Dark Krimson Update (COMPLETED)

Realized I never actually posted my completed system here so here goes

Many changes has got into the system since the last post.The watercooling portion grew quite abit more than originally planned. Bought a whole set of Bitspower compression fittings for the radiator, CPU block, GPU blocks, reservoir and pump. I even got a Fill Port to fit to the HAF.

Testing the system with the red solution at first was a bad idea. Leakage and spills practically made me lose all of it so I ended up using just plain old distilled water for it. 

Also gotten a set of 3 90CFM long life Cooler Master 120mm fans for the radiator. Way quieter, nice red lighting and moves alot of air.

So with no further ado, here are the pics:

   

If you noticed, I even got to spraying the insides all black. Made it look much cooler :)

Things that I till have not completed:

Sleeving the cables

Side window cutting

White LEDs to illuminate the insides

Project 2010: Dark Krimson

Wow, haven't updated this blog for so long already. For those who didn't know, I actually spent the second half of 2009 in the US. Got lucky to be sent for assignment there for 6 mths by Intel.

And the best thing about the US? Shopping for PC stuff!! :)

So, a Happy 2010 to all of you out there. This year, I've decided to start a new PC project on my current system. Manage to buy my X58 system and all the cool watercooling stuff from US to kick the project off. Why older Bloomfield system instead of newer Lynnfield? I'm waiting for the next gen Gulftown 6-core processor tha tis going to be a drop in replacement for X58 boards (probably still needs a BIOS update).

I'll be going for a black/red theme for my PC. First off, a paint job will be needed for the internals of the HAF932 I'm currently using. Secondly I've carefully selected the below upgrade components to go with the black/red theme:

• EVGA X58 SLI LE
• Core-i7 965 3.2Ghz @ 4.2Ghz
• OCZ GOLD 6GB DDR3 1600Mhz 8-8-8-12 1.65V
• 1.5TB WD Caviar Green
• 2x XFX Radeon 5770 Crossfire (Factory OC)

4770 Benched and OCed

Finally got to do some 3DMark Vantage on SC's build.

If you have read my post on 8800GT overclocking below, I was pretty happy to get about 13.5% boost of performance with voltage mod on my card for a final score of 5,884 on Vantage. Well, after my experience with the 4770, that score don't look too great anymore haha
4770 Default Specs (from Newegg) :

Model
Brand POWERCOLOR
Model AX4770 512MD5-M

Interface
Interface PCI Express 2.0 x16

Chipset
Chipset Manufacturer ATI

GPU
Radeon HD 4770
Core Clock 750MHz
Stream Processors 640 Stream Processing Units

Memory
Memory Clock 800MHz
Memory Size 512MB
Memory Interface 128-bit
Memory Type GDDR5

Ports
HDMI 1 (via Adapter)
DVI 2
TV-Out
DDTV Out

General
Max Resolution 2560 x 1600
CrossFire Supported Yes
Cooler With Fan
Power Connector 6 Pin
Dual-Link DVI Supported Yes
HDCP Ready Yes

Manufacturer Warranty
Parts 2 years limited
Labor 2 years limited


Straight up on first try with everything at stock, the 4770 easily clocked in a score of 6,693! That is easily 800 points higher than my over-volted + over-clocked 8800GT :(
And that was with value RAM and mid-range P43 motherboard! Haih...

To think I had to tweak and try so many things and couldn't even get close to the 6,000 mark. This card just did it without any effort at all and as we know, the 4770 has been known to be a good overclocker. Though heartbroken at my own 8800GT as I was, there's still excitement to see how high we can get this card to go.

AMD cards are different from NVidia cards in the sense that they do not have Shader frequency for you to tweak. Its all just about the Core and Memory frequencies to increase the card's potential. AMD was gracious enough to include an overclocking tool together with their driver installation package. So I pushed the card to 790/840 and saw a healthy increase of ~200points. Nice.

However, noticed that there some missing frames during the Vantage run so decided to go with a little lower memory clock (I don't GDDR5s need to have clocks anyways with their huge bandwidth) but compensate back with a higher Core clock. Missing frames were reduced but the scores also took a dip but not by very much. Stability is much more important than high frames with constant crashing I would say. So this is what I settled for in the end.

I think there is much more potential in this card. Even at the overclocked setpoints, noise was very much under control and the temperature can be considered low with the stock cooling. I just didn't want to destroy my friend's brand new card within the first month so cannot tell what is it's absolute limit yet. But to anybody that is considering buying a low cost solid card that should easily last you a couple of years, this is really the choice to go with unless you can find a 4850 at RM400 or lower which would be even better.

So, sad day for me today as I watch another new card beat my 8800GT through both price and performance. But that did not stop me from finishing Devil May Cry 4 at all the max settings...twice! :)
Those who haven't played it, seriously go try it.

Intel's New CPU Naming

Well, plucked this from Anandtech showing how Intel is going to market their upcoming Lynnfield and Clarksfield processors in both the desktop and mobile segments.

Interestingly, Intel plans to start segreggating their products based on performance into three categories; good, better, best (there is no bad/average in Intel haha). This categories will then be labeled as Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 respectively. So, let's say you plan to buy a new PC/laptop soon, how do you know which you are getting? Anandtech has done a good summary with the below tables:

Desktop Processor	Cores	Threads	Turbo
Intel Core i7	4	8	Yes
Intel Core i5	2 or 4	4	Yes
Intel Core i3	2 or 4	4	No

Mobile Processor	Cores	Threads	Turbo
Intel Core i7	2 or 4	4 or 8	Yes
Intel Core i5	2 or 4	4	Yes
Intel Core i3	2 or 4	4	No

With the above, we can clearly see the performance gaps betwwen each category. The Core i3 lineups are the ones with no HyperThreading and no Turbo Mode to temporarily boost when less cores are utilized. The Core i5 will have Turbo but with no HyperThreading and finally the Core i7 with both features turned on thus having the best performance of all.

This goes against what I believe some of you have concluded that Bloomfield or Socket 1366 will be maintained as the Core i7 and that the new Lynnfield processor will be marketed as Core i5. Because Intel chose not to use QPI link and number of memory channels as comparison, it basically means that the Core i7 will be a mix of both LGA-1366 and LGA-1156 sockets. To differentiate, we have the sub categories:

Core i7 9xx Series - LGA1366

Core i7 8xx Series - LGA1156

Core i5 6xx series - LGA1156

Core i3 5xx Serie - LGA1156

There is no talk about what socket Clarksfield will be using though it is rumored to be using a totally different socket compared to Lynnfield. This is going to complicate the marketing further I think.

Anyways, whether this is the right strategy or not, I believe it will vary from each person's perspective. I mean previously, if I see a core 2 Quad or Core 2 Duo, I know I'm getting a quad core or dual core CPU respectively and its all about choosing the GHz. Now, I have to worry about what socket the CPU I'm getting is using and will it be compatible with my current hardware. Big headache to plan my upgrade path now :S

What you guys think?

Cooler Master 90CFM fans upgrade

It's been a few days since my last post. If there were any readers out there, sorry for that. I had been pretty busy at work and preparations for my relocation to US by Intel. coincidentally, it was also because of these preparations that I had the opportunity to get my hands on the Cooler Master 90 CFM fans I've being eye-ing for awhile.

Cooler Master 90CFM Fan

I was in KL this morning to attend my US Visa interview. Basically everything went pretty smoothly and I had plenty of time left before heading back to Penang. So naturally, I had to make a pit stop at Low Yat first hehe. Walked around and found Sri Computers to be the only one carrying this fan model (or maybe I did not search deep enough) and also for a nice price of RM28. I found these fans selling in Penang as well but they will usually be priced at RM35. So I made a few calls back to see if anybody else needed them and in total I bought 7 of them :)

Here's the breakdown:
1 for SC's build (blue)
3 for another colleague (blue)
3 for myself (red)

Once I reached home and had dinner (about 9pm) I started to fixed up the new fans and try out the cooling improvements and visual effects I will be getting. So checkout the below sequence of blue/red fan comparison, before/after photos, some cable management shots and much more.

Red LED version

Blue LED version

Blue vs Red comparison. Notice the blue has brighter LEDs than the red.

Old set of radiator fans that have been serving me for the past year. Bye bye to them :)

Picture of radiator with current fans

Radiator with new CM fans

PC before fan change

After

Cable management behind motherboard tray. Much work still to do here. I'm planning to sleeve all the wires to make all of them an uniform black and do a much better cable tie cleanup. But it still looks pretty decent the way it is doesn't it? (Self praising haha)

Dark room shot through casing window (would be alittle more impressive if taken with a better camera). Not much to see from this actually. Future mod in plan is to cut a larger side window especially after internal paint job and liquid cooling for graphics, north/southbridges are in place. Water loops are meant to be shown off!

Lastly, a small comparison of cooling improvements with the new fans. With the very quite operation of the fans, I was allowed to power them up with 12V compared to the last set of fans due to noise levels. Also, with the high 90CFM rating, pressure is on that this fans should perform much better than my brandless cheap fans. However, for me, cooling improvements are not the primary reason I wanted to purchase these fans. My main goal is to maintain my current low noise level and at the same time, improve the overall look of the PC in accordance to my red coloured theme.

The results:

Temps before

Temps after. A 2C drop for the CPU and an overall 1C drop for all hardware in my case. This shows that the CM fans have increased the exhaust rate of hot air from the top which allows the negative pressure created internally to bring in cooler air from outside at a faster rate. Very satisfying results.

That's all folks! Hope you enjoyed the read and stay tune for my next posting on updates/benchmarks with SC's build. See ya!

8800GT Overclocking with Voltage Mod

Well, after my power consumption check in one of my earlier post, I'm very much keen to go back to pushing my PC's limits since I know it's not the main culprit of my high electricity bill hehe.

Since the beginning, I've pretty much concentrated on overclocking the CPU. I felt more comfortable doing that because I know I have more than adequate cooling on it with the Swiftech water cooling setup. I was getting about 32C with air-conditioning and about 38C at room temp which was very very good in my perspective. The first processor I got from Intel and into this system was the QX6700 (Kentsfield). I was able to push it to about 3.6Ghz from its stock 2.66Ghz. That was using nearly 1.45V and temps was reaching 45C at idle. I really want to hit that sweet 4Ghz spot.

QX9650, 45nm Yorkfield

I have since swapped the Kentsfield for a newer QX9650 (Yorkfield 2.93Ghz) processor. Using FSB overclocking, the highest I got was 3.9Ghz. The moment I tried 400Mhz FSB or higher, the BIOS just would not boot and it will default all settings back. I checked around in the forums and found out that my board, the Foxconn X38A, had significant FSB hole issues which varies from customer to customer. For my case, the hole was at 400Mhz. I do not know if there are any passing regions above 400Mhz bsince I did not try pushing blindly passed it. Foxconn has also appeared to have stopped updating the BIOS for this board to improve on overclocking (I'm never buying Foxconn again) So I went with multiplier overclocking instead. Using the mobo's recommended voltage setting based on the multiplier number you chosed, it took me only 10 minutes to climb from a ratio 9 to a ratio 12 effectively bringing me to 4.0Ghz. Voltage required was a low 1.375V :)

Anyways, back to what I really want to talk about, my graphic card overclocking experience! The Galaxy 8800GT that I own ships with all it's clocks at default NVidia stock settings: 600Mhz Core/1500Mhz Shaders/900Mhz Memory. My original card was defective after a few weeks (would not show BIOS but ok in Windows) and I got it replaced while under warranty. At that time, Galaxy had already revised it's 8800GT lineup and offered it in two new configurations; one with a Zalman copper heatsink and the other with a dual slot covered cooling. Both had 2 6pin connectors at the back instead of the regular 1 for all 8800GTs which Galaxy said is supposed to improve voltage stability for overclocking (cool!). Here are the cards:

The dual slot cooling version

The Zalman spiral copper heatsink version

What I ended up getting was the two slot full cover version. Though I was pretty pissed since the Zalman version looks much cooler and probably cools way better anyway but I soon had a change of mind. Remember when I said that these cards gave you option to connect two 6-pin power from your PSU? Here is why: The card comes with its on 3-phase voltage mod jumper! By changing the position of the jumper from it's two positions or removing it totally, you get to decide 3 different core voltage the card will be getting. Good news since no more solder gun or wires needed to volt-mod this card.

Observe the yellow colored jumper located at the end of the card next to the dual 6-pin connectors.

However, I did not try the jumpers partly due to worries of total system consumption but not anymore haha. However, found out that Rivatuner, the popular tool for Nvidia & ATI GPU overclocking, is not able to recognize the drivers I have installed. Though I was able to force it to recognize the driver version, I just won't be able to trust the overclocking done by it. So, looked around and found another cool tool to get the job done. Introducing, EVGA Precision software. Too bad it only works for NVidia cards.

EVGA Precision

Armed with 3DMarkVantage, here are the overclocking results. I slowly increased the core clocks with increments of 10Mhz each with shaders unlinked. I did not hit any issues midway and stopped at a healthy 685/1680/950 configuration for my first benchmark.

Do note that at stock clocks, the 8800GT gives about 5,200+ GPU scores. Here we are seeing a 5,552 GPU score. A nice 6.7% increase. Also, the test completed without any errors or freezes indicating the card is still stable. Temps measured during benchmark (thanks to EVGA Precision's added feature to display on-screen real-time GPU temps) was steady at 70C. Stock cooler is holding on it seems haha

Let us continue. Next stop: 690/1680/960 (increase in core and memory clocks)

Did not see much increase in with a 5,571 score so time to take a more aggressive approach. I linked the shaders to the core and increased the memory clocks to hit a nice 1000Mhz(Galaxy uses higher rated Samsung chips known to hit 1100Mhz which can perform better compared to the usual Qimonda memory). Benched at 700/1750/1000 clocks:

Now we're talking. GPU scores have hit 5,792 here. Thats a full 500+ points increase over stock values. For the final bench, I increased the core clocks another 10Mhz for a final configuration of 710/1775/1000 and Oced my CPU back to 4Ghz (I went back to default temporarily for the power consumption analysis). This is where my PC currently stands:

In summary, I've managed to squeeze an extra 13.15% of performance from my card with the voltage mod (Final GPU score of 5,884 vs stock's 5,200). I know my card cannot hit 700Mhz without problems when I tried last time and that has been solved with higher voltage provided to the chip. However, the card temps are now hovering dangerously near the 80C limit I set for myself (I just don't like to see high temps on any of my parts) and started to show artifacts on ATITool around that temp. However, if I were to water-cool the card or perhaps get the Accelero cooler, I could actually push the clocks even higher :)

Anyways, that's news for another day. For now, I'm just gonna enjoy my extra graphics boosts with some games (let me see how much better frames I get in Crysis hehe). Some closing pics showing improved Windows rating before/after OC. Bye guys!

Graphic score of 5.9 before OC

Graphic score of 6.1 after OC

Broken Hard Disk

My hard disk has been faulty for a couple of months now and I've been delaying on what to do until recently it started to crash my OS after 10-15mins of use (worse when I try opening a movie or starting a game).

The faulty drive

So, what happened to my Seagate drive? First, it started to make some pretty weird screeching sounds when it's on high activity. Then it started to show signs of failure during boot up. My BIOS would pick up the S.M.A.R.T readings from the disk and reported that the hard disk had a BAD status. At first I ignored it but apparently I had to hit the F1 button to proceed with boot up each time and it was annoyingly happening more and more frequently. Especially when your PC makes a smart move of updating your OS and rebooting and then you wake up in the morning to see it stuck at that BIOS. Practically a whole night of torrent-ing wasted.

Windows has also frequently popping up warnings of a faulty disk and recommends me an option to back it up and get a replacement as soon as possible but I simply chose to ignore it at first. I mean, after all I'm still able to boot to my Windows and do what I wanna do just as usual, caveat the few annoying stuff above. But recently, just as I stated at the beginning, it has taking it's vengence to a whole new level; crashing my OS to make sure I can't ignore this issue any longer as it is impeding my normal usage. :(

So, during lunch time, went over to Queens Bay Mall top floor and got me self a new 640GB Western Digital Caviar Green. The shop there was known for high prices and they did sell me the hard disk for RM219 which is about RM5 higher that PC Depot's price (PC Depot used to have very bad service and high prices but seems to have improved alot recently). Ironically, when I was building my PC, I was recommended by my friend to get a WD but I stuck with Seagate cos it was cheaper at that time. As you can see, I'm not gonna do the same mistake twice after what happened.

Anyways, my OS is now happily running on the new hard disk with no issues (let's hope it stays that way) but what I really want to share with you guys is how to check for your hard disk warranty and get a replacement drive for your faulty one. I do not know about Samsung and Hitachi but for Seagate and Western Digital, they allow you to check on the current warranty status of your drive at anytime through their website.

Seagate: http://support.seagate.com/customer/warranty_validation.jsp

Western Digital: http://websupport.wdc.com/warranty/serialinput.asp

So I went over to the site and checked on my drive's warranty. Bought it in 2007 so let's see what Seagate says. Typed in my Serial Number and Model Number (click for larger image):

If you're wondering where to get the Serial and Model numbers from, they are on your hard disk top label. I also noticed a suspicious "Certified Repaired HDD" line added on the label as can be seen below. Did I get scammed into buying a refurbished drive from the beginning? Hmm...

The Serial and Model numbers

And the warranty check results (click for larger image):

Apparently Seagate was kind enough to provide a 5 year warranty for their drives. The above shot shows my drive's warranty is valid till Aug 2012. This is different compare to Western Digital's 3 years . With Seagate's drives falling off so easily, it's good thing they are giving longer warranties to keep their customers satisfied otherwise sure kena complain teruk teruk :P

The next step would then be to RMA my drive to get a replacement. I'm going to try do it all online. I did not want to create an account with Seagate yet so I chose to return the product as a Guest. This is the link I went to: https://store.seagate.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/SgCheckWarrantyView?langId=-1&krypto=lZV0ifY90uy6PUbeNYxmlJ/eOamQTU8vX/yVcskL7Ra8YMmV34QjfaXbpO6NlvwR%2BTEC3tVdnhJ0%0AtmaQWKyGUNscSUkjrgNNSrX6sZWZFxPTN7qiNOvGlw%3D%3D&ddkey=SgSSORedirect

You'll have to fill up the Serial and Model numbers again and then enter your shipping address.

After I have finished the entire process of filling up some simple forms, Seagate basically provided me the address I should ship my hard disk to and also my RMA number so I can track the progress of my replacement. Of course this means I will have to bear the cost of delivery myself though the return will be covered by Seagate. I wonder if there is anywhere in Penang where I can do a walk-in RMA to avoid this cost.

Return address sample label (if you're wondering about the grey lines, it's cos I greyed out my address :P)

Seagate also provided instructions and specifications for the packaging because if it does not aligned with Seagate's requirements, they will void the warranty and blame the defect on the possible en route shipping mishandling :S

If you want an idea of how its like: http://www.seagate.com/support/service/pdf/pack.pdf

So I hope this helps some of you and excuse me while I go hunt for ESD packets and empty boxes.