A few problems and sprung up that will effect the rest of the tests. The USB Temp monitoring probe is some what slow in response and it shows in some of the graphs. It also appears to be off in reading temps.

The main problem with the temp probe is you can only use the probe they provided with the USB attachment, from what they told me its calibrated to each probe. So I cannot use any other probes that I have here on hand, the readings go way off if I use one of my other probes.

The next problem is this probe does not want to placed on bare metal. So by taping the probe to a bare metal Evap I would get really crazy readings. When the probe was removed from the Evap it would read correct. The answer to this problem was to put a small amount of black electrical tape around the probe and then tape that to the Evap.

Although this fixed that problem, it also made the probe read slightly off from actual temps and it would become even slower in reading temps.

So I will have to look for a different way to read the temps.

I did continue on with testing to see what the results would be like. You can see in these next graphs that temps are some what warm in the readings and appear to be about be about 5c – 8c off from actual temps measured with a Fluke meter.

Here is the CPUz screen of the following tests.

First test was the Jinu SS Phase, AMD 965 C3 at 4.0ghz running wPrime 1024.

This is one of the harder tests to run for a Phase unit as it stress all cores of the CPU to 100% use and puts out a heavy continues heat load to cool. The power reading matches a Kill-O-Watt meter very closely so the graph is spot on for power. As you can see it jumps over 100watts for this test and the Phase temp readings show that the Phase goes under a heat load and temps warm and then slow down as the Phase unit catches up to the load.

Second test will be 3DMark06 at 4.0ghz

This test shows the power usage going up as the GPU is working harder, but over all temps are lower because the CPU is not working as hard. There are points in the test where a higher heat load output is shown and that’s around CPU Test #1 & CPU Test #2, the Phase than gets colder as the Phase unit recovers from the load of those tests.

Third test will be 3DMark Vantage at 4.0ghz

Here you can see pretty much the same thing as 3DMark06, all though 3DMark06 uses a little more power than 3DMark Vantage does.

So I will continue to look for a better temp monitoring setup so I can get more accurate readings for this.

I also have a load tester close to being finished and I will run that to get a load curve of the Phase unit. I am looking forward to seeing actual heat loads on the Phase and what readings I will get.

To capture the old tapes we used a Canopus ADVC-1394 capture card which is some what of an older card but still worked very well for what we wanted to do. One of the quirks this card had was it would not run on a Win XP fully updated machine, so I used just a plan Win XP install and never updated it. This was fine as it would only be used for this.

So we had an older PC all setup running a Pentium 4 dual core installed in an Apevia X-Qpack case with several hard drives to store all the captures and provide editing/encoding work space.

This is the CPUz screen of what is actually running in this box, you can see that its nothing major here.

The tape decks my friend had that we would use for this.

Beta Deck – Sony SL2710
VHS Deck – JVC HR-S9911U
DVD Deck – Panasonic DMR-E20

Everything worked pretty well and I started off capturing, encoding and burning DVD’s. What I would do back then as I wanted this to be as streamed lined as possible because of the huge number of tapes to work on was to capture 3 tapes at a time which could be anywhere from 2 hour, 4 hour, or 6 hour recordings. When that was done I would edit to clean up split these huge files into parts that would fit onto a DVD. These would then be batched up and encoded which would take almost a solid week of encoding time. Those files would then be burnt to a DVD and then move on to the next batch of tapes.

All that took about a year to complete and the encoding machine setup was put aside as that project was finished up.

Well wouldn’t you know it, my friend simply cannot pass up any old tape that he finds and stops by the other day with a box of tapes he found in the back of a recycling center. Oh joy I get to start this up again LOL !

Pulling all the stuff back out I setup the system on the side of my bench and slowly figured out how it all went together and worked.

So the capture/encoding station lives on !

The software I used for this capturing the video is Vegas Video LE 3.0 and it looks something like this while capturing.

The captured raw files tend to be rather large, ~50gb’s+ so they need to be edited to clean up things and then split into sizes that will fit on a DVD. Generally a football game will need to be split into two DVD’s to keep the max resolution and detail that I can get with these old tapes.

For this part of the process I used TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress which allows me to edit and encode very easy and then batch up all the encoding.

When I did all this before I encoded on the Pentium 4 machine and that took a fair amount of time, almost 3 hours per DVD. Now I copy those files over to my main rig which has a 965XE at 3.9ghz and do the editing/encoding there which only takes ~23 minutes per DVD so its much faster with 8 threads working on this vs 2.

After the files are encoded its time to burn DVD’s. For this I use TMPGEnc Author 1.6 and its also pretty simple to do.

So that’s pretty much the process and it actually goes pretty smoothly. Many of these tapes that I did are rather old, this football game was 9-13-93 and recorded off of regular TV so quality was not the best, some of the older tapes I have done are late 60’s.

One other thing that you can do with all this software is encode to a mpeg file, or a whole host of other formats and save them on your HDD so they can be called up at any time. I can see another huge project coming down the line LOL

Another thing I used this setup for was Audio encoding from old LP’s and Cassette  tapes. I picked up a D.A.K. USB turntable back then that worked pretty well.

http://www.dak.com/reviews/2020story.cfm

For capturing and editing the Audio I used Audio Cleaning Lab 11 deluxe. This software has some very nice features like removing hiss and crack and pop filters for cleaning up the sound of old LP and tapes.

So an older machine with a few added features can be turned into a very useful work station. Being able to archive old VHS and Beta tapes that you may have laying around is a big plus. Taking our LP and Cassette collections and capturing them and with a little clean up they can be turned into really nice sounding files that can be archived or burnt to a CD for your enjoyment at home or in your car.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it !

The TJ07 cooling tower sat next to what I called the main rig which was in another TJ07 case. It had a EVGA 790i SLI motherboard and a QX9770 which ran at 4.8ghz overclock for 24/7 use. It was an amazing machine that had so much power at the click of the mouse button to run anything I wished at an instant.

Later as I became even more interested in extreme cooling and searched for even better ways to cool things. This amazing machine enter my work area. Built in 2006 by Jinu, this 2 Stage Cascade was the most powerful cooling unit I had, and I love every minute of using it.

Over time with using these machines you find that they have pro’s and con’s. On the good side, they get very cold and can handle high watt loads to keep overclocks stable. On the bad side they can generate lots of heat and can make a fair amount of noise like the 2 Stage Cascade.

The people who build these units, for the most part,  understand how they work, at least some do, but often designs are copied that work with out much regard to how and why things done.

Designs come and go, some build different units called benching units while others are smaller and built to fit in a case with the computer.

The problem that every unit must address is the heat coming from the CPU while its running in a overclocked state. Load testers are constructed that can be set to a given watt load such as 300watts and the unit is tuned for that heat load.

Tuning can be a tricky business that involves cutting cap tubes, charging the unit with refrigerant of a given type to a whole host of other ways. Different parts such as the Evaporator can play a large role in the capabilities of the unit and how it handles a heat load.

Here are three different types of Evaporators. A Chilly1 on the far left, a Teyber Stepper in the middle, and a Jinu Maze type on the far right.

There are a whole host of different types of Evaps and they vary in design from builder to builder. But which type works the best for a given cooling unit ?

So far that I have seen, there is no way to actually measure the effects of these things besides throwing a load tester on the unit and set to a watt load, or by what a builder says works well or doesn’t, with no real way to back that statement up with data other than experience of the builder and what they say.

Some of the things I am interested in to study are effects of Evaporators on units, how fade can be addressed and what does the heat output of a CPU really look like during a test.

I began building a setup that could monitor both temps and watt loads at the same time and show those readings in graph form so you could see just what was happening during a test.

Now there is problems when attempting this. One of the problems is how can I measure the heat output of just the CPU while the computer is running ?

Besides using a load tester, measuring the temps at a given watt load like what was done for me when I picked up the Jinu 2 Stage Cascade.

At 200w… it is holding -95c…
At 270w… it is holding -89c….
At 285w… it is holding -87c….

So that is a start and gives me an idea on what to expect.

I have several phases to this project that I am working on. One is I need to build a load tester and I have some parts for that here now and awaiting the rest.

I will use the load tester to calibrate my findings, or at least have some set data points that I can compare data measured with.

To monitor watt loads while the computer is running I will have to use something like a Kill-O-Watt meter like this one pictured and a unit that has a USB interface so the data can be feed to a computer and graphed with a Watts Up Pro unit.

To monitor temps I will use a temp probe that has a USB connection so data can be uploaded to the computer and graphed along with power usage.

So now armed with the ability to measure and collect data, send that to a computer and graph the incoming data I will begin my first tests.

The computer for the first part of this will be as follows:

Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD6, AMD 965 C3 CPU, ATI 4890 for graphic card and Corsair Dominator GT 2000mhz CL8 memory all powered by a Coolermaster Ultimate 1100watt PSU. For cooling I will use a Jinu Single Stage Phase unit.

The first test here shows the temperature drop of the cooling unit unloaded, that is it is not connected to anything.

I must note here that the units I am using for monitoring temps has a little lag to it from the USB/Computer interface, so it is not 100% perfect in the time scale and it does have an error margin in the actual temp readings. I watched the actual temps with a Fluke meter and these are with in +- a few degrees C.

So now I have a base line of how the unit handles without a load. When the load tester is finished I will add to this actual watt loads and what the temp reads at to make a performance curve.

Lets add the watt usage of the computer now.

The second test will show the start up of this setup at stock settings, the power usage of the full computer and how watt load and temps change from power on to sitting on the desktop.

First the Jinu Single Stage Phase unit must be turned on and temps pulled down to operating temperatures, then the computer will be started and run until it is at the desktop and idling.

CPUz screen of what the CPU is set at and its vcore setting.

Now the system is started up and run until its idling on the desktop.

So here you can see that the start up of the computer and how many watts it is putting out, it maxed out at ~280 watts during start up and then settled down to ~210 watts while running on the desktop.

Temps started at room temperature and the Phase unit dropped to ~-48c when the computer was started. You can see that temps warmed up a few degrees C then settled down to ~-48c for normal desktop operation.

The Phase unit showed it can handle these watt loads very well.

So now we have the basic parts of the up and coming tests. We can see in graph form what the power in watts is being used by the whole computer and how the Phase unit responds to the watt loads generated.

In the next series of blogs I will show bench programs run, how everything responds to these tests and how things react to higher over clocks.

A special thanks to Archer for the inspiration in doing this project

If you do a search on Newegg you come up with 36 listings which range in price from $145.99 to $283.99 with kits  in 6-7-6-18 to 9-9-9-27 timings, and 1.5v to 1.65v. So as you can see, this range of memory has a pretty wide selection of kits for what ever you are looking for.

The G.Skill F3-12800CL7T-6GBPI kit spec’s as follows: DDR3-1600 CL7-8-7-24 at 1.5v, PC3-12800 2GBx3. G.Skill Part number is: 10051040027518. So this kit will give you 3 sticks of 2gb each for a total of 6gb.

http://www.gskill.com/products.php?index=252

You can see a list of Qualified Motherboards there. Interesting to see that there are no EVGA Motherboards listed, but I am sure that will change.

Add a few pictures of the kit and my setup which is a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard and Intel Core I7 975EE CPU.

The PI refers to the heat spreader which for these is black, they look very nice and are not to tall to interfere with most heat sinks. They are actually about a 1/16″ taller than some of the other kits I have so its not that much. The dark blue logos look very nice on a Gigabyte board for those who want colors to match up with there rigs.

Because there are a lot of kits to pick from in this memory range I wanted to keep my tests at manufacturer spec’s for the first round and then see what I could get them to do with some RAM overclocking.

So I setup the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R & 975EE at stock defaults and set the RAM to 1600 7-8-7-24, 1.5vdimm running on SS Phase cooling and away I went.

First screen shows these results.

SuperPi 1M – 11.766s, PiFast – 24.61, wPrime 32M – 7.375s

Memory Read: 17231 MB/s, Write: 14066 MB/s, Copy: 19550 MB/s, Latency: 40.4ns

Then I up the overclock to 4.15ghz

SuperPi 1M – 9.906s, PiFast – 30.56, wPrime 32M – 6.063s

Memory Read: 17002 MB/s, Write: 14463 MB/s, Copy: 20970 MB/s, Latency: 39.0ns

And now 4.32ghz

SuperPi 1M – 9.453s, PiFast – 19.73, wPrime 32M – 5.89s

Memory Read: 16932 MB/s, Write: 14376 MB/s, Copy: 20671 MB/s, Latency: 39.1ns

And I topped out at 4.4ghz

SuperPi 1M – 9.25s, PiFast – 19.33, wPrime 32M – 5.687s

Memory Read: 17814 MB/s, Write: 14650 MB/s, Copy: 19522 MB/s, Latency: 38.6ns

So I was able to go all the way to 4.4ghz at 1600 7-8-7-24 and at 1.5v

Now overclocking this RAM was a bit of a problem. In order to reach a speed of 1800 I had to loosen the timings to 9-9-9 which resulted in poor stability so I left everything at 1600 7-8-7 which is where this RAM seemed to like to run.

SuperPi 1M – 11.703s, PiFast – 24.34, wPrime 32M – 7.235s

Memory Read: 19000 MB/s, Write: 15569 MB/s, Copy: 21878 MB/s, Latency: 39.ons

I spent just about a full day with Memtest trying to find sweet spots but going lower in timings would usually result in noboots or errors in Memtest. Again the sweet spot for this RAM is at manufactures spec’s, imagine that

When the first sets of RAM came out for I7 CPUs a good set of 1600 9-9-9 1.65v was plenty good for any rig. Now with manufactures that are able to get better results with kits for things like timing, speed and lower volts we are getting faster, tighter RAM that runs on less voltage, this is all a good thing imo.

But it remains to be seen that tighter RAM really helps any gaming platform, office apps or general use that anyone would really notice in everyday use. But for benching platforms and high end gaming rigs you would want higher end kits anyway.

This kit fits in well with a good mid range computer for everyday use. I am a big fan of lowering volts required to run tho and that will result in less heat output, plus help to save on your power usage.

So with a nice mid priced set of RAM this kit should be good to go on any mid ranged computer, but don’t expect much RAM overclocking with it. To me if you want to run RAM faster then get a set that is rated for that. High end gaming rigs would want to use the higher speed kits, why would you put anything less in a rig you spent a lot of money on.

At a speed of 4.4ghz that I was able to achieve before I had to start loosening up timings and giving it more volts I think that fits in well with high end air cooling and good water cooling setups, just don’t expect to overclock this RAM, use it at stock and you should be very happy.

You can find this memory at Newegg.

Thank you G.Skill for the sample.

We also run into older pieces of equipment that for what ever reason we decided it might have some use and take it back home to see what we can do with it.

A few months back a friend of mine was having issues with his wife’s old laptop, it would shut down on its own from time to time. The laptop in question is a eMachine M5305.

This is about a seven year old laptop now and had a sale price of ~$1,200 back then. Equipped with a blazing fast AMD Athlon XP-M 2200+ CPU clocked at 1789.4mhz in stock config., and stacked with 512meg of RAM this unit was a nice laptop, back then

Now a days these types of laptops are much faster and capable machines, but do older ones still have a use and worth repairing ?  Lets find out …

With a up and coming testing project I found myself needing a laptop that I could use along side my benching equipment. I had this laptop just sitting off on a shelf doing nothing so I decided to take another look at it today and see whats up with it.

This machine would turn on and get to the desktop and run for a few minutes then just shut itself off. A fresh battery was installed months ago so that left pretty much one thing it could be, over heating.

Searching around the web about these machines you find that it is pretty common that they over heat and do the very same thing that happens with this machine.

I found this nice guide on how to get inside one of these machines and went at it.

http://dexplor.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=171&highlight=5305+overheat

After opening up the machine I see this. It was not as bad as I had thought, showing just how badly a little bit of dust in the cooling area can have adverse effects on these machine.

So now pulling out the fan and seeing whats inside.

So with that cleaned out she is up and running, tho it still runs hot, but it doesn’t shut down at all anymore. With the covers all screwed back in place she runs a nice toasty 82 degrees. This follows with all that I have read about these laptops, they run hot.

Desktop picture of CPUz and HWmonitor

In the end I had a machine that had lived its life doing simple things, broke down and was discarded, and replaced by a new machine. The first owner is much happier with the new laptop as this thing is rather slow.

But as I found a need for it, it was a pretty simple job to bring it back into usefulness and a test/monitoring machine for a new project that I will show later when that is all up and running.

Here she is, the revived eMachine M5305 working just fine

Gigabyte has taken its great performing GA-790FXT-UD5P for the AMD platform and added USB3 & SATA3 ports in the GA-790FXTA-UD5 line. Even though USB3 & SATA3 products can be a bit hard to find right now, expect them to become more common place very soon. Today I will be looking at a Buffalo 1TB USB3 external HDD and see how it performs on the GA-790FXTA-UD5 motherboard.

The use of an external USB HDD is something that not a lot of people benchmark, nor would it be used as a benching platform. Users use these drives for mass storage pretty much and generally never pay them much thought after they plug them in. With the Buffalo 1TB USB3 drive we now have plenty of space to store a great deal of photos, movies, music or just about anything else that you would want to get off your main Hard drive. A USB drive is also nice in that it can be unplugged and moved to another machine for transferring large amounts of files.

One thing that becomes apparent though is the transfer speed of moving large files with these types of drives, they can be slow and take a fair amount of time to move large numbers of files around. The new USB3 spec is going to change that, for the better.

So let’s take a look at this and see just what we can expect from USB3 and the GA-790FXTA-UD5.

The setup I used for these tests is. Motherboard: GA-790FXTA-UD5, CPU: AMD 965 C3, RAM: 4gb Dominator 2000mhz, GPU: ATI 4890, Windows 7 64 bit, 32gb MTRON PRO SSD for OS, WD 74gb Raptor HDD, Buffalo USB3 1TB external HDD

Nothing major here except for the RAM, but I am not going to be over clocking this so that’s not a problem. The other two drives will be used for a comparison to the Buffalo drive. I do not have another USB drive to compare to so this one will have to be sufficient for these tests.

Picture of the Motherboard taken from Gigabytes website.

And a close up of the backside IO connections. The connections that are Blue are the USB3 ports,

USB 3.0 Support
The GIGABYTE AMD 700A series motherboards support the latest generation SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology made possible through an onboard NEC uPD720200 host controller. With superfast transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps, users are able to experience an almost a 10x improvement over USB 2.0. Additionally, backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 assures users of long term use of their legacy USB 2.0 devices. The onboard NEC SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology also provides new power management features that include increased maximum bus power and device current draw to better accommodate power-hungry devices.

For a full listing of the spec’s for the GA-790FXTA-UD5 please see Gigabytes website.

http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=3270

The Buffalo 1TB USB3 external drive can be seen here

http://www.buffalo-technology.com/products/external-drives/drivestation/hd-hxu3-drivestation-usb-30/

It also has bundled software that I included with this test, the Turbo USB3 feature.

Ok let’s fire up some benches and see just how this USB3 external drive performs compared to the other two drives.

First up will be Crystaldisk

The order of screen shots is… 32gb MTRON PRO SSD, WD 74gb Raptor, Buffalo 1TB USB3 external HDD

As you can see the Buffalo drive is beating the other two in everything but the 4k file size bench and holding its own against a fast Raptor SATA drive. Its really moving large files very fast and doing pretty good with small files also.

Next up is HDTach with the same order for the screens

Now we are seeing that the Buffalo drive has very good bandwidth compared to a SATA Raptor drive and huge burst speed. The only thing really holding this drive back is access time at 13.5ms vs the Raptor 8.3ms. The MTRON PRO SSD clearly is a beast with 0.1ms access time.

Next up HDTune with the same order for pictures.

Pretty much the same results as HDtach. But you will notice the Buffalo picture, I will get into that in just a bit.

Now PCMark05 results, again the same order of pictures.

Compared to the Raptor the Buffalo holds up pretty well.

As you can see from these benches the USB3 drive holds up pretty well, its very fast, and moves larges files with ease. I did transfer over from my WHS a few movie ISO’s and copied them back and forth many times and transfers went very fast. Playing movies or music from the USB3 drive went completely stutter free.

As a test I installed Win 7 on the USB3 drive and booted from that, it actually performed very well. This would make it a great drive to have a OS installed on in case you ever needed to boot from a recovery drive to fix your main machine for what ever reason you needed to do that for, virus infection, corrupt HD.

The USB3 drive is fast enough that it could be used with back up programs such as Acronis to keep different images of OS’s on and image back to the main HD.

Now for the bad… as you saw in the HDTach test there was some rather large spikes in the bench which resulted in poor performance. When I first saw this the drive would make a clicking sound, spin down, then back up on each of the spikes. I am sure we all have heard the sound of a drive going out and this sounded just like that.

As this sounded and acted like a bad drive, I had it replaced with a new one. Right out of the box HDTach did the same thing with the new drive.

All other tests, file transfers etc did not show this behavior at all, only HDTach would do this. I went through different BIOS, from the BIOS that came with the motherboard to the latest on Gigabytes website, same for the USB3 drivers. No matter what config HDTach would do these strange spikes.

Other than that problem which was not noticed in any other test this drive is a solid performing external HDD.

As a side note. Another Tester/Bencher that I have a great amount of respect for named Miahallen, has done a very complete and fantastic job on his review, it can be seen here and is a very good article on this and worth while reading.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=239828

I have been asked what type of drive is inside the enclosure of the Buffalo drive, here is what Everest has to say.

It’s the Gigabyte “Upgrade Your Life” Show Case.

I was very fortunate to have one of these beautiful cases sent to me. It was a used case and had been around a bit I think, but that’s no matter.

Here is a typical Gigabyte setup at a show.

So let’s break one of these cases down, see how’s its built and put in a starter setup to see how it all works and looks.

Here we have just the base of the case where you would house the PSU and drives.

Inside behind the GIGABYTE logo on the front you will find two light bars that are connected to a switch on the top of the bottom part of the case. You can turn the lights off and on from there.

We can now look at the top part of the case where the motherboard and other parts will be located at. A few close ups of the Power/Reset switches are located and what the corner joints look like.

And we can put it all together and see the complete but empty case.

I have installed the first build into the case using
GA-P55A-UD6
Intel Core I7 870
9800gx2 Graphics Card
4gb Dominator 2000mhz RAM
Megahalem Air Cooler
32gb MTRON PRO SSD
1x 75gb Raptor HDD
1x DVD Drive
Coolermaster Ultimate 1100watt PSU

As you can see even with this big monster Air Cooler there is still plenty of space inside this case.
The PSU is a problem with all its cables. I really prefer modular PSU’s so you don’t have a huge amount of cables to worry about if you don’t need them all.
Also the DVD drive that I have is a flat ribbon type and that would not reach all the way inside the case, a SATA drive would be much better for this.
Mounting the drives inside is no easy task. There is mounting brackets but putting in screws on the side nearest the front is extremely hard. So for now I just have them laying inside the case. The DVD will be removed after the OS is installed, until I can get a SATA drive.

But let’s fire it up and turn on the lights and see how this baby looks.

Additional things I need to do are to get some nice fans that light up for the two locations on the right and left of the top part of the case. Plus general clean up and some additional equipment to make it all nice.

I very soon learned though that plastic cases are very hard to keep clean. It came in a box with filler material for shipping protection that had dust that needed to be cleaned off, it was not easy. Where I live we also get a lot of dust in the Central Valley of California so keeping it clean might be a problem.

Over all this is a very nicely made case, sturdy and able to be moved around with ease. It’s nice to have a bench table like setup that looks clean, easy to work in and shows off your computer build very nicely.

I would like to say thanks to Gigabyte for their kindness in sending this case to me, I didn’t have to bug them to much LOL.

Here are some pictures of the case at Gigabyte CES 2010

I will post some updates to this when I get a chance

Thanks for viewing and I hope you enjoyed it

A popular case that my friends like to use is the Apevia X-QPack uATX line and we have built many of these. So I will be working with this case and upgrading a prebuilt system that was completed months ago.

Apevia makes three lines of the uATX series, the X-Qpack, X-Qpack2 and X-Qboii which is a uATX tower.
You can see that they come in a wide range of colors too pick from.

www.apevia.com/Products_Level3.asp?CID=1&CID2=2&CID3=0
www.apevia.com/Products_Level3.asp?CID=1&CID2=2&CID3=1
www.apevia.com/Products_Level3.asp?CID=1&CID2=2&CID3=2

The unit I will be rebuilding is based on the X-Qpack, but I also have a new X-Qpack2 here that I will show later on.

You can see that they come with a slide out motherboard tray and come with a Power Supply installed which is generally powerful enough to handle most builds that would go in one of these cases. Packaging and quality of the case construction is pretty high, all though the sheet metal used is a little soft and can be bent rather easy.

Here are a few pictures of the new X-Qpack2 I have here.

Parts list for this build will be:
Gigabyte P55M-UD4 uATX mother board
Intel Core I7 860
Corsair XMS3 4gig 1600 9-9-9-24
EVGA 9600 GSO 512 graphics card
Thermaltake Silent 1156 CPU cooler
Parts to be reused are
2x 1TB WD Green series HD’s
1 Sony DRU-820A DVD drive
The old power supply was a Antec 350watt

Requirements for this build is it will be used as a work computer so no high end graphics cards used, it must make as little noise as possible, and be able to play HD movies from time to time. This will be your general purpose web surfing, and office application build.

So starting off with the rebuild I took out the old motherboard which was a cheap Intel MB and we used an older QX6700 CPU that I had laying around. The CPU was pretty much a waste for this build but it was what I had on hand at the time when I built this months ago.

So I begin by take taking out the old mother board

And now installing the Gigabyte P55M-UD4, RAM and Graphics Card

It’s a pretty tight fit but it all goes in. I had to remove the top plate on the GPU to provide enough clearance for everything to slide in.

Now time to install the heat sink. This was to be a real challenge to get this to fit in the case as it is rather tall for a build in this case, so let’s see how everything came together.

Compared to a large Mega Shadow

Down inside you can see there is not much room.

But now I had another problem, the fan housing on the heat sink was too high and interfered with the power supply placement.

The heat sink could not be rotated 180 degrees as then the heat pipes on the heat sink would interfere again with the power supply. So what I ended up doing was to take of the fan housing which was a simple bracket, lower the fan and use a good old zip tie to hold the fan in place. It did not have to be lowered a whole lot and should still provide enough air flow into the heat sink to keep things cool as this build was not going to have a high over clock on it so all should be good.

Another problem came up again, this time with the old power supply. At first I was unsure what the problem was, I would fire up the computer and it would start and even get a ways into the boot up then shut off. At first I thought that I had not seated the heat sink on correctly and the CPU was over heating forcing a shut down. So with great pain I removed the heat sink and reseated the CPU, then the heat sink and tried again, believe me that taking off the heat sink was no easy task as there is very little room to reach in and turn the hold down screws. But the same problem happened again and again.

So now thinking that the power supply was the problem I removed the old Antec unit and plugged in my benching PSU and everything worked fine. As luck would have it we had a bran new Corsair 450watt unit that was a perfect fit, in fact it fit better as it was not so long. Now the machine was up and running fine.

The OS to be installed was a OEM Win 7 32bit and as usual that went very fast and no need for driver install as Win 7 takes care of that just fine. I really do like Win 7 for its fast install and no need for driver disks anymore. The only driver needed was for the EVGA 9600 GSO which I downloaded from Nvidia’s website and install, no reboot needed and bingo a full system up and running in about 15 minutes.

Another gadget that I show here is our ZombieTek LCD display. You can check out the blog I did on this over at http://www.techreaction.net/2009/12/26/zombietek-lcd-display/

Now I began tuning the over clock and making sure that everything would work fine with no issues. One of the possible problems with builds like this and cramming so much inside the small case is heat issues. What I do is decided on a moderate over clock and see how the unit performs running Prime95. These cases do tend to run a little warmer than big tower cases so care must be taken that a good solid running system is setup so I don’t get a call later on… Hey Bill this units keeps shutting down, what’s up ??

I ended up with a 3.0ghz OC which was not much more than a stock setup but temps became an issue if went to 3.2ghz. Normal use the 3.2ghz OC would have been fine as Prime95 stresses the machine far more than what I would expect this user to ever do, but I prefer to keep some safety margins in my builds so I backed down the over clock to a safer level. One of the things I really like about the Gigabyte P55M-UD4 and I7 860 is that you can under volt the CPU and still be very stable, stock setting was 1.256 vcore and I was able to drop that to 1.150vcore and give it a slight over clock and still be very stable and lower power usage.

So at 3.0ghz and 1.150vcore I ran Prime95 for over a day and everything was fine, temps were a bit warmer than I would like but ended up at about 60c with it being stress with Prime, normal temps were high 30’s to 40 which is not bad considering all the stuff crammed inside this small case.

Full well knowing that this was not a benching rig I ran a few benches just for grins.

And the final over clock

So doing a uATX build in a small case can be a real challenge when deciding on hardware to install. The X-Qpack is a great case to build on as it has small size, takes up little desk space and makes for a great work station. Using the new I7 line of CPUs can be a problem though with 4 cores and 8 threads all firing away they tend to get pretty warm. When I ran this CPU at a 3.4ghz OC and Prime temps would get to the 80’s which is rather warm, even at this temp range it Primed for over 4 hours nice and stable, but this is clearly to warm. Backing down the OC for a work station that will not be doing any gaming or demanding applications is a wise thing to do so no problems pop up later on, even in the 60’s range I feel it’s a bit to warm but knowing that this machine will never be stressed like this I feel its ok. Maybe a better heat sink might be used and if so we can mod that in later on, but for now I think this one will work fine.

Gigabyte mother boards come with great power saving features which is one of the main reasons I like these mother boards, and they have high quality construction, run very stable, and the ones I have tested and used just simply do not have any problems. They come loaded with features which make them a great value for a mother board.

I have also built many of the X-Qpack case builds and really enjoy building a computer based on these cases. They look really nice and provide a nice small package that works well with many builds.

Here is a WHS I built on one of these cases, packed with an old AMD 4200+ CPU and 4x WD 750gb hard disks. This unit can be shoved out of the way and it just keeps on ticking.

Hope you enjoy reading about this build

After seeing these units at Reachtech.com who manufactures these units in all different sizes and specifications I thought to myself that one of these units would be a great MOD to show computer data on the front of my TJ07 that I had just built. With the help from my friend Jeff I managed to get a unit from Steve over at Reachtech, both of whom are great guys and friends that I have known for some time.

The 4” LCD Display has a fully programmable SLCD6 controller with touch screen and the ability to upload programs and graphics, and talk to the computer through a USB port.

This is the unit I started out with to give you an idea of what these look like.

Starting with this I began to mock up what I thought the screens should look like. As I was extremely busy at that time I happened to come across a really good graphic artist Ross Fairbanks of GUIMagic who has done a large amount of work with Windowblinds. We exchanged ideas and came up with the very first set of screens that would show CPU usage, CPU temps, Fan Speeds and a Clock. These were the basic building blocks of the project and later changed to better fit programing problems and new ideas.

The project was begging to take shape now, this is the first screen.

Uploading this image to the LCD to seeing what this would actually look like. It looked very, very good so we dove into this and began to add more features.

Mocking this up in a bezzel and fitting it to the front of the TJ07

everything is great so far and looking good. Jeff ran into a programer by the name of  Craig Williamson who worked his magic and helpped get this unit up and running so it would animate the images and talk to a computer through a USB port and get all the vital data needed to display on the LCD.

As a test I installed the unit on my benching setup and it worked great.

Now with a working unit we began to look at cases or bezzels to mount the LCD into. Jeff managed to pick up a Garman GPS unit and we took out the display from that and installed ours into it. This looked really good and was just what we had been looking for. However having a injection mold setup made so we could make our own cases was rather costly and way out of our price range for this project.

Later Jeff had a simple plastic stand made up that worked well and easy for us to have made.

We still have lots of  loose endso complete this project but it stands right now it is  fully functional unit that can display CPU Usage, CPU Temps, Fan Speeds, RS Feeds and a Clock. Some of the data that is used to display on this comes from Everest and we can configure our own app to show a few different things like GPU temps or a mix of GPU and CPU temps and different fan speeds from what ever is installed in the computer. Different screens can be shown by pressing the buttons at the bottom of the screen to show what ever you want to display.

Around this time ZombieTek was born.

This unit works really well and would be great for a modding project, custom built computer case or other projects. Some features that we still need to work on is displaying more than 4 CPU cores and the number of Cores has grown a great deal from when we started this project. Other features that we had in mind were to include a skinnable graphics library so a user could upload different back grounds. Much of this would take a fair amount of time to do so that has been pretty much put on hold for now.

Here is a few examples of splash screens that could be used, really what ever you wish could be uploaded here. These are a few branded screens.

With the P55 Core I5 mother boards that seem to be very popular these days Gigabyte has released its first uATX version of this platform, this motherboard takes off of the same lines as the P55-UD4P which is a very solid platform and I expect the uATX version will be also.

So here is a direct link to Gigabytes website on this product.
http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=3168

Over time I have built many uATX computers that are generally used for business or work machines mostly based on socket 775 setups with E5200’s or Q6600’s. Most of the people that I built these machines for prefer a small form factor with as small a footprint as possible. I was pretty excited to see what this new motherboard has to offer many are looking at upgrading to new setups and moving over to Win 7.

Here is an example of the type of machines that I have built a fair number of. The case is a Microfly case which we like a great deal.
http://www.ultraproducts.com/product_details.php?cPath=13&pPath=439&productID=443

And the completed system, this one is a Windows Home Server which is running headless.

The motherboard that was sent to me from Gigabyte also came with a Intel Core I5 860ES CPU. Again just like the 750ES that was sent to me I found that over clocking this chip seemed to be a problem. As I do not have a P55 Air Cooler yet I ran this on my Jinu SS Phase, it also ran on the 2 Stage Cascade but it behaved very badly on extreme cold and appeared to be on the edge of cold bugging. Going from SS Phase to Cascade caused more problems with being colder and over clocks did not scale at all with the extra cold. Usually a session on the Cascade would end resetting the BIOS as strange crashes would happen and the board would not reboot forcing me to reset the BIOS and try again. This CPU would require huge vtt settings almost equal to the vcore to boot and was simply not stable, the highest OC I was able to get on Cascade was 4.6ghz.

So no LN2 for this CPU

Here are a few pictures of the P55M-UD4

And setting it up for SS Phase operation.

Jinu SS Phase setup

And Jinu 2 Stage Cascade setup

The benches were not all that exciting as this chip simply did not like the cold and this CPU seemed to over clock about the same as the 750ES I tested before, however the 860 has HT which is really nice.

So after pulling my hair out for several days trying to get the CPU to clock under cold and not getting anywhere I decided to see what type of game machine/work station that I could put together that would fit in the Microfly cases.

I think this is where this platform really shines.

Setup is:
P55M-UD4
Core I5 860ES
4gb Dominator 1600 9-9-9 RAM
2x MTRON PRO SSD’s
2x 260gtx graphic cards in SLI
Win 7

I set the over clock to this setting and upped the OC on the 260gtx’s to 700mhz core.

I did not do a Crysis bench as… well I really do not play Crysis. As this is basically the same setup as the review I did on the P55-UD4P I expect it would be very close to the Crysis bench I did there. http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=234002

With the contest that Gigabyte is running now
http://event.gigabyte.com.tw/BeatMeIfYouDare
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=235502

I decided to give the Resident Evil bench a spin.

http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/demos/Biohazard5_Benchmark.exe
Use Resident Evil 5 DirectX 10 version
Use Variable Benchmark scene presetting with 1280×1024 display resolution

I really did not like this bench very much, it simply is just too much to watch and is too long.
So here is the result of the test, I am not sure if it means that I have an Average of 194.6 FPS or that, that score is just Average. In any regards a 194.6 FPS is a pretty good imo. I also found it somewhat of a problem getting a screen of the results.

So now I come to a game that I am currently playing and like very much, AION. This is a great game that has only been out for a few weeks now and seems to growing strong.
http://na.aiononline.com

Here we see what my graphic settings are.

This is a very busy hub at Eltnen Fortress with lots of activity so it’s a good place to see what FPS I get here. These numbers change around a great deal as with any online game so this is not a static number. So even with a 43 FPS everything is smooth and payable here with little to no lag.

And as I move out to the open country you can see FPS number jump up a great deal like here at 206 FPS.
Normally its jumping around from say 150ish to over 200 depending on what’s going on.

Just after I took this screen the area I was in had a group of Asmodians Rift in and cause a bunch of trouble, as I had gone AFK for just a few minutes I came back to find myself dead HAHA. But last night they were not so lucky

And just to add, you can run into many beautiful looking characters in AION, here is a sampling of a few I came across while doing my tests.

Ok so the good and fun stuff is out of the way, let’s talk about a few things that I found as problems with this motherboard.

As this is a uATX motherboard real estate can get a bit over crowed and tight spacing of components can be a problem.

When the first GPU is installed it leaves no space for the RAM clip hold downs to be opened so that a stick of RAM can be removed. That means that after you install the RAM and then GPU’s and find the need to either add more RAM or remove it you will have to take out the GPU’s in order to open the RAM hold down clips. This might be fixed by moving the RAM slots a bit further away from the GPU’s.

Next up is the Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons. The location they are in is completely covered up by GPU’s making them impossible to get to after everything is installed. These could either be moved to the edge of the motherboard or removed as the only one really needed is the Clear CMOS button which could be placed on the edge of the MB. This became a real pain when I went to Cascade operation and found the need to clear the CMOS many times.

Here is only 1 GPU installed, when 2 are installed you cannot get access to any of the buttons.

Just like the P55-UD4P and many other Gigabyte motherboards there are several power saving features included with the package. I really applaud Gigabyte for their consistent efforts in adding these features to their motherboards.

As those of us Over Clockers generally do not use these features while benching, they are great features for the work or gaming rig that is run 24/7.

First up is the standard settings in the BIOS for power saving which are pretty standard these days, but Gigabyte has added utilities to enhance this.

Here is the Dynamic Energy Saver.
http://www.gigabyte.us/FileList/WebPage/mb_080104_des/tech_080104_des.htm

I ran this utility most of the time while testing and here is a screen showing CPU Power load while I was gaming.

Total system power usage which had the PSU plugged into a Kill-A-Watt meter shows 342watts usage while gaming.

This pretty much shows that running a highly over clocked rig that may be on High End water cooling or SS Phase draws a fair amount of power, this does not even include the draw from my SS Phase so total computer usage for this rig might be well over 700watts and more if you are using a more powerful system with higher end GPUs etc.

One utility that I did not get a chance to play around with which seems rather interesting for those who are Bluetooth oriented

AutoGreen- Greening your PC via Bluetooth cellphone
Auto Green provides system energy savings by enabling users to turn on and off their PC remotely using their Bluetooth® enabled mobile phone. Once your phone is paired with your system, you only need to step away from your PC, and it will automatically enter S3/S4 ultra low power state, giving you an added level of power savings.

I did not have a Bluetooth receiver for this to test out.

These utilities are added value imo that help us reduce power usage, lower noise and heat output from our computers. The utilities that Gigabyte provide could very easly take up a full review of the suite of products they provide and features they add.

So in closing this review I find this motherboard to be another very nice, stable mother board from Gigabyte, full of features and in an uATX form factor which can fill many different roles from work station, gaming rig, or home server etc. It will handle just about any game other there these days and with its low desktop foot print it can be placed in just about any location around the desk and not take up so much room like tower cases do.

The power/reset button locations on the motherboard are not that big a deal really and not needed, when installed in a case those buttoms are wired to buttoms on the case. The Clear CMOS buttom needs to be moved tho.