Well a new Tech Tips is finally here. It’s not what we wanted to release (frankly) and we have some very exciting other stuff coming up soon, but we saw the weather outside, and it’s something I’ve toyed with a few times, so we thought “What the hey” and packed our junk outside.

Look for the Domino ALC to show up at an NCIX near you in the coming weeks!

Throughout the day I get quite a few emails asking me various tech & computer related questions, so I thought, “What better place to answer them than my blog?”

Q: What i have to do to overclock core i7 965 and what type of cooling to use and what memory, which motherboard and a good videocard.

A: Overclocking the Core i7 as I covered somewhat in my video here, is not all that complicated provided you have the right system components, but what I didn’t really cover is a list of recommended components.

I’ll start with cooling and work my way through the rest of your questions. When we did up that video, the CPU had just launched and there wasn’t a whole lot available! In fact, we only had ONE CPU cooler in stock that was even compatible with the Core i7! Now the situation looks a lot better and there are lots of different options.

Water cooling recommendation: The Swiftech APOGEE GTZ gets my vote. Don’t forget a hold down!
Air cooling recommendation: The Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme still rocks and comes in 1366 now.

For memory, once you get into about 1333MHz triple channel, the performance doesn’t improve much. The most important thing to consider when selecting memory (in my opinion) is the after-sales support. Almost every RAM vendor it seems offfers a “lifetime” warranty, but very few of them are actually likely to be around long enough for that to matter. At this point I can’t recommend buying 3GB of memory. It’s time to move on to 64-bit and lots of RAM!

6GB RAM Recommendation: Corsair 1333MHz C9

For motherboard there are lots of different options out there already, but my high end recommendation is still the Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME. It has a great feature set, the BIOS is maturing very fast (I use this board in my own system), and the overclocking is very good, even with 12GB of memory.

If you want to save a few bucks, the recently-launched ASUS P6T looks like a tremendous value offering (if you can call a $300 board a “value offering”…)

As for the video card, that doesn’t affect overclocking, but now that so many of the X58 boards support SLI AND Crossfire, you’re free to use pretty much whatever video card you want! Just pick the one that best suits your budget and performance requirements.

Now I’ve added an Areca RAID card to the mix. This is starting to look like a worse and worse investment all the time. I wanted to try with a few different cards because I figured “Hey, now I’ve got an Areca, so it’ll just be a matter of 3 different products that function properly, but have varying levels of performance”.

WRONG!

Card #1 (ARC-1210) makes my POST & BIOS screens refuse to show. Windows boots fine, and from there I can configure RAID sets, but that’s not something I can accept as a 24/7 solution.

Card #2 (ARC-1222) boots fine in the machine, allows me to create a RAID set out of the four X25-M drives, gives great read performance, but then takes a big dump on the write performance (far worse than onboard), wavering up and down between about 225MB/s and 50MB/s (no consistency to it)

Card #3 (ARC-1680ix-8) failed to boot several times and simply hung at the “Waiting for RAID card firmware to become ready” screen the first couple attempts. I even left it overnight with that screen up and the little indicator spinning away. I decided to give it one more shot this morning to see what happened and it booted! I was thrilled, but write performance still sucks. Read/write caching are both enabled (as far as I can tell) and I’m almost at the end of my rope here…

Well, I’m a little late publishing this one, but I recently had an experience with a USB gadget that I felt was worth documenting on in video format. We started shooting this video at 5:30, 1 hour before I was supposed to be at a portrait studio in Vancouver.

Yeah… I ended up having to stop at a relative’s house to borrow a disposable razor (and some hair gel). Fortunately they were having dinner and there was extra, so I got a bite to eat as well! Win!

As a follow up though, with only 1 day stubble, the Syba USB shaver WILL remove hair without TOO much fuss. It’s still no replacement for a well-sharpened hunting knife, but it’ll do in a pinch

I’m far from releasing all of my benchmarks and experiences with this new setup, but I have run into a couple of problems worth mentioning in my quest for the best possible storage performance.

First I attemped my new setup with a 3ware 9690SA-4I and I created a forum thread over at XtremeSystems.org documenting my failure with that… What a waste of time that card was… After that I decided to move on to the Onboard, but there ARE bottlenecks and compromises that have to be made doing that.

I don’t notice the same freezing/hitching or lock ups that some have claimed exist with Jmicron controllers on cheap SSDs, but I *do* notices a sluggishness at times. I don’t think it’s related to the SSDs, but rather to the southbridge. One way to replicate it reliably is the Windows Experience Index. If anyone can shed some light I’m very interested to hear why this happens during the CPU Test…

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve negotiated a deal with Bawls Canada and the order is placed. By next week you should be able to purchase Bawls Guarana Energy Drink in cases of 24 at a retail and individually online. Still not sure about pricing, but expect it to be competitive with the local stores!

Wow. I can’t believe they’re here already. I was expecting these to take quite a bit longer!

Unlike all of the other test floating around on the web, I actually paid for these. That’s right, more than $2500 in hard drives for 320GB of storage. That’s a cost of $7.6/GB! Evidently I’ve completely lost my mind, but I’m confident that the performance and overall speediness of my machine will justify the upgrade. Let’s hope I’m right *gulp*. RAID 0 performance on ICH10R and a 3Ware 9690SA-4I PCIe 8x hardware RAID card to follow!

I’m very excited!

One of the users at the NCIX.com forums sent me an email with a terrific shot he took of the Syba USB Plasma Ball that we’ve had on sale the last couple weeks. I don’t know much about photography, but I do know that at 1920×1200 this is a great desktop background!

Thanks Mike!

the original thread can be found here.

Well it’s been FAR too long since I’ve put anything in my blog. I’ve got some really exciting stuff coming up to do with Intel SSDs (think 4 X25-M 80GB drives) and a nice 4 ports 3Ware RAID controller, but I won’t have drives for another 3-4 weeks, so I’ve got some new content that’s completely unrelated.

The Lenovo S10 is the next hot new netbook on the market, so we grabbed one from the back and opened it up to show the fit & finish of the machine as well as the accessories it comes with. We don’t cover performance, but you can assume it’ll be about on par with the other netbooks on the market

This was shot, edited, encoded, and uploaded in HD, but you may have to wait a minute or two for it to buffer (depending on your network connection) so click here if you want to watch in HD.

It looks like a couple of users over at XtremeSystems.org have attempted to remove the IHS of the Core i7 Extreme 965 CPU with tragic results.

credit for this disturbing image goes to clo007 from XS.org

I have to question the wisdom of attempting to remove it in this manner when we already knew that Intel’s been soldering the IHS on for years! I may still attempt something like this with a method I cooked up back when I popped the top on an X6800 (which lived)….