Well XSPC has launched a couple of new blocks. This company has been around for a while, but this is the first time in the last few years at least that they’ve been getting any attention in North America.

I’m looking into carrying their products, and so far they’ve been extremely receptive and the prices look great compared to competitors Danger Den and EK Water Blocks. The only thing that makes me apprehensive is the fact that we’re in a period right now where there aren’t really any single GPU graphics cards over $300-$350, so it feels like the market for full covers is a little bit less than it was when everyone and their dog was designing, releasing, and selling 8800 G80 blocks.

None of that changes the fact that these are some SEXY looking blocks. Please post in the comments if you want to order one and I’ll see what I can do about bringing them in sooner.

links to 9600GT and 9800GTX product pages

As many of you know, I’m the water cooling product manager at NCIX, and besides being willing to bring in almost anything a customer asks for, speedy shipping times, and great customer service, (/obvious NCIX plug, hehe) I realize that there isn’t much that differentiates us from other water cooling shops. Then it hit me. We are different from other water cooling shops in that we carry an incredible amount of other PC hardware.

My next thought actually came into my head because of a conversation I had had with a customer who was not terribly confident installing a full cover water block. Full cover blocks are (for good reason) designed for a short life cycle, so things like detailed instruction manuals and accessories can be skimped on sometimes. He was worried that he would mess up his card and I said to him, “I’d love to do it for you, but we don’t offer a service like that”. Well, it’s about to start.

This week or next week NCIX will be launching a “custom water cooled video cards” page, which will allow you to choose your video card, choose a water block, choose your tubing size and add an assembly fee. The assembly fee is set right now to be at $100 to cover the time of an experienced water cooling tech (me in all likelihood for the first while) to install, double check, pressure test the block on your card, then pack it for shipping, as well as the extra risk that NCIX takes by offering water cooled video cards directly to customers.

Right now these water cooled video cards will be available on select eVGA and XFX cards only because they do not void the warranty for using aftermarket coolers. We will also include your stock cooler in case you need to send the card back to the manufacturer. This leaves you with a VERY unique solution. Right now you can buy water cooled video cards, but the cost is prohibitive, you rarely get the water block you want, and you’re stuck with the water block if you want to sell the card or move it into an air cooled secondary/girlfriend’s/kid’s/parents’ machine.

This way you pay less than a pre-water cooled card, you get to pick a high quality copper block from one of our suppliers, and you can go back to air cooling on the card if you want to. Oh yeah, and you aren’t stuck with a particular video card either. You can pick a stock card, an overclocked one, or whatever your heart desires. It’s about consumer choice and value. I’m confident that with our custom water cooled video card builder you’ll find the best choice and value for a water cooled video card.

Here’s a glam shot of the card we’ll be using in some of the ads. It’s an older 8800GTS 320 with an EK Water Blocks nickel plated full cover water block on it. Initially product offerings will be limited to 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB card, but we’ll be expanding the program to cover 9800GTX cards shortly if all goes well.

This was a tough topic for me to approach. On one hand I’ve got the state of the memory market right now, which is >99% DDR2, but on the other hand, I’ve got to consider that that’s about to change. DDR3 is quickly becoming a viable option. X38/X48 and 790i were designed for use with DDR3, whereas all of the previous chipsets were designed for use with DDR2 and DDR3 support felt like something of an afterthought.

I’ve been criticized a little bit for calling out Corsair’s marketing names for their products and ignoring the others, but when it comes down to it, A) Corsair is a GREAT choice for system memory and power supplies (and anything else they make), and B) They were the ones who ponied up the RAM for us to showcase in the Tech Tips. If anyone else had asked to have their RAM featured, we would have been happy to oblige. It all comes down to support, and I’ll support whoever supports the Tech Tips project.

I should start this entry by saying that once I start writing a poem, it seems to get more and more satirical and ironic as I go along, whether that is my intention or not. Never is this more apparent than events such as Mother’s Day…It’s lucky my mom has a good sense of humour. In this case, I’ve honestly had a pretty good run with 680i. There were some problems with it, sure, but that’s not to say that there are MORE problems with it than any other chipset past or present. It just happens to be the one that I’ve had the most experience with as an SLI user. It’s managed to survive an attempted upgrade to X38 (didn’t like my RAM), as well as a contemplated upgrade to 790i (required a full tear-down of my water cooling loop – couldn’t be bothered right now with my 680i board running the way it does) without being replaced, and for someone who upgrades as frequently as me, a board that lasts this long may as well be made out of solid gold.

Quite frankly I’ve had this system working GREAT until I moved into my new place. I had it stable with 8GB at 3.6GHz on my water cooled Q6600. Can’t complain about that. I moved into a new place and it’s really hot in my room now, so I’m having a really hard time re-stabilizing it and I’m already back to 3.0 (and still going…) trying to get things running so well again. That’s what reminded me of some of my initial frustrations with this board (well my old AR revision especially), and prompted me to write this poem.

Without further ado:

Ode to 680i

The chip I met that fateful day

Was called 680i.

They promised the world

It would dance, it would sing

But it also made me cry.

–7F–

I unwrapped my board. So excited I was,

That my knees were all a-quiver

But despite using French

And a knife, and a wrench

I just couldn’t make it deliver.

–7F–

“An overclocker’s delight” they proclaimed.

“Engineered for the extreme”.

But my Q-6-6

At a mere 2.6

Made my blood start to boil and steam.

–7F–

Fanbois weren’t impressed. They said,

“There’s going to be hell to pay.”

The partners were scared

Board revisions prepared

And nVidia saved the day.

–7F–

But all was not well in nVidia town.

There were still a few bugs that remained.

Cried the internet trolls,

“There are FSB holes

When the memory speeds are *unchained!

–7F–

“Well nothing is perfect”, nVidia said,

“But we’ll help you as best as we can.”

“Try linked and unlinked

Try a prayer, take a drink,

Or try an additional fan.”

–7F–

The BIOS rev. is now P32

and most everything seems to be swell

It BSODs

If I so much as sneeze,

But at least it’s not Apple or Dell.

–7F–

Part of the problem may lie with my RAM

Because I am using 8 “G”s.

It says it should work,

But it’s not without quirk

So the speed boost is only a tease.

–7F–

Hardware that doesn’t work quite like it says

Is so common these days, I’m afraid.

But wipe those eyes dry.

Replace it, don’t cry

And get back to your Warcraft Raid.

–7F–

It’s the heart and soul of DIY

And there isn’t a lot you can do.

You can YELL on the ‘net,

suck it up, buy new stuff,

Or just go back to nForce2.

Well, this has been an exercise in frustration since first upgrading to Windows Vista with my RTM disc a few days before it was officially released. I already had a key and all of that jazz in case anyone reading thinks I’m some kind of software pirate

From day one transfer speeds over the internal network weren’t good. It started at about 4.5MB/s pushing or pulling from my Vista computer. For 10/100 that’s not horrible, but it’s certainly not great. I upgraded to a gigabit router for better HD streaming and so that I could start to use a NAS device as my only storage and just use a Raptor 150GB in my computer. With the gigabit upgrade they went up to a whopping 8MB/s. I was not impressed.

Being the hardware junkie that I am, I assumed it was the hardware, ran out (well to work anyway) and bought a shiny new 8 port gigabit switch to see if that would fix the problem. Identical transfer speeds. I read all over the internet about bad Vista file copy performance and that there were some fixes, but they worked for some people and not for others, and I never really did start to make any progress until I disabled DHCP on my router and manually configured every computer in the house to use a static IP. This got speeds up to about 16MB/s pushing and 40MB/s pulling from the Vista box. That’s more like it, but still not quite there.

The problem with turning of DHCP is that I move around a lot. I take my computer to LANs, I pack my home server with me sometimes when I go away (it’s got my whole life on it), I’m frequently tweaking things, adding new PCs to the house, reformatting windows, people come over and want to use the wireless, the girlfriend goes to school and her laptop won’t connect because it’s configured to use a static IP….. etc etc etc. So that solution went out the window and I was back to 8MB/s push or pull…

Then SP1 came out and it was like a breath of fresh air. I was getting 45-55MB/s copying files to or from the home server, my songs weren’t pausing to buffer about 5 seconds into playing (before proceeding the play the rest of the song just fine – go figure), and my HD videos weren’t buffering either. Life was good. Then I moved. I’ve got my network configured the same way I did at home, and now I can’t get those speeds… Except sometimes. Every once in a while I’ll copy something and it’ll do it at 45MB/s, other times it’ll cap around 15MB/s, and other times it’s more lik 8MB/s. So basically all 3 of the different caps I’ve run into in the past are present right now.
DHCP is enabled on my router, but setting the home server and my PC to use a static IP anyway (reserved IP for their MAC addresses) seems to eliminate the 8MB/s barrier. I still have to get my roommate to upgrade to SP1 to see if that fixes the problem, but it seems to me that shouldn’t have anything to do with it unless I’m copying files to or from him. I guess it may come down to turning off DHCP again, but I’m not sure how SP1 will affect that solution.

The make this long story a little shorter: I thought Vista SP1 fixed the problem, but it turns out it only fixed it sometimes. Might be time to just buy a stupid hard drive to actually put into my computer for my files, and use the home server to back up content that I’m already storing locally…

A couple weeks ago, right before I went on vacation, I decided it was finally time to upgrade my Klipsch Promedia Ultra 5.1 set that I bought ages ago. I’ve used a number of sets of high end computer speakers from the Monsoon M2000 4.1, then to the Logitech Z-680 5.1, then to the Klipsches that I was using until last week. Actually, while I still owned the Klipsches, I picked up a used set of Creative S700s to see how well they held up against the Klipsches. They were close, but not quite there.

I have used digital output with the Logitech Z-680s running off the onboard “SoundStorm” audio on my nForce2 motherboard back when that was what all the cool kids were doing.

That’s not the only audio solution I’ve used though. Since then I’ve tried the Chaintech AV-710, Auzentech X-Mystique, Creative Audigy 2 ZS, Creative X-fi XtremeMusic, and Creative X-fi XtremeGamer since switching back to analogue outputs.

So why talk about all of this? Sound in music and games is a very subjective thing, and unless the writer has had experience with a variety of different solutions, then his or her experience can’t be taken seriously. I could say my $1 store headphones are the best thing ever, and if they were the only thing I had ever used, then I would not be wrong necessarily, I would simply be inexperienced.

Well, right before I left on my vacation I picked up (on sale of course) this Onkyo recevier and this set of KEF speakers. The difference is stunning. I find myself in a situation where I have enough experience listening to computer audio equipment to know that this is a whole other ballgame, but I lack the technical expertise to properly explain it. I’ll do my best to put it in layman’s terms.

Compared to my Klipsches, the sound is not “louder, but it is more “full”. The bass, instead of being easily distinguishable from the rest of my music like “oh that’s the bass” is just “present”. Everything works together much better. I wasn’t even aware of how much separation the channels could have when listening to a music CD. I’ve heard talk of a “sound stage”, but never actually had a set up that properly created one before.

I have to confess that I’m living in a smallish place right now and I am running in stereo surround with the surround channels sitting next to the front channels, but I will report on the gaming performance once I have chance to try things out a little more.

Basically the point I want to make here is that there are a few different major steps in terms of music & movie listening quality at your computer. There’s onboard. People will argue night and day about good onboard versus bad onboard, with “HD” onboard in there somewhere. Whatever. It’s all completely inadequate. Any time someone tells you that you need “$500 worth of speakers to tell the difference”, ask them how many sound cards they’ve ever owned because 95/100 times the answer will be “zero”. I can tell the difference with my low quality MP3s between a $30 sound card and onboard sound with $1 store ear buds, and I’m no audiophile.

The next step is obviously a dedicated sound card. It’s not about CPU utilization or 3D effects anymore to be perfectly honest. Much of that can be done in software and we’ve got quad core CPUs! What can a lowly sound processing chip do compared to a Q6600? It’s about the fact that when you get down to it audio is an analogue thing. Speakers are analogue devices. The file you’re playing or the CD you’re listening to are digital mediums. You need to convert that digital signal to an analogue one for speaker output. Analogue devices are ALWAYS affected by cleaner PCB layouts, higher quality components (DACs, capacitors, etc), and anything else that can reduce electrical noise. The difference is night and day, even between a dedicated sound card and motherboards that come with sound riser card.

The next step is moving to a receiver. That means I can take a purely digital signal from my computer (in my case the optical output from my onboard sound – not affected by digital to analogue conversion, since it’s not doing it.) and run it to an AV receiver, then out to my speakers. You can’t really compare a $30 sound card to a $500+ piece of video/sound processing equipment until you start to step up to something like an Auzentech X-fi Prelude (which I will move to once I have some cash again so that I can take advantage of EAX being encoded via DDL (theoretically) and sent to the receiver), so for me it’s like taking that step from onboard up to a dedicated sound card all over again. Also, I may switch over to analogue outputs again once I have a Prelude and the receiver will run amplifying/video switching duty for my Wii/Computer.

You might be reading this with a skeptical eyebrow raised, so I want to share a story from when I was working as a sales rep at the NCIX Langley location. I had a customer come in who was deaf in one ear and had very little hearing in the other. He wanted to buy a computer, and I said “grab a dedicated sound card and some great speakers, it’s a part of the experience that really doesn’t get talked about enough, despite how VERY important it is”.

He said, “It’s all fine and good for you to talk about it, but this is my money”

The conversation continued from there, but in the end he bought a sound card and a set of speakers totaling about $500.

The point of this story is not my sales prowess, but rather what he said to me after the sale when he came in a couple weeks later to pick up some blank media.

“You were absolutely right. I LOVE the speakers. It makes a HUGE difference in my games”. He didn’t have any feedback for me as far as music was concerned. He didn’t listen to a lot of music, but he just wanted to let me know how much better it was for games (which I personally have a harder time telling the difference in to be perfectly honest) it made to use some good quality sound equipment instead of onboard with cheap speakers.

PROGRESS! I didn’t get the Thermochill radiator that I was planning to use for this build, but what I was able to get was a Feser X-changer 360 radiator, which is marketed as a “Thermochill Killer”. What better way to test this claim than to put it up against the Skulltrail system.

Here you can see it installed in the bottom. The cabling has also been tidied up substantially down there now that I have a radiator in. Everything needs to be tucked away perfectly to keep the cables out of the fans.

Here’s the cable management from the back. You can see the both of these Noctua fans have a clear path to the other side of the case. The 3rd fan is exhausting right into the intake of the power supply, then directly out of the case. I thought there might be cause for concern having the hot radiator air going into the power supply, but the exhaust from the power supply is quite cool, even under full load.

All of the Tygon tubing is full of Feser One black fluid and green UV reactive zip ties are being used on all the tubes to ensure that they do not slip off. There is still some fine work to be done, such as splicing the power cords for the two cathode kits so that they will both turn on and off with the same switch.

I also need to go get some blue UV SATA cables from home. Intel, in their infinite wisdom only included 4 SATA cables with the Skulltrail motherboard when there are 6 ports, all of which are being used in this system. Fortunately I have some extras at home that I’m willing to part with for the sake of my customer. Otherwise he’d end up with mismatched cables, and in a system like that, that kind of thing is unacceptable.

I also still need a RAM cooler for the FB-DIMM memory. I had a CoolIT one on there before, and it works great, but I took it off out of curiosity to see how hot the memory would run.