Recent content by ZoomStreak

Are we assuming an infinitely large reactor vessel containing no fuel?

CAREM isn't really a Gen IV reactor -it's just a basic LWR, mostly quite a lot like the hundreds of others already in use in power stations and submarines, although it does fit with most definitions of SMRs (small modular reactors). The WNA site is a good place to start (and generally more...

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is credible (because people take it seriously) and biased. First and foremost, its purpose has always been to campaign against nuclear weapons. This isn't a necessarily a bad goal, but it's worth considering any of their publications in this context.

You still get some conversion in thermal reactors, just not enough to replace the fissile material lost.

There's no need to get a power supply that powerful, even with overclocking/water cooling, with only one graphics card the PC won't use more than a few hundred watts. Pick up a high quality, efficient one in the 500W range - look at Seasonic and Enermax. For the motherboard, you might want to...

Bear in mind that for CUDA you'd need an Nvidia graphics card (unlike the 5970 which is an ATI/AMD one, though there's always open CL, whih might be the better option for the future).

3 grand will get you a lot of compute power. AMD's new 6 core chips can be had for $200 (it's called the 1055t, I think?), throw one of those on a $100 motherboard with 4GB of RAM (also about $100) for each node with the standard power supply/case/networking/storage stuff and you'll have a...

Parallel processing is a big deal, dude.

One of the problems is that, while the theoretical maximum number of operations a cpu is capable of has increased significantly in recent years, many pieces of software are unable to utilise this, because the increase in performance comes from putting more cores onto a chip, rather than...

OK, if you're going for a multiple GPU setup then the i7 starts to make more sense. I wouldn't say the phenom would halve the performance of a 3 way crossfire, but there would be a noticeable difference. Overclocking also tends to be better in the i7s. Of course, AMD are releasing 6 core chips...

For gaming, you'll see very little difference between the two builds. Hardly any games are coded to take advantage of the increased parallelisation afforded by the i7 CPU and triple channel memory has only marginal benefits in most applications. In fact, the i7s are often slower than the...

I'd have a read of this article: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/balanced-gaming-pc,review-31741.html?xtmc=balanced_pc&xtcr=1 In general, most games are GPU limited once you have a fairly decent processor (eg. i5 750, phenom 965). The i7 often performs no better than these ones since it's set up...

I think its pretty unlikely that a hilly course could be faster than a flat one. You have to remember that the increase in air resistance is not proportional to speed but rather to the speed squared (roughly speaking), and overcoming air resistance is where most of the work is done in a cycling...