Previous lessons learned

This one is going to be air cooled. Water is fun, but it is such a nightmare if anything needs to be changed. Here are example problems from my 2003 project:

Coolant goo: Eventually, the coolant fogs up all of the hoses.

No coolant goo: Just fill it with distilled water, and you'll get algae growing inside the hoses! Yuck!

Pump death: The pump dies about once per year, so the machine needs a complicated heart transplant.

Sediment: Pump bits and algae sludge eventually create a sediment that needs to be flushed.

Drips: Hose clamps need to be damn tight, or it will drip. I had to double up some clamps.

Hose size issues: Big hoses are better, but it makes finding parts a pain.

Upgrade woe: Upgrading a waterblocked graphics card is a big issue.

Heat: All that overclocking heat still needs to go somewhere. Pour 500 watts of it into a room without air conditioning and you'll be toast.

For my new cooling, I am going to do something simple to start, but I have some parts I've wanted to use for aircooling that could be fun. I have a monster centrifugal fan with a 5 Amp 12v DC motor the size of a coffee mug. It is used for things like kitchen hoods. I hooked it up to a power supply and it cleared off my desk like a leaf blower. My ideal setup would pipe the heat into a clothes drier manifold, and shoot it out the window.

Interestingly, I've changed almost every component's brand since my 2003 build. There is real competition between all of the parts makers! The only part that is from one of the last machine's makers is the operating system.

For performance this time, I am shooting for 2 Sergios of computing power. A Sergio is a unit of computational power defined as the power of my friend Sergio's computer.

PROGRESS BLOG

Aug 7, 2005

Ok, so this time when I searched for good prices from reliable vendors for the parts, NewEgg is the place that kept popping up. It had the best prices on everything, and everything was listed as in-stock, so I ordered the whole deal from them. And it all worked out great! The whole pile showed up after just a few days, and nothing was missing or back ordered.

I slapped it all together in a few hours, booted it up, and it seemed fine. So then I began the ordeal of configuration and software installation.

RAID

My first issue was RAID. It needs to be set up in the BIOS, and then you need to wait for a half hour or so while it reformats the drives you selected. After this, Windows will not recognize it unless you put in a floppy with the right drivers. It took me 3 tries to get XP64 to install, and I had to track down drivers from nVidia's web site since the included drivers are XP32-only. When everything finally was installed, I booted to Windows, and it immediately died, instantly going back to bootup. I am not sure why. Maybe I need a new version of the BIOS, or maybe I left off some other critical driver.

I went back and un-RAIDed it, and after that it would boot to XP64.

SLI

My next issue was getting SLI to work. One card was not recognized as SLI-compatible. The DFI docs show why, but only in the big fold-out quick-install guide. It needs a bunch of jumper blocks moved on the mobo to change the SLI ports to be symmetrical  8-lanes each, instead of one 16-lane and one 1-lane, which is the default. Also, my nVidia graphic drivers needed to be updated, and installed twice. The original installation only installed the drivers to the primary card. After this, SLI was alive and selectable.

BF2

I installed Battlefield-2 to see if everything works. Unfortunately, it popped me out to a reboot again. My new machine seems unstable. It sometimes just reboots, and I am not sure why. After that, though, everything worked. Now I have used it for two days with no reboots, but it still seems to have some driver issues. It will not run 3DMark05.

What now?

I could try to reflash the BIOS. I think there may be a newer version. I could give up on RAID, and instead make it dual-boot and use the other drive for XP32. Or, I could try again with RAID. Or, I could just leave it as is, since it is working fine for what I want to run. I am going to tinker with it some more and I'll see what happens.

Aug 9 2005

Ok, so I rigged up a floppy properly, with a Molex -> Floppy cable. It also required a setting in the BIOS to get it to show up.  I hate having a floppy drive on my new machine, and I'll get rid of it when I'm done.

I found a device driver problem with the nVidia drivers. To make it work, I had to uninstall the drivers after I changed to SLI, and then reinstall them. Now they seem to work.

The random crashing problem I had before seems to be cured if I up the memory voltage to 2.8V (it defaults to a low 2.6V)

I put the new version of BIOS on the mobo. To do this, you need to get the disk image from DFI, create a special bootable floppy, boot the mobo from the floppy, and then it installs. After this, you need to reset the CMOS by moving a jumper, and then it should boot. Unfortunately, something is still wrong with mine, because if I make any BIOS changes and save them, the machine will not POST. If I just use the default BIOS settings, I still have that low-voltage memory issue.

I found that the problem with the RAID is that windows will not allow the driver to run, because it is not qualified, even though it is the correct and working driver. I need to fool windows into accepting it anyway.

I found a few useful websites:

www.dfi-street.com (The official support community)

www.planetamd64.com (An AMD 64 support page)

www.nvidia.com (Drivers for all of the nVidia stuff)

www.dfi.com.tw (BIOS for the DFI stuff)

Stuff to try:

I am going to try to make a custom windows installation disk that puts the right RAID drivers on the machine. I am going to try to do a more drastic CMOS reset procedure, to see if I can clear out that CMOS bug.

Aug 10 2005

I fixed my BIOS. I found useful instructions HERE. And more instructions somewhere else.

The main issue was completely resetting the mobo after flashing. I had to pull the battery and power, and let it sit for half an hour, reboot with a special key pressed (I think page up)  before I could get it to reboot.

Aug 15 2005

Finally got RAID working. I used the old 6.65 nVidia RAID drivers, and I followed the instructions on http://www.angrygames.com/nf4raid-1.htm

Next problem: nVidia's drivers seem to have Vsync broken under SLI. I read that it may be possible to fix with the coolbits 8 regkey, setting split-frame and Vsync. Triple buffering doesn't work either, except in OpenGL.

Also, I found that this machine doesn't have enough RAM for BF2 textures on high-quality mode. So I put in 2GB of memory instead. 3GB doesn't work, so I have leftover 1GB. Grrr.

Aug 19 2005

Everything is working reasonably well. No Vsync, but that is ok. For benchmarking, my first try is 12854 in 3DMark05, which is 24% slower than the fastest machine that has been posted online. The fastest machine is using 3 lines of vapor cooling, one for the processor and two for the graphic cards.  Being 76% as fast as this beast is not bad at all!

Oct 2005

nVidia released a new driver that supports Vsync. Now everything works.

Also, I got printing to work by manually installing an older HP driver directly from XP without any disks, and then assigning the HP printer to this installation.

Lessons Learned

* XP64 is almost ready for prime time, but expect problems. It seems like drivers are available, but they are very hard to find, and many are done as a prototype or an afterthought.

* Widescreen isn't very ready for gaming. Very few games seem to let me run them in true widescreen.

* Games don't have high enough settings for the latest and greatest systems. Even brand new Battlefield 2 doesn't let me dial up the stuff to the full abilities of my hardware.

* Heat heat heat. Heat is getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, even with a very efficient and effective cooling system. Burning 400 watts is going to turn the room into an oven.  To fix this, you need to aircondition your computer room much cooler than the rest of the house. I might try using a drier vent to put the heat outside.

* RAID-0 is not very much faster than no RAID, it uses up half of the disk space, and it is less reliable than no RAID. It is also very difficult to get it working, especially with flakey XP64 RAID drivers. It is one of the things I wanted in my previous machine, but I couldn't get it to work, so I really wanted to do it, but I think it wasn't worth the effort.

* SLI slam dunks the benchmarks, but it has somewhat flakey support, especially with the critical Vsync issue. And it isn't really necessary at this point. Games run at excellent framerates with high quality settings even on a single 7800GTX card.

Software List

There is a bunch of useful free software for building and testing. I am going to list a few things I used.

nLite: Lets you make a customized and unattended installation disk. I had problems with this for XP64 OEM, though.

CDBurnerXP Pro 3: Useful for turning the ISO file from nLite into a disk, and it is free.

AVG: Excellent, free, virus checker.... but doesn't work with XP64 :(

Ad Aware: Spyware checker

Spybot: Spyware checker

Firefox: Better browser

3dMark: Graphics benchmark

Adobe Acrobat Reader: New version 7 installs ugly browser bar that needs to be removed.

SpeedFan: Shows temps and fan speeds

OpenOffice: Free way to see Office files. Works very well.