2007 February 13 archive at Daniel Spisak on Technology

Archive for February 13th, 2007

1 year, 6 months ago

I’ve been working on my new PC

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Categories: Personal and Technology Musings

So I figured I should show people the new desktop PC that I went ahead and built. Basically, I’d been using a 3 year old Shuttle SN41G2 with an Athlon XP 2500+ cpu, 1GB DDR 400 ram, ATI X1600 Pro 512MB AGP videocard along with a 120GB IDE drive and whatever Pioneer DVD burner was $40 in the last 6 months. This rig still runs well for lots of tasks but I knew I was going to be wanting a newer system that was dual processor and could run Vista well and eventually play DX10 games well. Plus, I wanted the system to be much quieter then my Shuttle which had developed an odd whining noise in one of the fans which was getting on my nerves some.

Enter the new hotness! Its bigger then the Shuttle, but still is small enough to fit under one arm okay. Here are the hardware specs for the beastie:

Silverstone SG-01 mATX SFF Case
Antec TruePower 2.0 420W PSU
ATI X1950 Pro 256MB PCI-E videocard
Intel DG965OT mATX Viiv compliant motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
2GB DDR2-667 Kingston ram(important note below!!!)
320GB Seagate 7200.10 Barracuda SATA HD
D-Link AirPlus DWL-520+ 802.11g PCI card
Whatever the latest Pioneer DVD burner was

Front of the system
Front of new PC

Rear of the system (one 60mm fan missing) Back of new PC

Left side of the case. Note how there is zero clearance from the PCI-E power connector to the HD cage. I also went ahead and took the time to route the motherboard header cables underneath the board and taped them down with electrical tape. The ribbion IDE cable is going to be replaces with a rounded 10″ cable once it arrives for better airflow. I also moved the one 60mm fan that comes with the system into the top position to help with cooling the video card. Left side of PC

Right side shown here. It’s a little hard to tell from the photo, but the stock Intel cooler has a decent amount of clearance over it from the PSU fan intake. Also here you can see how I routed the motherboard header cables out and under the motherboard to the positions needed. In this photo I still had my original 2GB DDR2-800 Geil ram installed. I had all kinds of problems with this RAM. Namely, the RAM didnt operate at DDR2-800 speed at 1.8V like they claimed. Also, the RAM was using a 16-chip package which was not compatible with my motherboard. After trying to talk to Geil via email and not hearing back from them for three weeks I returned the RAM to Newegg for a refund and spent the same amount of money on DDR2-667 ram from Kingston that worked flawlessly on the first try. Moral of the story is always buy Kingston, Crucial, or Corsair for RAM and dont even bother looking at anyone else, especially Geil because their customer support is non-existant!
Right side of PC

Now the system is mostly complete but its got some later additions that will happen. Mainly its going to get either an NVIDIA 8800GTS 320MB card swaped in to replace the ATI card or I will wait to see how ATI’s R600 graphics chip launch later in March goes to see how the cards compare performance wise. When I do the DX10 card upgrade I will also be upgrading to a Corsair HX520 modular 520W PSU to help deal with the cable clutter in the case.

I’ve also got some new 60mm and 80mm SilenX fans on order to help with airflow and noise in the case along with a nice rheobus fan controller to mount in the unused 5.25″ bay in the case that should arrive later this week. Right now the CPU runs 41C at idle with the stock Intel cooler on the chip. The ICH hub chip however runs at 76C which I am a bit concerned about. Once the new fans arrive I will have 2 x 60mm fans and a 80mm fan for air circulation in the case with the loudest fan being 16dBa.

All in all the system has been working great and I have Vista Ultimate running on it and things seem to be working well. Anyways I will post more about the system after I get the rest of the fans and the fanbus installed. I may consider swapping out the stock Intel CPU cooler still for a Silverstone NT-06 cooler but I am not sure how I feel about that still.

1 year, 6 months ago

Maintenance and changes here

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Categories: Personal

So, as it turns out, my friend Nick who graciously lets me host my frankenstein parts OpenBSD server is in a bit of a power crunch at the moment in their facilities.

What does this mean for your intrepid writer here? Well, it means I have to move the physical server that runs Nonmundane.org. Not that any of you ever care really but it does serve all of my email, my photo galleries, and my main blog which is then crossfed into LiveJournal and Vox for me by Wordpress.

Speaking of which, earlier this week I went ahead and did a small shedload of server maintenance and upgrades. The blog is now running WordPress 2.1 and using the latest version of the K2 theme along with all of the other 14 or so WP plugins I use updateded to their latest versions. Additionally, I’ve upgraded Gallery to version 2.2 RC1 and it seems to be quite happy now.

Next thing to upgrade will probably be the OS on the server at some point. It’s running OpenBSD 3.8 right now, but I am eyeing version 4.0 and keeping and eye on -current. Perhaps when 4.1 is release I will spend the time to upgrade to that. The other big upgrade I have planned for the server is a few months down the road. I think I will ditch the Athon XP 1800+ hardware for a used Core 2 Duo Mac Mini at some point. According to this post on the OpenBSD mailing list it looks like a Mac Mini can run OpenBSD-current without too much trouble.

In any case, I have my good old friend Sheer to thank for the soon-to-be new home for the NM server. The server is going to get moved on Thursday so my primary email, photos, and main blog will be down for most of Thursday since I have to pickup the server in Long Beach, then go to class at UCI in the afternoon and then hit up Rancho Santa Margarita in the evening to setup the server in its new home.

This means if you need to email me for the next few days, try me at my Gmail account at timelord@gmail.com. Otherwise, just IM me.

I will laugh however if I get calls/emails/IMs about “the server is down” since I consider the forums on NM dead and deceased.

About the Author

Daniel Spisak was born from the fiery depths of fusion and now roams the pale blue dot known as Earth. I obtained my bachelors degree in Computer Science from UC Irvine at the end of 2007.

I am also involved in technology & security consulting firms as well as being a freelance technology writer. I also contribute to Jerry Pournelle's website and Chaos Manor Reviews. Additionally I am also a freelance photographer as well and you can find my photos either on my own personal gallery or up at my Flickr account or on Zivity.

This blog is one of the main locations where I do my writing, which is then automatically sent to my LiveJournal, VOX, and MySpace accounts. I can also be found on a variety of social networking and microblogging sites like Pownce, Twitter, Brightkite, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

If your viewing this site with Internet Explorer it may not look correct because IE is horrible about following W3C web standards properly or consistently. I suggest you try browsing the Internet with Firefox. It is much better and not as vulnerable to security flaws as IE can be.