January 2006 Archives

AnandTech: Apple Makes the Switch: iMac G5 vs. iMac Intel Duo. Well, it might seem like a no brainer to get the new iMac, but a couple of great points this article makes:

• The Intel Duo is an interim chip for the desktop Macs. There is a new chip "Merom which is the desktop version so putting them into iMacs is just to get them out. The chips are pin compatible, so presumably the MacBook is going to be longer term and shortly in 2H06, the desktops will get much faster.
• Apple has ported their core applications, but not their professional ones. Microsoft and Adobe have announced but haven't shipped their applications, so most of the time you are running in binary translation mode which means sloooooww.
• The industrial design of the iMac is amazing. it is only 1.5 inches thick and with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse looks incredible.
• If you buy one, then upgrade right away, it uses notebook Ram so there is another 200-pin DDR2 SO-DIMM slot (this is standard notebook memory), slam another 512MB right away to really improve performance.
• It uses a standard 3.5" drive, so you can upgrade that to anything you want. Comes with 160GB standard.
• Having dual core doesn't seem to improve responsiveness very much. This is unlike Windows which gets much better with a dual core system.
• Performance compared with a 1.9Ghz G5 vs. a 1.8GHz Intel Duo isn't a blow out. The 1.8GHz Duo is 30% faster on a few native tasks like video encoding, but for things like Keynote (their version of PowerPoint), it is more like 10%. So don't expect an amazingly 4x faster Macintosh as suggested by the hype. This just shows that the overall system is what matters and that since Apple has switched over to mainly PC parts (standard drives, memory, video) it is going to have similar performance.
• Running PowerPC applications is just terrible. Applications double in memory size and they get 50% slower if they don't crash.

As a final caveat, these applications aren't tuned and use the gcc compiler, not the Intel tuned compiler, so while the new Macintoshes are exciting, they aren't the true revolution. Longer term though, they are going to be more mainstream as they use a high volume chipset and then there are the ergonomics of the OSX. It puts things on a more level playing field.

DailyTech - Editor In Chief and CEO of Tom's Hardware Both Step Down. Tom's Hardware started as a great site and it is a good example of the speed of the web. I too noticed about two years ago the quality had diminished and switched to reading Anandtech.

Apparently, the rest of the world noticed too...

Stanford GSB '87 Alumni News. Well it took a year, but I finally updated the GSB alumni swebsite. Gosh, you really can fall behind.

Also, I've got Madison Park Trail, for the group of folks who are trying to get a trail from the new SR-520 bridge which will hopefully have a bike lane to have a spur that leads to Madison Park. Now that would be asesome!

Yahoo! Search blog: Firefox Toolbar: Beta no more!. One of the nasty things about the yahoo search bar in firefox is that it silently and completely resets default search. Here is how to get back to the default where google is used:

1. Type about:config in your location bar. This will display a list of configurations for your browser. The bolded ones have been changed from the default.
2. Right click on the ones that have the Yahoo url in it and set it to "reset". This will get you back to Firefox default settings
3. 3. Close browser window and open new one. You should be all set.

SkiWashington.Com. Amazing conditions in the last 48 hours. First, it snows 15" at Crystal and an amazing 16" at the Summit (it is only 2500' there!). Then it starts to rain like crazy.

Who would have every thought that The Summit would have 129' of snow. That's over 10 feet!

Larry's forecast is for more snow at the 2000-3000 foot level for ythe whole week. It means an incredible weekend coming. Sign me up for Crystal this Saturday!

TEN Technology flexibleDock Adjustable Car Dock and Charger for iPod | iPod Accessory Review. So on the cheap, get this plus the Sony cassette adapter and you are set. $50 from the apple store.

Well, now that the case decision is made, the main question is how to charge in the car. It works fine to charge my iPod nano with a generic USB charger, but my 4G ipod doesn't work correctly.

• Griffin Technology TuneFlex Auto Charger and Flexible Docking Cradle for iPod nano | iPod Accessory Review

Well, I ordered the OCZ PC4000 Gold 2GB Kit, but in the mean time, I thought I'd just tweak up the single stick of OCZ PC 4000. Interesting to see how to get the settings right. Basically, I got the thing with memtest to be stable at 238MHz FSB 1:1 with very tight 1T 2-2-2-6 timings running at a modest 3.2V rather than a barn burning 3.4V. Windows also booted, but Prime95 failed on one core after a few minutes. In general, I'm finding that having two cores both going full bore, is much more stress and you have to really turn down the clock rates on the processor. Hopefully 235MHz will be stable.

DFI, timings etc - Forums on the BleedinEdge. Great points here for how to get your OCZ tweaked up. Like the Corsair forum, BleedinEdge is just great given the many settings available in the DFI LanParty UT Ultra D BIOS.

In this case, it shows how he got the board to 250MHz FSB. I actually tried these, but I actually found that they didn't work as well as the general recommendations.

AnandTech: USB Flash Drive Roundup - 10/2005. A good review of 1GB USB flash drives. The main message is that all drives are not completed equal. For $90 premium Lexar JumpDrive Lightening and Kingston DataTraveler Elite use fany high speed memory that means it will be much faster to write.

Read the reviews though, most of the drives sold haved absolutely miserable performance. Even the Transcend Jetflash I got just three months ago is now middle of the pack, so a good implementation and better NAND memory make a difference.

Or if you want to save some money for the next level down, the Corsair Flash Voyager is about $70 but writes noticibly slower, but not a bad tradeoff if you aren't writing every day. OCZ Rally is about the same price but is the reverse, fast read, but slow writes, so those are runner ups if you don't want to pay or you think (like me, you'll lose the little drives :-)

Maui accomodations and lodging details - Napili Kai Beach Resort Maui. Asa swears by this spot on Maui. It is far from the big condo complexes and is just two stories and has its own beach. I normally think of Maui as gigantic resort heaven, so this is a good option with snorkeling outside, etc.

Will Core Duo Notebooks Trade Battery Life For Quicker Response? | Tom's Hardware. Well, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Early previews of the Intel Duo show there are some power issues. Some folks think it is the USB 2.0 bug in Windows, but we'll have to see.

The processor itself codenamed Yonah is a dual core mobile chip that Apple is using in their new MacBooks and which will be the replacement for the Pentium M.

Drool, drool. It is fast and if folks can figure out its battery issues, its a real winner!

There are as many cases as there are iPods it seems right now. I've tried three of them. The Waterfield one that is a nice cloth one with a hook for a 4G iPod. It is nice, but bulky. A silicon green thingy for my nano. It works, but I like the look of the nano and it seems strange to hide it. A stickon shield thing that looks like a plastic wrap that is too difficult to even think about putting on. So the search continues with a couple of options. By the way, the absolute best place to find user reviews of this stuff is stuffed into the Apple accessories store. It isn't indexed by google, but the user reviews and whats most popular is interesting. Also since, like Amazon, this is an ecommerce site, you don't have the normal spammer problems so here in order that is roughly ordered by most popular on the Apple Store, best user reviews there and iLounge ratings are the choices. There aren't any perfect ones, but here goes for the best clear case with a belt hook for carrying around.

I ended for trial purposes getting an iSee for the 5G iPod (since the Agent 18 doesn't have a belt clip) and the Crystal Jacketfor the iPod nano, and and will report on how it is going but iLounge has a good overview of nano cases and 5G cases

• Agent 18, stylized audio accessories. Got good user reviews from iLounge. This is a simple polycarbonate case for iPod video, iPod nano, etc. but it doesn't have a belt loop co holder so not the perfect solution. $20 list. Most folks like it for it design, but don't slide the iPod in, it will scratch! I won't use without a belt clip though. Not reviewed by iLounge though. Some folks think the Isee has a better looking case and other disagree. They seem to be the most popular cases by far at Apple, so that's interesting.
  Apple. It is better selling than the ISee but less than Agent 18, but has fewer reviews so far compared with the iSee
• Contour Design Isee Nano and for 5G iPod. This only got a B, but several folks at both Apple's store reviews and ilounge like it better than the review. Think it is more sturdy. Go figure. Also $20. There is debate about whether the Contour Design fits as well. It does seem to scratrch easily itself (how ironic) and has a belt clip. The 5G and nano are quite similar.
• Power Support Crystal Jacket for iPod Nano. This got an A- and is now available for $20 direct. One fellow thought it was weaker than the Isee. It does include something to protect the clickwheel. It isn't carried by Apple, so no idea how real users like it. There is much debate about why it got an A- since others like the largely equivalent. There were some questions about whether it is durable enough compared to the iSee.
• XtremeMac Microshield. Although it is B rated by ilounge mainly because it isn't completely protected. It is more durable plastic and a better belt clip, but leave the top unprotected and there isn't something to protect the clickwheel. Because it is closely pressed, it leave "wet marks" on the iPod so that is a little ugly.And also quite a few remarks about how often the scratch on

How Much RAM Do You Really Need? | Tom's Hardware. Given the rapid increase in memory, it's been amazing to me to see that in the last six years, we have been pretty much stuck at 512MB-1GB. The pricing has remained pretty much the same, but now the 2GB memory sticks are coming out and it is just about time. Maybe a year ago, the first games (these are what really drive the need for more memory) and the widespread use of photo and video editing, pushed all the machines here from 512MB to 1GB. The price was reasonable too, 1GB was about $250 for high quality stuff not you can good high quality 2GB Ram kits (notably the OCZ PC4000 Gold for $230 with a $25 rebate from newegg) that performs very well and most importantly gives big applications like Photoshop or Battlefield 2 2-3x faster boottimes and frame rates.

Now, we are seeing 2GB kits (that is a pair of 1GB memory sticks) at $120-$380 depending on quality of the memory, so it is much more affordable. The good news is that for many games it makes a big difference. The chart shows frame rates at 512MB and 2GB for Battlefield 2. I can tell you that for Call of Duty and F.E.A.R, they are simply not playable at 512MB, it takes so long to download and there is hard disk access during the game. 1GB is just fine most of the time, but for the next generation 2GB is the place to go.

So given my OCZ VX has now failed, what to get for the dream machine? Well, Anandtech has the answers with a test of really fast 2GB kits. These cost a great deal more than the bargains, but they run faster timings so why not. They do show that a 1GB kit is actually faster. The reference OCZ 3200 Platinum R2 1GB Kit is still like lightening and pretty cheap according to Pricegrabber at $171 from Newegg.

But the memory to consider are Mushkin 2GB Redline XP4000 which you can get direct for $380 but the main issue there is now is the support as their forums show unhappy people

The other one is the trusty OCZ (I actually use OCZ in half of my machines now) called the melodious OCZ PC4000 2×1024 EB Platinum that pricegrabber has for $372 but this is not at newegg or zipzoomfly :-(

Finally for just a little bit performance, but 40% less is the Corsair TWINX2048-4000PT which use the Samsung UCCC chips instead of the pricer Infineon Cs that OCZ and Mushkin are using so it is just $220 according to Pricegrabber. Also simlar are the OCZ parts are PC4000 Gold and PC4000GX XTC, and they are about the same price as the Corsair kit. We have not tested either OCZ UCCC, but with the same memory chips, performance should be similar so they are good choices if you want to stick to OCZ. These are $230 and $250 respectively and the main difference is seems to be the fancy heatspread on the XTC vs. the generic ons on the Gold.

Summit at Snoquamlie. Get a text message when more than 6" of snow falls at your favoriate resort. This sues a service called rubbersnow. Very cool.

KING5 Seattle News | First Alert Weather. Another good snowforecaster in addition to the folks at skiwashington

In this case folks agree, there will be 2-6" of snow on Friday and then 6-12" on Saturday. We are talking powder days!

Brett & Theresa Central. My buddies at Network Magic have been busy. I've been working with them for three years now and Brett has been trying to make it easy to get stuff up on the web.

This is Brett's home site. It is actually hosted on his machine at hom. This net2go feature lets you publish part of your gigantic hard disk on the internet. So instead of waiting decades for flickr to upload your microphoto images, you just copy them to a folder on your home machine and it gets published.

Naturally, you can have private shares for just friends and family, but it is pretty amazing to realize that the cost to host 100GB on the Internet is now essentially zero. I love broadband!

AnandTech: FAST 2GB DDR Kits - Part 2. Well it has been along time in coming, but we are finally at the point where you can get 2GB on your machine with a pair of 1GB memory. Good for really memory hungry games.

The recommendation is for the OCZ 2GB PC4000 from part 1 but this costs almost double at $400 according to pricegrabber compared to about $230 for cheaper 1GB pieces.

They really like the Mushkin Redline XP4000 which you can get direct or from newegg.com and these are also $380 direct, so quite a bit to swallow, although they overclock very fast.

DRAM Settings for DFI NF4 (all) VX, TCCD/TCC5, BH-5, 3200 Gold & General BIOS Info - Forums on the BleedinEdge. Wow what a great site I just found that talks about really making OCZ fly. Nice to have a memory vendor who knows their audience.

Some quick things I learned:

• All OCZ memory seem to work better with the -2 variants. They recommend the 5120-2, 704-2BT, 704-2BTA. Put the memory into the yellow slots. As always depending on board revisions, some do better with the -3 (all official BIOS are -3 based). Others work better with orange slots. The true power nerd has to try two sets of BIOS and two sets of memory cards.
• The Tref in the Dram settings seem to need the most tweaking, they reocmmend 3120 or 4708 for TCCD/TCC5 memory which would include the OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev 2, PC3700 Platinum , PC4200 Platinum and PC4800 Platinum). You need to have this when overclocking above 250MHz FSB
• Tref of 0648 works bets for VX or 3200/3500 Gold/GX memory
• The true nerd should try 0648, 0780, 1168, 0016, 0032, and 2336 and this might work better.
• Don't use this board with a 20 pin PSU
• If you don't boot, this happens with OCZ VX quite a bit. Make sure you only use the Orange slots for the official or -3 BIOS.
• To test memory, boot one stick in slot 2 (the farthest orange slot from the CPU). If one boots, but the other doesn't you have a bad memory stick.

This site also has specific and very detailed notes on settings for memory. For instance for a late model San Diego or Venice, Winchester, Hammer or Newcastle with OCZ VX, 3200 Gold or 3500 Gold GX (that is CH-5 memory, here are the setting needed. Here are the settings for the Genie BIOS:

200
enable
2.0
02
06
02
07
16 or 14
03 or 02
03
02 or 01
03 or 02
0648, 2560 or 3120 (0648 has worked on many systems)
auto
enabled
auto
0
level 8
level 2
auto
DRAM Respnse Time: fast or normal (as needed if your BIOS has this feature.)
auto
256
disable
16
07
disable

In Genie Bios

200 and higher (start at 230mhz or so and work up)
auto
16 16
7 (for testing, then adjust for max overclock)
100
disable
1.500v
1.300v [/b](This is about 1.57v, if you need more do not go past 1.45v here, use more the 123% below, there is a reason ) [b]
above VID * 123%
1.30v
1.70v
3.3v-3.4v (up to 3.5v for Gold and Gold GX)

Also there is this strange thing called Drive strength and here are the settings for TCCD/TCC5 try 3, 5 or 7. I f you have the OCZ VX or the new BH Gold then try 8 or 6

DFI NF4 Bios Files - Forums on the BleedinEdge. A good list that includes the coveted 704-2BT

DFI Forums - NF4 Ultra-D - 1 LED hang on 702-2. After hours of debugging, it turns out all these problems seem to be from a failing OCZ PC4000 VX memory stick. Finally did a swap for some OCZ 3700 Gold Rev 3 and it booted fine and found there was one good one and one bad.

So the lesson is that if you suddenly get blue screens and funny failures, sometimes it is really a hardware failure. For the record, I've had over the last six years, three hard disks fail, now two sticks of memory. Now I am overclocking and the like, so I'd expect to get more, but it means that if you suddenly start to get strange things happening, you have to go back to the beginning as a do-it-yourselfer and debug with just a graphics card, CPU and a single stick of memory.

So on to getting more Ram, maybe the 2GB sticks are right. By the way, "OCZ": has a great forum on settings. Also other things I've learned in tromping through DFI-Street.com a few things you need to know:

• DFI LanParty likes TCCD and not CH-5 apparently, so looking for that makes sense for something else.
• DFI is made to overvolt the Ram, in fact, it can go up to 3.5V, but the tradeoff is that some folks think that really blows the Ram after a while. I'm a poster child there. The TCCD memory apparently doesn't need such overvolting.
• The BIOS is versions are complicated, but basically, the latest version is 704-1 for generic Ram, 704-2 for CH-5/UTT ram that you put into the yellow slots and 704-3 for TCCD that you put into the Orange ones.

Final lessons are the various keys you hold down when you boot the system:

• TAB. This gets rid of the splash screen so you can see the POST
• INS. Hold the insert key down and you boot with "safe" memory timings

Well, I really torqued the DFI last night. Got it all working again and even played a game for a while. Got it back to the 81.98 BIOS and disabled the dual cpu enhancement, but I went a bridge too far. I also updated the bios I thought to 702-2 but now it hangs on the video detection, so I'm assuming that it was a bad idea to flash.

But now what to do. First, BiosCentral - Award BIOS Beep Codes are valuable to understand. When Award (the main maker of BIOS) has a problem it tells you on the PC speaker what the issue is. This happens before POST. Here are the codes:

FWIW, I get one short beep, so it is something else behind the nice flash DFI splash screen. Sigh.

DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI/ULTRA Bios. This table is hard as heck to read, but what it says that if you are willing to try a non-official BIOS (that is a BIOS which is not 623-3), then for a DFI LanParty UT nf4 Ultra D with OCZ VX PC4000 memory and an Athlon X2 you will need to:

1. Load the 702-2 BIOS. This is an alpha bios for Revision E CPUs only. Revision E are all dual cores and "Venice" single cores released after about May 2005.
2. Move your OCZ VX memory to the yellow slots. These actually have different memory configuration tables for different types of RAM. So that -2 BIOS are for Winbond BH5 and UTT (a.k.a CH-5) chips and yo should put these in yellow. The Samsung TCCD based Ram modules go into the orange slots and use the -3 BIOS. You can figure out which underlying chips you are using by google or searching Anandtech whose memory reviews typically tell you what memory chips are in what modules.

NOT USE 8x.xx AT X2 DUAL CORE" href="http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=9967&st=20">NVIDIA Forums -> AWARE: NOT USE 8x.xx AT X2 DUAL CORE. Apparently, lots of folks are like me, having trouble with BSODs and other crashes. Besides adding the AM processor driver, folks suggest disabling the dual core optimizations in the nVidia drivers. For high screen resolutions e.g., bigger than 1280×1024, they don't help anyway since most applications are graphics card bound. So, here is how to get stability, use the 81.98 nvidia driver and then add the keys below or go backwards to 78.01.

They provided us with registry keys to add to disable dual core support in their drivers. Armed with this new information we benchmarked again. We tested again with the same hardware setup as the previous tests, and this time all testing was done manually using r_usesmp 0 and 1 to change the SMP mode on and off. Update: We have now been cleared by Nvidia to release the registry updates necessary to disable dual core support in the 80 series driver. Remember you edit your registry at your own risk.

1. Go into Regedit and determine the current primary display card by looking in HKey_Local_Machine\Hardware/DeviceMap\Video and note the GUID (global unique indentifier assigned by Windows) for the entry "\device\video0" which is the long string at the end of the entry in brackets { }.

2. Edit HKey_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{guid}\0000, where {guid} is the number derived from the above step.

3. Open the "0000" directory and enter a new key called OGL_ThreadControl and give it a value of 2. This will disable multithreading in the driver for all OGL apps.

4. In the same "0000" directory, to disable driver multithreading for all D3D apps, you can enter WTD_EXECMODEL and give a value of 0.

How to install the AMD X2 drivers, hotfix, the correct way. - XtremeSystems Forums. OK, I don't know if this is valid, but the recommendation on this site is to apply two hotfixes to improve Athlon X2 stability and to make it work with ACPI...

1. Install the amd athlon 64 ×2 dual core processor drivers from AMD
2. read this website and download the hotfix....READ Microsoft documentation and download from Sendfile
3. Edit your registry to enable the HOTFIX, follow these steps.
   1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
   2. Right-click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager, point to New, and then click Key.
   3. Type Throttle for the new key name.
   4. Right-click Throttle, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
   5. Type PerfEnablePackageIdle for the value name.
   6. Right-click PerfEnablePackageIdle, and then click Modify.
   7. In the Edit DWORD Value box, type 1. In the Value data box, make sure that Hexadecimal is selected, and then click OK.
   8. Quit Registry Editor.
4. Make sure your BOOT.ini has this command in it, /usepmtimer to check, right click on My Computer go to properties, click on the ADVANCE tab, then under startup and recovery click on settings, then click on EDIT....make sure your boot.ini looks like this

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

How to install the AMD X2 drivers, hotfix, the correct way. - XtremeSystems Forums. OK, I don't know if this is valid, but the recommendation on this site is to apply two hotfixes to improve Athlon X2 stability and to make it work with ACPI...

1. Install the amd athlon 64 ×2 dual core processor drivers from AMD
2. read this website and download the hotfix....READ Microsoft documentation and download from Sendfile
3. Edit your registry to enable the HOTFIX, follow these steps.
   1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
   2. Right-click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager, point to New, and then click Key.
   3. Type Throttle for the new key name.
   4. Right-click Throttle, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
   5. Type PerfEnablePackageIdle for the value name.
   6. Right-click PerfEnablePackageIdle, and then click Modify.
   7. In the Edit DWORD Value box, type 1. In the Value data box, make sure that Hexadecimal is selected, and then click OK.
   8. Quit Registry Editor.
4. Make sure your BOOT.ini has this command in it, /usepmtimer to check, right click on My Computer go to properties, click on the ADVANCE tab, then under startup and recovery click on settings, then click on EDIT....make sure your boot.ini looks like this

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

How to use the Zippy and 850SSI on DFI nF4 - 56K caution - XtremeSystems Forums. This is reminder for me, that using the 5V and high voltage OCZ VX on the DFI LanParty is a little hazardous.

The long and short version is that you have to have the 618 or higher BIOS, this fixes a problem where on a cold boot, the BIOS doesn't applied the amped up voltage to to memory but does apply the overclock, so the memory doesn't respond and you get 3 LEDS and you are dead. I have this fix, so that's not the current problem.

The longer version is that some power supplies don't have enough 5VSB to actually start in cold boot at 5V Vdimm mode, so you either have to have a burly power supply or you have to wiggle a little with the jumpers as described. I have the burly Enermax 600, so that isn't the issue.

The new problem for me is that I get a blue screen and then the thing won't cold boot. If you wait 30 minutes, something resets and you can boot normally. I wasn't getting the cold boot problems before and some folks think that running the OCZ VX at high voltage eventually causes catastrophic failure of the DFI board, so you should really only run at 3.2V and below or use the less memory hunger TCCB based memory rather than the CH-5 UTT that is in the OCZ VX. I'm also tempted to try the UTT tuned BIOS, but that risks destroying the BIOS. Yuck. The google searching goes on.

The BSOD is due to a video driver problem. I now suspect that the Nostaligic screensaver is making a bad call set and somehow crashing the driver in a way that I get the cold boot problem after the blue screen. Something interesting happens after a blue screen on this machine for some reason. It cold boots fine otherwise and warm boots fine.

Tong Family Blog: DFI LanParty nF4 Ultra D problems. An update on my DFI LanParty problems. I got an Enermax 600W power supply and these boot problems disappeared. Now it appears that there is a fix for the Seasonic power supplies and their 5VSB issues, so you have to contact Seasonic to get a new power supply.

Even the fancy new S12-600 had it and you have to make sure you have Revision A3 so you can boot off of DFI LanParty.

I'll have to see about whether that applies to my older Seasonic SuperTornedo 400

DFI Forums - NF4 Ultra-D - Nf4 Ultra-D power issues with seasonic

Been in contact with Seasonic for the past 2 weeks concerning a faulty S12-600 Rev. A1.

Just heard back from them today that they have a Rev. 3 that DEFINITELY fixes the DFI boot problems (at least that is what I am told). Their RMA contact told me the Rev. 3 S12-500 and S12-600 PSUs will be available beginning Feb. 15th.

If you still have problems with your S12, I highly recommend that you contact Seasonic for an RMA.

DFI Forums - [Resolved] resolution for disappearing Maxtor drives? (post #12). It doesn't often happen, but sometimes you learn exactly why something doesn't work. In this case, the early DiamondMax 10 drives don't get recognized in PCs because of a pecularity of the SATA specification about how pin 11 or stagger spinup is handled. There is a good discussion about it at Maxtor but here's a summary:

Applies to all Maxtor DiamondMax & MaXline SATA drives! Many people including me, can not recognize this drives or their motherboards are recognizing them hard, and mainly have problems with detecting them when cold boot.

All this drives have feature calld "Staggered Spin-up Detection". This feature is for servers &/or more than 2 drives to power up one by one, this makes the power supply's work esier when turning on such a system. This also makes it possible to run machines with multiple HDD's with lower power supplyes. They are cheaper also. Anyway this feature must bi off (Disabled) on PC's, or when there are one or two HDD's on the system.

By the SATA specifications the SATA HDD power cable is with 4 pins on the PSU side & 15 pins on the HDD side. By this specifications, Pin 11 is reserved (not used), and should be grounded or pulled low.

These series of Maxtor SATA HDD's are using this pin 11 for turning that feature on & off. When it is on, the HDD is waiting for more initializations more time that any standard Sata controller, Bios & motherboard will wait. So when it is off, the HDD acts like normal PC SATA drive.

Because this pin 11 is reserved for future use by SATA specifications, many SATA power cable manifacturers leave this pin going nowhere instead of grounding it (because it is not supposed to be used), but in our case it automatically enables the feature. So this drives auto sense if pin 11 is connected to power, not connected or grounded.

IMPORTANT: If Pin 11 is not connected or connected to power supply, that means that "Staggered Spin-up Detection" is enabled, & your HDD will NOT be recognized or not recognized all the time by the bios!

SOLUTION: Pull ot the power cable from the PSU & the HDD, and count 11th Pin, start counting from the side with the adge. Ground this pin to your case for example (to some screw) or get a BIOS update or there is the don't autodetect fix as well.

DFI Forums - NF4 SLI-D - tweaking windows (video for NF4 LanParty) mirror added. OK, this clears up the myths about what to do about when you need the various nVidia drivers, it is confusing because in fact, on modern systems, you don't want any of it but the video drivers....

In a PCI-Express system, there is no need for a GART driver since it ONLY affect AGP bus (and there's no AGP bus in a PCI-E system...)

As for nVidia IDE driver. I've not found it necessary at all unless running RAID (and really only RAID-1 for rebuilding an array as RAID-0...if it gets hosed...you've lost everything).

The IDE driver also can cause many conflicts, bsod's, freezes, as well as stop your cd/dvd writer from performing properly.

DFI Forums - [Resolved] resolution for disappearing Maxtor drives? (post #12). The old fix was to update the firmware, but you need to actually buy a vanilla SATA drive card so I just instead spent another $120 and got a later Maxtor, but now I see there is a simpler fix, what is happening is autodetect on empty drives is causing the Maxtor to get lost, so here is the recommended simpler fix.

My Maxtor DiamondMax 10 exhibited most of the symptoms you guys have described:

#Wierd behavior where Windows would insist on checking the disk for consistency upon reboot
# Failure to detect the drive
# If it did detect the drive it would often hang during booting Windows.

It had similar symptoms on my older Epox NF3 board. The fix I used for the Epox worked for my new NF4 Ultra-D as well.

1. Go into the BIOS
2. For every IDE channel and SATA channel that is enabled but has no drive connected\
3. change the detection method from "Auto" to "None"

This bypasses autodetection of drives and seems to be what was causing all my problems... my Diamondmax not being detected or being detected incorrectly. This solved every one of the problems I was having.

Previously, I'd only been able to use Quicktime to playback .MP4 files. These are the newest sort of encoding that use H.264 encoding and AAC for the audio track.

Turns out that it isn't well documented, but the easiest way to use Windows Media Player or any DirectShow compatible player is to:

1. Install ffdshow filter (20051108 or later) at Afterdark and other place or Freecodecs have the latest versions. Right now that is 20060126
2. Install the Haali Media Splitter (a.k.a the Matroska splitter)
3. Use any DirectShow compatible Players (like Windows Media Player (8,9,10 ), Media Player Classic (6.4.8.6 ), BSPlayer (1.36 ), etc) will playback MP4 files.

Free-Codecs.com :: Download DirectShow Filter Manager 0.5 : DirectShow Filter Manager helps you to list, sort, find, add or remove DirectShow filters. If you are like me, you install all kinds of video products, the problem is they can really screw up video output.

For instance, I reinstalled Nova Development's Video Explosion. It installs a 2000 copy of Ligos AVI Splitter and MPEG-1 player and that is way too old. Videos from other sources then just hang.

Download the DirectShow manager so you can see what is going on with the Windows filter system. Most importantly, it has a reset button that resets everything to Windows defaults.

Windows has a tool called quartz.ax which does most things right and this tool along with gspot lets you see what is actually being used and tendered.

DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI/ULTRA Bios. For those of you who like living dangeriously, in addition to the stock BIOS that comes from DFI, you can also have a special set of BIOS that Oscar Wu, one of the geniuses on the web, he has actually tuned them for different memory and different CPUs.

For instance, the 7.02-1 only works with Revision E CPUs, but there are two variants, 7.02-2 which only works with BH-5 and UTT Ram and 7.02-3 that only works with TCCD. The TCCD you put in the Orange slots and the BH-5 and UTT you put into Yellow.

I have OCX VX PC 4000 (now discontinued) actually uses the Winbond CH5 die and not the BH-5, so I probably should just use the generic variant. Interesting the note on putting the BH-5s into the yellow slots though. I think mine are currently in the orange pair.

Adrian's Rojak Pot - Where The Best In Technology Gather. Now talk about obscure! This is a BIOS entry in my DFI LanParty. It refers to the 123rd bug found in Dual Core Opteron and Athlon 64 X2 (socket 939)s.

BAsically, at low frequencies, DRAM data gets there too early and the processor hangs sinc data by passes the L2 cache and initiates an early DRAM read.. So if you select DISABLE, this avoids the bug which I need to do for my 3800+

There is also a feature called auto where the BIOS can query to see if it is a bad processor.

DFI Forums - NF4 Expert - Random BSOD. Well, I just got another Stop 0x0A, I'm wondering if it might not be the IDE driver. That is usually the first thing folks say to uninstall from nVidia. Or maybe a later video driver.

Seems like I have two problems, some driver is bad and also a warm reboot problem where ram isn't found. Sigh.

DFI Forums - NO BOOT 3 LEDs LIT. OK, here is a strange problem that has just cropped up.

The DFI LanParty nf4 Ultra D seems stable, but when you turn it off and then back on immediately, the system hangs with 3 LED lights on and the speaker beeping. This means that no ram is detected. If you wait 20 minutes, it boots fine. Very strange. I bet it is related to either the new Athlon or perhaps to the use of OCX VX ram at 3.4 volts. Maybe, the voltage doesn't get applied right?

There are related posts on warm boot problems where folks are focused on the video card, but in general, there seems to be some sort of BIOS problem.

Another fellow thinks it is the OCZ VX and essentially, you have reflash with some special parameters.

Apparently, there are beep codes that occur. The beeps I hear are just a single beep, beep, beep. It is like Morse code for computers :-)

Mobile Podcasting: Back to Basics. Stan is a super smart guy and he's right about thinking about what marketing is all about.

NetworkGarage.com: It's a mouse, no... its Skype phone/mouse. No, this isn't a joke. It is a mouse that flips open into a VOIP handset.

Kind of an amazing idea. Shows you can make just about anything. Heck, if it did bluetooth, so it didn't need a cable I might actually buy one!

DW1640 - Calibration Area Full error when writing CD-Rs - BenQ DVD Burner / Philips DVD Burner - Club CD Freaks. Well, trying to copy CDs and I got this incredibly obscure error from Nero.

What it means is that on modern CD drives, the laser actually changes power. It calibrates itself and there is an area on the CD where it writes how much power is needed.

The post basically says that bad (or in my case dirty media) can cause this area to get full. So make sure your CD-R is clean and it comes from a good source (I use Verbatim Data-Life Plus which are expensive but more reliable).

Also it might be some strange hardware problem. Some folks think a whimpy power supply can cause it. Hard to believe in my 600 watt power supply monster machine.

Common Stop Messages. I had thought I had fixed my crashing Windows machine by installing the latest nVidia driver 82.xx, but just got another machine check. Seems like there is still a problem.

When the system recovers, it complains about a memory access problm in nvsvc32.exe in the applications event viewer

Faulting application nvsvc32.exe, version 6.14.10.8265, faulting module version.dll, version 5.1.2600.2180, fault address 0x00001e85.

Not very satisfying since it could be hardware or a device driver. Auhma.org has some suggestions