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.

Well, I’ve been a die-hard wireless user for a lot of years now. It’s been a bit of a love-hate relationship. When I was going to UBC wireless was an essential part of my day and fairly reliable. They have an excellent network there and with a decent wireless card you can walk around campus with a laptop in front you and browse the net.

Not that I ever did that.

As many of the people who game with me on a regular basis know, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with wireless in my home. I’ve tried 3 different routers and about 1/2 a dozen different wireless adapters (USB, PCI, PCIe) over the last year or so and I just can’t find something that works consistently. Either my connection always sorta sucks, or it’s really good, then just totally craps out for 2-3 minutes at a time. It can be very disruptive if the tank shows up while I’m sitting there teleporting around because my ping is 900ms.

So I bought one of these (by the way there’s a smoking deal coming on these in the next sale or two).

The instructions are basically “plug them into the wall, then plug an ethernet cable into them, but make sure you don’t plug into a power bar or it might cause interference”. I was like “Okay. That’s pretty simple”. I unplugged the power bar for the family computer, threw the powerline unit into position on that side, ran over, plugged it into my switch and the wall on my side and…. nothing. No network connection. Turns out the power bar I unplugged on the family PC end also had the router plugged into it. I’ll be needing that. So after I corrected that mistake I could see all the computers on the other side of the powerline network, but still no internet access. A quick reboot resolved that and now I’m golden.

For a little over $50, it’s nothing short of a miracle.  Transfer speeds are absolutely dismal, but since I don’t need gigabit to that side of the network anyway, I don’t really care. The gigabit switch on my side (pictured below) connects me to my girlfriend’s computer and the Windows Home Server. On the other side is just the media PC and the family PC to which 2-3MB/s is fine.

“So Linus, you’ve probably made some great value upgrades to your system that increase performance while decreasing total cost of ownership.”

At least, that’s what most people would be concerned about with a computer upgrade. Here’s what I’ve actually done over the last couple of weeks:

1. Changed from a Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME to a DFI X58-T3EH8 for looks and to get an extra internal USB header
2. Added a $135CAD (by the time it’s shipped to me from Europe) fan controller
3. Made a whole lot of adapters & sleeved a lot of cables
4. Added another water cooling radiator to the front of my case (a HW Labs Black Ice Pro II that I had lying around)
5. Modded 6 mesh front bay covers to sit in place of the solid aluminum ones that came with my case
6. Took my case apart down to the bare frame and washed it with soapy water (much like I should do to my car

Things still to be done:

1. The fans don’t match, as those of you with a good eye may have noticed, so I need to get some more GELID UV Blue fans for the top, back, and bottom rad. I also need some LED blue fans for the front rad, but I’m not yet decided on that one. I may just add a UV cathode in the front for the UV blue fans I already have there.

Well here’s my real upcoming Nehalem build. My last post about it was a bit of a joke. I’m not really good at taking night shots so this one is a little bit overexposed, which is most evident in the tubing. I’m very happy with the results of this setup though. Looking forward to getting a CPU to pop in there.

The ES 965 I’ve been playing with had to go back to the person who owns it.

Well I had a chance to play with an engineering sample Core i7 with a Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME motherboard and 12GB of Aeneon DDR3-1333 C8 memory for an upcoming NCIX Tech Tips, and I’m actually very impressed with the platform.

I’ve mellowed out in the last couple years going from balls to the walls overclocking (think E6600 @ 4.0GHz 24/7 with a custom -25C chiller under my tower) to being more concerned with overall platform stability and maturity (while also loving speed).

On another note, I have a confession to make. My name is Linus and I have a memory addiction. I don’t need lots of memory. Frequently with 8GB in my system I was looking at up to 7GB of “cached” memory under Vista only being used to store frequently used programs. That didn’t stop me from salivating when I saw that high end X58 motherboards were going to feature 6 RAM slots. Naturally the first thing I did was load each slot up with 2GB of RAM.

Here’s a shot of the test bench I used including the less-than-stellar stock heatsink from Intel (got an APOGEE GTZ hold down en route from Swiftech), a 6800GT that has served me well over the years, and my ghetto sleeved OCZ GameXSTream 600W (also present in the top picture with my chiller). I will be doing a complete overclocking walk through for Nehalem on NCIX Tech Tips, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with a dog CPU, all 6 RAM slots loaded up (far more stress on the memory controller), and terrible stock cooling:

- 200x base clock multiplier without much fuss
- 1480MHz C8 @ 1.66V on this random set of 3 dual channel kits of memory primed for 12 passes overnight.
- QPI speed of over 1700Mhz without much trouble
- 3.7GHz on the CPU before running into what I think was a combination of a thermal limitation (80+C under load) and having a less than steller overclocking chip

For a terrific beginner’s guide on overclocking see this thread on www.xtremesystems.org

HAI GUISE,

ALMOST FINISH I7 UPGRADE LULZ XD I CAN USE MY OLD CPU FOR GAMEING?

SEEMS WONT FIT SO I HELPED TO UPDATE THE BOTTOM HALF

I WILL HAVE CPU BOTTLENECK NOW?!?!?!

Well I decided to do some follow up performance numbers that include more drives as well as RAID-0 results with the Seagate 7200.2 drives, and the long and short of it is that I will be replacing my Samsung F1 with a pair of Seagate 7200.2s when I do my next reformat.

The performance difference is not staggering, but when combined with the reduced noise, reduced power consumption and reduced footprint (I”ll be sticking the 2.5″ drives to the back of my motherboard with industrial velcro), it’s an easy decision to make.

Here are some comparisons to some other drives that I found interesting. The mobile drive’s performance looks quite disappointing in direct comparison to the F1 750GB, but when compared to a more equivalent drive (Seagate 7200.10 160GB) it’s a closer fight.

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.