October 2005 Archives

Arctic Silver Instructions. I've been getting pretty hot temperatures on the new Athlon X2. When the two CPUs are running, I rapidly get to 70C and this causes thermal shutdown. These things should run about 50C at maximum according AMD Forums particularly with a high quality heat sink like the gigantic XP-120 I've been using.

Well, I think I've found the answer. I've been putting way too much thermal grease on my heat sinks. The Arctic site has some great recommendations. This thermal grease should lower temperatures by 2-5C.

Here are the main points:

1. You need to clean the surface of the chip with 99% isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) with a lint free cloth like a coffee filter. If you previously had thermal grease they recommend some sort of specific remover. Even a hair or a piece of lint can hurt performance as can a fingerpinrt
2. If you are using older Arctic Silver 1,2 or 3 there is a prep step, You then put a BB size drop of Arctic Silver and with your hand in a plastic bag, you rub the compound into the heatsink clockwise and cunterclockwise. This fill the microscopic holes in the heatsink. Now clean the surface off with another coffee filter but without any solvent. This ensures that the thermal compound fills the valleys
3. Now for all versions of Arctic Silver, you put a small amount of Silver. For a Pentium 4, it is the size of an uncooked grain of short-grain wirte rice (1/2 a BB). For an Athlon 64, it is the size of 1 1/4 grains or 2/3 of a BB.
4. Mount the heatsink on top straight down and very slightly twist it by one or two degrees. *Do not remove the heatsink, otherwise you will introduce air bubbles and voids."

One problem is that once you have a applied a thermal grease, it is impossible to revmoe all the pad and grease from the microscopic valleys so you must use the special ArctiClean 1 and ArctiClean 2.

If you don't have these fancy cleaners, then you can use:

• On the heatsink, you can use isopropyl alcohol but it is impossible to remove the stuff completely, so hopefully you use ArcticSilver to start
• On the CPU top itself, you can use ArctiClean or any dish dtergent but not automatic dishwasher dtergent. Once the majority of the compound has been removed, you can use a soft pink erasor to get the rest off.
• If you do any of the above, then you should do the final cleaning with isopropyl alcohol.

Back to getting my X2 overclocked configuration stable. Right now at 245MHz FSB x 10, I'm driving the CPU as hard as I can. I'm also now running at 5:6 multiplier to memory, so memory is now at 223MHz running at T1 2-2-2-6. So how do I test stability, well a single instance of Prime95, doesn't quite work right. You need two to run against both processors as described in :

With MovableType 3.2 installation done, there are a couple of plugins that are pretty much mandatory installs including:

• MtInlineEditor - Movalog Plugins - Trac. This lets you inline edit text entries.
• Enclosures. You pretty much have to have this to do podcasting. When upload an MP3 that's a podcast, this plugin sucks it out and creates a special feed that is just the podcast content.
• Photoblog. This lets you create a table of photos you have stuffed into directory.

Tong Family Blog: DFI LanParty nF4 Ultra D and Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300 bugs. Well, here's an update, you need a couple of things to get this drive working right:

As they say at DFI-Street.com you have to get a new piece of firmware called the BANC1E00 and then you have to find a plain vanilla SATA drive controller. Not the one in the nForce. Fortunately, I have an old SATA controller in my Chaintech nF3.

It also turns out that there are serial numbers for drives that correspond to firmward releases, so if you buy the latest versions as listed below. The 6xxx series corresponds to the DiamondMax 10 and has a 3 year warranty, the Maxline III is the 7xxx series and is the exact same drive but has a 5 year warranty. Right now on Zipzoomfly, there is $2 difference, so get the Maxline III

As an aside, I did take a look at the new 400GB and 500GB drives that are coming out, but these are much more expensive right now. For instance, the award winning Hitachi 7K400 on storagereview.com costs nearly $275 on pricegrabber compared with $130 for the Maxtor.

The new 500GB drives are even more expensive with the Hitachi 7K500 at $370 according to pricegrabber.com so really out of reach

Same with the new Seagate 7200.9 500GB, which is a well rated drive according to anandtech. It also costs $360 at pricegrabber

Six Apart - Professional Network - Power Tools. Well, have flipped the tongfamily and soon the geekfishing.net blogs over to MovableType 3.2. Ludwig was right, the install is tricky, since configuration files are changing and there in compatiblities with the anti-spam stuff I use. Notably MT-Blacklist has to be manually deleted.

In exchange though, styles get much better. Anyone upgrading, should really use the Stylecatcher plugin, this let's you flip styles by just typing in a URL rather than the laborious process of changing a zillion templates.

StyleCatcher 1.01: StyleCatcher is a simple but powerful plugin built for Movable Type 3.2 that lets you easily swap out any one of dozens of different styles on your Movable Type-powered site. The plugin also allows you to use other style repositories, so you can get styles that aren't provided by Six Apart. (24 KB .tar.gz file)

King County Parks' Burke-Gilman Sammamish River Trail. This is a great birthday party trek for kids that can ride bicycles. If you go from Marymoor Park up to the Red Hook Brewery, the current Lake Sammamish Trail never crosses a street for 10 miles. That's a remarkably long way.

You can go from Marymoor right by the tennis courts and pick up the trail there. From there, King County has done a great job of putting in underpasses for bicycles through all the major streets. It is about 7 miles and very flat up to the Red Hook Brewery where they have the Forecasters Pub. It is open for kids during the day and it has good sandwiches, burgers, and of course beer too. Then it is another 4 miles or so up to the Bothell point where you can turn around, or make your way up into the Burke Gilman.

Go early on Saturday and Sunday with the kids and you avoid the bicyclists streaming through. Bring some food for the ducks too if you like.

Really greate audio has become essential to PC Games, but how do turn up the volume without waking up your whole house?

UpgradeAdvisor.com and others are recommending the Medusa 5.1. These are expensive at $105 a pop, but sound like they are worth it. There is also a Medusa USB version that works with a laptop, but of course since there is less voltage, you don't get the same subwoofer oomph, but you do get fewer cables which is nice.

They are hard to get in the US, so you have to go the official Medusa USA website to pick them up. They have plain packaged versions that are much cheaper too. $105 for the plain SL-8790 which has an analog connection and the SL-9794 is just $95 postage included.

This is an amazing building. Incredibly beautiful with a super high atrium in the Grand Hyatt that has the highest hotel rooms in the world.

Buildings.com.hk includes many interesting nerdy facts about it. Edward had told me that it had a huge ball in the center to keep it centered, but this is actually true of the Taipei 101 building (it has a 500 metric ton sphere in its center that in an earthquake has enough mass to keep the building from toppling).

In fact, this is earthquake proof to 6.0 and typhoon proof mainly because of its extensive concrete foundation.

The Jin Mao Building occupies a site area of 23,000 sq m , with a foundation area of 19,600 sq m. The depth of the tower block is 19.65 m, while that of the annex block is 15.5 m. 429 steel bar piles, each 914 mm in diameter, were piled to a depth of 83 m. The total volume of soil used in the work approached 320,000 cu m.

Wow!

We've been visiting some of the tallest buildings in the world. It is amazing how many are in Asia right now and also how many really big buildings are being planned right now.

AnandTech: USB Flash Drive Roundup - 10/2005. The latest roundup. Last time, the Transcend was the fastest, but now we have 100x drives that are more expensive at $100 but incredibly fast.

The two fastest overall are the Kingston DataTraveler Elite and Lexar JumpDrive Lightning. Both really fly because they are "dual channel." That is they have two sets of NAND flash and write to each simultaneously.

AnandTech: OCZ VX Memory + DFI nForce4 = DDR533 at 2-2-2. I finally got the system working. I was getting all kinds of blue screens saying things like "Accessing illegal memory." The issue is the nVidia Network Manager which everyone on web says that this thing is very unrealiable. I just used ZoneAlarm.

Looking at Anandtech, they were able to get this level of performance with the very fast OCZ EL DDR PC-4000 Dual Channel Gold VX

CPU Ratio 10×267 (2.67GHz)
Ram Timing 2-2-2-6
Ram Voltage 3.5V
Command Rate 1T

Madshrimps got a very similar 268MHz with 2-2-2-5 timings at 3.2V.

Here is what I got using the above as a high water mark and DFI Street as a guide. First off was trying to get OCZ memory to just perform at their rates 2-2-2-8 at 250MHz FSB at 3.3V as the specification at OCZ says it can do. I did some errors at this level with memtest, but had to increase the CPU voltage from the stock 1.3V for my Athlon X2 3800+ which runs natively at 10×200MHz, this worked pretty well if I went to 1.5V for the CPU. The other interesting thing is that Ram actually worked better at 3.2V than 3.3Vs, so my best stable rate was:

CPU Voltage 1.4V
CPU Ratio 10×250MHz
Ram timing 2-2-2-6
Ram voltage 3.3V
Command Rate 1T
LTD/FID 4x
Trp 8 cycles

Pretty much benchmarking has shown that you want to stay with tight timings of 2-2-2-6 with 1T command rate and go to the highest front side bus frequency you can. I'm testing stability first with the builtin Memtest. On my machine, test 5 and 6 seem to give an instant read on bad memory.

The two options that need a little explanation are LTD/FID, this sets the ration of the hyperchannel (4x) to the frontside bus (250MHz). You don't need to overclock this so you lower the multiple. The default is 5x until you get back to 2GHz.

Finally, there is this parameter Trp, it should be equal to the 2+6 cycles that are the first and last numbers in the memory timing. The default in the BIOS is 7 cycles, so I think that was one of the issues.

On the issue of CPU voltage, at 2.5GHz (25% overclock), the CPU seems just fine. The default voltage is just 1.3V at 2GHz (10×200MHz) and 1.4V seems just fine for 25% overclock which is amazing. This machine by the way is memory speed limited and the true CPU maximum is probably in the 2.6-2.8GHz range depending on cooling.

The other trick that some for reason, every release of new BIOS comes in three flavors -1, -2 and -3, these use different ROMSIP tables (yikes, I have no idea what that means), but folks like to use the -2 flavor and this seems to give the best performance.

Finally, So what's the maximum overclock that I get on my machine, well this will depend on how the RAM gets cooled. Right now with a huge XP-120 heatsink with a 5" fan on top, there just isn't room to put another fan on top of the Ram, so right now I'm leaving it, although I think that the answer is another 5" fan on the front side and an 80" fan against the Ram, but some folks have been really creative with rubber bands and small 60mm fans on Extreme Overclocking where you essentially get a small fan, then put some bolts on it partially and then use a set of rubber bands around the edges of the connectors or you bend a coat hanger to do the same thing and make a little cage that wraps around the edges. You have to see it to believe if on the forum.

Computing.Net - pci.sys - Missing/broken :(. Been steadily going from my Windows SP1 up to SP2, installed the latest nVidia drivers on the DFI LanParty. Boy, was that a mistake, the thing won't boot now and the boot system reports, missing pci.sys. To get this back, you need to find a Windows XP original CD and then to this very bizarre recovery console, this gives you a command line version of Windows where you need to type:

set AllowAllPaths = true
expand d:\i386\pci.sy_ c:\windows\system\drivers32 /y

The first command allows you to overwrite files in the c:\windows directory. The second takes the compressed version of pci.sy_ and puts it into the drivers library.

By the way, I think could either be because my Ram is flakey, the most common cause according to the web, or because I replaced a bunch of disk drivers with their nVidia equivalents or because the nForce4 and NCQ disks don't get along. More debugging to come.

Sigh, problem after problem. Installed the various drivers, ignoring the Maxtor problem right now. Now the Ethernet controller is on and see the DHCP host and I get an address, but mysteriously, I can't access the Internet. Ugh.

This seems to be a problem with the builtin nVidia firewall. Incredibly, when you boot it, it seems at least for me to run in medium mode and then it rejects the home router I have. Thinks that things are spoofed there. They should be Pure Networks to autoconfigure the nvidia firewall, apparently, it needs to be told about the home network.

Symantec et al do autodiscovery, but apparently, this is not true with the built in nVidia one as far as I can tell

Some folks at Hard Forum think the issue is that Newegg (where I buy my drives) doesn't pack them properly. Get them from ZipZoomFly or Hypermicro is the recommendation. Sage words about packing, maybe that's why so many of my drives fail?

DFI Street reports that it is a problem with the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB, you have to update the firmware. This is done by calling Maxtor and then they will give you a program that you boot and it flashes the drive an it ain't easy as you can see below. Maybe this will fix all my Chaintech and my DFI problems with this drive.

The net is that the newer firmware release E00 appears to fix these problems, but you have to talk with Maxtor to get it.

They confirmed that there was an issue with a few newer Maxtor SATA drives and a few newer motherboards. They said it was a "slight incompatibility", rather than a problem... but they said it COULD be fixed with firmware updates. They had me download 2 firmware updates. I had to flash to one, then reboot... then flash to the second one (it wasn't possible to to straight to the second one). The process wasn't very smooth. At first, they gave me one that wouldn't flash at all... then I got one that said flash mismatch.... Anyways, finally I got both firmwares to update. I turned my computer on and it actually booted up (and fast) without a BSOD (which it had been getting). I have continued to run it for a while and all seems to be well. So hopefully all is good. I will know for sure by the end of the weekend (I plan on running her hard )... Both techs told me to see how it went and let them know... BTW, my original firmware verison was BANC1B70, I then flashed to BANC1BY0, and then finally to BANC1E00. The boot disk their utility created didn't exactly run properly. I have to boot from a Win98 floppy and look at the switches on their .exe file... but in the end, it appears all went well. Hopefully the process will be simplified soon... I am not sure about posting the firmwares and instructions here... it sounded as if you had to have EXACT firmware upgrades for the version you currently have

Wow, I had almost given up hope on the DFI LanParty nF4, but amazingly, somehow it has come back to life. It must have been the CMOS reset. The recommendation is to take the battery out for a day. I didn't plug the CMOS jumper in right and then I flipped the 5V dRAM voltage select and eureka, the thing started!

I still don't know what combination of things did it. But, I'm thinking it might have been the long CMOS reset and then the jumper. On the other hand, I do wonder since the instruction did say, don't boot the system up in 5V dram mode and I did this :-)

In any case, the only major trouble now is the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB drive is not recognized by the BIOS and it clicks like crazy. Folks at Anandtech have reported similar issues. I have some problems with my Chaintech nForce2 board where sometimes the Maxtor disappears. Some folks suggest calling Maxtor and getting a technician to do a firmware upgrade. We'll see.

Also the Benq 1640 comes set for IDE Slave only, you have to move the jumper, looking from the rear, it is the standard, left most is Channel Select, the center is Slave and the right is Master. Ugh, these days, it should always ship CS. Hat tip to CDFreaks for that.

Tong Family Blog: Gigantic Fan. Well, I finally put the XP-120 into a machine and it was indeed big. Still need a bunch of 120mm gigantic fans. The Globe is hard to find and mnptech.com doesn't carry it anymore :-0

So here is a new listing. Sharky Forums has a good list of fans which I've cribbed. I did get the Nexus for $15 (yikes), so I'll have to try that.

1) Panaflo 120mm Medium speed Fan from Coolerguys but it is quite noisy at 35dBA
Dimension 120 × 120 × 38mm
Air flow 85.5 CFM
Noise level 35.5 dBA
Speed 2100 RPM
Bearing Hydro Wave

2) Enermax Blue 120mm Fan w/ Speed Control from Frozencpu for $16 with fan control or Coolerguys at $15, it is very quiet and most flexible IMHO. It is also called Tek-Chain.
Dimension 120 × 120 × 25mm
Air flow 63 - 94.9 CFM
Noise Level 24.6 - 30.1 db
Speed 1800 - 2300 RPM
Bearing Type Dual Ball Bearing

3) Globe 1202512L not found on the web and it says 34dB, but I find it very quiet, so there you go.
Dimension 120 × 120 × 25mm
Air flow 67.28 CFM
Noise Level 34.0 db
Speed 2000 RPM
Bearing Sleeve Bearing

4) 120mm Nexus Quiet Case Fan $16 from Endpcnoise.com but it is very low flow as a compromise since it only spins at 1000RPM
Dimensions 120×120×25mm
Airflow 36.87 CFM
Speed 1000 RPM
Noise Level 22.8 dB
Bearing Sleeve Bearing

SonyStyle.com | TX Series. The lastest small Sony. They are just coming out. Now only 2.76 pounds vs. 3 pounds on mine. Also with an EDGE modem as well, so featurewise the same, but smaller. Cool.

WindowsDevCenter.com: Getting Your Bluetooth Headset to Work in XP. Argh, I have a bluetooth headset and a Bluetooth adapter, but it won't work with the default driver in SP2.

The problem with the Bluetooth stack built into Windows XP SP 2 is that it has limited support for profiles. In particular, it does not support the Headset profile required to connect with Bluetooth headsets, and hence your Bluetooth headsets will not be able to work with your Windows XP PC.

You need to figure out what actual Bluetooth adapter you have and load the appropriate Widcomm stack so that you can use your headset. Of course, my adapter doesn't have a brand name and just a mysterious FCC ID of QW3-BTCA01 that someone on Howard Forums also has. Some more googling shows that this is the Desma Bluetooth USB which in the Desma site is called model BT111FTT02.

For the same reason, the very cool Sony VAIO notebooks won't use a Bluetooth headset for VOIP or anything else according to Mobilewhack.com. Arggh. My kingdom for a Bluetooth headset driver for Windows XP SP2.