AlexHopmann.com

Building a silent PC- you failed!

On Friday I finally got all the bits together for me new home RAID array. This one is a Sans Digital TR4M 4-space ESATA enclosure plus 4 Western Digital GP 1TB drives. Building it as Raid5 it looks like the total capacity will be 2.8TB (as the computer measures it, not as the drive companies market it).

I started it formatting, skipping the “quick format” option. That was over 24 hours ago and its at 36% right now. Which points out one of the biggest problems with large drive arrays (or any kind of large storage)- if you aren’t careful managing it can be a total mess. This does make me a bit happy that I decided to go with just the 4-drive array rather than holding out for a full 8- the bigger one would be even more of a mess to manage at times.

For my media-PC I purchased a silent video card. Gigabyte makes the SilentPipe series for several of the Nvidia models and it seemed like a good idea to be able to get a card with decent graphical power (not top, but at the time it was better than any of the other cards I had) and no noise.

The catch is that when building a Media PC you need to keep in mind the overall system. The SilentPipe GF8600GTS has two problems- first of all its form factor is kind of big- the cooling fins stick about a half inch over the normal height of a PCI-express card. In a full sized case this would be fine but in the Zalman media-case I have there is only the exact room for full height cards and the extra half inch means the top of the case doesn’t really fit right.

The second issue is heat. The card runs correctly, but overall it does run pretty hot and since its not blowing the hot air outside the case itself it places extra heat load on the rest of the system + relies on the existing case fans to create air moment through its fins and out its vent. I suspect this results in my overall case fans running higher more of the time, so in the end I fear that I’m actually running a more noisy system for trying to use a silent video card. Instead of adding one relatively slow running video card fan I’m pushing the main fans faster and higher RPMs create a lot more noise.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about problems trying to get my SSD drive working in my laptop. Since then I’ve done some experimentation and figured out the issues.

Initially I bought a RiData 32GB CF card (266x speed) and a SYBA SY-SATA2CF CF to SATA Adapter. It wasn’t working (would hang in Windows setup or boot) but I couldn’t tell which component was at fault. Since then I noticed that Sans Digital has the CS2T CF adapter which is shaped like a 2.5″ drive and accepts two CF cards. Its a lot more expensive than the Syba adapter ($99 vs. $18), but it works and $18 isn’t a bargain for a card that I just couldn’t get work right.

Having the Sans Digital be shaped like a normal drive is also a huge help. With laptops you often need to insert the thing way back into the case and they all pretty much assume the standard drive form factor. The Syba was a big pain to get in but the Sans Digital fits into my Dell laptop easily. Once I could tell it worked I bought a second RiData 32GB card and was able to just insert it and expand my volume in Windows- Presto! 64GB SSD drive for $290. It runs Vista great and I’ve installed Voyager (flight planning software) so I should be able to use it in the airplane.

I should mention that I’ve bought several products from Sans Digital so far- I’ve also gotten both of their 4-drive SATA external enclosures, the USB TR4U and the eSATA TR4M. Both work great and are inexpensive and easy to manage ways to add massive storage to your computers.

The hard drive in my Dell laptop started acting poorly so I’m trying to replace it with a solid state drive. Being too cheap to go spend $600 on an “off the shelf” SSD I’m trying to make one using a CF->SATA adapter and a 32GB CF card. Total cost $160.

The only catch is it doesn’t work so far. The Vista install dies part way through “uncompressing files”. Same with XP. At this point I’m wondering if the problem is my CF card (RiDATA 32GB 233X) or the adapter?

Any thoughts? Anyone get this working? There is a really cool looking adapter that lets you use 3 CF cards, but its $180 and its only from geekstuff4u where the shipping to the US is another $45. I can’t find that part from any US place.

I’ve had a Gigabit Ethernet network for quite some time but have mostly been using older Cat5 cables. They looked like they worked fine so why mess with them, right?

Lately I’ve been upgrading them with newer Cat6 cables. I just noticed a file-transfer that appears to be averaging 60megabytes per second or 60% utilization on the Ethernet. I’ve never gotten anywhere close to this performance before- it looks like the Cat6 stuff does make a big difference.

Reading my 500th video card review today I realized that the typical video card review sites don’t really cover the stuff that I care about. Also this stuff changes all the time and there are rarely good places to go to just figure out what is the right stuff to get now. So I decide to post a page that contains my Video Card Guide.

When I’m looking for a video card I’m interested in the following goals-

• Great basic support in Vista, etc, for large monitors. My current desktop rig is one 30″ LCD and a second 20″ LCD in portrait mode (so its the same pixel-height as the 30″).
• Support for common 3d games and applications at great visual quality. I’m running them at 2560×1600 so my ideal is to be able to run at the highest visual settings at full screen resolution with a decent (>30fps) framerate. Typical targets here for me at WOW, Half-Life 2, Flight Simulator X, Google Earth, etc.
• Great media support. It should support H.264 and VC1 acceleration so I can run high definition video at full screen easily without taxing the CPU
• Reasonable price. I’m unlikely to spend $600 on a video card (although sometimes I’ve been tempted to spend $400).
• Stability. If the drivers crash a lot I’m going to be very upset…
• Flexibility. SLI and Crossfire (dual card solutions) are a pain. Having said that I would consider them if the price is right, and especially for the flexibility of getting one card now and another later. The fact that the standard Intel chipsets don’t support SLI is a major mark agaisnt Nvidia.

I tend to have a lot of computers around. I tend to prefer working with lots of big monitors and different computers to deal with different tasks all over. On my desk I have 3 monitors (two 20″ and one 30″), an old computer that is typically open on email, my main development workstation that is doing all sorts of stuff and a few other computers doing misc things (servers, machines I’m setting up for other tasks, test machines, etc).

Clutter is not a new thing in my life, but I’m trying to simplify my desk a little bit. I’ve moved the computers out from under the desk by buying a few USB extension cables and some nice 15′ DVI cables so the computers can all be out of the way but still be hooked up. I also needed some extension cables for my speakers (a 5.1 system which are currently attached through 3 pMix “personal audio mixer” devices that lets me attach them to 3 computers at a time).

Having multiple keyboards around has become a pain so I’m trying out Synergy which is a free tool that lets me use one keyboard/mouse across multiple computers. This is not the same thing as a KVM switch since it doesn’t switch the video- all the machines are hooked up to their own displays, just the mouse moves between them. I just installed it so no reports on its reliability yet. I did hit a glitch where it kept reporting that my “server” machine was rejecting the connections of the client one- changing to a different port solved this problem. I think I might have been accidentally running two instances of the synergy process, with one of them incorrectly configured. I also haven’t tried hooking my Mac into the setup yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

Check out this PCI adapter that lets you use up to 4 CF cards as a SSD (via John).

Of course I have a bunch of more questions-

Can this support the newer huge CF cards? 64GB ones are supposed to exist although the largest on NewEgg is 32GB. But the 32GB one only costs $134, so a 128GB SSD for $600 would be awesome. The pictures only show the 2GB and 4GB cards so?

There are versions of this that work with notebook sized IDE and SATA adapters. I bought one of the IDE ones before I realized that the app I have in mind I really should have gotten the SATA one.

Is there going to be a PCI-Express version soon?

What does the performance look like? For boot? Does it help Windows runtime performance much? Would you want to use it as Swap? What about for running a database?

I wonder if this thing would be interesting for data-center machines. If you could have great performance and higher reliability than a hard-drive, this would be really attractive for servers. For your typical web-server 128GB is more than enough…

I’ve got my new workstation built and am writing on it at the moment. The hardware part is all done I think so its time to start some observations while I get all my software installed and setup.

Before I go onto details of the build and some comments on the parts, I’ll mention that I did manage to overclock it to 4.0ghz (quad core), which I think is pretty cool. I suspect I’ll bring it back to 3.66ghz or so in a bit to run a little cooler since that extra little bit doesn’t actually matter, but as a milestone it was pretty fun ti hit. If I think about it, I had my first 3ghz machine probably 4 or 5 years ago and I think I got a 3.6ghz machine 3 years ago just about this time of year. Of course that was the old slower P4 architecture and only single-core (although HyperThreaded), so this machine is probably well over 4x the performance of those machines.

The Antec P182 Case

Overall I’m very disappointed with the Antec P182 case that I got. Before I get into the details lets say that this is a big case. It has 6+ 3.5″ drive bays, 4 5.25″ drive bays, and is supposed to have plenty of room for everything. Overall the situation for PC cases is just pitiful. Compared to the Mac Pro they all are pretty bad. You get the gamer-cases that are all dressed up with wacky windows and plastic demon skulls. And you get other cases that various people tried to design but pretty much none of them are done with any skill or taste.

This case is for my new main workstation. This is going to be a high performance computer and I’m starting with 4 hard-drives although only a couple of PCI cards (video and sound). The case needs to provide for clean cabling, good cooling, not be super-loud (but my office already has enough fans that it doesn’t need to be silent or anything) and I’d like it to look decent.

So to recap, I’m looking for-

• Plenty of space
• Easy expandability
• Looks decent
• Good cooling
• Not loud


Empty Antec P182 case before install


The parts for the computer came in a few at a time, so I started putting things together before everything arrived. The power-supply goes in the bottom of the P182. Pretty quickly I’m hitting trouble as its a real pain to jam the thing in there. Even worse, there is a nice fan in the bottom in between the bottom drive-bay and the power-supply, but its getting in the way of the cables coming out of the power supply. Later on I end up having to take this fan out because the situation is even worse on the drive side, with the drive cables (power and SATA) are impossible to get out of jamming the fan. The picture to the left is before I removed the fan and you can see how tight it is.

Again, let me point out that this is a very big case. Not the biggest, but its the biggest I have. In a SFF system you can excuse a certain amount of jamming things in. In a large tower case the designers are supposed to have figured this stuff out so that things can be put together without creating a problem.

This may be a situation where the case designers have not caught up yet with modern parts. I suspect it might work with old IDE style drives but the SATA connectors stick straight out more and need more room behind the drive bay. To be clear, with the Antec P182 its hard to not bend your SATA power connectors to the point where they break. This picture shows the drive bay with out the fan- the metal bar at the top of the picture is where the fan would be and you can see how much the power cables would be bent if it were still there.

Another issue (which points to a similar blind spot) is that all the fans have old-IDE style power connectors rather than headers which attach to the motherboard. These are bigger and mean that your motherboard can’t monitor and control the fan speed. The case has some nice external switches that let you adjust fan speed, but the ideal situation is to have the motherboard automatically adjust it based on the internal temperatures so it can crank up when you are gaming and run quiet the rest of the time.

The fit for the motherboard itself is also fairly tight, again given the size of the overall case. There are some baffles that let you separate out the bottom power-supply/drive section from the main section, but they get in the way of the bottom of the motherboard (where Asus puts the USB/Firewire and front-panel connectors).


Finally, if you get this motherboard you need to make sure that your power-supply has a long enough 12V cable. Normal cases put the power-supply at the top of the case which will end up being close to where the 12V connector is on the motherboard, so the power-supplies tend to not make this cable long enough. The P182 does make a nice provision to run the main power-connectors behind the motherboard to keep them out of the way of the expansion cards, cooling, but my 12V cable was at least 4″ too short and so I couldn’t actually get things working inside the case until I bought an extension. You can see the extension cable in the bottom right of the picture. This part from Amazon is exactly what you need to fix this situation-


The last thing that was a trouble during install was that I couldn’t figure out how to mount my DVD drive in the external bays. I was probably just being stupid but the manual is (as usual) horrible at providing any useful information on this stuff. It was not clear whether you insert the drive from the inside or the outside, other than that the inside is blocked by the motherboard. My first attempt to insert it from the outside got stuck because I put the mounting rails on backwards- it turns out that the clips go towards the outside of the case which (to me) is non-obvious.


Finally, some observations on the case now that it is all put together. Overall once it is put together it seems very nice. The big thing I’d look for differently is that it is a pain having the DVD drive inside a fold-out door. To insert/remove disks you need to open the door and put it in. I’d much rather just have external access to the drive so the front-door thing ends up being a pain overall.