000 rpm and respond in 3.2 to 4.5 ms! I take it you're suggesting I set the Adaptec SCSI to RAID 0, right? I guess that means I'll be striping and that the system will think it's looking at a single 73 gigabyte drive. Diskeeper Pro 9.0 will defragment them as effectively as a single drive, and Norton Ghost will restore them the same way it restores a single drive, true? Even though I'll be doubling the risk of hard drive problems, I take it I'll be able to restore the most recent Ghost backup made from them. I notice, by the way, that the reviewers cite impressive statistics about the reliability of these hard drives.

I downloaded the trial version of SuperCache, not SuperCacheNT, yet I'm getting a testable, though hardly dramatic, improvement. I'll get the version you recommend, but that's about enough. A faster CPU and motherboard will have to wait. Newegg will probably deliver everything together, since they won't see either order until tomorrow morning. I'll wait until it all gets here to haul this tower out from under the desk. Once I do, I'm naturally going to make sure of what I have inside the case. I rushed into buying last summer without even realizing the difference between the 754-pin Athlon 64s and the 939-pin jobs. I'm especially curious about my power supply and fans. I definitely ordered the biggest and the most fans the dealer offered, and I specified a power supply with extra leeway too. Still, I'm going to make up for last year's sloppiness. I'm going to make sure I have what I need before I start overclocking.

B

[Bryan Crow]

Bouncin:

Thanks for your reassurance and your helpful comments.

Yes, that's my mobo.