Faster RAM helped Vista rating

In a previous posting, I mentioned how my daughter's new PC came with DDR2-533 SDRAM. Well, http://newegg.com had a sale on DDR2-800 SDRAM; Patriot 2GB (2x1GB 1.8v) was selling for $94 a set, so I bought 2 sets.

It turns out the new HP test systems my employer buys have DDR2-533 RAM, so I donated the old 1GB from home to one of my test systems to bump it up from 1GB to 2GB. I put the second 2GB DDR2-800 into another of my AMD X2 systems which had only DDR2-667 before, moving the DDR2-667 also to work.

The Acer PC now has a Vista Windows Experience Rating of 5.0 limited by CPU. Before it was 4.5 limited by memory - for some reason the CPU's rating bumped up to 5.0 from 4.9 with the RAM update. So my estimated cost of $740 went up to $850 after the RAM and shipping.

As another side note, I ran a boinc client on this Acer for a few weeks and with its dual CPU running at 100% load 24 hours a day, the CPU temperature hovered around 125 degree F. All of my other dual-core systems can run at 100% load being only 100-105 degree F, but they all have better copper coolers. So I'm assuming the noisy, 70mm stock CPU cooler in the Acer 380 isn't the best. However, if you don't plan to run the dual cores flat out (and my familt will NEVER do so - I'm the odd-ball doing things like that), then Acer's stock CPU cooler is fine. If you plan to do a lot of Video encoding or game playing, you may want to consider a new cooler with at least a larger fan to get better air flow with less noise.

New PC for Daughter

Well, I was planning to upgrade the internals of my Daughter's 5-year old Dell 500SC (with 1.2GHz Celeron) ... but she beat me to the punch and literally let the "magic smoke" out. The room smelled for a bit and the system was completely dead - the power supply died. So desiring a solution to last the family for another 4 to 5 years, and given the cost of buying Windows Vista as an "upgrade" I decided to just find a good, low-cost stock system which came prelicensed. Plus my wife likes to touch-n-feel things before buying.

Acer Aspire E380
We found a nice "open-box" Acer Aspire E380 for $590 plus we received a free $50 free gift card. It has a nice "stainless-steel" looking case with black trim - very sharp & wife-approved. Although just manufactured in Jan 2007, I guess this particular model is being axed so BestBuy was selling off the floor model. I've had several Acer notebooks in the past and consider Acer quality acceptable - but their web site and documentation has gone very badly downhill. Off the shelf, the E380's specs were:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ (2.20GHz)
• Acer EM61SM/EM61PM Motherboard, based on NVidia 6100V chipset
  
• Hitachi 320GB SATA 7400RPM Hard Drive
• 2x512KB DDR2 PC2-4300 (533) RAM
• Windows Home Premium (Experience Rating 2.9 limited by graphics)

Home Tweaks:
My first step was to add a PCI-Express-based NVidia 7600GT graphics card with 12 hardware pixel shaders and 256MB DDR3 RAM (worth about $99 online). This boosted the Windows rating from 2.9 up to 4.5, with the rating now being limited by the rather pathetic system RAM. The 7600 is rated at 5.9; the X2 processor is rated 4.9 and even the stock SATA hard drive is rated a 5.6. Not bad for a computer costing less than $600.

But NVidia suggests a minimum 350-watt power supply with 18A of 12vdc power for the 7600GT, while the E380 came with only a 300-watt supply split between 10Amp and 13Amp 12vdc rails. Given the old PC died from power supply failure and the E380's stock power supply was blowing some pretty hot air out the back as-is, I upgraded to an EnerMax 400-watt ELT400AWT ($75 online). This is the 5th system I've used this supply in and I have been pleased with the results. The ELT400AWT has modular cables for the drive power, a large 120mm fan, and after installation is blowing nice, cool air out of the Acer E380. It is rated for a total 12vdc of 30A being split with up to 20A on either of two 12vdc rails. That should satisfy both the NVidia 7600 and the DVR card I may add later. Since my daughter doesn't play PC games I don't foresee ever needing to add higher graphics power to this PC. Actually, I was a bit surprised at the temperature difference between the stock and EnerMax supply - since both were running the same load I can only assume the stock supply had a super low efficiency.

I added a quiet 120mm door fan with external filter. I like the Antec Tri-Cool fans, as they include a small switch to select 1 of 3 speeds (and therefore 1 of 3 sound levels). As much as I hate the fan cable linking the door to the case, blowing air directly onto the top of the PCI cards and the various chip sets has such a noticeable impact on lowering temperatures that I feel obligated to do this. Luckily the Acer has a perforated door grill which allowed the fan to be attached via 1.25-inch machine screws without cutting a 120mm hole in the metal door.

The only tweak remaining is the slow RAM. While the Acer EM61SM Mother board has no real manual (even online), from everything I can find it should support DDR2-800. But I'm in no hurry ... as soon as I find a use for the old DDR2-533 RAM I'll buy 1 or 2GB of DDR2-800 to swap into this system. Until then it runs pretty well.

Issues to watch for in buying "off-the-shelf" systems
With margins being squeezed, builders like Dell, HP or Acer tend to skimp on the specs that normal people don't look at. The difference between a $600 and $1200 system is rarely enough to justify spending the extra $600. In my case, I prefer to buy the $600 system and spend another $200-300 to make a system better than the $1200 one would have been.

Things I have found "lacking" in stock systems:

1. Slow hard drives - I've had a few stock systems come with 5400RPM instead of 7400RPM. When was the last time you saw a Dell or HP add mention the RPM of the drive? They don't - just the drive size. Even launching the "Device Manager" won't show you the drive speed; you need to find the model number and search the web (I did this for the E380 and was happy to see the drive was SATA and 7400RPM.) Would swapping drives void your stock warranty? I'm not sure, but I would guess not.
   
2. Slow system RAM - to be honest, this Acer E380 is the first system I seen that came with such under-powered RAM. But again I guess it is to be expected since all the big-box shops just list the RAM size and maybe the DIMM's used. Launching the "Device Manager" also won't show you the drive speed; I guess the only thing you could do in the store is reboot to the system BIOS and see what it says - but I wager it just says "auto" for speed. Would swapping memory sticks void your stock warranty? I'm not sure, but I would guess not.
3. On-Board graphics - of course this is a rather common and easily detectable issue. These days one should assume the built-in graphics are useful only for normal office applications and watching videos. In truth, this is best since the extra graphics power needed for gaming literally puts a "power tax" on all usage - adding to people's electric bills whether they need that GPU power or not. Would adding a plug-in graphics card void your stock warranty? No - I assume ... unless it overloads the stock power supply.
4. Power supplies - while I always assumed the "stock" supplies would be less-than ideal, until I discovered the extreme "hot-exhaust-air" difference between the Acer E380's stock power supply and the rather modest-cost ($75) after-market power supply I did not think the gap was so great. But clearly the stock supply was creating a good deal more heat, which ultimately means it is running at LESS efficiency. To bad my AV power meter is back in Minnesota so I couldn't compare the actual watts-consumption difference. Would swapping in a good power supply void your stock warranty? I'm sure it WILL, which creates a sad irony ... if your good graphic card fries the stock power supply (and you remove the card BEFORE getting the system serviced) then the maker would need to fix the "bad" power supply. Yet if you put in a good supply which won't burn or cause such warranty repairs, you void the warranty.
5. Microsoft License - a little known issue is that buying a "stock PC" purchased with an OEM Windows license does NOT give you the right to change motherboards or "upgrade" the computer. This is something I learned the hard way - with calls to Microsoft to overcome authentication issues with Windows XP on another old OEM system. In effect, the low-cost "royalty license" included with your stock system is tied to that motherboard - a new motherboard requires a new license ... although with my phone call and excuse that the old motherboard had burned out, the fine folks in the South Asian call center gave me codes to reauthenticate the old XP license on the new motherboard, but I should not assume that will happen a second time!
   

End Result: so by spending $540 (PC minus gift card value) + 75 (power supply) + 100 (NVidia 7600GT) + 15 (door fan) for a total of $730 I obtained a working family computer with Microsoft Vista Home Premium and an experience rating of 4.5. If and when I update to DDR2-800 RAM the experience rating will be 5+. Given the license limitations of the OEM Vista license I was careful to buy a motherboard which should still be effective 4 years from now. With 2 PCI-express slots, 2 PCI slots, 4 DDR2 slots, 8 onboard USB ports and an AMD AM2 socket, the E380's motherboard will surely be obsolete even 2 years from now, but it should still be serviceable and effective for many years.

I doubt even spending $1100 for a "fancier" stock system from Acer or HP or Dell would have given a better result. I can still put together faster Ubuntu Linux systems from scratch for $350-450, but they don't require Windows license fees nor fancy GPU power.

The Cost of Power

Summary: Some musings comparing work accomplished by my computer to my personal out-of-pocket costs for the electricity to feed it 24-hours a day - something I dare say very few home computer users look at.

Last month I upgraded a Celeron D 2.53GHz media server to a Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz. When not using the server for "media" (watching DVD or recording broadcast TV), I run BOINC/Rosetta distributed science jobs on it. Since the Celeron D was functional, I moved it to an old chassis & updated the power supply - both have efficient, after-market power supplies.

As a hobby (and part of what my Mother would call our inherited Scot's blood) I enjoy using an AC power meter to evaluate the cost of running appliances. My meter is from http://www.brandelectronics.com/ and it shows some interesting facts, such as that my Cox digital cable box consumes 24-watts when powered "ON" ... and 23-watts when turned "OFF" :-)

Obviously, the Core 2 Duo - running 2 jobs at once - contributes more credits to BONIC projects than the Celeron D. But I was interested in comparing what I gain given the monthly costs to run my now unnecessary Celeron D.

Computer Summary:

Core 2 Duo: 1.8GHz, 1GB DDR2-800 RAM, 320GB SATA drive, nVidia 7100 (fanless) 400w power supply

• Rosetta Benchmarks; fp=1744 int=3656 (since dual, means maybe fp=3488 int=7312)
• When Idle: CPU temp = 70 DegF, AC power usage = 105 watts
• When both cores at 100%: CPU temp = 100 DegF, AC power usage = 129 watts

Celeron D: 2.5GHz, 512KB PC2100 RAM, 30GB PATA drive, nVidia 6300 (fanless) 350w power supply (it had 1GB RAM, but 1-of-2 sticks went bad)

• Rosetta Benchmarks; fp=764 int=1677
• When Idle: CPU temp = 100 DegF, AC power usage = 98 watts
• When sole CPU at 100%: CPU temp = 125 DegF, AC power usage = 134 watts

I was at first pretty shocked that the Core 2 Duo - even with both CPU at 100% - used less total wattage than the Celeron D. Especially since every time you pick up a computer magazine there are dire warnings about needing a 600w, 800w, or even 1000w supply in a "modern" computer. By the way, a good AC power meter also tracks maximum power - which turns out in my case to be from 140 to 150 watts max when either the Core 2 Duo or Celeron systems first boot up.

Sonce both systems eat about the same power, just rounding the wattage to 130 watts burned 24-hours per day amounts to from $7.50 to $13.00 per month. This ranges includes my Minnesota kwh charges of about $0.08 per KWH and also my California charge of about $0.14 respectively. I wonder how many people understand they pay that much per month to run their computer 24-hours a day? Over a year that totals from $90 to $160 per computer - and this is JUST the computer. I'm not including the wattage used by monitors, printers, Ethernet switches or the DSL/cable router hardware. Plus with the computers running in a cool Minnesota basement, I don't have to include the extra air conditioning load they'd create in a hot climate like my Southern California home.

So now for the true "musing" - if I average the last 10 Rosetta jobs handled for each computer:

• Core 2 Duo: average 10594 seconds and 36.87 credits granted per job
• Celeron D: average 10406 seconds and 22.75 credits granted per job

However, since I'm looking where my $7.50 (or $13.00) per month goes I have to remember the Core 2 Duo runs 2 jobs at once for this same wattage so really one could say I am "paid" an average of 73.74 BOINC credits for each pair of 10600 second jobs that the Core 2 Duo runs. So the Core 2 Duo gives me almost 4 times the BOINC credits for the $100 spent a year on electricty to feed my hungry computer with both cores at 100% load 24-hours a day. Of course, even if the CPU throttled back to idle I'd still be paying about $80 per year to run the computer 24-hours per day.

So should I still run the Celeron D? Should I upgrade it to something closer to the Core 2 Duo? The upgrade cost me close to $450 once one considers the cost of the CPU, the new motherboard, and the new DDR2 RAM. This is an interesting question without a simple answer ... yes, running the old Celeron D doesn't cost me any more from a hardware stand-point ... but I am paying good money out of my pocket for the power.

So what is the real cost of power?