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• When it comes to performing a memory upgrade, the obvious options are to go from 512 MB to either 1.0 GB or 2.0 GB. But because HP’s new units include 2.0 GB, I skipped 1.0 GB entirely, and instead benchmarked the upgraded systems following a 2.0 GB and a much more costly 4.0 GB upgrade. Because you can buy a 2.0 GB module of the right kind for about $20-$30 and all 4.0 GB modules cost over $100—when you can find them—any cost/benefit analysis of the benchmark results comes down heavily in favor of the cheaper, lower-capacity 2.0 GB module. I had to ask for help from Micron/Crucial to lay hands on a $150 module it offers, which had to be shipped to the United States from Scotland because it wasn't available in the United States. Next, let’s take an HP EX475 apart so you can access the memory socket to remove the 512 MB module and replace it with its 2.0 GB counterpart. Each step along the way is illustrated with a photo. Here’s a list of tools you’ll want to have on hand (and purchase, if necessary): Small Magnetic tip Phillips screwdriver (or telescoping magnetic pick-up tool, readily available at car-parts stores for $3-$4).#0 Precision Phillips Screwdriver (if you can’t find one locally, here’s a modestly-priced $4.65 model from Electronic City). I used the smallest Phillips screwdriver from a cheap set of hardened steel jeweler’s tools I purchased at Fry’s for $5.(Optional) pair of small needlenose pliers (useful for slipping modular connectors out of their receptacles when a finger grip isn’t good enough to do the job). Step 1: Remove Front Door and Top Panel Cover from Unit I usually place the unit on top of a towel when working on a desktop or other furniture surface. While the EX47* and EX48* have nice black rubber feet underneath them, these might mark up light-colored or polished surfaces without some kind of protective layer beneath the unit. To remove the door, swing it open. A small plastic pivot point on the upper hinge is all that holds the door onto the case. Push down on the door with your right thumb near the hinge, and it should pop out and swing away from the case. Lift the bottom pivot point out of its holder, and the door is off. Please be gentle throughout this process. HP did a great job of engineering this hardware but it hasn’t been built for constant tinkering as a stock PC usually is. To remove the top panel, which is made of sturdy silver plastic with a sheet metal inside liner, grab the front edge firmly with your right hand, and push from the back with your left hand. The panel is held in place by four steel clips, which you must slide forward about 0.5" to release. This will take a bit of force to accomplish, and is the only time you’ll use any real muscle in working with this unit (reassembly is much easier and takes far less effort). If you push down a little with your left hand while also pushing forward and pull with the fingers of your right hand, you’ll find this helps to loosen the top from its usual anchor points. Step 2: Remove the Drive Trays (and Drives) The HP MediaSmart Server cares a great deal about physical drive arrangement and order. When you take the drive trays out of the unit, remove the top one first. Lift the latch at the center of the tray, then pull gently on the A-arm at the bottom of the tray. Once you get the first tray out, if you encounter resistance in removing other trays, you can reach inside the enclosure and grab the rear edge of the drive for a gentle pull forward. I worried about the plastic trays being too flimsy, and got into this habit pretty quickly. As you remove each tray from the top town, stack it on top of the preceding trays (I rotate mine 90° between layers, to make the stack more stable). When you finish, the bottom (system) drive should be on top of the stack. Step 3: Loosen the Backplane Cables and Unlock the Latches As shown in the initial photos, a pair of (four-pin) fan cables in black, yellow, and blue and a 10-pin control cable connector plug into the top of the SATA backplane at the rear of the enclosure. You’ll want to gently remove the fan cables and the 10-pin connector from their mountings. It’s pretty safe to grab these cables by the connector or the wires just as they enter the connector and gently remove them from their mounts. The fan cables should slide right out (I marked mine L and R for left and right to make sure they went back into the right pin blocks). You may have to gently rock the 10-pin connector side to side to get it to let go. Finally, you’ll want to swing the two latches down that lock the SATA card into place. From the front, the left-hand side latch swings left, and the right-hand side latch swings right. Swing both 90° so that the handles are parallel to the sides of the case. Step 4: Remove the Backplane from the Motherboard The green circuit card with an edge that is flush with the back opening in the case is a modular four-port SATA backplane that plugs into a special socket in the motherboard below. It’s where each of the four internal SATA drives that the HP MediaSmart Servers accommodate plug in for motherboard access. You must lift this card up to undock it from the motherboard. The easiest way to do this is to reach inside the drive bays, then stick one or two fingers through one or two of the holes in that circuit board. If you gently lift the card just a little in this way, it should lift free from the motherboard. It’s attached to the drive cage on four metal guides, two along each side edge. To remove the card from the case, slide the card up gently until the metal guides line up with the slots in the card itself. Then you can easily remove the card from the case without difficulty. Step 5: Remove the Front Cage Cover This is where a small, precision, hardened tip screwdriver is absolutely essential. Two miniscule machine screws hold this cover in place at the top and bottom right as shown in the photo. You must be careful when loosening or tightening these screws because they are small enough to be extraordinarily susceptible to damage (stripped threads or chewed out crosspoints). That’s why I and other MediaSmart hackers recommend spending a few dollars to purchase the right kind of screwdriver for this task. Once the screws are removed, rotate the cage cover to the left, and you can slip it free from the latching metal tabs on the left edge to detach the cage. Finally, you must remove the modular connector that powers the status LEDs for this device to free the cage completely. You can now see the motherboard at the bottom of the case, ready to be removed. Step 6: Remove the Motherboard Tray The motherboard tray is secured by two normal-sized PC machine screws at the lower left and inside on the lower right. Make sure to identify the screws that attach to the white metal motherboard tray (other screws are nearby, but loosening them won’t free the motherboard). Remove these screws and you’re ready to slide the motherboard out. In the photo, I’ve positioned a screwdriver on one screw and the magnetic grabber on the other, which are your targets. Notice the power supply cable at the upper right. You may need to push this down slightly to enable the motherboard to slide forward. Please be gentle: there are lots of soldered parts (three big capacitors at front left for example) that you should try to leave untouched if at all possible. Step 7: Switch the Memory Module With the motherboard tray out, it’s absurdly easy to switch the memory modules. Loosen the clips to the right and left of the module holder, then remove the old 512 MB module. Slide the new module into the holder (and make sure the center divider lines up properly so the module will seat correctly), then push  the clips on each side to lock the module into place. Congratulations! You’ve finished the first task! Before we go on to the second task, let’s take a look at some benchmark results from the EX475 with 0.5, 2.0, and 4.0 GB of RAM and the stock Sempron 3400+ CPU. Check prices for HP's MediaSmart EX475

• The deep dive session on Moorestown, Intel’s update to the wildly successful Atom processor, was heavily attended. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Moorestown is how far it will distance itself from the PC. Moorestown's power consumption at standby will be reduced by up to 50x. Moorestown will be the core of a new line of SoCs (systems-on-chip) from Intel. So, unlike the current Atom, we may see many different instantiations of Moorestown products, aimed at highly segmented markets. The Moorestown platform will mainly consist of two parts: Lincroft (the SoC) at 45nm and Briertown. Lincroft will have the CPU, MIPI display interface, LP (low power) DDR memory controller, plus 2D/3D graphics and memory controller. Briertown is the second chip which has SDIO, audio engine, modem for 3G, and so on. Lincroft brings in the display and memory controller into the CPU die, plus graphics and video decode capabilities. The new CPU will have Hyper-Threading and “burst mode,” similar to Turbo Boost on Intel’s desktop and laptop CPUs. Power reduction is partly enabled by moving to the type of I/O infrastructure used in handheld and mobile devices, including SDIO, MIPI (for displays), and low power DDR memory. Also, the graphics and video decoders can run independently of the CPU at lower power. So graphics, video decode, and audio are fixed-function coprocessors. What’s being left out of Moorestown are PC interfaces. For example, MIPI is replacing LVDS as the display interface. PCI Express is out entirely. USB will be present, but not SATA I/O. If Intel’s goal is to segment Atom based netbooks so that they’re more limited than PCs, then Moorestown will accomplish this. On the other hand, it will be much more power efficient than a PC-like device, while maintaining Atom-like levels of performance. Turbo Boost We’ve talked about Turbo Boost in the past. Turbo Boost is a feature of Intel’s Nehalem CPU that allows the frequency of utilized cores to ramp up to higher clock speeds in order to bolster the performance of a lightly-threaded app. The limiting factor is TDP--thermal design power. As long as the overall CPU remains within the thermal budget, the core (or cores) can be pushed harder than the default frequency to get a bit more performance. With Intel’s upcoming Arrandale and Clarkdale 32nm dual-core CPUs (which support four threads via Hyper-Threading), Turbo Boost also affects the on-die integrated graphics core. Graphics Turbo will be introduced with Intel’s Arrandale 32nm mobile CPU. Intel is building in a “graphics turbo manager” that manages the power budget for the integrated graphics core. There will be a Turbo Boost driver that handles Turbo Boost across the two CPU cores and the graphics core. In the case of running a graphics-intensive application that’s not hitting the CPU very hard, then the GPU clock frequency scales up, just as it would on a CPU core affected by Turbo Boost. Currently, the Arrandale Turbo Boost driver will be a Windows 7 component, and only support the integrated graphics core. Should the laptop instead include a discrete graphics chip, graphics turbo doesn’t affect its performance. However, Turbo Boost still has some impact on the graphics chip, since the processor has PCI Express and memory controllers on board. The upshot of all this, from the point of view of companies building laptops, is that the design of the thermal solutions to keep notebooks cool are more critical than ever. Turbo Boost will keep the system running closer to the maximum thermal envelope. So, it’s important that Arrandale laptops have proper cooling solutions. Intel has data that shows the skin of the laptop (palm rests, the underside of the case) often become hotter than the actual CPU, which affects its overall performance envelope. A poorly designed cooling solution will mean the system won’t run at its maximum possible performance under Turbo Boost.

• On the PC front, Intel showed its upcoming 32nm dual-core CPUs running real-world applications. The company noted that the CPUs are on target to be delivered by the end of Q4. Performance of Clarkdale looked to be faster than the fastest Core 2 Duo--about 1.5x 3DMark Vantage performance (when comparing Clarkdale integrated graphics to G45 integrated graphics on the Core 2 Duo). What’s interesting about Arrandale and Clarkdale is that they’ll have the integrated graphics on the CPU package. The CPU package will have two chips, the CPU and the Intel graphics core. The CPU will be built on the new 32nm process, while the graphics core is 45nm. Even more interesting, the dual-channel memory and PCI Express controllers are integrated onto the graphics core, not the CPU core, unlike the original Nehalem-based Core i5 and Core i7s. As with earlier Nehalems, Turbo Boost is a part of the picture, allowing the CPUs to throttle up to impressive performance levels on lightly-threaded applications. Turbo Boost has been extended to the graphics core, too, allowing the GPU clock frequencies to crank up when more graphics horsepower is needed, as long as the overall thermal envelope of the whole CPU package remains within operational parameters. The GPU itself has been improved by increasing clock frequencies and adding more shader units. Performance of just the graphics unit is estimated to be double the current Intel G45. We saw the Resident Evil benchmark running on Arrandale (the mobile version) at around 18-20 fps at 1280x720. So, while it won’t kill discrete graphics, the new graphics core should "suck less" than previous Intel IGPs in 3D environments. What Intel is really aiming its integrated graphics core towards is HD video. It now supports dual-stream HD decode, so now can handle Blu-ray picture-in-picture functionality. Intel has also been working to improve the user interface of the graphics control panel. What we saw looked much improved over the existing Intel control panels, particularly if you’re a home theater video enthusiast. Videophiles now have more control over key parameters than they did previously. Since Arrandale and Clarkdale now move the memory controller onto the CPU package (and are DDR3-exclusive), systems built on those CPUs should see substantial gains in memory bandwidth--up to 1.7x versus systems with DDR2-800 memory. Toss in Hyper-Threading support, which allows for four simultaneous threads on the two cores, and the performance will rival Core 2 Quads in the same target price. Intel didn’t divulge pricing, but compared Clarkdale to the Core 2 Quad Q9400, so it’s safe to say pricing will be under $200. Despite the presence of integrated graphics on the CPU package, you can drop in a discrete graphics card into a Clarkdale system, which should make this a great CPU for building a budget gaming rig. Toss in enhancements from Windows 7 to make more effective use of Hyper-Threaded CPUs and you have a recipe for fairly high performance in even lower-cost machines than today's Core i5 is able to provide. Looking Forward As we noted on day one, Intel’s emphasis at this year’s IDF was strongly focused on small things: new mobile CPUs (Moorestown), handheld devices, and very thin laptops and netbook computers. But there was still a lot of meat for PC enthusiasts. While we didn’t get hands-on, Intel was very public about the 32nm Gulftown six-core CPU arriving as an upgrade sometime next year for owners of existing LGA 1366 systems. Arrandale looks to be a great addition to Intel’s mobile lineup. The company also announced Clarksfield, the quad-core, 45nm laptop version of Nehalem. Clarkdale on the desktop looks to be one of the best budget CPUs we’ve seen in a long time. While Intel only spoke of the 3.3 GHz version, we’ll likely see lower-clocked versions. Overclocking headroom is unknown at this point, but given the massive Turbo Boost increases we saw, Clarkdale is likely to be overclocking-friendly. But with Turbo Boost dynamically delivering additional performance, you may not need to overclock. If anything disappointed us at this year’s IDF, it was the anemic showing of Larrabee. Given the downright pathetic nature of the demo Intel was showing, Larrabee looks to be no threat to Nvidia or AMD’s ATI division for some time to come, at least in terms of gaming. We’re anticipating testing the new Intel processors, both mobile and desktop, as they arrive. And what performance enthusiast wouldn’t look forward to six cores under the hood?