Archive for October, 2005

Too much Thermal Grease

Oct 31st, 05 / 1 Comment

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”:http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showtopic=59602 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:

# 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
# 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
# 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. !>http://www.arcticsilver.com/images/p4_as_dab1.jpg!
# 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.

Hardware

Athlon X2 stress test

Oct 30th, 05 / Comments Off

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

Hardware

Useful MovableType Plugins

Oct 29th, 05 / Comments Off

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”:http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/plugin/enclosures.html. 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”:http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/plugin/photogallery.html. This lets you create a table of photos you have stuffed into directory.

Blogs

DFI LanParty nF4 Ultra D and Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB fix

Oct 29th, 05 / Comments Off

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”:http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9496&page=6&pp=20 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”:http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductList.jsp?ThirdCategoryCode=011016&SortBy=BD&Brand=MAXTOR, there is $2 difference, so get the Maxline III

| Maxtor Product Number | Firmware | DFI nF4 Compatibility |
| 6B300S0 | BANC1B70 or BANC1BY0 | Incompatible, requires update |
| 7B300S0 | BANC1E00 | Compatible |
| 7L300S0 | BANC1G10 | Compatible |
| 6L300S0 | BANC1E10 | Compatible |

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”:http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200407/20040729revisit_1.html costs nearly $275 on “pricegrabber”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=3851929/sort_type=bottomline compared with $130 for the Maxtor.

The new 500GB drives are even more expensive with the Hitachi 7K500 at $370 according to “pricegrabber.com”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Hitachi_500GB_Hard_Drive,__9722200/sort_type=bottomline so really out of reach

Same with the new Seagate 7200.9 500GB, which is a well rated drive according to “anandtech”:http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2577. It also costs $360 at “pricegrabber”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Seagate_Barracuda_7200_9_500GB_Hard_Drive,__12462123/sort_type=bottomline

Hardware

MovableType 3.2 and StyleCatcher

Oct 29th, 05 / Comments Off

Six Apart – Professional Network – Power Tools. Well, have flipped the “tongfamily”:http://tongfamily.com and soon the “geekfishing.net”:http://geekfishing.net blogs over to MovableType 3.2. “Ludwig”:http://www.theludwigs.com 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.

bq. 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)

Blogs

Birthday Party Trek

Oct 29th, 05 / Comments Off

!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”:http://www.metrokc.gov/parks/rentals/pomjun99.htm 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”:http://www.redhook.com/happs_forecasters1.htm 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.

Routes

Speed Link Medusa 5.1 Headset

Oct 27th, 05 / Comments Off

!

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”:http://www.medusa-usa.com/ 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.

Games

Jin Mao Tower

Oct 24th, 05 / Comments Off

!>http://www.building.com.hk/feature/05_00jinmaopic2.jpg! 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”:http://www.building.com.hk/feature/05_00jinmao.htm 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.

bq. 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!

China

Tallest Buildings

Oct 24th, 05 / Comments Off

!

|Rank | Name | Built | Stories | 1. Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan 2004 101 509 1,670
2. Petronas Tower 1, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 1998 88 452 1,483
3. Petronas Tower 2, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 1998 88 452 1,483
4. Sears Tower, Chicago 1974 110 442 1,450
5. Jin Mao Building, Shanghai 1999 88 421 1,380
6. Two International Finance Centre, Hong Kong 2003 88 415 1,362
7. CITIC Plaza, Guangzhou, China 1996 80 391 1,283
8. Shun Hing Square, Shenzhen, China 1996 69 384 1,260
9. Empire State Building, New York 1931 102 381 1,250
10. Central Plaza, Hong Kong 1992 78 374 1,227
11. Bank of China, Hong Kong 1989 72 369 1,209

China

Best USB Flash Drive

Oct 4th, 05 / Comments Off

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.

Gadgets