I realize this isn’t a car blog, and it’s not the first time I’ve posted about the ub3r Civic, but I was pretty annoyed by the situation I found myself in fairly recently. I woke up in the morning to go to work and found my passenger side window smashed in. The theif took a 5+ year old bottom of the barrel JVC deck faceplate (not even the whole thing) and left everything else including the video card, wireless card, Sony deck in my trunk, change in my ashtray, etc. I mean, seriously! It’s like breaking into someone’s house just to steal the right foot of all of their flipflops. They’re not valuable. They’re not useful to you, and now they’re not useful to me.

Fortunately the total cost was $200 for the window and labour from Boyd (thanks guys) and $50 to install the Sony deck I’ve been meaning to put in FOREVER because I’m a lazy SOB… It just grinds my gears when stuff like this happens. Especially to me!

Well I’ve officially broken my first review sample. I’m not sure what happened, but I was setting up the NAS, playing around with the features, and otherwise preparing for what should have been a fairly interesting episode of Tech Tips

Then BAM!

We’re in the Tech Tips studio and I’m getting ready to start showing all of the cool features like scheduled backups to the Blu-Ray drive, RAID configuration, fast network transfer speeds and all I get on the front LCD is “Initializing Kernel” over and over again. I can’t help but wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with the power delivery in the Tech Tips room because we’re not running it off a UPS, but I’m pretty sure I know a borked firmware when I see one and I certainly didn’t try to update it.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board for a new topic I guess. We’ve had some requests for a video card overclocking guide, so maybe something like that would be appropriate.

Well I’m breaking the news a little bit ahead of the official NCIX announcement, but we’ll be creating a workshop that we’re going to start running on Saturday July 11, 2009. It’s something we’re really hoping will be an ongoing project and we’re basically going to give customers who are buying a new PC the option of paying $50 for assembly or paying $50 to attend a workshop on how to build their own PC. There’ll be a free toolkit and free pizza at the workshop so it should be a great experience all around.

I’ll be teaching the first couple of workshops, so there’s a lot of preparation to be done over the next few weeks, but I’m very excited about it.

Well I’m not sure yet if I can replicate this or not but it’s been annoying me enough over the last 5 minutes that I thought I’d post about it. System is running Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 (64-bit) and I kept running into issues transferring some files over from another hard drive that also has a boot partition on it where the board kept booting to the other drive. Since I’m also tweaking some BIOS settings and whatnot, the boot order keeps rearranging, so the solution I came up with (clever me) was to switch SATA cables so that the system would always automatically boot from the correct drive.

The drive in question is an OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD, so it’s a plenty fast drive. Man was I ever suprised to see 10,000ms access times in the resource monitor when all I was doing was downloading adobe flash player with literally nothing else open. Switching back to the SATA port that the drive was originally on has everything back to normal, but those 10s response times were VERY noticeable and it was not mis-reporting.

I  also know that the issue was not caused by putting the drive on a different SATA controller. They are both connected to the ICH10R southbridge and drivers are installed for that as well. Very random. I would have taken a screenshot but the system was soooo painfully slow I had to do something. It would respond just fine for about a second (I could type into search fields, click things, etc) but then it would become completely unresponsive for 5-10 seconds.

Well for the PCIe slot repair I’ve hit a pretty big obstacle. I can’t seem to get a hot enough soldering iron at the local “DIY” stores, so I will have to try to go somewhere more specialized. If anyone has an idea where I could find a soldering iron that’s hot enough to work with lead-free solder on a PCB, please hit me with an email. It’s my name at NCIX.com (don’t want the spam screenscrapers grabbing my email addy from my blog)

Also, I’m very disappointed in Corsair. I’m currently in the middle of doing an upgrade on my girlfriend’s computer (she’s moving to i7 on account of I got my hands on a shipping damage eVGA X58 with a broken PCIe slot that I bent back into shape and wedged closed with a white eraser and some bent CPU socket pins that I bent back) and I decided to go SSD while I’m at it because for some reason she’s a stone cold hard drive killer. I remembered the briefing I got from Corsair on their S128 SSD and it seems to me it was all about “oem grade, high quality, high durability components”. I observed some “hitching”, something I hadn’t yet experienced having only used Intel X25-M drives and Corsair “S” series drives. Seems like the M64 mean “Jmicron 64GB drive” I did my best to replicate the IOmeter tests that Anand performed in his epic tale of SSD performance and I observed maximum latencies of up to one second when writing random 4k files over a 4GB section of the disk (100% random writes). It’s a little better than the two second latencies that he was observing, but with inconsistent test benches and methodologies it’s impossible to replicate the results exactly. Either way one second is FAR too high for an SSD.

I guess the most disappointing thing is that (I swear the bit about “uses high quality samsung controller” used to be right on the product page, but the Google cache doesn’t have it) Corsair made such a fuss about their drives using better quality controllers than the competition, so I bought one and here’s what I end up with.

After writing this I did some reading on the Corsair support forum. It looks like the “M” series drives are “not controller specific” and right now they are using a Jmicron controller. Fail.

This is one of those projects that clearly isn’t worth the time I’ve already invested, but it’s more of a “can it be done” adventure than a practical thing. I got my hands on an eVGA 790i board that was damaged in a shipping accident. There’s no insurance, there’s no warranty (eVGA won’t put on a new slot for me), so I’m left to my own devices here. I tested the motherboard and it works fine with a PCI video card, but not with a PCIe video card in either of the other slots. I get an error message telling me to move my video card to the top slot (I wish) for non-SLI operation.

Here’s my first attempt at removing a PCIe 16x slot from a 680i donor board. I figured if I torched it I might be able to remove it in one piece with all pins attached. Also I was hoping the pins would be relatively clean for re-insertion into the 790i board. It worked very well except for that fact that the slot bent from the heat while I was removing it.

Then I tried a more brute force approach and simply ripped off a PCIe slot. I’m currently in the process of re-pinning this one using pins from the other two that I tried to torch off.

As for the 790i board, well, I’m going to have to get pretty creative when it comes to removing the pin nubbs that are left over. If anyone’s got any ideas, I’m open to them. Right now it looks like what I’ll need is an incredibly fine soldering tip, and then something else to poke through and make a hole. Once I do every hole that way, I should be able to insert the new slot and solder it from the back. Wish me luck… I’m not exactly skilled with a soldering iron so the temptation is obviously also there to just run the board with PCIe video in some sort of “non-gaming” machine like the girlfriend’s sister’s media PC or something… It kinda kills me to use a 790i and DDR3 for something like that though………

Well I pulled some strings and I managed to get some SLBEJ or D0 stepping processors locked into a new SKU so that we can sell them as “guaranteed D0″ CPUs. They will cost a few bucks more, but I think it’s reasonable considering that these things are like hen’s teeth and most places won’t guarantee anything.

If you want the link it’s here. I even threw a $25 instant rebate on it.

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=38881&vpn=BX80601920%20-%20D0&manufacture=Intel

This thing is so cool. We just got a pallet. Yes I’m serious a PALLET of these things in our warehouse.

I guess they’re for promotion purposes but they’re so cool I wouldn’t be surprised if we could sell them.

Well we finally got a sample of the GTX 275. I don’t mean to be down on nVidia for this being a paper launch but like everyone else I would rather have seen a hard launch. Either way the parts are out there now and seem to be quite plentiful. I just wish things were a little bit less confusing in their product line up. I try my best to explain it in the edition of Tech Tips. Enjoy!

Yeah. It’s pretty much the best Tech Tips ever. I apologize in advance for the intro. I th0ught it would be funny, then it turned out really brutal, but then it got so brutal it got funny again.

I had a lot of fun with these products and making this edition of Tech Tips, and I think that they both represent a compelling value as unique products in the market. Without further ado: The Razer Mamba #5….