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Things in my life today are radically different than they were five years ago.  And those five years have truly vanished in a blink of the eye.  My life has never changed more to be honest.

At one point I put a lot of effort in to burning DVDs of TV shows.  I have binders among binders of DVDs.  I still have several unopened spindles of DVDs here that I purchased to continue the effort.  I had no fewer than three TV tuner cards at once.  And in cleaning my room today I had to ask myself whether or not I should keep these DVDs.  The record quality is poor.  There are commercials.  And I’ve never once used or looked at these DVDs since wasting HOURS burning them.

Up until a few months ago I had a PC sitting in the living room with the soul purpose to enable to watch these DVDs.  SageTV made MPEG-2 streaming more of a reality so I wound up doing that most of the time.

Today though not so much.  It’s easier to go online and grab a pristine digital copy of any particular show I want, store it on my big 3TB drive array, and use TVersity to stream it to my PS3.  I even get a bluetooth remote control that works extremely well downstairs.  The DVR records any TV shows I might not want to miss and I don’t need to configure USB UART interfaces and a spare digital cable tuner in order to record something from DIY or HBO.  Also the cable companies seem to offer plenty of free movie choices.

The biggest hurdle I have now is finding the time to watch all 200+ episodes of Bleach or Naruto or anything.  Who can tolerate 40G worth of MacGuyver reruns?

Of course this brings up a very good point: embedded devices are blowing the PC away when it comes to “on-demand” home video.  This is a shame because these devices are often very limited to what they can and can’t do.  Most of these devices have restrictions on what formats you can play or how easy it is to play certain types of content on them.

The pipe dream here is to be able to use any computer in the house or use the playback device, download videos from whatever source to a shared network drive with infinite capacity, and stream it seamlessly to any computer or TV in the house.  And to do this with high quality audio and video with added features you’d expect from a DVD such as subtitles, chapters, audio streams, etc.  Oh, and they key here is that this ability should be very affordable and use technologies already in the home.

I don’t know if it will happen or not.  We’ll see where it goes in five years.  It’s possible that DRM and related technologies will get shoved in our faces more and that will cripple this effort.  You’d think that this’d be pretty easy to do with any modern home PC.  It’s just a matter of software.  Windows Media Server seems to be the only well fledged solution on that front but it’s mind numbingly shallow in terms of formats it supports.

The brings to mind the whole Instant Messanger problem.  IM was great when I first started using it in 1997.  ICQ was free and reckless.  With the pile of bloatware that is modern AIM, ICQ, MSN, or Yahoo can anyone truly say that in the past ten years that IM has improved?  Where is integrated SSL or PGP?  What ever happened to file transfers just working especially for images?  Why can’t Skype have a push to talk button?  Where’s a decent client for Jabber?  Why can’t more clients be universal like Trillian? Why on Earth is IRC still alive?  I might like Yahoo’s feature set if it wasn’t loaded with toolbars and ads and crap I don’t need.

Not everything improves with age in technology.  IM hasn’t.  Email hasn’t.  Windows hasn’t.  Music hasn’t (iPod excepted).  Video has a little but very slowly.  DVI, HDMI, Net Neutrality, YouTube good.  HDCP, MPAA bad.

For more pictures of this project you can visit my galleries.

Several years ago, I was fascinated with peltier elements.  I won’t bore you with an encyclopedic definition but in general terms they’re basically little heat pumps.  You plug them in and one side gets super cold while the other gets super hot.  If you reverse the voltage, you change which side gets cold.  They can be as small as a fingernail or as large as well… only the government researchers know that really.  The bottom line is that you have the power of a fridge in a very small package and with no moving parts.

Computer overclockers have found these very useful in making their PCs run faster.  For me it started with buying one 156w unit, than a 172w, than a 226w, than two of those, and so on and so forth.  I kept increasing my cooling capacity and in turn my computer went fast and faster.  But it was never enough.

And more is better right?

In 2003 I reached the final iteration of my peltier cooling monstrousity.  An 1100w dual water loop cooled behemoth I called “The Cube”.  It consisted of a 226w peltier cooling the CPU directly, a 172w peltier cooling the GPU, and four 172w peltiers chilling the water.  It was big, loud, and required a 20amp 110v circuit to run.

The heat output of this computers CPU and GPU was about 170 watts when overclocked.  More than enough to make the inside of any case in to an Easy Bake oven.  With decent air cooling the CPU may have been stable at around 60c degrees.  With typical water cooling about 45c degrees.  When using a big 226w peltier directly mounted you could expect 30c degrees.  If you want to chill a CPU down below 0 celcius you need The Cube.

I don’t actually know what the final cooling power of this project was but according to the CPUs onboard diodes it was well below 0.  Unfortunately that prevented me from knowing the true temperature.  Also the thermal diode on a CPU may very well be highly inaccurate in that temperature range.

As I mentioned, this system had a 226w peltier mounted on the CPU.  The CPU was operating at about 110w overclocked.  The 226w peltier actually required 300w of power to run.  This also meant that the hot side of the peltier was operating at with over 400w of heat energy.  You can cool the hot side of the peltier with water cooling just like how a car’s engine works.  The coolest you can hope water to be without major evaporation is room temperature.  This is a downside to peltier cooling since how cold the cold side gets is directly proportionaly to how hot the hotside gets.  These peltiers when dealing with CPUs are only reasonably capable of cooling the cold side about 20c colder than the hotside.  If your water temperature is 40c, your peltier hotside is about 50c, and your CPU is going to be about 30c.

The bottom line here is that you want to make your water cold too.  I had to build a water chiller capable of bringing the water temperatures down to under 10 degrees celsius.   After actually doing some thermodynamic math with my target temperatures I discovered that I would need A LOT of power to do this.  Four 172v peltiers later and the chiller was reborn.

And it worked.  The water was able to stay under 10c degrees while extracting the heat from my CPU, GPU, and their respective direct mount peltier units.  Something has to cool the chiller itself which alone generated 1,060 watts of heat energy.  That’s a decent microwave oven worth.  This is where the dual-loop comes in: a completely separate water cooling system designed to only cool the chiller.  This would be known as the ‘hot’ loop where radiators were used to distribute the massive heat load to the air.  The ‘cold’ loop used the chilled water to cool the direct mount peltiers.

Unfortunately this system proved to be highly inefficient.  The amount of heat that was dumped in to the hot loop from the CPU, GPU, and six peltier elements was a stagering 1800 watts.  The entire system itself plus computer parts drew over 2200 watts from the wall sockets once you factor in power supply inefficiency.  That’s the upper limit of a US 20amp breaker.  Forget the expense of electricity, that’s pretty much a guaranteed fire hazard!

I suppose that all of that 2200w ended up as heat energy in my 12×10 bedroom.  I needed to run my 900 BTU air conditioner just to stand being in the same room in the thing and I left my windows open in winter just to keep myself cool.

The overclocking difference that you get at -10c degrees isn’t much greater than what you get at 30c degrees.  The extreme expense of a project like this doesn’t justify the performance gains especially with Moore’s law making all of our gear obsolete in months anyway.  Phase change cooling is more powerful than peltier cooling, produces less heat, and is much less expensive to run.  Even it’s benefits to real world PC performance are really hard to measure.  And it has been with this philosophy that I have proceeded for the 5 years since this project.  I now build quiet and basic water cooling systems that maximize performance at the minimum of cost.  If you’re going to bother for the most performance possible just dunk your CPU in liquid nitrogen.  Why half-ass it with anything else?

Going from the Netgear PCMCIA 802.11N adapter to the DLink USB 802.11N adapter solved all my dropping issues.  I think the real issue might have been the Dell 600m doing something weird the the PCMCIA power during periods of slight inactivity.  I’m happier now though.

Fallout 3 continues to be awesome.

Wrath of the Lich King is interesting.  I haven’t seen any of the new level content.  But the 3.x patch changes a lot of little things in nice ways.  The Druid Feral spec gets some neat little improvements.  It’s interesting to have to learn some things over again.

Still playing with my Vista install although I haven’t put as much time yet in to it as I would have liked.  There are some definite issues with this install.  First off, I’m having major sound issues.  Any 3d spatial sound seems REAL flakey.  My moving the camera I can hear or stop hearing certain sounds.  It sounds very obviously wrong and is a huge drawback to games.  This affects Crysis.  It also affected Bioshock until I enabled it’s EAX compliance.  Alchemy does nothing.  You can see here that I’ve been trying DX10 games.  The other issue is that the machine is a memory hog.  Vista sucks down memory like there’s no tomorrow and it makes 4G look very reasonable.

The list of supported DX10 games is very small.  Smaller than I thought really.  I have been able to notice some DX10 features.  Yeah, it looks a little better.  But the reduced framerates sorta mean I have to run with a bit less resolution.  Especially in STALKER Clear Sky.  I have 7 DX10 capable games as it stands.

The biggest frustration I’m feeling right now though is not being able to download Warhammer Online which means I need to run to the store tomorrow to get it.  Sure, you can download it from Direct2Drive but I hate IGN as a company after the billing nightmare I had with them a couple years ago.  They will not get my business.  The other issue with D2D is the inability to install the game as often as you want.  Steam is great.  It provides patches and updates.  It also allows you to install the game as often as you need on machines if you blow away the OS as I just did.  D2D makes you call their customer service department to reactivate a game after 1-2 installs.  This is retarded.  It can take over 24h for the reset to even happen.

Or, I’ll buy it at the store tomorrow for the same price and I can install it as many times as I want.  I suspect I won’t even need the DVD to play the game.

Also FYI, today I installed brake pads for the first time.  Big step for me :D

I installed Vista 64 Ultimate today on my gaming rig.  I had caught a virus on it and also I had reinstalled XP 32 on that partition several times over.  I wanted to do things from scratch and I wanted to partition the OS and Apps separately.  I’ve never really used Vista or a 64 bit OS before so I figured why not give it a shot.

I really wanted to be unbiased about this.  I went in with no expectations either way.  My own little Mohave experiment.  I acquired a copy of Vista Ultimate SP1 and installed it and that was a breeze.  The install was very quick as was getting all the drivers set up.  I found good 64 bit drivers for everything I have on the machine.

Haven’t had one stability issue yet though I haven’t installed any games.  It is more memory intensive than XP, at least out of the box.  Performance feels a bit more clunky however I have all the bells and whistles enabled.  Firefox and IE7 are noticeably slower.  However, I have a quad core CPU and a powerful GPU so I suspect I am getting more benefit from those.

One downside is certainly the lack of direct hardware support for the Sound Blaster X-Fi card I have.  ALchemy should work okay I guess but Creative really ought to do something about this situation.  Software EAX uses more CPU but again I have a quad core otherwise going to waste.

I really wanted Vista to check out some DirectX 10 features.  Hopefully I will be able to see some on the 8800 Ultra.  There are many new games out with good DirectX 10 visuals that make Vista maybe worth having.  I’ll have to see what I have in my library.  Getting a new GPU to really experience all the new eye candy is tempting but really out of the cards at the moment.

It’s relatively painless to get Vista to stop nagging you about everything.  As usual with any Microsoft product these days, I seem to spend significant time unchecking every option checked and checking every option unchecked.  I seem to be the polar opposite of Microsoft’s ‘generic user’.  However, this really wasn’t any worse than what I go through with XP every time.

In fact, Vista is quite well organized.  I feel it’s a lot easier to navigate than XP.  There are a lot more options but it they’re in the right places usually.  I do feel it’s like a refined XP.

That said, I feel like it’s a refined XP.  I see absolutely no reason why this software should cost so much more money.  I have Vista Ultimate and I’m staring at it and wondering… well what… where… where is everything neat?  What is anything that makes this better than XP?  Granted I’m still looking around.  I fully intend to see what all of these new apps can do.

However, I can’t help but think that $100 is a better price point for Vista.  Hell, I can go buy Leopard for $129 right now.  It’d probably run on my gaming rig tho… it’d defeat the purpose of having a gaming rig.  Still, tit for tat, it blows Vista away for features out of the box.

I have to wonder if Microsoft hands are a bit tied since this anti-trust thing.  I suppose they can’t go throwing neat apps in to Vista left and right the same as Apple can.  I don’t know how that affects free MS downloads.

But Vista is the in thing for PC gaming, no hardware EAX aside.  And as for 64 bit well… does anyone care?  I guess if you want 4G of memory which… in hindsight might actually be a boon to a Vista install.

My jury is still out until I have several months on this thing.  If it games better and I don’t need a GPU, I don’t think I’ll be too unhappy with it.

How I have spent my long weekend:

1.) Playing with the PS3 that did, in fact, show up from the Ebay seller.  I got a TVersity server to stream movies, pictures, mp3s, etc to my PS3 and it works quite well.  Remote Play on the PSP is also amazing.  I can watch movies stored on my file server from anywhere in the house on my PSP.  I can even play my PSX games over the network.  That’s hawtness.

2.) The video card, a shitty GeForce 5200 AGP, blew in the above mentioned file server.  I was planning on eventually putting the spare GeFroce 6200 PCI card I had laying around in to the cube anyway so this sort of spurred me on.

3.) Cleaning the computer room.  Even though I just moved it managed to get horribly disorganized again very quickily.  I’m going to need to organize some of the storage a little better.  My new room is quite large but I still moved too much in to it so now it seems very cramped.  Same with the bedroom so I installed some shelves in there.

4.) FF3 :3

I finally finished installing my Asus P5E3 Premium.  I finally made the switch to DDR3.  I took a big risk in this not doing anything for my performance.  I just wasn’t able to make the Q9450 stable at over 420MHz on the Maximus Formula and suspected this was a chip limitation.

I didn’t have high hopes for the P5E3 in solving this issue.  But, in fact, I gained 30MHz FSB on this board.  450MHz is rock solid while I have problems at 460 which I can’t seem to resolve.  However, 450-460MHz is the sweet spot on the X48 because of latency and tRD etc so I’m happy to be here.

The serious limitation is the fact that I can’t use a 9x multiplier with this chip.  3600MHz is definitely respectable but I bet this could ramp up to 4GHz easy with a better multiplier.  It makes the E8400 look better and better since it can hit insane speeds.

The question remains… is a really fast dual core better than a slightly fast quad core?

As for DDR3, it’s really nice not to have to worry about memory holding me back.  I’m not sure it’s gaining a lot of real world performance.  But overall I’m running about 5-6FPS higher in Crysis which makes it playable at the highest settings.

More info, pictures, and the new watercooling set up can be found here.

I’m not completely happy with the P5E3 Premium.  It comes with 802.11n and I wonder how much money I paid for that complete waste.  Is Asus really that out of touch with their users?  Anyone who’s going to blow that much money on an overclocking motherboard is probably using it for games.  And if those are online games then you really don’t want to be using a wireless connection.  The added latency and instability just isn’t worth it.  Also, coming from the Maximus or Rampage formula with the POST code reader, the on board power/reset switches, the CMOS clear on the back panel, etc are all missing features on the P5E3 Premium.

But my biggest complaint is the lack of voltage and temperature reporting.  This makes overclocking REALLY difficult since the board will over or undervolt any particular setting you make.  If you’re considering upping something like PLL or Termination voltages you really need to know what they are set to at default.  For example, on the Maximus the NB voltage defaulted to about 1.61V.  If I didn’t know that then I would have considered the Auto to a 1.55v NB setting an overvoltage when in reality it would actually be adding less voltage to the mix.

I finally broke down and purchased a Q9450.  MicroCenter had one at better than online pricing so I couldn’t resist.  Unfortunately, it is overclocking poorly for me.  Something is limiting my FSB to under 428MHz.  The 1333MHz FSB of this chip only gives me a 8x multiplier.  So I can only pull about 3.4GHz out of it.

Not sure if it’s the chip or my Maximus Formula.  When I see other modern Intels breaking 4GHz without a sweat I really start to wonder what I’m doing wrong.

I’m going to pick up a Rampage Formula I think and see if I do better with that.  If that doesn’t work than I know this chip is garbage and I’ll get an E8400 or something.

I’m also upgrading my watercooling system with an Apogee GTX Cu, a Laing D5 pump, and a set of NB/SB/Mosfet waterblocks from Slovenia.  I’ll be removing the Laing DDC pump from my system but I’ll still have the D4 in there.  So dual 12v pumps which are not bad to go with my roughly 3×120mm RAD set up, a whole bunch of chipset waterblocks and my watercooled 8800 Ultra.  Why the big upgrade?  My NB is running too hot because it’s getting heated up from the CPU and GPU and i need better detla T’s out of the waterblocks to counter act this summer heat.  I never replaced the stock thermal goop on the Maximus Formula with some AS5.  So my NB temperatures crawl up to 45c easy which is the exact point that X38 becomes unstable.  It might account for my shitty FSB, it might not.  But if I’m going to water cool I’m going to do it right.

If like me you were an early adopter of Core 2 Duo then you probably still have that old E6400 or E6600 rotting on your 975X, P35 or X38 chipset. And, truth be told, there isn’t anything shabby about this what so ever. There’s really very little you can’t do with these processors even now about 1-2 years after hitting the mainstream.

But your friends are now sporting 1333MHz or quad-core CPUs and getting a lot better performance in modern games based on UT3 or Crysis or CoD4. Physics is getting heavier and heavier in every game released and this still needs a beefy CPU for performance even if you have an 8800 GPU of some sort.

If you can stand to wait a little longer than the Q9450 is the answer for you. This is a Yorkfield core with 2×6M L2 cache (for a total of 12M), an 8x multiplier on a 1333MHz bus, and four 45nm cores running at 2666MHz each. I’m not currently sure what price it will fetch but it will run in the $300-$500 range. So finally an affordable version of the Intel top end processors which also support 12M L2 and 1333MHz FSB.

Is it absolutely worth upgrading from an E6600 or Q6600 or E3450 to this processor? That really depends on the rest of your system. I have the Asus Maximus Formula, an X38 board, some good RAM, and an 8800 Ultra. I’ve been playing the newer games and notice that CPU does start lacking sometimes so it seems like the next upgrade I’d need to make. If you need to upgrade your board or RAM to take full advantage of the Q9450 then you might want to wait until DDR3 becomes a bit more affordable before jumping in to a new processor. And certainly if you have an older video card then that should be your first upgrade since it’d yield the best gaming results for you. GPUs are always the most important for gaming.

Of course if you don’t do any serious PC gaming then you really don’t need any of this stuff. Even five year old hardware is fast enough to do anything else you need.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=4137114

With the new boxen comes a new 3DMark06 score.  14318.  A number which reflects the poor overclocking performance of my E6600 (3.41GHz just isn’t all that stable) with the excellent performance of my NX8800 Ultra at 741MHz core (might be stable).

This number won’t last.  I fully intend on destroying it when my Corsair Dominator 9136 arrives this week.  My Corsair 6400C3DF was back for RMA a second time in a year due to failure and after failing to get me a replacement set (after erroneously sending me 6400C5D and then promising me another replacement set and failing to provide) let me get the next set up.  9136 isn’t low latency at 5-5-5-15 but it does run at a cool 2.1V which should buy me some FSB which my E6600 at low multipliers is screaming for.  It’s the perfect RAM for me right now.  I was about through with Corsair but this has given me faith.

The only remaining non upgraded part on this beast is the E6600.  3.4GHz out of a 2.4GHz proccy isn’t bad but with so many others getting 3.6GHz easily on them I’m sad.  Funny thing is that I am getting about 700MHz more out of it on this new motherboard (Asus Maximus Formula).  Cool.  But instead of failing Orthos, when it crashes it just reboots the whole machine.  I equate that problem more to system RAM than CPU.  It might just be stable at 3.42GHz or better with faster RAM.  I was pretty sure this CPU would never get over 3.33GHz though so anything is an improvement.

If there was a decent 1333MHz FSB quad core out now in the affordable price range with 12M L2, I’d be all over it.  But it looks like I might have to wait for a MUCH better 3dMark score.

I usually name my PCs after characters in Final Fantasy. I’m a big JRPG dork, I admit it.

The Cid gallery can be found here.

My Cid thread on LiquidNinjas is here.

Cid is a simple project really. I wanted to buy an Nvidia 8800. It wouldn’t fit in my Lian-Li PC-60. I really liked the look that the VapoChill LightSpeed Lian-Li add-ons have but didn’t want to spend the money or go to phase change cooling. My own PC-60 was getting on in years and suffered from a few stripped holes. But just getting a new case wasn’t in the cards because of some custom artwork dremeled in to my case panels. I decided to buy a new PC-60 and cut the old one down in size. The planets aligned and it also worked out to be a great way to fit a massive Enermax Galaxy in to this tiny case as well as my long unused 7″ LCD panel.

If I could have just gotten a PC-2000A, I would have.

I did a poor job in cutting the case down and a worse job of re-assembling it. There’s only so much you can do on a rubber maid tub in the middle of a dining room on a folding chair with a dremel and no clamping devices. Riveted back together it is strong enough to support the weight a case must support, but its a little wobbly. Someday I will redo some of what I did to make it a bit more stable but for now I’m sick of getting metal shavings all over the house.

I’m about 50% done with the project today.  I still need to install the LCD screen and cut down the side panels, both huge projects which I might outsource to someone who can cut straighter lines than me.   The good news is that the water cooling system is running and has made the 8800 Ultra stable.   More on that later.

I installed a Bulgin Blue LED switch on the front panel.  It took a bit of extra drilling and soldering.  It looks kind of neat but it’s overshadowed by the standard blue power LED right underneath it.