Setbacks on the Reiter rig and the Oh Baby! post

I was expecting to be finished the Reiter rig by now but it seems that the Gigabyte board I am using doesn't like overclocking much at all. Bit disappointed about that but luckily I can rectify the situation. I have decided to pickup a E6600 to go into the Gigabyte board running at stock speeds and then am going to use the E6300 in another board that will go into the Reiter rig. I am probably going to use an ASUS P45 chipset based board now instead as I know that they have pretty decent overclockability. Will have an update on this again in the future.

As for the Oh Baby! rig post, it has been taking a lot longer than I expected to write it all up. 100 pictures will do that to you though. Still working on getting everything written up and ready to go. Bit disappointed that I couldn't have it up earlier but I'll keep working on it till it's ready.

Overclocking the Gigabyte GTX 670 OC Edition

So I've finally managed to put away a some time to write this post bit by bit so that I can have more time to work on the Oh Baby! rig post. I've managed to benchmark the overclock on six games that have actual benchmark programs built into the game. The games are Mafia II, Just Cause 2, Far Cry 2, Dirt 3, Dawn of War 2: Retribution, and Batman Arkham City. It is a bit odd how all the games happen to be sequels, but it seems more like a coincidence rather than anything else. One thing I like to look at is if the games are V-Sync stable. When I say this I mean averaging at 60+ FPS consistently. The reason I prefer V-Sync is because with this card it can cause tearing in the screen very easily if the FPS is much too low or very high and takes away from the visual experience. I recently downloaded the newest beta nVidia driver (306.02) as it has some minor improvements for the GTX 600 series cards. 


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An update on the Gigabyte GTX 670 OC and the Oh Baby Rig

I've been meaning to do the Oh Baby! rig build post for a while but haven't managed to get to it yet as it's got  approx 90 pictures of building content so it's been on the backburner for a bit. As for the Gigabyte GTX 670, I popped in MSI Afterburner and overclocked the GPU to 1147MHz Core Clock and 1850MHz Memory Clock (3700MHz effective). I have yet to load Arkham City back up to do another benchmark, but considering it's performing at almost stock GTX 680 clocks, it should be a fair bit of an improvement over the out of the box clocks. I have yet to see if I can push the clocks any higher in terms of the core clock, but I know that with the memory clock of 1900MHz the card will crash, so 1850MHz seems like the stable limit for the most part. I may explore overclocking the core clock more though in the future, but for now it certainly is a good set of numbers. I also scaled back the Power Limit from 100% to 98% just so it doesn't overpeak the core clock. Hopefully I can get to the benchmark and Oh Baby! rig post by the end of this week though so stay tuned.

Gigabyte GTX 670

So I ordered a Gigabyte GTX 670 OC version (model number GV-N670OC-2GD) off of NCIX last week for 450 dollars after tax. It was a great deal cause I got free shipping, and 2 free games (Mafia 2 and Borderlands 2). For that price how could I go wrong? I needed an upgrade from my singular GTX 460 (if you read in one of my previous posts, I mention how my SLi config got ruined because one of my 460's died) so I decided to step up from it I would need a new 6xx series card. GTX 680's are a bit too overpriced in my opinion, and even though the new GTX 660 Ti's just came out and are 100 dollars cheaper, I wanted the 256-bit bus vs the 192-bit bus that the 660 Ti provides. That way I can be sure that I'll have a GPU that will perform rather excellent for the next couple of years. It's a shame I still have a sandy bridge processor (so I can't utilize PCI-E 3.0 speeds) but I'm sure the card will still perform extremely well.


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MSI Z77A-GD65 Motherboard

So I've been meaning to do this sooner but here we go. A brief overview of the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard. I won't be going too in depth as to absolutely everything thing on the board (with pictures anyway) but I will try to cover as much of the specifications as I can. First off, this is a Z77 chipset motherboard (which is the newest LGA1155 chipset revision as to this date). I have a personal preference towards MSI boards nowadays simply because I like their ease of access to overclocking, their UEFI interface on their BIOS, Winki (which is currently version 3 as of this article), their Military Class setup for all their components on their boards (uses solid capacitors, super ferrite chokes, highly conductive polymerized capacitors, and DrMOS), has PCI Express 3.0 on all their Z77 boards (has been available since their Z68A boards that were G3 labeled), and best of all, a CMOS reset button on the rear of the board. The CMOS reset isn't available on all of their boards unfortunately, but the Z77A-GD55, Z77A-GD65, Z77A-GD80, and Z77A-G45 (the Z77A version not the Z77MA version) all contain this button (which is located between the top USB/PS2 ports and the digital audio ports). I find this button useful because if you have a bad overclock and it doesn't get to the point where you can boot into the BIOS you can simply press this button with the system off and unplugged. Without having to open the case you have already reset the bios to defaults. Pretty handy I think. Some other manufacturers have also started putting this on their boards which is great, but I would still rather prefer MSI's other offerings. As for the Winki (currently version 3), if you're curious as to how it works or what it has for features, check out the dedicated page on MSI's website HERE.


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Corsair Carbide 300R Mid Tower ATX case

So I've decided to start the posts about my friend's Oh Baby! computer by talking about a couple of the parts that are used in the build. Firstly I will be talking about the Corsair Carbide 300R Mid Tower ATX case. The rig cost 65 dollars (not including tax or shipping and on sale from 90 dollars at Newegg.ca) not including a 15 dollar mail-in rebate. I don't like to rely on mail-in rebates as the deciding factor of price of the rig because sometimes the mail-in rebate does not get fulfilled. For a 65 dollar rig that is normally 90 dollars, I expected a bit more from Corsair on this one. There's a few things missing that should have been included with the rig especially considering it's price range. That being said, it does still have some very nice features to which I will be going over in this overview of the Corsair Carbide 300R Mid Tower ATX case. 


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Final parts are here

Got the final parts today for the Oh Baby! rig today. What came in the mail today was a Corsair Carbide 300R case, an Intel Core i5 3570k, and a LG DVDRW drive. Soon to follow is going to be a post containing me building the rig.

The Corsair Carbide 300R box, i5 3570K, and LG DVDRW drive (in OEM packaging)

In other news, currently my overclock on that DFI LanParty rig is unstable, doesn't seem to want to pass Prime95 right now. Going to take some fiddling to figure out why it's not stable, but I know that it's fixable. I'll post an update when I manage to get around to fixing it.

DeepCool IceWind Pro and the DFI LanParty Rig

OK, so as I referenced in a couple of previous articles, I am working on an old DFI LanParty Ultra-D motherboard rig and seeing how it compares to an old ASRock 939Dual-Sata2 motherboard as well as an old ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard in terms of performance and see how it has held up over the years. To help with overclocking, I purchased a DeepCool (or Logisys if you want to go by the brand that acquired them) IceWind Pro heat-sink. This heat-sink I purchased was 35 dollars and has heat pipe direct touch or HDT technology. This is where the heat pipes are in direct contact with the CPU allowing for better heat transfer rather than the heat pipes being soldered to the base of the heat-sink and the base of the heat-sink has to transfer the heat from the CPU to the heat pipes (which is less efficient in heat transfer).


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Got some of the parts today!

Well today I was woken up to a massive box placed at my bed by my dad (who I thank for answering the door). All that's missing at this point is the case, CPU and DVDRW drive. Today I received a MSI Z77A-GD65 LGA1155 motherboard, a EVGA GTX 560 DS 1GB GPU, an OCZ ZT 750w PSU, a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 60GB SSD, a Patriot G2 8GB dual channel kit (2x4GB), and a Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme heat-sink all for the computer we're dubbing the Oh Baby! computer (an inside joke with my friends).

Most of the Oh Baby! parts

I'm a bit disappointed that the Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme box is an OEM box, because I have ordered one in the past (mind you it was a few years ago) that came in a nicely packaged and decorated box. But it's not what's on the packaging that matters as much as what's on the inside of it. Just wish that they would go back to that packaging in the future as it is more professional looking and shows that Tuniq means business.

The OEM new box on the left and the old box on the right

For myself, I ordered the IceWind Pro heatsink as well as a Silicon Power 32GB flash drive (because I needed a drive with more storage than 4GB so I can store seasons of TV Shows on it without running out of space).

The IceWind Pro heat-sink and Silicon Power 32GB flash drive

The case, CPU and DVDRW should hopefully be here by the end of the week and then I can dedicate an entire article to how it was built. In the meantime, I will also be covering in a separate article on the installation of the IceWind Pro into the DFI system as well as seeing how good it overclocks.

Parts on the way for another build

So one of my friends had their PC unfortunately crash recently. And to that, they said, time for an upgrade. So we discussed something that would last 5 years and would be a fairly decent gaming rig. I came up with these specs for $1000:

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R
Motherboard: MSI Z77A-GD65
CPU: Intel i5-3570K
Heatsink: Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme
RAM: Patriot Gamer 2 2X4GB DDR3-1600
GPU: EVGA GTX 560 DS SSC
HDD: WD Caviar Black 500GB (from old PC) + a new Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 60GB SSD
PSU: OCZ ZT 750W 80+ Bronze
DVDRW: LG GH24NS90
Fans: Xigmatek 140MM XLF-F1455 (x4 @ $5 a piece) + the ones included with the Corsair Case

The parts are now on order (total including tax and shipping was approx 1150), and both him and I are looking forward to the parts in the mail. I will have pictures up the day I receive the parts and I'm sure I'll have pics up of me putting it all together as well in a seperate post later on.
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On a separate topic, Charlie recently gave me an old PC she no longer needed. Inside was a lost gem of a motherboard, a DFI LanParty Ultra-D Socket 939 board. Man, that thing was a beast back in it's day. Unfortunately, the RAM that was installed into the system wasn't cooperating with the motherboard, causing it not to post. Considering it used DDR-400 RAM, I had plenty kicking around to try the system. It definitely did not like the high density RAM that I had lying around, so I tried also some Mushkin Silverline RAM that I had installed into another 939 board prior, and the thing boots up just fine now. I went through and dusted out the computer (sat outside for like 2 hours dusting off the internals and all the components because it sat for so long and looks like it collected a lot of dust when it was in use) and now is fairly respectable inside now. There's still some dust in some hard to reach areas, but it's certainly a fair bit better than the condition I originally received it in. It came packaged in a Coolermaster Centurion 5 case, which is a decent case for it's time with plenty of front ventilation. Also inside, it had an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ which is a decent dual-core CPU as well (but not as well performing gaming-wise as a Core 2 Duo). I've ordered a Deep Cool (or Logisys if you want to go by the brand that procured them) IceWind Pro heat-sink to install on to the system so I can overclock it and see how good I can get it performing. It's a decent performance heat-sink that won't break the bank too much and considering I won't really be using the system, I don't want to drop 60+ dollars on a heat-sink (the IceWind Pro only cost 32 dollars). I'm curious if it will outperform my ASUS 939 board (where the Mushkin Silverline RAM came from) as well as my ASRock motherboard that I was originally running with for years prior to building my i7 rig. My ASRock board outperformed my ASUS board (2.8GHZ vs 2.5GHZ) but I believe that was mostly due to the fact that the ASRock BIOS seemed to have better overclocking capabilities, or it could be that the CPU itself just wasn't up to the task, but we'll see how the DFI rig compares to those two for a general sense of how it's held up over the years.

Parts parts parts.

Boy I love getting parts in the mail. Makes me feel like it's Christmas opening up boxes from Newegg and NCIX to be greeted with two new XFX PRO550W 80+ Bronze power supplies, two sets of Mushkin Blackline 2x4GB kits, and two Western Digital 1TB Caviar Blue hard drives all of which are going into Charlie's duplicate rigs. I also ordered two Bitfenix 140mm Spectre Pro Blue LED fans and one Bitfenix 120mm Spectre Pro Blue LED fans to install into my own rig (because the two top mounted Xigmatek XAF fans are making a bit of vibration noise and it's really annoying me).


I've installed everything already into the one In-Win rigs, just need to get the SATA cables that came with the motherboards (which are in possession by Charlie at this moment) to hook the CD drive back up. I managed to fit the excess cables neatly behind where the 3.5" hard drive bays are allowing the system to have the most efficient airflow without extra cables getting in the way. I hope this will start to clear up stability issues and BSOD's because now the system has more than enough wattage for all the components with a fair amount of room for future improvements as well as better quality RAM. Fingers crossed!


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Parts on the way for Charlie

So I had to order some parts for the Avon customer (which will now be referred to as Charlie as she allowed permission to use her name). Ordered two WD 1TB Caviar Blue hard drives, two XFX PRO550W power supplies, and two sets of Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 2x4GB DDR3-1600 kits  for both her pcs. Hoping it will be here before the weekend so that she can start having a stable system.

The situation takes a scenario from my page about power supplies. The builder thought he'd put in a GTX550Ti (which is a great entry level gaming GPU) into Charlie's systems in order to jack up the price of the computers. However, he didn't take into account how much wattage a 550Ti draws and as such only put a cheap 350W power supply into the two systems. Because of this, Charlie is having a bunch of BSODs, freezing etc simply because the wattage is being stretched past the peak wattage of the power supply. Not only this, but there was no headroom to any upgrades in the systems at all in the future. As such, I've planned to  upgrade them to a 550W power supply so that it can take the extra hard drive in the system as well as give them some headroom so that they can do a bit more upgrading in the future if necessary.

Not only is the power supply too low of a wattage, but the RAM was also a bit cheaped out on. Instead of using premium RAM that has heat-sinks on it, the builder decided to use Kingston Value RAM (which isn't bad if you're on a REALLY tight budget). Considering how much was paid for the system, I definitely think that having better RAM and a larger hard drive would have been more important than jacking up the price with a graphics card that will probably never see past 20% load. The reason behind getting heat-sinks on RAM is because less heat is less wear on the parts. Not having a heat-sink on the RAM causes the chips to stay hotter longer and as such, wear out quicker. If you are on a tight budget and just need something right away that you PLAN to upgrade later, you can always get value based RAM so that you can have a system that is operational, however I would suggest against value based RAM if you plan on owning the system for more than 3 years. It's not necessarily going to mean that after 3 years RAM without heat-sinks will fail, but I have seen from personal experience that RAM without heat-sinks does get unstable a fair bit quicker than premium RAM with heat-sinks installed.

Lastly, because of the need of storage, I have planned to upgrade Charlie's systems to have a Western Digital 1TB Caviar Blue storage drive in the system (as well as the 500GB that is already currently installed in the computers. Even though Charlie expressed her NEED for as large of storage space as possible to the builder, he instead only put a 500GB drive in (when a 1TB isn't that much more in price). I was fairly disappointed when I heard how she needed a lot of storage but instead only got a 500GB and then a graphics card that is more than she'll ever use.

What I would have done if I built the system from scratch is build an AMD FM1 system instead first off to save cost which still having excellent performance (as the most expensive A8-3870K is almost the same price as the i3 2120). I would have put premium RAM in, a motherboard with four DDR3 slots (to allow for more upgrades in the future if really necessary to put extra RAM in), a lower end graphics card (such as a 6570 that only costs 60 dollars) to save on price as she doesn't plan on doing any hardcore gaming, and an aftermarket heat-sink on the CPU (as both systems are currently sporting stock cpu heat-sinks) to allow for easy cool overclocking.

She was also charged for a Logitech Z506 speaker setup (which she voiced that she did not need). Considering the price of the speaker setup (which usually goes between 90-100 dollars), I would have instead (if still needing speakers) hooked her up with a set of Logitech LS21 speakers or Creative A220 speakers.

Here are the current specs of her two systems which are built identical(pre-upgraded by me):
In Win EM013 Chassis
ASUS P8H61-M LE Motherboard
I3-2120
Kingston Value RAM 2x4GB
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB HDD
EVGA GTX550Ti Graphics Card


Would have also liked to see in her system a more updated chipset (such as a Z68 or Z77 chipset) on the motherboard as H61 is fairly old now. But soon hopefully everything will be cleared up on the system and resolve several issues Charlie is having at this time on the two systems (assuming Windows was installed correctly and all drivers are installed correctly).

Updates and Why you should get a second opinion

So over the last few days I've been helping one of my mom's Avon customers with a bunch of computer problems that they have been dealing with through another company (which will not be named here). The employee that was supposed to deal with all their issues has been lazy and lying about work he's done and has had poor performance across the board thus far. I'm glad they're finishing dealing with him because not only does it make their life easier only having to deal with me (of which I'm pretty much available 24/7) and am willing to actually do work assuming I'm not sick to my stomach or something that day. They have been overcharged on parts that they don't need for their systems and are getting billed for stuff that hasn't even been done. This is why you should always get a second opinion and look around whenever possible to weed out sketchy computer technicians.

Now, on to updates on the Reiter rig. I've gotten Windows 7 64-bit all up to date on the system and have installed several other programs. Everything seems stable thus far, but have yet to do a Prime95 test because I've been busy with other things around the house and the previously mentioned help with the Avon customer. That being said, everything is definitely shaping up on the system and it is near ready to go, just want to cross the T's and dot the I's to make sure that as soon as it leaves my hands it'll be stable for the friend I'm building it for without any hiccups.

Other than that, not much else to talk about right now. Been busy collecting NES games to play on my recently purchased Retro Duo and playing a lot of League of Legends on PC. Ghost Recon Future Soldier still doesn't work on my system (hasn't worked since day one) which I purchased through Steam (at least not through my account). Input of WASD and my mouse both don't function at all. There is a work around where if I create a separate user I can play it no problem, but I shouldn't have to do that to circumvent an  issue that shouldn't be there in the first place. I passed Max Payne 3, the story was pretty decent and loved the visual style of the cut-scenes. Multiplayer is a bit unbalanced though, with higher level people being pretty much godly by comparison to lower leveled people so that's a bit disappointing but when you do find a game where it's pretty much balanced, it's got decent replay ability, but I wish Rockstar would have some sort of balance filter in play so you could choose to play just with people of plus or minus 3 levels from you or so before it goes and dumps you into a game with 8 level 40 players and you just get your butt handed to you. In any case, I'll just have to tough it out till I can get to a respectable rank so that I don't constantly die from sniper rifles (which are extremely over-powered by the way).

Reiter Rig on it's way to glory

Got the new drive today, and at the moment it seems to be functioning correctly. I have formatted it for NTFS and am currently in the middle of installing Windows 7 64-bit and some programs on it. If all goes well, I should hopefully have the system ready to go by the end of the week. So far I've gotten the Windows 7 installation up and running, and am now in the process of getting SP1 installed (as well as drivers for the hardware), an antivirus and firewall installed, and several other programs such as Steam and League of Legends. Looking forward to having another finished desktop tower that can play games at a respectable framerate.

Some pictures on the current status:

The replacement Caviar Black 1TB installed into it's bay

The bay re-installed into the Reiter rig

A shot of the hard drive info from the BIOS indicating the correct storage size

The start of installing Windows 7 64-bit onto the Reiter rig

An unfortunate day.

Well today one of my GTX 460's decided to take a dump. The EVGA GTX 460 installed in my system is deciding to drop video randomly. I'm not surprised that it's failed, I applaud it's performance up to this date (because it was a RMA replacement). I have contacted EVGA about the issue to see if anything can be done to resolve the issue, but it's doubtful as I believe it has no more warranty at this point, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see. I've had stellar customer support from EVGA in the past so maybe something can be done to fix this issue for me without too much of a hassle. In the meantime, at least I'm not hooped, I still have the PNY GTX 460 running in the system so I can play some games, but just not at as high of quality.

In other news, the Reiter rig may be ready to go soon. The tracking number says that the HDD is in the superbox (but I haven't checked the mail today). So tomorrow I'll probably have something to do anyway and will keep my fingers crossed that the new HDD is going to function properly without any other strange issues arising in the Reiter rig.

Replacement Caviar Black on its way.

Yesterday I received notice that the replacement Caviar Black has shipped. I'll probably be receiving it sometime next week and hopefully can get the Reiter rig up and running at that point without any more hiccups. Other than that, had a fun weekend with my friends as we went to the States for a day getaway to all hang out together. Not much else has been going on in the ways of PC's, mostly just waiting on that HDD before I can really do much else with the system at this point. It is otherwise ready to go it seems, just need the HDD up in there and then get Windows 7 64-bit installed and some extra programs that the Reiter rig might need.

Broadway rig finished and friend happy

So not much to report on the Reiter rig yet, still need to get the hard drive shipped out. Work has put me on temporary layoff because they hired too many people back in December and it's now getting slow (because of summer). A bit of a downer, but at least I can collect EI while I figure out what to do at this point. I finished up the Broadway rig last week, got good Memtest86+ (2 passes) and Prime95 for 24 hours so I deemed it stable. Friend picked it up last Thursday and has never been happier playing games with a decent frame rate. Not too much else to talk about right now, another one of the XAF fans was annoying me yesterday and vibrating a bit, but seems to be fixed right now anyway. I was a bit skeptical about the blade design, and it's starting to show that it's not really a good working design. All I can say is next I'm getting Bit Fenix fans when the other XAF fan starts annoying me again. I'm not going to necessarily dock Xigmatek for fans in general, the more traditional blade shapes seem to work fine, just the XAF blade shape doesn't seem to be doing much of what it's supposed to anyway. I may use the fans again in another case or something in the future for a build or something, but right now I'm just dealing with the deformed one by unplugging it and hoping that the other doesn't start freaking out again.

Broadway Rig almost finished!

Got the new Mushkin Silverline 2x2GB RAM today. Installed it into the system, re-overclocked the new CPU to 2.8GHz (has the same multiplier as a E6300 unfortunately), and did a Memtest86+ full test. No problems! Finally things are starting to look up on these builds. After verifying with 2 passes with Memtest86+, I was sure that the system was working 100% on the RAM. Right now, I'm working on defragging the hard drive and then doing a Prime95 balanced stress test for 24 hours to verify that the system is ready to go. If everything goes smoothly from here on out, I'll be able to give the new rig to my friend when he comes out this week. Not too much else to say right now, still need to mail out the DOA drive back to NCIX (haven't gotten around to printing off a prepaid label through Canada Post yet) but once I get the new drive back, hopefully everything will go smoothly for the Reiter rig at that point. Other than that, not much else occurred over the last couple days, but hopefully by the end of the week I'll have some stuff sorted and be ready to return to work after being off since October 2011 due to a back injury. Sorry, no pictures at this time of the replaced RAM, but it looks the same as the old Mushkin RAM (same heat-sinks on the individual RAM sticks), so nothing really visually new in the Broadway system.

Reiter rig parts ahoy and a bit of a set back

So today I picked up the motherboard and memory for the Reiter rig. Gotta say, wasn't expecting all the original paperwork (and CD) and most of the original cables to come with it (even a spare 775 pin cover). The eBay seller even saved the case stickers for the Gigabyte motherboard. Gotta say, if it powers up and functions great, the seller is definitely going to get a 5 star rating for this. The package even came from Estonia, and there's what looks to be no damage at all during shipping (which is excellent). Also the seller  included a double fan connector (which I guess he was using for his CPU heat-sink fans). The north bridge heat-sink looks to have faded a bit (it used to be more of a golden yellow metallic color). Not really something to be bothered about, just something I'd thought to mention. The board I received, by the way, is a Gigabyte GA-965G-DS3 (in case you didn't read up on it in a previous post). It is a bit older than the P5Q in terms of generation of chipset (uses the 965G chipset which is a few generations older than the P45), but it is still a quality board with some overclocking potential (not as much at the P5Q though). The RAM the seller included was 2x2GB of Crucial Rendition RAM (which is their budget RAM without any heat-sinks on the outside). As I won't be overclocking the ram too much, it shouldn't really be a problem that there's no heat-sinks on the outside, just something that I aesthetically prefer on systems or if I need a bit of headroom on the overclocking side. Quite impressed thus far, lets see how it does in the case.


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Phanteks PH-TC14PE, one of the kings of cool.

So today in the mail delivered to me by DHL was my new Phanteks PH-TC14PE. I went with the blue version simply because I have a MSI board, and blue LED lighting (for the most part) in my rig. It comes in a fairly large and impressive box showing off all the different colors it could have came with instead of the blue.

The reason I chose the Phanteks over a Deepcool Gamer Storm Assassin, a Noctua NH-D14, a Thermalright Silver Arrow, and a Thermaltake Frio Extreme, is simply because the heat-sink comes in a number of different colors. Not only does the heat-sink itself come in different colors but the fan blades are color coordinated to go along with the color of the heat-sink. The different color choices are red, orange, blue, silver and black. I think it would have been nice if they manufactured one in green, but at least the black one will go with a plethora of different gamer color configurations so if you happen to have an odd colored motherboard (either the heat-sinks on the motherboard are a color not featured or the ram heat-sinks are), or a different colored LED setup, you aren't going to be completely left out.


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This is why you don't skip troubleshooting

So today I received the Mushkin ram. Plug it all in to the board, fire up the system to do a memtest. Failed. Hmm, OK well lets try messing with the timings and voltage for an hour to see if it'll cooperate. Nada. Ok, well then I guess I'll see if it'll work with dual channel of just dimm A slots. Hmm, works just fine. Ok, lets try doing single channel of dimm B1 and dimm B1. Nope. It at least showed up as single channel in memtest, but still failed. Ok, lets try doing 3gb using dimm A1 dimm A2 and dimm B2. Nope. This time, it was still showing as dual channel (which it shouldn't because it's only got 3 slots filled) and still failed at around the same test. Out of random testing, decided to also try just the dimm B slots. Fails almost instantly. Well, I guess that the B slots aren't functioning correctly, either a phase isn't working correctly on the board for the B dimms or the memory just doesn't wish to cooperate with the motherboard for whatever reason (cpu not handshaking with the ram correctly). Contacted Newegg today to see if I can get it replaced with 2 2GB sticks instead of the 4 1GB sticks. They were kind enough to refund the tax and item price of the 4 1GB sticks as well as sent me a free way bill to ship back the ram, so I am not really losing any money on the build. This is one thing I really like about Newegg is the fact that they are willing to give you a free shipping label on DOA stuff if you ask them correctly. Maybe this will solve the headache and will allow me to have a properly overclocked board without any fuss. This is why buying used can sometimes be a bit of a gamble, but if the two dimm A's are firing properly hopefully I can get away with the 4 gb on 2 slots without memtest still continuing to fail. I should have probably checked this before sending back the Corsair ram, but I didn't bother to think that something was wrong on the board. Bit disappointed in myself at this moment because of this. Normally I don't space out on these sorts or things, but now I understand why the board was being so uncooperative in the first place. Anyway, the new Mushkin 2x2GB kit is on order now. As this is my fault, I won't be expecting anything extra from my friend that I'm building it for.

New Mail + Looking at HCG-620W and Reiter rig

So today in the mail I was graced with the HCG-620M for the Reiter rig, as well as the I/O Shield for the Broadway rig. The I/O Shield came a bit bent up but I managed to straighten it out with my trusty pair of double sided pliers. I installed the I/O Shield into the system and it makes it look a bit cleaner on the back now.

On Friday I got a slip in the mail for another package and picked it up on Saturday (May 26th). To my surprise, it was my 30g tube of Prolimatech PK-1 thermal paste. It was shipped from Ireland! I was actually kinda surprised and wondered what lie in the package until I opened it and was graced with the 30g tube. I have tons of other thermal pastes, but who could pass up a deal of 30 bucks (plus shipping) for 30g of thermal paste. And the Prolimatech stuff is pretty decent as well, with a thermal conductivity of 10.2W/m-°C and overall excellent performance. Comparing that to a 13 dollar Arctic Silver 5 4g tube, I would have to say that it's definitely a better deal. Because I use so much thermal paste while building systems and also for renewing the thermal paste in my own rig (which is something you should do every few years to make sure that your heat-sink performs the best that it can) getting a massive tube like this is a fair bit more cost effective. I have tried a numerous amounts of thermal pastes and am looking forward to using the Proliamtech for everything in the future. I've tried others like Tuniq TX-4 (which has horrible shelf life btw), Arctic MX-4, Gelid GC-Extreme, Xigmatek PTI-G4512, Xigmatek PTI-G3606, and of course Arctic Silver 5 (which makes a huge mess when you go to clean it off a cpu). Out of those, I preferred the MX-4, it spread on easily and had good thermal performance, but now that I have the Prolimatech stuff I'm sure that I'll enjoy using it over the others I have. That being said, I'm going to eventually use up the left over tubes of my other thermal pastes as I need to.


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Not much progress + Fan Tips and Suggestions

So an update on shipments of parts today. Nothing new to report on the Mushkin ram, just says that it left LAX @ 7:02 yesterday, kinda disappointing but to be expected considering I went with the cheapest Purolator shipping. Will probably be here middle of next week (or sooner if I get lucky). Power supply should also be here any day, then I can start putting some of the hardware into the Reiter rig. By the way, from now on I will be referring to computer cases as rigs simply because I can get carried away where I use case when I am referring to a situation rather than a computer case, so it will cut down on a bit of confusion.

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Got a new 140mm Xigmatek XAF fan in black. They're decent fans, kinda make a bit of noise if you don't put them in carefully. It could possibly be the technology specific to the XAF fans (uses a "Copper Bushing Axis Bearing") that may be causing slight tilting during the spin that may be the cause of the vibration, or it could be that the 90 CFM (amount of air flow) may be causing the fans to warp causing a slight vibration (only really seems to be happening to the one that had a slight defect which may be the culprit). In terms of overall noise when it's not vibrating, you're mostly hearing just the sound of a fast large volume of air with a tiny whine from the motor (which is fine in my opinion). Really any fan under 24dB isn't going to be a huge burden on gaming experience unless you want an absolutely quiet system (in which case you're most likely going to be looking at pricey liquid cooling instead of air cooling). Unfortunately I didn't get around to taking any pictures of the install because I completely spaced out and got 2 hours of sleep since last night so everything is a bit overwhelming right now. Anyway, got a nice optimal airflow path going now in my rig with excellent CFM fans installed that should be fairly reliable (unless that one fan decides to have a catastrophic failure due to the slight defect). I used to be all about Silenx fans, but recently some of them have been giving me a bit of grief (one of them has literally locked up and overheated to the point where it was actually transferring some of the motor heat to the heat-sink, opposite of what it should do), and the old Xigmatek fans were in the system prior to the Silenx fans and they're still running strong (but are covered in dust right now), however they have been removed from the rig and replaced with XAFs (with the exception of the side panel fan which is a CLF 120mm Blue LED fan).
When looking at fans, there's several things to consider, LED vs non-LED, CFM per dB (can become a fair bit important if you want maximum cooling with the most minimal dB), price, CFM vs static pressure (or sometimes labeled as air pressure), and size of the fan.


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Shipping and a bit on Power Supplies

So today I was notified that the Mushkin ram has shipped, which is great. Should be expecting a number of parts in the mail over the next week including another Antec HGC-620W power supply, a couple of I/O shields for the two Core 2 Duo builds, the Mushkin ram, and the motherboard and ram for the Reiter case.

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The Antec PSU is a very good buy for the price, usually is on sale at NCIX and Newegg.ca for between 70-90 dollars (+tax and shipping). It's nearly fully modular aside from the 24pin and the 8pin connectors (which you need both of anyway). Also the finish is pretty nice and it's a single rail PSU (which I'm all about). In my opinion, multi-rail PSU's are a bit of a headache because the CPU ends up being on one and then leaves the other rails to be desired by the gpu and other accessories which can sometimes overflow the rails (especially in a SLI or Crossfire environment). Not too bad on energy efficiency neither for a 80+ Bronze PSU. And in it's price range, for having all Japanese capacitors (which are more reliable and tend to last longer), it's one of my top picks indefinitely besides a XFX PSU. Some other brands tout that they have Japanese capacitors, but in a number of cases it just ends up being the main capacitor that is Japanese and the others are slightly lower grade. That being said, there are brands that even though they don't specify Japanese capacitors they are still of good design, however only are worth picking up if can get it cheaper than an Antec HGC or a XFX.


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Start of something new.

Well, my friends, I started a blog about my work with PCs. This blog will contain hardware, software, and tips for PCs, as well as answering questions others may have about problems or upgrades.

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As a start, today I got some parts for a Core 2 Duo build I am working on for a friend today. It may not be current generation hardware, but it'll definitely play a plethora of games on decent settings at a decent framerate.

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