indiboi.com

This is truly disappointing. I bought an oh so nice Icemat Siberia headset almost two weeks ago. I’ve been using it lightly to play FarCry & Prey… and today when I took them off the little screw holding the wire part of the headband snapped out of the plastic holding it all together.

The whole assembly is dependent on a metal screw attached to threaded plastic, at most 3mm long. This seems like really flawed design to me.

Thankfully they’re still under the merchant’s return policy, for replacement only though. I really like the headset, it’s just… no good if it’ll keep breaking. It could have been cracked in transit, but I can’t see how this thing would hold up at all for the 2 years it is under manufacturers warranty if mine broke within 2 weeks. The cost of shipping will eventually make returning for replacement financially idiotic.

I can be so dumb sometimes. This is clearly obvious to anybody that knows me, but anyway. I made a little tiny mistake several years ago, never really worried about it until lately. I’ve been noticing that the load average on the file server just goes through the roof whenever NFS transactions are taking place. I figured, without thinking too much about it, that the 900 Mhz Athlon just wasn’t up to handling the ‘power’ of my more modern hardware connected to it.

It turns out, and this just blows my mind, that I never actually compiled the IDE driver into the kernel. Perhaps it didn’t exist when I was using the 2.4.x series, but either way, I’ve apparently been running this thing for years without using the proper drivers. Hdparm was reporting an absolutely horrible buffered disk read of 3.99 MB/Sec, now with the right driver it reads a massively quicker 37.27 MB/Sec. Of course the SATA drive in my new box easily does twice that, and obliterates it when doing cached reads (16MB cache vs. 2MB).

Anyway, looks like I don’ t need to upgrade the CPU (and of course then the memory, motherboard, probably the power supply, ugh) on the fileserver after all!

D’oh!

I’ve been spending the past few days setting up all the software on the new computer. I suppose that’s pretty expected. I ran into a couple of snags installing Gentoo x86-64, but a lot of them were as simple as typos (sadly).

I finally got around to getting back into Windows, loaded up CPU-Z to verify some of my memory settings. The BIOS doesn’t tell me what the settings actually are when it’s on ‘auto’ …so I set it manually to the memory specs of 4-4-4-12 2T DDR2 800.

It turns out that I actually was setting it slower than the ‘auto’ settings. I rebooted, clicked everything back over to ‘auto’ and woot… it auto selects 4-4-4-12 1T DDR2 800. That little 2T vs 1T makes a huge world of difference, one command per every cycle, versus one command per every two cycles. I suppose that means it’s actually twice as fast, hehe.

Those settings are at 1.85 volts!

Yay for G.SKill memory. :)

My temps are good; right now the cpu is at 29°C, but that’s with the case fans up to max. I can’t hear them when the A/C is on anyway. When the fans are on low, last night, it was about 31°C. I attempted to put the box into a slightly better location than next to my chair, but now temps are higher. It just barely fits under the side table/desk where the old box would normally sit. I knew it’d be a tight fit, but unfortunately I didn’t take into consideration that the fans would be essentially blocked. That raises the temperature by quite a few degrees. I’m not sure if it’s really a problem, because it tends to stay under 40°C, but it does concern me.

I didn’t really like the old box sitting on the side table anyway, so back it went. Right now the new box is sitting on the flooring boxes (that I still haven’t finished installing, d’oh). At least it’s out of the way for now, and the fans aren’t blocked.

I’m presently installing Gentoo onto my new box. I pretty much had to decimate my finances, and go into minor debt, but it’s black and shiny and oozes number crunching power.

So here it is…

Antec P180B Case (the updated version with the features of the P182)
Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus Mainboard
EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB Video Card
Corsair 620HX Power Supply (yay for modular cabling!)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
G.SKill 2x1GB DDR2 800 ‘HZ’ RAM
Seagate Barracuda ES 320GB SATA HardDrive
Samsung SATA 18X DVDRW with Lightscribe (No More PATA for me!)
Logitech LX710 Cordless Desktop

So far so good. I might add in a discrete sound card, but probably not; just depends on how it performs. Creative is still sitting on X-Fi drivers for Linux, so until they’re released that is totally out of the question. I’ve been considering a HT-Omega Striker though, I’m impressed with it, but I guess we’ll see.

Oblivion is so fast that I can barely control myself, as I’m used to the considerably slower GeForce 6200.

I have several MIR to deal with, that should help a bit. Sadly, my brother warned me of the drop in memory prices and I didn’t heed the warning. It was on sale when I bought it, but my RAM dropped about $30, but oh well, the price I paid was pretty sweet anyway.

The next step is a big fancy widescreen LCD. That’ll replace my aging Sony LCD, though it’s still quite nice.

I’m totally lost when it comes to setting up the ‘overclocking’ in the BIOS, it is set to “auto” right now, but it doesn’t display what the settings are. I don’t even know if my memory is running at the proper settings, hah. I did manually set the timings to 4-4-4-12 2T, no problems thus far, but that’s what it’s rated at, so it better work! :)