The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 4

This is a part of a series on a computer that I am building. For links to all of the articles in the series, click here.


ATI Radeon HD 6970

Sapphire Radeon HD 6970

This card comes in several versions, but after having read a few reviews it seems that the most overclockable aftermarket card was is the Sapphire Radeon HD 6970, as opposed to the version released by Gigabyte, MSI or even the Asus reference card. The XFX 6970 comes close, but performance wise I felt this was a slight bit better, though it cost a few £'s more.

The first thing anyone will notice about this graphics card is that it is big and heavy, and as such it has some hefty power requirements and takes a standard 6-pin and a 8-pin power connector. With all of that power, you do get some pretty hefty processing prowess. The card easily competes with its Nvidia rival, the GTX 570; Though both certainly have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Some specs about the card:

Power requirements: 1x6pin &1x8pin 

Interface type: PCI express 2.1 x16

Clock speed: 880MHz

Video Memory: 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 SDRAM

Memory clockspeed: 5500 MHz = (5.5GHz)
API's supported: OpenGL 4.1, DirectX 11
Max. Resolution: 2560x1600

Output: 2x DVI, HDMI, 2x mini display ports

cutout of the internals of the card

With that out of the way, the card supports, what AMD refer to as AMD Eyefinity, which is another way of saying the graphics card supports up to 6 monitors. This particular model comes with 5 output ports, but I dont think I have the money to buy enough decent monitors to game with 5 active monitors.


I chose this card, due to some overclocking reviews stating that the sapphire 6970 was the most overclockable of the aftermarket cards (XFX 6970 being the second best for overclocking ability). And I may at some point try and up the clock rate to the fabled 950MHz and also attempt upping the voltage and other parameters as much as possible.


The card fared well in most technical reviews with very high frame rates in most games, however my purchase from dabs.com (this in no way reflects on the solid build quality from sapphire or brilliant customer services offered by dabs.com) was a dud card. After several attempts, where the card worked in some instances and failed after a few minutes of use - I tested all of the components belonging to my build one by one, and isolated the cause of the fault to the graphics card. I assume that some sort of static build-up or a heavy drop during delivery was the cause. The box certainly had a slightly dented corner upon delivery. Dabs instantly offered a refund, and even arranged for a free pickup of the dead card.

All in all, a faulty card (just my luck), but great customer service and a great graphics card. I plan on purchasing another one of these, perhaps after my I tug the reigns on my spending limits a bit.

Microsofts TechNet site

Just a quick post regarding the TechNet site run by Microsoft. Although most of Microsofts time is spent trying to wring more money from its consumers, every now and again Microsoft releases some insanely good products and ideas, examples include 'windows xp and 7'*. TechNet is one of those amazingly good things Microsoft does (it now incorporates the tools from sysinternals - which too are amazing). I have read and made use of the many articles posted on the TechNet site.

The latest one that I've read, "Use a USB Key to Install Windows 7", shows the steps necessary to put a windows OS installation .iso file onto a USB flash drive for installation via USB. Which is pretty handy for installing on a netbook or a machine with no physical CD/DVD drive. Viva Microsoft!

*(There is the whole other side to products that are either ripped off or just plain bad, and things like the kinect and vista fall into those categories respectively, then theres the whole IE6/7/8 fiasco and the closed source culture they embrace - but thats a huge flame war awaiting to happen, so I will refrain from discussing it any further)

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 3

This is a part of a series on a computer that I am building. For links to all of the articles in the series, click here.

Asus Crosshair V Formula 990FX

The Asus Crosshar V Formula is the latest incarnation of the popular enthusiasts board from Asus' Republic of Gamers department. It is designed with the serious overclocker in mind and it comes with a whole heap of features to help those in pursuit of faster clock speeds. In fact, whilst researching and writing this piece, it has come to my attention that the current world record for an overclocked personal computer runs on this board at a whopping 8.4GHz across all 8 cores on an AMD FX octa-core processor!

The motherboard taken out of its packaging.

First off, let me run over some of the specification of the motherboard:

CPU: The motherboard claims to be AM3+ meaning that it supports Athlon II, Sempron, Phenom II and the newest FX series of processors. Which means it has support for up to 8 core processors with up to a 140W of  power drawn through it safely.

Chipset: The chipset on the motherboard is the AMD 990FX/SB950, which I apologise doesn't hold much meaning to me, except that it is a newer design and is faster and better than the older chipsets.

Memory: The motherboard has a total of 4 DIMM slots that accept DDR3 RAM, up to 8GB each for a total of 32GB. Which is plenty of upgrade-ability, should future versions of windows or firefox start hogging up huge amounts of RAM. (In their defence, the newer versions of Firefox, 7 and 8 that is, have focused on speeding up Firefox and fixing memory leaks; Mozilla have done a great job so far and I am now slowly shifting back to Firefox from Chrome). The RAM slots support a variety of default speeds and overclocked speeds and voltages, which is great for people wanting to overclock their RAM modules to get their system a few nanoseconds faster.

Expansion cards/GPU: The board supports a variety of PCIe type expansion cards. And also allows for up to 3 graphics cards to work in tandem. The terminology for this is SLI (for Nvidia cards) and CrossfireX (for ATI based cards).

Storage: For those of us who have a lot of files and require large amounts of storage, this motherboard provides ample storage ports in the form of 6GB SATA and 2 eSATA ports (one external on the back). The 6 SATA ports could effectively be hooked up to 2TB hard drives for a massive 12TB of storage :O otherwise, they could also be used for a RAID setup of your choosing. Being price conscious, I don't intend to fill up my case with lots of hard drives and I may make do with 2 hard drives and possibly one SSD for the OS installation.

This also gives me an idea to run a test to see if I can beat the 14 second Debian boot time that some people claim to be able to do. An operating system booting in less than 14 seconds, now that is true art.

USB: The motherboard has 6 USB 3.0 ports (4 at the back, and 2 on the motherboard, which require additional cables to reroute to the front of the case). USB 3.0 is a massive increase on USB 2.0 speeds and devices touting the USB 3.0 labels are springing up on websites that sell these products. The high price point and low availability is probably holding back these products and as prices become lower, we should see sale figures go up as well as general usage of USB 3.0. As I dont have any USB 3.0 compatible hardware yet (yes I know, shame on me), this is a great addition for future-proofing my PC.

The amount of effort put into the motherboard shows

Audio:  Asus have built into the motherboard, what they call the SupremeFX X-Fi 2 audio controller. It features improved sound quality over default on-board sound chipsets, but the labelling and marketing strategy hides away the fact that most of the complex audio encoding/decoding is done with an audio codec via the device driver. This may cause issues for people considering running Linux or Hackintosh projects - as I'm unsure about driver availability for this motherboard for other platforms. The sound is indeed brilliant compared to a default sound card on my old motherboard. And for audiophiles and people craving better sound for their games this will suffice. For the more serious music makers, perhaps you should consider purchasing a high end discrete sound card - this is not a replacement.

The thunderbolt add-on card (if you purchase that with the motherboard (I don't think it is sold separately)) provides better sound quality and also bundles a dedicated networking card, that supposedly performs some sort of magic to enable faster and better gaming in a LAN environment. This may be due to throttling bandwidth or performing hardware based packet QOS in realtime. Eitherway if sound and LAN are an absolute necessity, this is a great add-on to purchase. For me, I didnt bother with it, as the motherboard already performs great out of the box.

Overclocking: The motherboard has a tonne of overclocking features built in, such as an advanced UEFI BIOS that allows saving multiple profiles and an automatic recovery mode should your last overclock shut the PC down. Since I've never used the board before I wont comment on these features here, but as I do build my PC, I will comment on what overclocking features are included and how effective they are.

The motherboard comes with enough basic support for the BIOS and OS install, the DVD that comes along with the PC includes windows drivers (and a nice Asus InstALL feature - that installs all the required drivers for the chipset). The DVD also seems to include linux drivers (yay - for dual booters), but as of yet, I haven't tested them and cannot comment further.

This really is just the tip of the iceberg. The motherboard comes with plenty more features and I suggest you go over to the Asus site or the ROG site to check out all of the features.

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 2

This is a part of a series on a computer that I am building. For part 1, and links to all of the articles in the series, click here.

Now I will admit that the title of the post is a little off-beat for a PC build; After all what has a PC build got to do with Siberia or a Siberian railway network? But... I did name it after investing some thought into it, and my reasoning is explained below.

The Trans-Siberian railway is the worlds longest railway network in existance today, connecting Russia with the far east, branching out to various countries and smaller lines en-route. It happens to be one of the longest running railway projects too with ongoing work and constant upgrades to the lines.

The great Trans-Siberian railway

Through its  9,289km length, it traverses both urban and rural areas, encompassing some of the most awe inspiring scenery in eastern europe and the orient.

The views along the railway!

The railway lines themselves are quite nicely lined with amenities and features oft found in higher rated hotel chains, making the ardous journey just that little more enjoyable. I s hould point out that I am in no way related to the company that runs these lines and am not advocating or advertising their services. In fact I have never travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway and hope that I do get a chance to make that journey some day; But thats another story, for another day. for more information onn the Trans-Siberian, see the external links here.

So why is the article named after a eastern european railway? Well, the computer build has been planned in my mind for a very long time, just as the railway probably initially was and it is (perhaps not in the grand scale of things, but in my mind) equally important (to me, both as a computer system and a learning experience). My plans are to build a reasonably powerful system, with good specs but above all it must be customisable and extendable, just as a railway. And finally, just as the railway, the system must be cost effective and as environmentally friendly as it is possible for a gaming computer.

That I feel is enough non-technical blurb. Lets move onto the more important aspects of the build. Shall we begin by examining the parts I would like to include on my computer?

Motherboard: Asus Crosshair Formula V 990FX. A slightly pricey but powerful motherboard with a huge selection of additional features from Asus. It supports AM3+ chips, so its good for future AMD chips as well as the current AM3 series of chips (I know the new Fx series 8-core processors were launched a few weeks ago). USB 3.0 for super fast USB speeds, up to 32GB of RAM, so its extendable for future-proofing. Another bonus is its support for 3-way SLI or Crossfire (so I can choose to use up to 3 NVidea or ATI graphics cards in tandem for raw processing speeds). It has enhanced audio processing built into the motherboard, which, if I am to believe the reviews, sounds good enough for gaming, so I wont bother purchasing a seperate sound card. Finally it has a whole slew of overclocking features built-in, which is my main attraction to this board. More on the motherboard on another day.

Processor: AMD Phenom II x6 1100T Black Edition. When I first decided on my build, this was AMD's top of the Range processor. Now superceded by the FX series' 8 core processors. Never the less with a base speed of 3.3GHz, this will be powerful and overclockable (I've seen 4.2GHz as a stable speed on these).

Memory: Corsair Vengeance 2x4GB. The motherboard allows overclocking RAM, and with a trusted manufacturer behind these, I trust that these units will serve me well. Since these are pluggable, I may replace them later with RAM with lower latency to see if I can garner a faster system overall. For now, these are cheap and cheerful.

GPU: ATI Radeon HD 6970. Super powerful GPU, with support for the latest and greatest direct X and OpenGL games. Good framerates in all of the new games and supports multiple monitors at HD resolutions. Overclockable too.

Hard Drive: I currently have an old 1TB SATA drive. Its a Samsung Spinpoint F3 drive with 3Gbps speeds. Not the best (or most reliable) drive, but I got it at a bargain price when 1TB used to cost an arm and a leg (I still have all my limbs intact, so it really was a bargain). The first drive did start making some funky clicking noises, which I returned to ebuyer for a second drive, which has been behaving for the last 12 months. I will reuse this drive for a while, since hard drive prices are at an all time high due to the unfortunate floodings in Thailand causing distrubution issues for UK retailers.

Perhaps in the future, I will purchase a few 2TB drives and configure them in a RAID setup. And use a SSD for the OS and gaming. 

Cooling: Corsair H80 liquid CPU cooler. This really is my first venture into liquid cooling, so I'm just going out on a limb here. But there are plenty of good reviews for Corsairs H80, and one of the main deciding factors is that they finally included brackets for AM3 motherboards unlike the previous H60/70 releases where it was for just intel boards.

Power Supply: BeQuiet EP 600W 80 plus Gold PSU. Some computer system builders are particularly picky about having modular power supply units. For me its not such a big issue as I dont mind neatly packing away excess cables out of sight on a non-modular unit. A modular unit is ideal so that you can just plug in the cables you need. But this particular power supply unit won me over by both its £60 price tag and the 80 plus gold sticker on it. It is non-modular, but I guess you you really can't have it all. The 80 plus gold ensures 90% or more efficiency from the power supply so that only 10% or so is really wasted as heat during power conversion; Which is a big step up from my current 50~60% energy efficiency.

Case: NZXT phantom white. This looked absolutely stunning, so it went on my list straight away. It was designed by a professional case modder for NZXT, it has plenty of airflow, fan control, accessability, and a power cable routing system for my non-modular power supply. Also, did I mention that it looks awesome?

Well those are the only parts that I can think up of that are crucial to my build. Perhaps I'll add a few components in the near future. For now, as I order these products and they begin arriving, I'll try and review each one as best as possible. Till next time, ciao.

The Great Trans-Siberian PC Build - part 1

So for the last few months (or years rather, since the inception of the idea) I have been working on building a computer all for myself. Admittedly I'm not a hardware person; I prefer being in the comfort of my seat and programming hardware to see it do some pretty amazing stuff, but when it comes to actually putting together hardware I'm about as good at it as an ogre is with china kitchenware.

Well after toying with the idea, I did a feasability analysis and a cost analysis (very formal and very SLC). I decided that my initial build would be to spend in the region of £750 to build a powerful AMD based system. But as with any project, deadlines and cost are two things that are hard to keep a reign on.

Next time, I'll show you what my parts list look like and how much I oversaw my budget by.

Part 1 - Introductions (this page)
Part 2 - Components list
Part 3 - Asus Crosshair V Formula
Part 4 - Sapphire Radeon HD 6970
Part 5 - NZXT Phantom
Part 6 - AMD Phenom II 1100T Black Edition
... This is a work in progress, so further parts will be added as I complete them

Work and other updates

Work and other updates,

So its been almost virtually forever (yes, I deem a few months of inactivity as a virtual forever) since I've last posted on this blog. The blog is almost like any other diary project I've undertaken, they all start off with a flurry of activity and ideas and then a few weeks down the line the interest dies down only to be surpassed by whatever new project takes my fancy.

Well just an update, I've left one job, been out of work for 4 months and now I have been working at another job for just over 6 months. Time truly flies!

Starting off with MySQL

Ive just had to install a MySQL server on one of our Debian machine and thought it would be great to add a short tutorial for people who would like to start installing and configuring their MySQL databases under linux. I'll assume that you are using a Debian based linux, but I cant imagine the commands being too different in any other linux.

So what is MySQL? It is a Relational Database Management System (RDMS), which runs on a server/client architecture and provides multi-user access to the data simultaneously. Did I also mention that its insanely fast, and a great place to learn about RDMS without having to pay $$$ for an enterprise database. (Quite recently they were acquired by oracle, but the development of the community edition is still ongoing).

MySQL is "the worlds most popular open source database" in their own words, and I have a feeling they are right about that, as it appears everyone who develops web application usually follows the PHP/MySQL or RoR/MySQL path to start off with.

Ok, heard enough? Lets get on with it already.

Installation:

Fire up a terminal window and give yourself superuser access, using the 'su' command. Ubuntu users, remember to 'sudo' your commands.

apt-get install mysql-server

That pulls up the latest version of the mysql server from the debian repository and installs it. Read the instructions while installation is ongoing, and if you are in a server environment you will need to allow the mysql database to start at boot up.

Usage:

To test your installation type:

mysql

If that lets you in to the database console, voila mysql has been successfully installed, although you dont really need to do this, as the installation should quit cleanly without errors. If it complains, ensure you have hall the needed packages and google your way out of the mess.

now 'quit' out of the mysql console, and set your root password as follows:

mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

If you want more information on using the database, the MySQL site has some great webinars. Go check them out: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/

Thats all I have for you for now, I dont really have time or space to describe mysql usage here, so we can leave that as a topic for a later date.