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Loading ...You only notice when things go wrong…
combatus
I’ve had a bit of a time of it recently PC wise. I’ll start first with my dissatisfaction with a certain watercooling manufacturer, or should I say two, who produce full cover cover blocks for graphics cards. The first I bought for my 6800GT a few years ago and that was fine. Indeed the second for my X1900XT was also fine. Then the trouble started…
I upgraded this block to one with higher performance and less restriction but never got to find out just how good it was because fitting it fried the card. Oh how I hate the smell of burning silicon. It’s still unknown what happened but from the looks of things the VRM plate didn’t fit particularly well and may have shorted something. I blogged about my watercooled Crossfire setup and those who read it will know I again had issues with one of the blocks fouling a capacitor on the board. A bit of modding with a dremmel sorted this but neither the supplier nor manufacturer have mentioned this on their websites following my emails so use these combinations of block and GPU at your own risk!
I’ve now moved to a setup with a single 8800GTS 512MB (G92) and things have got worse! The first block I bought came with the wrong screws so that is on it’s way back, although the block did fit the card at least (read on). The second block appeared to have come from another planet in that it fouled practically every component on the card.
My 8800GTS is a reference card so seeing that these companies should be using it as template you’d think they should fit?
On closer inspection, I noticed the layout of the block looked suspiciously like it should fit a 3870. I also noticed that the picture of the 3870 block from this manufacturer looked identical to the block I had and not like the block for a G92 card. My suspicions were confirmed when I test fitted the block on a 3870 and it fitted like a glove. This issue was confirmed by the supplier who said they’d recently noticed it to. In desperate need to finish my system and re-attach the sidepanel for good (yeah right!) I ordered another card from a different supplier. Shock horror this one is on it’s way back to with the same issue - G92 block in an AMD HD 3870 box!!! ARRHHH!!! Do you ever wish you didn’t fiddle? Oh well. If you ever wandered what 5 £50 full cover GPU waterblocks looks like then check the pic below outor pop round and see my desk. Not a pretty site and Combatus is not a happy bunny! Does anyone have a waterblock that actually fits a G92 8800???
If you need an AMD HD 3870 waterblock then you can probably find one any Royal Mail van given the number I’m sending back…
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Loading ...An Easter full of modding!
combatus
I don’t know about you but I have to scream and shout to get any decent modding and gaming time these days! I’m lucky to be home from work by 6pm and weekends of late have mainly been spent under my car taking advantage of the dry weather. The rest of the time it’s too wet for any serious outside modding but at least it means I’ve been working on www.watercoolingmatrix.net ! If you haven’t submitted your system, well why not!
This weekend though, and indeed next week too as I’m off work for a few days, is going to be full of modding. Firstly I have a side panel window kit coming for my Stacker from www.thecoolingshop.com
My choice to save money by opting for the non-windowed version when I bought the case a few years ago was one of the worst decisions I ever made! This weekend I hope to right it and have UV light pouring out into my room with a nice view of my watercooling. It’s dremmel time!
Secondly I have an AC Ryan UV cable tidying kit on it’s way to me which has the following goodies in it:
Each kit comprises of 8 items (incl. 10m / 30ft of FlexSleeve™):
- FlexSleeve™ 3mm (1/8″) : 3.3m (10ft) UVcolor
- FlexSleeve™ 6mm (1/4″) : 3.3m (10ft) UVcolor
- FlexSleeve™ 10mm (3/8″) : 1.6m (5ft) UVcolor
- FlexSleeve™ 13mm (1/2″) : 1.6m (5ft) UVcolor
- Heatshrink Tubing 10mm (3/8″) UVcolor : 30cm (12″)
- Heatshrink Tubing 20mm (3/4″) UVcolor : 30cm (12″)
- Heatshrink Tubing 25mm (1″) UVcolor : 15cm (6″)
- Tie wraps : 10 pcs
Kit is less than £7 HERE
My cables have been a mess for while now and this kit should hopefully make things look meaner (and greener).
Also on it’s way to me is some new OCZ Freeze Thermal Paste.
The paste is the new king of pastes beating even the mighty Arctic Silver 5 and CoolaboratoryLiquid Pro in thermal transfer performance in a recent test of scores of different TIMs. I’ll be replacing the gook on all my waterblocks over the weekend.
Not a bad bunch of kit for less than £20! I say we all get modding kit instead of Easter Eggs personally, except Smarties ones of course!
So do you have anything planned for your PC this Easter?
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Loading ...SLI/Crossfire - the next upgrade?
combatus
I blogged about Nvidia and ATI’s relentless push for dual graphics setups a while ago [clicky] and spoke about the rediculous situation with high end boards - every single high end board out there has dual PCI-E graphics slots but hardly anyone uses them so why can’t we ditch one and get extra functionality?
This has also been mentioned several times in CPC by the well informed Ben Hardwidge who agrees with this to. So with 3-way SLI upon us and dual GPU cards due out in the next couple of months, with little news on faster single core variants, will everyone have to opt for some kind of dual GPU setup? Those of us who save up and get the best single card hoping it will last for a couple of years of high end gaming may have no choice but to opt for something that resembles a 7950GX2.
Well if this is what it will take to run Crysis at playable frame rates at 1680×1050 then so be it I hear you cry!. Hold your horses is all I can say - the 7950GX2 may well be the fastest DX9 card ever made, but they have been fraught with problems and many owners simply weren’t able to get the most out of the card due to flakey drivers and the card wouldn’t work at all with Vista to start with. There have been several people on the CPC forums asking why their GX2 is no faster than a mid range card in games even though SLI is enabled and they’ve checked everything. Its the same reason two cards don’t always scale well in some games - infact very few games scale well with SLI, at least not enough to warrant the extra money.
So is this the only option? The only way to boost framerates for the forseeable future is to do the unthinkable and get an SLi or Crossfire setup? It certainly looks this way. One would hope that both companies are hard at work making bloody sure these cards don’t suffer from the same issues as their predecessors. We’ll have to wait and see if this turns out to be the case. In the mean time I really do hope that Intel enters the market and shakes things up a bit. They say three’s a crowd, well maybe ATI or at least the graphics department at AMD, might go bust. Who knows. I just hope that those of us who have been saving get something worthy of our hard earned cash this spring.
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Loading ...CPC Benchmarks Top 100 + Festive clocking
combatus
I set myself a little challenge a month or two back to try to stay in the CPC benchmarks top 100. - without spending any more money of course! All was fairly easy to begin with - my scores of 1100 and eventually 1200 were enough to keep me in the top 80. But now the heat has really turned up and now there are only a handful of Dual cores fighting amongst the Quads for position.
Following the dimise of my X1900XT, my watercooling is now minus a GPU in the loop and this means there is plenty more cooling to be had for the CPU, RAM and fuzion block system. I go through phases with overclocking. One minute I’m all for it and clocking the nuts of anything than has a frequency, other times I get tired of waiting for Orthos to do its rounds and with the occasional crashes in games no doubt related to a few too many Mhz on something or other!
However tonight I decided to see what I could push my E6600 and OCZ Flex RAM to as my CPU temps at 3.5Ghz (my cruising speed for 100% stability at just over stock voltage) were temptingly low and just begging me to start tweaking!
I completed the various tests of finding the max FSB, RAM speed and CPU speed and then set about finding a balance between them that was stable. I eventually ended up with 415Mhz x9 which pits it in at just under 3735mhz and the ram at 1240mhz. Voltages were pretty hefty by this point 1.57v to the CPU, 2.38V to the ram, but no need to raise anything else yet!
The CPU still idles at around 37′C and loads in the mid 50’s which isn’t too bad - a far cry from the 27′C idle and 44′C load at 3.5ghz though! This was enough to scrape me in at number 100 with a total score of 1324
All I can say is well done to anyone with a dual core system that can crack the top 100 at the moment. It’s very tough going indeed and I’m not sure how much more I can squeeze out of my poor E6600 before it spontaniously combusts!
A Merry Christmas to everyone, especially those who get up to a bit of festive clocking over the holidays, either with their existing kit or some shiny new hardware!
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Backup and storage - when two copies are not enough.
combatus
Losing important files is one problem that is still a thorn in the side of the PC industry. While many factors like hard drive’s failing or a super deadly virus attack are over-hyped somewhat (I’ve only had one drive actually fail in the last 10 years) so long as there is a possibility of losing data, backup is essential.
I consider myself to be pretty good at backing up. I have one large drive in my PC where all my programs, files and photos are stored and I sync this with an external drive every week or so. I’ve lost data once or twice when fiddling around with RAID arrays or formatting drives when installing Windows (completely my fault of course) but on the whole it’s been fine.
Until a few weeks ago…. I was reinstalling Windows and when I ran into problems with a new motherboard recognising a hard drive I decided to try another. I tried both my back up drives – neither of which worked as it turned out to be a faulty board, but in the process I had swapped the data between the two and back again.
All seemed fine – I got a new board and everything installed as it should. Then a few days later I was looking at some photos and found that some wouldn’t open. On further inspection and advice from various forums it was decided that they had become corrupted!!! Not uncommon either apparently and the reason for this was transferring them from one drive to another, in particular amongst large amounts of data (the folder I transferred had all my videos and photos – over 15GB).
Luckily I only lost a handful of photos but this proved to be a dilemma. If when transferring a few files from one drive to another this kind of thing can happen, my back up procedure isn’t enough, as indeed any two drive system isn’t.
I considered a RAID 1 mirror array but then that’s not totally safe from something like a power surge and clearly with watercooling in the system as well, the chance of a bad leak is always there too.
Luckily Custom PC had just reviewed a few online storage companies and after a bit of discussion on the forums I signed up to a site called www.Mozy.com where for about £2 a month you have unlimited storage. I tried a few services before signing up but this proved to be the quickest and the only one where you can easily restore files via several methods (including getting DVD’s sent to you) as well as restore the files+folders in their original organisation and hierarchy – not just individual files.
It takes an age to upload the few gigabytes of data I already had, but once it’s done it’s done. The only downside is that you can only upload from one PC – to do so from another will cost you another subscription. You can however transfer a subscription from PC to another but you have to delete the original backup.
Of course you can just make sure you keep the data on the drive in question and don’t move it like I did and not bother with online storage but what about a fire? Unlikely yes but a possibility.
So this is pretty much solved for me – not only does online storage offer 99.99% security but combined with a basic backup at home it should be all you need and for less than the cost of an 80GB hard drive per year you get unlimited storage. Some other services are free and there are new ones being setup all the time so there might be better ones than the one I’m using.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...New Watercooled Board from MSI
combatus
It looks like more high end boards are getting the watercooling treatment as MSI releases a watercooled board based around the X38 Chipset. It differs from the Asus Blitz and Maxiumus designs of having a single block cooling other chips via heatpipes buy using the hole heatpipe system as a large waterblock with a threaded hole at each end.
This should provide better cooling than the Asus boards as each chip involved has water passing through it. However it’s debateable how well the design will work with air cooling which will more than likely mean a high price for the board as it might only be aimed at watercooled systems.
Asus Blitz
This also raises the question of what will happen if your pump fails but there are ways round this - pumps like the DDC range from Laing have a 3 pin fan connector which you can use to monitor the pump and alert you if it stops working. Chances are you’ll be cooling your CPU too so this will heat up far quicker than the chipsets and would be the first point of instabilty should things get toasty.
The benefits are clear though. Watercooling the CPU puts most heatpipe systems under a fair bit of strain as they are designed to use residual air from cpu HSF’s to cool themselves. Asus have included small fans to counteract this but they are not the quietest things in the world. The central heatsink on my Asus P5K Deluxe is too hot to touch after the system has been on an hour or two and I dare not increase the northbridge voltage.
Having integrated waterblocks on a motherboard also saves you the hassle and expense of finding and buying some that fit your board and plumbing them in.
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...The case for high speed “Next generation” internet in the UK
combatus
Lets face it. Broadband in the
UK has been a complete farce the last few years. The initial boom has slowed, and while it was great to move from 56K to 512k, finally browsing the Web the way it was meant to be browsed (affordably) 6-7 years ago if you were quick off the mark, recently it’s been a far less pleasant experience.
The “up to xMbits†slogan left many feeling as if they’d been taken for a ride with far lower speeds than advertised. “Fair usage†policies now mean that doing anything more than switching on your PC will land you a snotty letter or email and see your speed reduced even further, especially god forbid if you surf during the evenings when you’re home from work or school (workers call in sick and kids bunk of school please). Ever increasing contention ratios due to over-subscribing and generally poor service add to the list of complaints nearly all of use have had at one time or another.
The situation has stagnated for nearly 5 years. While faster download speeds have meant those big game patches come a little quicker, very little benefits are felt from anything over 3 Mbits. Torrents or anything to do with file sharing rarely go above this speed (3Mbits is equivalent to 375KB/sec) that is if your ISP hasn’t capped torrent download limits already in which case half a megabit would be more than enough for you!
Browsing certainly isn’t any faster on my 20Mbit Virgin Cable Broadband than it is on a 2Mbit ADSL line we also have in the house. The upload speeds for a vast majority of
UK ISPs is still absolutely appalling so we are still left hanging around sending those 5MB emails of holiday pics.
So what is the way forward? Well I’d like to see the same situation with broadband as with do with hard drives. Plenty of room for manoeuvre and keen prices. There is one problem with this though. The outlay for fibre networks would top £15Billion. Now, the companies that would benefit from this have the money to invest but they are reluctant to do it. Why? Because the main feature of this so called “next gen†broadband is WebTV. Internet based streaming TV is already a big hit in Asia and in better-equipped EU countries. It is in my opinion, it’s the future of television and the internet.
Millions of people already download programs over P2P and watch TV programs on applications like the BBC iPlayer. With Internet TV streaming through 50+Mbit broadband connections, HD TV is definitely on the cards too.
Clearly one or two TV companies would be a bit disgruntled with this, namely Sky and Virgin Media, who already hold healthy numbers of subscribers to their services.
Until they back down and let broadband take it’s own course, the UK will be stuck in the Dark Ages as far as the internet is concerned. We are approaching the limits of what the current networks can provide so the crunch time is only just around the corner.
I just hope we do the sensible thing and go all-out for a decent fibre-based broadband network and not a piddley speed upgrade to 30 or 40 Mbits which will benefit no one.