Well I couldn’t resist. Grabbed an Obsidian 800D. That doesn’t mean I’ll be getting rid of my TJ07 machine. Just putting together a new machine for another member of the household. Iteration number one (basically only some final specs, no cable management, no liquid cooling, fail build) is done. The machine is functional but there’s a LOT of work to do… Here are some pics. I’ll be updating when I have some time to get a better video card (thinking of grabbing a 4870 X2 used at a good price) and when my special order liquid cooling parts finally arrive

Honestly this makes a lot of sense to me. Customers have been doing this for years. Rather than buying a brand name PC, they’ve been doing a ton of research to find the best components and then they’ve been integrating them on their own. Corsair’s goal is to take a lot of the guesswork out of it by encouraging users to put together their PC using as many Corsair components as possible. A campaign like this wouldn’t have made sense even a year ago but now that they’re doing cases, power supplies, cooling, RAM, and hard drives, they can make a strong case for doing up a “mostly” Corsair PC because even without a “Dell” or “HP” warranty, you know that most of your hardware is covered by some of the best support in the business. Here’s Corsair’s vision of how this looks. Mine is below

Corsair’s big thing right now is about using their components as the basis for your new PC. This Windows 7, DirectX 11, Core i7 gaming PC that we built for them to take to tradeshows is a great example of their new philosophy of choosing reputable parts to build your own “brand name” PC.

I got it pretty much put together this weekend. I still have a lot to do in terms of adding games for people to demo and making sure that 3D Vision is working correctly & all that noise. It should be a very fast demo PC with the centerpiece being a GeForce GTX 275. Everything is working great even though I used some open box hardware in order to avoid opening up new stuff for demo purposes.

The Raven is actually not bad to build in at all. It’s not my favorite case from a cable management standpoint, but it’s well thought out, and I think it looks really cool in person even though it doesn’t really photograph well.

Here’s a teaser shot of the hardware. I’m going to try to do a proper build log this weekend

So far I’m really enjoying my time with the CoolIT Boreas. I set it up last night on a test bed PC running a Core i7 860, 4GB Corsair RAM, an MSI P55-GD65, and a Topower OEM 900W PSU. Overall at idle the unit is reasonably quiet and performs quiet well, but I’ll definitely be making some changes to it. Here I show idle temps with the Core i7 860 running at 3.6GHz using OC Genie. At load though it jumps up to 60C. It’s very important to manage the heat output of your CPU for the Boreas to perform well. Unlike a conventional water cooling system which can actually dissipate more heat as the CPU gets hotter, the Boreas will perform exceptionally well until it is overwhelmed as we’ve seen demonstrated in reviews and end-user testing.

I’ll be making some major changes to this unit including new CPU block, new pump, new (bigger tubing), and we’ll see what it’s capable of.

I was given the task of creating an eye catching demo system for our new Aberdeen store which will be opening in the next little while. I decided to bring take it with me on Friday as a homework project for the weekend (as if I didn’t have enough to do this weekend…) and I’m quite pleased with the results. It’s a bit of an “all show and no go” configuration with the Intel X38 “BoneTrail” motherboard and an ASUS 8800GTX, but since those parts look slick I decided to run with it. Here are some day photos that I took. I will add some night ones once I have a chance to take them (maybe at night would be a good time for that)

edit: NIGHT SHOTS!!

Now the first thing you’re probably thinking is “SSD in a storage server? Is this guy out of his mind?”

The answer is “Probably.”

I’ve lost 3 boot drives in my Windows Home Server since I started using it, and while it’s quite painless to replace a dead drive in WHS if it’s NOT the boot drive, the procedure when it’s your OS drive is LONG and ANNOYING. Since SSDs are supposed to be so “reliable” and Corsair claims their S128 SSD has a MTBF of 100 years or something, I thought “Why not give it a shot”.

I also added a much better HDD mounting caddy to my WHS because the one in this rubbish case vibrates like crazy. It also couldn’t have been helping that I had no fan blowing over the drives. It should be an overall large improvement to my WHS assuming the SSD doesn’t cack out.

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