I received my motherboard replacement last Friday and I am happy to report it works like a champ.\u00a0 Although I am unhappy to have gone through what I had to go through to get my computer upgrade done, I am quite happy with the (nearly) final result.\u00a0 I had one minor hiccup where I had to re-activate Windows, but I expected that and it was only a minor hassle.<\/p>\n
On Monday, my new full tower (huge!) case arrived, and I moved my motherboard, etc., into it.\u00a0 I am really impressed with the case design; Cooler Master seems to have put a lot of thought into it.\u00a0 My only complaint is the hard drive bays, while mostly genius, makes hook-up difficult.\u00a0 They have this beautiful system where you put your drive into a plastic frame (no screws involved) and then slip that into place.\u00a0 There’s a locking mechanism to hold it there.\u00a0 The only catch is that the connection part of the drive points to one side of the case with not much breathing room.\u00a0 This means (1) taking off the side to attach power and data cables and (b) not much wiggle room for said cables.\u00a0 Still, with a little help I got it to work and overall I love the case.<\/p>\n
Once I had everything hooked up, I ran AMD’s Overdrive utility.\u00a0 Not so much because I wanted to overclock my CPU’s, but so I could monitor their performance and, more importantly, how hot they got.\u00a0 At first, they ran cooler than when I had the whole setup inside a much smaller case with poor ventilation but with a huge standing fan blowing on it.\u00a0 Then I gave it a stress test:\u00a0 I got BOINC running again (for SETI@Home and MilkyWay@Home).\u00a0 It had stopped working for some reason, but a quick reinstall got it functional and put all six CPU’s at 100% use.\u00a0 I went to bed, got up, and found the CPU’s were all hovering around forty degrees centigrade.\u00a0 I had a little trouble finding an optimum temperature for my CPU (AMD Phenom II x6 1090T), but I did finally find a spec on AMD’s website which listed a “Max temp” as being sixty-two degrees.\u00a0 So I am twenty or so degrees in the safe zone.<\/p>\n
My new case does allow for a liquid cooling solution, so I may in the future be able to make things even cooler.\u00a0 Such things are (1) expensive and (b) would mean replacing my current CPU cooler which I am hesitant to do.\u00a0 Still, it’s an option to explore.\u00a0 The case has several HUGE fans and I added one more big one, so it is already well ventilated.\u00a0 The power supply sits on the bottom with its fan aimed down so most of its excess heat goes right out of the case instead of over the top of the CPU.<\/p>\n
Sometime today or tomorrow I will use the Overdrive program to run a couple of tests designed to find out how fast I can reliably run my cores.\u00a0 Several websites have said they can get the clock speed up to 4GHz without losing stability.\u00a0 This is a significant boost from its native speed of 3.2GHz.\u00a0 I have never overclocked, however, and am not keen on doing harmful things to my new CPU.\u00a0 Still the Overdrive facility is designed to prevent that.\u00a0 It allows you to test the stability of your CPU at whatever speed you’ve set it for.\u00a0 Also, AMD has a cool feature built into the CPU which will speed up some of the cores while slowing down others when they are idle.\u00a0 This means improved performance without a significant change to power usage or overall heating of the CPU.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I am thoroughly pleased with my upgrades.\u00a0 Sometime in October I will increase my RAM from eight to sixteen gigabytes.\u00a0 That will be my last upgrade for awhile, I think.<\/p>\n
Setting computer stuff aside, the week has been otherwise relatively ordinary.\u00a0 My involvement in the ASUUC auction is slowly taking up a bit more of my time.\u00a0 Tonight is an organizational meeting for that, and we’ll have a few decisions to make.\u00a0 I had a teleconference earlier this week about the software we’re going to use, and its presentation put out some ideas about how to run the auction that is different from years past.\u00a0 I am not favorable to changing a methodology which has worked well in the past, but I am keeping an open mind.<\/p>\n
On an unhappy note, my surviving son, Spaceman, has gotten some test results back.\u00a0 He has a growth on his pituitary gland which they now think is what’s called an intercranial germinoma.\u00a0 This is extraordinarily rare and scary as hell.\u00a0 It affects .7 out of every million kids.\u00a0 Of those who do show up with this particular brand of tumor, it is usually not<\/em> on the pituitary gland, so Spaceman’s case is even rarer than most.\u00a0 The scariest part to me was reading about “survival rates.”\u00a0 It has been cured in many cases, but reading that people survive a long time but still die after a few years is more than a bit frightening, especially since I lost my other son earlier this year.<\/p>\n One last bit of personal news:\u00a0 I received a date for final orders for my divorce, October 21.\u00a0 After that, I am a completely single man again and my roommate and I get to figure out what future we have together.<\/p>\n Enough of all of that.\u00a0 I am mostly in a pretty good mood thanks to the upgrades.\u00a0 I am doing my best to not let my son’s condition get me down, and shall continue that effort by signing off for the day.\u00a0 See you tomorrow with a lovely poem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I received my motherboard replacement last Friday and I am happy to report it works like a champ.\u00a0 Although I am unhappy to have gone through what I had to go through to get my computer upgrade done, I am quite happy with the (nearly) final result.\u00a0 I had one minor hiccup where I had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions\/121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}