I am still here

I am still battling computers, but have found Wiki formats more satisfying than a blog - so you can find me at lynnlinse.wikispaces.com

I have five quad-cores and three dual-cores (plus other misc systems) all slaving away for me, all running in fairly low-cost setups. Ubuntu's up to 7.10 and has literally evolved to the point where anyone satisfied with OpenOffice and internet access will be happy with it. I use OpenOffice all the time - am writing odd fiction (which I'll soon start putting up at my Wiki site).

Two months ago I finally upgraded my "fun system" away from an AMD A64 solo-core to a Intel Q6600 quad-core. I also abandoned the old XP-OEM license I technically lost the right to use years ago. Instead last year I bought (horded) two legal OEM Windows XP Pro licenses which came with a free VISTA Business upgrade. Cost was $108 each, which isn't bad considering the cost of a "real" VISTA license. Just remember that such cheap OEM licenses don't allow changing motherboards ... which is why I waited until my Q6600 to install & activate.

I did try VISTA again in Jan 2008 when I swapped in the new hardware, but couldn't even last the week as one doesn't expect a quad-core to run slower than a Celeron - plus my backup app hosed the VISTA filesystem - odd, it created a 20GB backup in a portion of the filesystem with PATH NAMES TOO LONG FOR VISTA TO HANDLE! Shocking, I have no clue why an operating system - especially one as over-bearing as VISTA - would allow this. But using VISTA's explorer or even CHKDSK, VISTA just couldn't show, delete or trash the directory created. So I reformatted the VISTA away and went back to Windows XP Pro.

Since all the reviews still say WinXP is 30-40% faster for games anyway, this seems the best answer. I occasionally play Morrowind or Oblivion and see a huge difference in graphics refresh (aka - detect none) compared to my old A64 at 2GHz plus ATIX1600. But, now that graphics are blinding I detect the hiccups where the hard-disk (a Raptor pinging away) needs to thrash in a new game map. Maybe I'll look into RAID 0 some day.

If you're curious, my home play-system now includes (prices as-of Dec-2007):

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz ($274)
• Asus P5K with Intel P35 chipset ($126)
• EVGA/NVidia 8800GT factory over-clocked ($290)
• 2x1GB Curcial DDR2-1066 RAM ($114)
• Windows OEM XP plus free Vista Business upgrade ($108)
  

The case is my old (but beautiful) Coolmaster Wave, and I reused all the drives, fans, power supply etc.

In theory both the CPU and MoBo support DDR3 and faster than DDR2-1066, but the cost of anything above DDR2-1066 was too crazy to consider. As I'm just running Windows XP
Pro (with legal option to run it or VISTA) I've not seen the value in more than 2GB RAM yet either.

Also, this Asus includes some nice auto-over/under clock features ... which is nice since my machine tends to spend more time editing OpenOffice documents than gaming. Thus my Q6600 generally is running down at the 1.4Ghz range and the system chews up about 120-watts idling, whereas the old A64+X1600GPU system idled at 95-watts.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 and wattage

Well, joey-lyn (my home server) is happily running with her new Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 and GigaByte GA-945P-S3 motherboard. Kind of an amazing new thing ... with Windows running but no real activity and the case open, she idles at 67 degrees F (room temperature in my Minnesota basement) and the stock Intel fan even stops turning. First time I saw this I panicked thinking I must have gotten something caught in the fan blades & my new CPU was toast! But I guess the mobo's auto-temp control thinks 67 is cold enough not to need fan RPMs.

Of course she rarely is idle - when not busy for me she runs four BOINC projects ( http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) ; folding proteins, indexing new proteins for patterns, predicting malaria outbreaks, and of course some SETI at home. Yet at 100% load on both CPU she runs between at between 100 to 104 degree F. This is with a stock Intel cooler and a media-player style case. That's a far cry from her first CPU - a 2.53Ghz Celeron D which easily hit 150 degree F at full load ... in the media-player style case with the TOP OPEN. I didn't dare close the case.

I am actually amazed at the power this CPU has - last night I was 15 minutes into viewing a AVI video file with VideoLAN before I realized I hadn't suspended the BOINCs jobs. With the old Celeron or even the A64 processor used last month, I would have KNOWN instantly that I forgot this because the video would run jerky and haltingly. But the Intel Core 2 Duo - even with both processors pegged at 100% by two (2) BOINC jobs - had no trouble running the video as well.

Server's current configuration:

• LIAN LI PC-V800B black anodized alum case - really sweet case, but hard to install CD drives (need to remove power supply!) and you'll want an ATX mobo narrower than 8 inches or you end up with IDE or RAM sockets UNDER the back end of your CD drives!
• ENERMAX Liberty ELT400AWT (400W) Power Supply - I have 3 of these now, wonderful semi-modular design allows removing unused drive cables
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz 2M shared L2 Cache Processor
• GIGABYTE GA-945P-S3 LGA 775 ATX Motherboard - even with the stock heatsink, the chipset runs too hot to touch. Oddly, this mobo offers ONLY a CPU temperature sensor so I cannot even see what temperature the core Intel chipset is running at.
• EVGA/NVidia 7100GS with 512MB GDDR2 PCI-Express - I wanted something with modest power for video and yet is FANLESS. (I prefer large 120mm case fans to the little jet turbines used by onboard video boards)
• CORSAIR 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
• My case has 3 low-RPM 120mm fans with filters - I mounted 2 of the fans by cutting holes in the top plate to blow down on the PCI cards and mobo chips. As much as I hate "door mounted fans", in all of my case mods I've found these can reduce chipset and video temperatures by 5 to 20 degress F. Overall she makes a satisfying, yet quiet purr.
• 250GB SATA 3G WD drive - not big for a "server", but although I call Joey my "home server" I moved my file storage to a DNS323 NAS ("Network Appliance Server") running RAID 1 on dual SATA drives. This gives me more flexibility using Joey as a DVR or DVD/CD burner without risk of conflict between safe RAID files, network access, and the demands of video and DVD/CD burning.
• HP Lightscribe DVD/CD burner (every modern format)

Power usage:
I encourage every computer or multi-media freak who runs systems 24 hours a day to obtain a good quality AC power monitor - I use one from http://www.brandelectronics.com/. You really need to know what that new qizmo is costing you. For example, I cringe every time someone suggest using an old 386 PC running Linux as a "cheap" alternative to a $39 LinkSys/DLink style router. An old PC like this running 24/7 likely drinks $5-6 of power PER MONTH, while the commercial box draws perhaps $0.50. I suppose that makes your PC a "cheap router" if you Mom and Dad pay the electric bills only! It also points out some odd realities - in California my Cox digital cable box consumes 24-watts when "ON" ... and 23-watts when "OFF"! So I guess turning it off just reduces the LED power usage :-)

Measured as AC input to just the computer case (no display etc), Joey the server uses:

• draws 100-110 watts during boot up
• idles down to 95 watts with no CPU load
• running BOTH core at 100% pushes power usage to 125 watts or about 3.0kwh per day. I pay about 7 cents per kwh, so Joey costs me $6.30 per month to run full-time, with about $1.25 of that being the extra juice used to donate CPU cycles running BOINC jobs.

My DLink DNS-323 NAS has just dual 150GB Samsung SATA drives. They run pretty hot, and at present mainly function as backup for boot drives, My Doc-style files, and a collection of software tools. I may upgrade them to a pair of 500GB drives, or maybe not. Most of my multi-media goes onto drives in USB enclosures and burned to DVD/CD as "backup". The power the DNS-323 uses:

• 9 watts when no files are being accessed and the 2 drives are power down - since it spends most of its time idle the NAS costs me about $0.50 per month to run.
• 25 watts when fully active, such as during a file backup or copy

A64 Temperatures

Interesting differences:

The PcChips mobo which properly manages the Athlon64 temperature has a Zalman-clone "cyclone" style copper cooler. It runs at about 2200 RPM and is fairly quiet. The Athlon64 idles at between 75 and 79 degrees F. When pressed to high load it will be running in the 85-87 degree F range. In rare situations I've seen it hit the low 90's. Not bad for a modern CPU. The Speedfan utility can query both the mobo's view of CPU temperature, as well as the AMD K8 CPU offers direct PCI access into the CPU's view of it's own temperature. The direct K8 value tends to be within 2 degrees F higher or lower than the mobo. This gives me fairly good confidence in both values.

In contrast the Asus mobo with the same Athlon64 CPU always saw the temperature at 70 to 73 degree C - and was always running the CPU fan of the CoolMaster copper cooler at minimum RPM of 1400. Direct SpeedFan access to the K8 via PCI put the temperature in the 100 to 110 degree F range. This is a worrying difference - but given my room temperature was in the 72 to 74 degree F range it's rather hard to believe the CPU was really running COLDER than room temperature. So the Asus has to go - I RMAed it back to newegg.

I ordered as replacement an interesting Jetway mobo with an Nvidia chip-set and a mix of PCI, AGP anf PCI-Express slots. If it works with my NVidia 6800 AGP card, this mobo (with 2 PCI-Express slots) will make a good server that can still be in use 3 or 4 years from now.

Asus K8V-MX MoBo with A64 CPU

Summary: happy with my last upgrade, I bought an Asus K8V-MX mini-ATX motherboard for use with a second low-watt A64 3000+ CPU for use as my file server, DVR, and media server. I was sorely disaapointed in the Asus - I'd assumed by preputation the Asus would be easy to use; I was wrong. I may still buy Asus in the future, but for now this motherboard has proven unusable.

My second upgrade was from an old, overloaded Intel Celeron to a socket 754 Athlon 64 3000+. The Celeron had had trouble - even with hardware-assist from graphics and PVR cards - playing encrypted DVD smoothly if there was any network activity. Especially since this was also a file server, remote access during playback would cause hiccups while playing video. The new CPU plays DVD's flawlessly even during file access and the low wattage CPU plus after-market cooler have drastically quieted this worker-bee system. Overall the upgrade was a success, but this is more thanks to the faster CPU and RAM. As I said, this mobo is going.

The Asus K8V-MX motherboard is mini-ATX form with 800Mhz front-side bus, 1 x AGP x8 slot, and 3 x PCI slots. It is a basic motherboard, doing what I need.

Pros:

• Good name in supplier (???)
• BIOS has more options - still missing a few I'd like to see
• Floppy and IDE connectors up near top where they should be
• Asus has mobo and Cool-and-Quiet tools; but are buggy (it issues an alarm any time the Cool-n-Quiet CPU cuts core voltage to 1.0 volt since it expects core voltage to be 1.4v and also dies with memory faults)

Cons:

• Mobo + CPU were a pain to installed and took nearly 6 hours to get running smoothly
• CPU area is a bit crowded for a good after-market cooler
• Putting main power connector so close to floppy/IDE makes that place very crowded with extra wires - assuming you're not using custom short cables. I prefer the main power connector over near the rear of the mobo since it allows excess cable to neatly mounted below the power supply
• Cannot disable boot sources; only shuffle priorities in limited ways. This means cannot enable floppy boot before hard drive if one also has USB drives plugged in while booting or you cannot boot.
• BIOS doesn't understand low-RPM after-market coolers; I had to disable BIOS control to avoid it complaining about CPU fan RPM during every reboot. This causes the CPU fan to remain at its lowest speed regardless of CPU temperature
• Latest BIOS from Asus (which was to fix the RPM issue) doesn't boot Windows 2000 Pro; the AGP driver hangs the system
• Unlike the PCCHIPS, the Asus "CPU" temperature is a full 20 degree F lower than the K8's direct reading. The PCCHIPS is only 1-2 degrees off.

The first problem I had with the Asus K8V-MX was it would hang upon POST during the USB controller initialization. Of course I started with no drives or AGP/PCI cards in place, but since I have a USB mouse I had been plugging in an external powered DLink USB 2.0 hub. Eventually I discovered the need to plug my mouse directly into the mobo and disconnect the hub to boot successfully. Once I things running better, experimentation taught me that that I needed to change the BIOS setting "USB 2.0 Controller Mode" away from the factory default of HiSpeed/480Mbps to FullSpeed/12mbps. I can understand the desire to default to HiSpeed, I don't see how the BIOS in effect "hangs" when connected to a hub which doesn't appear to support it????

The second problem I had with the Asus K8V-MX was my CoolerMaster KHC-L91-U2 cooper after-market CPU cooler idles at only about 1400 RPM and that causes a POST halt for CPU Fan failure and "Press " error every time I boot. I guess Asus assumes we have one of those 60mm jet turbines whining along at 4000+ RPM. Actually, given the over-clocking reputation of Asus this is one of the LAST problems I would have expected from them. Fortunately (and unfortunately) Asus claimed a BIOS ungrade to v2.11 would solve this problem.

This lead to my third problem. After I upgraded the BIOS to v2.11, the CPU fan error dissappeared but Windows 2000 Pro started hanging a few seconds after the white Windows Logo screen shows up. Trying to boot in Safe Mode also hungs. Eventually with enough goofing around I was able to see a BSOD showing that file viaagp1.sys was failing. The BIOS notes didn't mention any change to AGP support. At this point I pulled my PCI cards out - I hadn't installed my NVidia AGP card yet. Just to make sure this wasn't some driver issue I took an old 30GB hard drive and did a fresh Win 2K pro install without any SP or special drivers. After Win2K was running independly, I used the Asus CD and started to install the Via 4-in-1 driver. It hung during the AGP install. After this, my new Win2K install also hung in exactly the same place. I goofed around looking for BIOS settings to disable or adjust the AGP slot to avoid this hang. Eventually I just rolled back to the old BIOS that came with my motherboard and had to disable the CPU fan support.

My fourth problem was there is no way to disable boot sources and for some reason USB drives seem to be lumped in with Floppy drives. Normally I leave the default order of floppy -> hard drive -> CD-ROM. But once I got the USB setting changed to allow booting with my USB hub, the the BIOS would halt when it detected that the USB thumb drive I often have connected did not include a boot image. It was no big deal to change the order to be hard drive -> CD-ROM -> Floppy since the mobo includes a nice F8 "Boot Menu" that enables me selecting the floppy manually the one or two times a year I'd boot from floppy. But I prefer the "old fashioned" BIOS design with allowed one to only define 1 or 2 boot sources and ignore all others.

Temperature Sensors:

• W83627EHF is a Super-IO chip with serial, parallel, floppy, smart-card; Asus seems to also use it for any fan control.
• K8 CPU has direct readout (per SpeedFan documentation)

SpeedFan details (need v4.30 or higher to see K8 Core Temp):

• CPU of W83627 - is 20 degree F lower than K8's sensor, but reacts to CPU load.
• AUX of W83627 - seems closer to the real CPU temperature - only 5 degrees too cool and also reacts to CPU load.
• System of W83627 - assume is the die temp of Super IO chip
• Core - direct from AMD K8 / A64

My worker-bee system consists of:

• Athlon 64 3000+ (51-watt CPU)
• 1GB DDR400 / PC3200 RAM
• NVidia 6200 AGPx8 graphics card
• Hauppauge PVR 350 PCI card
• Sony DVD-ROM
• 40GB Western Digital as main system drive
• HighPoint SATA PCI card in RAID 1 to a pair of Samsung 200GB drives
• Removable PATA rack; I place archived media files on various 200-300GB drives that can be mounted as required
• All wrapped in a old, clunky mini-tower with bad drive mounting options - I will be moving to a nice Lian Desktop case to keep the height low

PCCHIPS M860 MoBo with A64 CPU

Summary: bought PcChips M860 ATX mobo for use with a new low-watt A64 3000+ CPU. While it has worked satisfactorily, I doubt I'll buy another PcChips mobo.

My first upgrade was from a socket A Athlon XP 2400+ to a socket 754 Athlon 64 3000+ . Gigahertz-wise it is pretty much a wash since they are 2.08 and 2.00 GHz respectively. Comparison tools suggest a 5% boost for normal work and 20-25% if the 64-bit feature is used. While it's hard to detect a 5% improvement, I did notice some peppiness in certain graphics and menu options. Overall, the main value I've seen so far is the cooler and quieter behavior. I've even disconnected 2 of the 4 chassis fans I had running.

The PCCHIPS M860 mother board is ATX form with 800Mhz front-side bus, 1 x AGP x8 slot, and 5 x PCI slots. It is a good basic motherboard, doing what I need.

Pros:

• Mobo + CPU installed and booted very painlessly
• Plenty of space around the CPU for a good after-market cooler
• VIA chip sets have been good to me in the past

Cons:

• BIOS has few options (can be good for some)
• Floppy and IDE ribbons are all at the "bottom" of the mobo, meaning running the ribbon cables up to the normal CD-ROM and drive location nearer the top
• Had to reflash the mobo to obtain meaningful temperature readings
• All of the "latest drivers" at PCCHIPS web site are much older than the CD supplied; the CD being new is nice, but it implies the vendor is pretty lazy in support for older products since they don't even bother to put existing new drivers up
• PCCHIPS offers no tools which show board stats (temp, volts etc). I use these to setup my SpeedFan details. Without this it can be tricky to decode the various temp readings.

Overall the CHCHIPS mobo is suitable for someone like my Mom who just use their computer with a minimum of concern for adjustment. I'll continue to use it until my jump to a dual-core system.

Temperature Sensors:

• IT8712F is a Super-IO chip with serial, parallel, floppy, smart-card; it doesn't seem to used on this mobo for any fan control.
• F7583 appears to be a temperature sensor and fan control chip
• K8 CPU has direct readout (per SpeedFan documentation)

SpeedFan details (need v4.30 or higher to see K8 Core Temp):

• Temp1 of IT8712F - is not connected; is garbage
• Temp2 of IT8712F - assume is die temp of Super IO chip; is 82-84 degree F usually
• Temp3 of IT8712F - seems to be not connected; is garbage
• Local of F7583 - is mobo / chipset; controls Chassis fan?
• Remote of F7583 - is CPU plus 1-2 degrees F; controls CPU fan?
• Core - direct from AMD K8 / A64

My for-fun system is good & basic; not a power system, but good enough the games I play and the work I do:

• Athlon 64 3000+ (51-watt CPU)
• 1GB DDR400 / PC3200 RAM
• ATI radeon X1600 AGP graphics (good for games like Oblivion)
• HP DVD R/W with LightScribe
• LiteOn DVD-ROM
• 80GB Samsung drive
• Creative Audigy 4 Sound Card
• All wrapped in a nice CoolMaster aluminum ATX case