Alex Hopmann’s Blog

NewEgg has the OCZ Agility 3 240gb SSD drive on sale today for $239. This is the same one I just used in my new workstation and its been working great for me so far. This is a great price and together with another few recent sales marks SSD prices dropping below $1/gb.

Also AnandTech writes up their latest High End Buyers Guide and their SFF HTPC build is very close to my workstation build. Same processor, motherboard, case. Smaller SSD for only $20 less than the deal above, and they added a slot-based cable video input instead of the graphics card (since they did this as an home theater machine). Of course my HTPC is in an even smaller case and uses the external 3-channel video input and a slightly lower end processor.

Two quick updates on the new desktop PC before I get around to writing up more about the build process. First of all I mentioned in the previous post that I went with 8GB of RAM because the larger DIMMs were just to expensive. It turns out this is a perfect example of just how fluid the PC industry can be. Just a few weeks ago the only options to buy a 2×8GB RAM set cost more than $250, and last week NewEgg did a Shell Shocker for $99 which of course I snapped up. They are still more than 2x the price of 2×4GB sets, but since I love to run lots of things at the same time, run lots of VMs, etc, the extra RAM is really nice.

Meanwhile I also read about how you can upgrade 2GB Radeon 6950 boards to 6970s just by updating the BIOS to enable the extra shaders. Since I have one of those this sounded great, so I followed the instructions over at TechPowerUp. Er, except that I didn’t read all the instructions and missed the bit where for my board I was supposed to use a different tool RBE to update my existing BIOS instead of using the alternative BIOS they supplied. The result was a video board that hangs Windows anytime Windows starts up with the board installed and enabled. Luckily my motherboard has on-board video so I could use that but unfortunately the software that flashes the BIOS doesn’t work when the board is disabled in Windows.

Furthermore, the instructions on TechPowerUp show how you can easily fix these problems just by flipping a dual-BIOS switch on the board. So I look on my board and find the spot where the switch is supposed to be- the board has stenciled labels but I guess they cut costs by leaving the switch off. Grrrr.

I finally solved this by making myself a DOS boot disk using these instructions and putting the ATIFlash DOS utility on it. I was lucky I did follow the instructions about saving a copy of the old BIOS and that restored me to working state.

Proving that I’m a glutton for punishment I then tried the suggested technique of using RBE to update my existing BIOS. It didn’t seem to work for me- GPU-Z reported the same number of shaders and the machine seemed noticeably less stable. So I went back to the beginning and everything is running fine again.
Then I put the new RAM in. The downside of a smaller PC case is that it can be a real pain to modify it in any way. To replace the RAM I had to remove the video board (since it was in the way of the RAM side-clips), and the power supply (since it blocks everything in this case). Luckily the power supply is fairly easy to remove since there are nice thumbscrews that let you pull it out the back without un-plugging anything.

With the new RAM in I start up the machine and ran the Windows memory diagnostics. I always like to do this with new RAM to make sure everything is ok, especially given how much of a pain it can be to return stuff after 30 days. Its really great that Windows 7 has built-in RAM diagnostics- you just hit F8 during boot up, then tab to switch the “page”, and then select the diagnostics. I got a clean pass from those and am now full-steam ahead with 16GB of RAM.

I’ve now completed building out the new desktop PC and thought I’d detail the hardware component choices I made. As I said last post, one of the key advantages of building your own PC is that you can pick the exact components you want, so its worth going over the list of those components and why I picked each one. In a future post I’ll fill out details about the challenges I encountered putting this thing together.

Finished view of my new PC in a Mini-ITX case

Component List

Processor: Intel Core i7- 2700K (quad core, 3.5ghz, 3.9ghz turbo)
Motherboard: ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT (Intel Z68 chipset, Mini-ITX)
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaw 8GB (2×4GB DDR3 1333)
Graphics: HIS IceQ X Turbo Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Boot Drive: OCZ Agility 3 240GB
Other Drives: 2x Raptor 150GB Drives (from my old machines), Blu-Ray/DVD/CD burner (from my old machine)
Case: Lian Li PC-Q08B (Black aluminum Mini-ITX Tower Case)
Power Supply: Antec NeoPower 550W Power Supply
USB3 Hub: Syba SD-HUB20058 USB 3.0 4-port hub (internal/external)

Component Details

Before I dive into the details I’d like to reiterate my goals for the system. The idea is to build out as high end of a system as possible while staying within as small of a form factor as possible and not buying any of the extremely-expensive parts. This is my main workstation machine for my home office so I use it for coding, running VMs, browsing and playing games.

Processor- for a brief window of time the Core i7- 2700K was the top of the line processor available. For some time Intel has always had a “top of the line processor” that cost close to $1000. But this past year the best processors have been under $400 so its been a fairly easy choice to get the high end one. Intel just came out with the new Core i7- 3960X that costs $1049, but that takes a new chipset and socket type and there aren’t any mini-ITX motherboards that support it. So I get to stick with the 2700K which is just as good for most games, and even better for most encoding tasks (since it has the on-chip GPU that can be used for encoding).

Motherboard- There are really only two choices here. I wanted the Z68 chipset since it improved a bunch of things over the previous ones for a high-end system, and only Zotac and ASRock make motherboards in Mini-ITX form factors. The Zotac board I just couldn’t get to work. It fails pretty consistently on boot. I’ve tried it with multiple CPUs and RAM, so the problem is definitely the board. Also its impossible to upgrade the BIOS without booting to Windows (as far as I can tell) and since I can’t boot to Windows without crashing, that ends up being a pretty serious problem. The Zotac board has some nice video outputs, but they don’t matter for this system, and the ASRock adds an eSATA port which is really nice. The only problems I have with the ASRock board are that the eSATA port doesn’t support port-multipliers. I had been hoping to use it with an external Sans Digital 4-drive eSATA box, but it only shows one drive when I plug it in.

RAM and Power Supply- I got both of these on New Egg “Shell Shocker” specials. No special logic for these other than that I wanted brands that are generally well known, I wanted 8GB of RAM (tempted to get 16GB but the 8GB DIMMS are still way too expensive) , and I wanted a “modular” Power Supply that lets you just connect the specific connectors that you need to reduce cable clutter inside the box.

Graphics- I’ve generally liked the ATI/AMD boards lately and this one seemed to be this generations sweet spot of being able to drive 3+ monitors and give enough performance at 2560×1600 without being in the stratosphere of pricing and heat. This board seemed like it would be relatively quiet with decent cooling for the system which I was expecting to have a fairly crowded box.

Boot Drive- I’ve been using an Intel X25M 80gb and the boot drive was getting a bit cramped. NewEgg had a killer sale on this OCZ Agility 3 and 240GB gives me plenty of room for boot-drive stuff. One interesting note- because my old system was on my old drive as a VHD, I was able to copy the VHD file over to the new drive using a “VHD Resize” utility, reinstall boot-loader stuff, and it made it fairly easy to just switch all my existing OS over to the new machine.

Case- The Lian Li PC-Q08B case was one of the few choices in this range. I was looking for something that was as small as possible, but would still accommodate a full-sized video card. This case supports plenty of drives and overall ends up far smaller than what I had before. Overall the case was a pain to setup, but that usually goes with the territory when you are trying to build a smaller form-factor system (although plenty of big systems are a pain too). The way the USB3 ports on the front work are especially weird. They didn’t include a normal USB motherboard header (which the ASRock board wouldn’t have had anyway- the one advantage of the Zotac is it has extra USB3 ports). The front panel connectors just terminate in USB3 plugs that you have to work through the case and plug into the back. Instead I bought a small “internal” USB3 hub that can run off a standard floppy power connector and stuck it in my internal drive bay. Now, that thing is plugged into one of my back USB3 ports, but at least both of my front ports work and I still have one in back.

As I said, I’ll fill in more details about the various challenges putting this thing together shortly. The results appear great right now though- instead of taking up a huge amount of floor space, I have a small mini-tower in the corner of my desk. The CPU doesn’t exactly run cool (its ~40C at idle and maxes out at ~70C under high workloads), but its well within the expected limits. And best of all the overall result is acting very stable and is snappy fast.

Here I go again. I’m starting to feel like a bit of a masochist building my own PCs rather than just buying something nice off the shelf. A colleague asked me the other day why I build my own and sometimes its hard to actually figure it out.

Ultimately it comes down to being able to spec out exactly the parts that I want. I can get the exact processor, video card, dvd drive, hard drives that I want. When you buy from a vendor you have to deal with their choices which are often optimizing for very different things. They also tend to have weird pricing where certain crappy components are cheap but the ones you want are a huge upsell (SSDs are still in this category- they charge far higher than market prices for them when you configure one with a PC now). Also by buying pieces I can more easily roll over components that are still working fine from the previous PC.

Either way the biggest pain is dealing with broken pieces. This is frankly where Apple has it nailed lately- bring your broken stuff into an Apple store for the first year and they just fix them (although sometimes you wait around for a year). Dealing with replacements and RMA shipping whether from Dell, HP or NewEgg is just a huge pain.

For components in general I’m a big fan of NewEgg. Buying stuff from them is great, their prices are decent, they ship things quickly, and its easy to find the right stuff on their site. But when something doesn’t work the RMA process can take hours to the point where I often just give up rather than try to get the component replaced (which I suppose is the point). I’ve discovered you need to be careful about buying the components of a system early since after 30 days returns become an extra-nightmare. I bought a nice slim blu-ray drive for the Media PC but took more than a month to try it out. It turns out it was DOA. So I contact NewEgg. They say “too late, contact the manufacturer for their warranty”. So I contact Sony Optiarc and they reply “we are just an OEM, contact your retailer for warranty support”. And thus we enter Kafka land… Eventually someone worked it out and $10 and several hours later my drive is on its way back to them to be replaced, but I assume it will be weeks before I get my replacement.

This year’s upgrades are both pretty similar. Both my Media PC and my main home workstation are getting new Sandy Bridge processors and new smaller cases with mini-ITX motherboards. The old Media PC was in a fancy “media case” which was about the size of a big receiver and the new one is more like 10″x12″x3″. It doesn’t have room for 5 drives in it like the old case, but then again I bailed on putting 5 drives in the old case since the heat and noise was a big problem and I didn’t need more than 2TB storage in the actual media center box anyway (all the big movies are off on the server anyway).

The workstation has moved from the huge and heavy Antec P182 case to a new mini-tower that is more like 14″x10″x12″ and is about as small as you can get with a mini-ITX motherboard, high-end CPU, a few drives, and a full double-width video card. Its still super-tiny compared to the huge old tower and I should be able to stick it in the corner of my desk behind my monitors and free up a ton of floor space.

More details on both systems in later posts.

As with many others, I received my Kindle Fire yesterday and thought I’d write up my initial impressions. My main frame of reference is comparing it to older Kindles and my gen-1 iPad which probably sees 50% of its usage as a Kindle reader.

I should start off my with my expectations. First of all the price point is low enough for me that I was willing to take a chance with it to learn what its like to live with an inexpensive mini-tablet. I’m hoping that it fills a role in my multi-device household that includes ePaper kindles, the iPad, many PCs (laptops and desktops) and the xbox. I should be able to use it to read a book, to check recipes in the kitchen, or watch some TV shows on Hulu, NetFlix or Amazon. I’m also putting my entire music collection into the Amazon Cloud Drive so checking out how they pull off the seamless integration with their cloud services should be obvious.

First of all, overall the device is really nice. The display looks good although its pretty reflective and certainly shows fingerprints pretty easily. The lack of any hard-buttons other than power means that simple things like increasing/decreasing volume require hunting around on the screen (& multiple steps) which makes it pretty inconvenient as a music playback device.

Again, the general impression was that its a solid effort but with some rough edges. It should actually have plenty of CPU compared to my gen-1 iPad and WP7 phone but lots of simple animations “tear”/drop frames. The best test of this I did was that I used my iPad & Fire to read exactly the same book side by side and flipped pages. The iPad page transitions were smooth, the Fire ones would glitch. The same sort of thing happens in the flip UI on the home page (which is actually not a very practical UI anyway although its nice eye-candy when it works smoothly).

Overall video playback worked pretty well, although NetFlix seemed like the audio was slightly out of sync with the video. Hulu seemed like it was better enough that it wasn’t annoying (watching a TV show on NetFlix was off enough that it bothered me).

The browser is ok, although it also just “felt” a bit rough. Pages just felt like they were loading in a bit of a funny way. Also it will be interesting to see how I feel about the 7″ form factor after using it for a bit. For reading fiction in the reader it was fine, but reading a technical book felt really squished and most web-sites wouldn’t fit in portrait so I had to switch to landscape which was a bit awkward.

I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t have audio-in of any sort. If it did you could see amazing apps like Amplitube run on it. At $200 for an amazing guitar/vocals effects box I’d probably buy a few. Of course if Amazon is losing money on every one sold that might not work out so well for them. It will be interesting to see if the USB port can ever be used for any peripherals?

The lack of any option for 3g is too bad also. The whole billing model for cellular network devices is a mess right now but I’m assuming by 2020 we will have that all figured out and these super-portable devices will be much more killer when they are just automatically internet connected, always, everywhere.

One other frustrating thing is that the on-screen keyboard is terrible compared to those in iOS and Windows Phone. I don’t really have any experience with other Android phones or tablets- is keyboard input this bad on all Android devices? Or maybe the Fire has a less expensive touch digitizer so its less accurate at reading the positions of my taps?

Overall, its still a very solid inexpensive media consumption device and it seems like it could open up this category for a much broader audience. Further, its realistically a v1, and I’d expect to see lots of improvements polishing these rough edges in the future.

I’ve tried twice before to get LED lightbulbs for the house. This has seemed like a very exciting thing for quite some time- the idea of fairly low power, efficient, almost never burning out light sources seem like a great thing. But so far the results have been a disaster-they were fragile, didn’t support dimmers, and the light quality was terrible- both very little light output, plus the colors were horrible.

I think I can say that they are finally here and practical. I got a selection of several different ones at Home Depot over the holidays and put a few in and so far the results look great.

Probably the start is the Home Depot’s own brand the Eco Smart. At just $18 its far cheaper than the others, and its the closest to a normal lightbulb. $18 buys you a bulb with 429 lumens, equivalent to a 40 watt normal bulb, but it only uses 9 watts. I replaced a location that I had been using an existing LED and the results went from terrible to great- I can easily recommend it for anywhere you need a “normal” bulb that doesn’t need to be too bright (no equivalents of 100 watts here).

I also bought a few from Philips who appear to be making a big push in LED lights. I got 8 watt and 12.5 watt equivalents of normal bulbs and an indoor flood that is 12 watts. These cost quite a bit more at $22 for the 8 watt and $39/$49 for the 12 watt bulbs.

The flood is a bit weird- you can tell its a LED since it looks like it has a bunch of lenses on the front. The light quality is good though, just the bulb itself looks weird when you look at it. The “normal” two are even more strange when turned off- they look yellow when off, although when on it uses some special technology to create good looking white light. For exposed applications I feel like the Eco Smart looks better, but the 12 watt Philips looks like it can be a good fit in a recessed light fixture- it seems like it has some good openings for ventilation, but I do plan on keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t get too hot. When its on you can’t really tell its at all different than the other lights.

Best of all, they are all dimmable and unlike CF lights they turn on quickly and should have much longer lifespan. I’ll update on here in a couple of weeks what they are like after living with them for a bit.

So Windows (like most OSes) maintains a number of caches where it keeps in RAM frequently accessed disk contents (as well as a few other things). Normally these are not adjustable- it just uses extra free memory for this to improve performance, and the minute you actually need the memory, it is freed up and available to a real program.

Hyper-V puts a little twist in this. When you create or start up a new VM, it needs the full memory as hard-allocated memory to that VM and apparently it doesn’t force a cache clear if there isn’t enough memory available. We are building a bunch of stuff on 48GB servers and initially thought we would easily be able to put 3x 15GB VMs on them- the remaining 3GB would be plenty for the OS that basically wasn’t doing anything. But at times we have found the Cached memory is as high as 20GB (after a bunch of big file copies, usually of VHD images), and the machine doesn’t have enough free RAM to boot the target VMs.

Any thoughts on how we can clear this? Dynamic memory coming in future releases should fix this issue, but for now it would be great if we could just run a cache clear/flush right before VM start time.

I’ve been having a problem lately with the Windows Media Center I use for my main TV. I’m still running Media Center on Vista and I have a 750GB drive in the box that only has about 200GB of real content on it, but even though it should have around 500GB free, its only reporting 10-20GB free.

My suspicion is that the Windows Home Server integration might be at fault. I recently upgraded my Home Server with Power Pack 3 and it has a cool new feature that integrates with Media Center and can automatically archive data to the larger disks on the server. The Home Server has always been a bit strange about how much free space it reports- despite ~7TB of real free space, the system disk I have is fairly small and I think that causes it to report only a small amount of free space. Now that the C: drive on my Media Center is doing the same thing it makes me suspect that the Home Server is doing something fancy with the disks and causing this problem.

Anyone have any ideas? The Home Server tie might be a total red herring…

As I typically do this time of year its is time for “Winter PC Cleaning”. This is the time of year when I often end up looking at which machines around the house I need to upgrade, which to replace with new machines, and which machines to reinstall Windows to get rid of the cruft that tends to build up over time.

On that last point, its unfortunate that its necessary but it really does seem like a good thing to do. It isn’t as bad as it was in the old days when your system really got slower and slower and progressively less stable if you didn’t clean it up. But as improved as it has been the last couple of years, there is still plenty stuff you install that makes various hooks into the Windows Explorer, into your codec list, and all over the place and without starting from scratch now and then. In the past I’ve felt like I had do to this every year with my main machines, but I guess its a mark of progress that I’ve survived for a whole 2 years without worrying about it.

Two years ago I built my new workstation using top of the line parts of the day. At the time a 3ghz (overclocked to 3.66-4ghz) quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM was pretty much top of the line (unless you went to the server-class Xeon chips in which case you could use two quad-core CPUs for 8…) It is an interesting benchmark of the state of progress in the industry that while the shiny new Core i7 machines are indeed faster, they aren’t enough so that I’m really eager to build out a whole new system right away.

Still there have been a couple of things that have been annoying me. My home workstation was still running Windows Vista and while I’ve been increasingly using a Win7 VM on it, having used Windows 7 at work for a long time now I’ve been eager to upgrade it. The other biggest concerns were that the main disk has been feeling really slow. Its one of the expensive faster “Raptor” drives, but its not that much faster and combined with the fact that I’ve been running 32-bit Vista which sure seems to page a ton, and that the drive is so noisy you really hear it when its seeking all over the place, it has felt like a real dog.

So given that I’m moving up to Windows 7, I bought myself two key upgrades- more RAM to take the system to 8GB (which with the 64-bit install of Windows 7 I plan should work nicely) and a SSD for my boot drive. NewEgg was nice enough to have a screaming black-friday deal on the 80GB X25Mg2 drive for $219 (down from the usual $279 or so) which was enough for me to pick one of those up right away. I kind of wish I’d bought two so I had one for my laptop, but I’m not quite going there yet.

The other big plan is to install Windows 7 in a VHD so that I’ve got more flexibility to backup my OS image. I found some instructions here although I’m not worried about the dual-boot thing. I know some friends who are using dual-boot to have separate partitions for non-released stuff (beta versions of Office and other stuff) but I just run those in VMs and don’t mess with different base OS images.

There was one big trick missing from the instructions for VHD install. When I went to setup Windows and selected the VHD disk it told me that the given partition was not supported for boot. Turns out that the “Next” button was enabled after all and the install worked just fine, so that warning just needed to be ignored.

So hopefully that should do it for now. I suspect it will be time to upgrade my video card (currently an ATI 3870) in a few months, although I’m really hoping that they will come out with some that support 4-6 outputs on a single card (which is the rumor). Those of course might need new connectors (DisplayPort) so the scary part might be waiting on a new generation of displays. Since large multi-touch displays should also become practical sometime in the next year, I’ll be waiting on those for sure before I upgrade anything.

One interesting twist- when I was doing my table I was mostly thinking of SATA in terms of the high capacity 3.5″ drives, where you can get a 1TB drive for ~$90 and a 1.5TB drive for $120. So that is actually $.08/GB (which I rounded up to $.1). But a very interesting in-between solution is to go with the commodity 7200RPM 2.5″ drives. The fancy 10k/15k RPM SAS drives are always worse performance/$, but a $60 250GB 7200 RPM 2.5″ drive gives you pretty much the same IOPS. Plus I’ve seen 2U server designs that can fit more than 25 in a single box (as compared to ~8-10 max 3.5″ drives).

So if you aren’t trying to maximize capacity in a 2U unit you can either do-
10×1.5TB 3.5″ drives, 15TB storage, 750 IOPS, $1200, 0.625 IOPS/$
or
25×250GB 2.5″ drives, 6.2TB storage, 1875 IOPS, $1500 1.25 IOPS/$

Which represents twice the performance/$ at a cost of less than half the capacity/$. But again, if you weren’t going to be able to use that capacity anyway, its a great trade-off.

Alternatively in the same price range you could get two of those SSDs if you data-set is really small-
2×64GB SSDs, .13TB storage, 6600 IOPS, $1400 4.7 IOPS/$

So the SSD performance/$ is still better, but the capacity is so small that its unlikely to work for many applications.