Switched On Tech Design

Category: Uncategorized

  • New watercooled build coming…

    We have a new mini-workstation/gaming build coming; here’s a couple of teaser pics from the first one:

     

     

     


     

     



    More to come! It’s a beautiful little thing 🙂

  • Intel’s Socket 2011 vs. 1155/1156 – A size comparison

    For those moving from 1155/1156/1366 you might be a little surprised at just how much bigger the new CPUs are; it’s little wonder that they require a twin-lever clamping system on the motherboard.

     

     

     

    Customer’s old CPU on the right (Intel i7-870, Socket 1156) and their new CPU on the left (i7-3820, Socket 2011). That’s a lot of extra CPU real-estate for all those extra pins – almost 900 more. It’s quite a bit heavier in the hand, too.

  • How to test your system’s stability

    If you’re overclocking or just unsure whether your system is performing properly a stability test can be quite helpful to determine just what’s going on. One of the most widely used and effective tests is Prime95; it’s lightweight, does a good job of stressing your CPU and RAM and will happily run for as long as you’ll let it.

     

    You can download it from here. Choose whichever version matches your operating system, download and install.

     

    When you open it you will asked whether you’d like to join GIMPS or if you’re just stress testing; select “Just Stress Testing”. You will then be greeted by a window which looks like this (click twice to expand):

     

    Choose Blend, click OK. The program detects how many cores and threads your CPU has and should automatically select the right number of torture tests to run.

     

    Once you have clicked OK you will see a rather cramped screen which looks like so:

     

    To make this into a more sensible window, click Window -> Merge All Workers, and if you want it all in the one window then click Window -> Merge Main & Comms & Workers.

     

    The testing has now started; you will probably hear your CPU fan ramp up shortly to keep your CPU cool as it works hard. Each of the worker threads will report in when it reaches a checkpoint successfully; if there’s an error it will tell you or your system will crash out. Since it is very CPU intensive it will generate a lot of heat; now is a good time to keep an eye on your CPU temperatures to see how they are faring under load. A good program for this for Windows systems is Coretemp, found here. Be warned, though, it does come with a couple of installer toolbars which you will probably want to decline installing.

     

    Coretemp shows you how hot your CPU is at any given point in time; when open it looks like this:

     

    What temperatures are cause for concern will depend on your CPU; if you see anything over 80 degrees it’s a cause for concern for most chips, though, and anything over 90 requires immediate attention. High temperatures can damage your CPU and other components, so if you see anything that’s out of the ordinary stop Prime95 (click Test->Stop or Test->Exit) and your temperatures should lower; then find out why it was so high! Laptops and the like have much less ability to move heat compared to their desktop counterparts, so be prepared to see higher temperatures there.

     

    If you like being able to monitor your CPU temperatures you can start Coretemp minimised to your system tray; I typically have mine showing both my highest core temperature and my system clock speed like so:

     

    34 degrees and 1.6ghz (the speed a 2700K drops to once it’s idle).

     

    Back to the stability testing – let Prime95 run for at least 6 hours, preferably 24hrs – we have had both overclocked and faulty systems which have taken over 24 hours of stability testing before they start throwing up errors. How long you let it run is a matter of taste and how important maximum stability is to you. If it throws up an error it’s time to start looking at why; if it’s overclocked you need to change your settings, if it’s not then you need to start isolating hardware to try to find the cause. If it does cause your system to crash you’ll usually get a blue screen error in my experience, so it should be pretty obvious when you do find that you have issues 🙂

     

    Found this writeup useful? Or do you use a different program for stress testing? Let us know in the comments!

  • Adding another disk to a ZFS mirror

    I was asked how to add a disk into a ZFS mirror today; this is an easy one:

     

    # zpool attach [poolname] [existing disk] [new disk]

     

    …and done! The pool will begin to resilver with the new disk as part of the existing mirror. You might want to do this to replace a part of the mirror which has been removed or is faulty, or you might want to expand a 2-way mirror to a 3-way mirror (longer MTBF for  the 3-way, beyond that it’s not worth it).

  • SAS Cable Length for Norco 4224+M1015

     

    This is a question we get asked reasonably often – what is the right SAS cable length for a Norco 4220/4224 chassis while using IBM M1015 HBAs?

     

    50cm: Doable but puts a great deal of strain on the connectors, particularly on the card end.

    60cm: Enough with some slack and no excessive pressure on the connectors.

    75cm: Enough with a reasonable amount of slack; will likely require a few cable ties to prevent obstructing airflow if you have more than one.

    1m: Too much slack.

     

    We tested the lengths with the HBAs in each of the available slots, from nearest to the CPU to farthest away. Were you to have raid cards/HBAs with end ports rather than upwardly-facing ports you would be able to get away with the 50cm cables without issue.

  • Napp-it update: 0.8h

    Napp-it has a new default build – 0.8h, mostly incorporating bugfixes and adding a couple of alert options. You can update from your napp-it->update menu. For more info see the changelog.

     

     

  • HD6450 – Review for servers/non-3D workstations

    The AMD Radeon HD 6450 is a low-end graphics card that’s perfectly suited to basic graphics duties such as you’ll need on a server or workstation board that lacks inbuilt graphics capabilities (on-CPU or a discrete chip).

    It’s flexible in output – VGA, HDMI and DVI – is more than powerful enough for everyday use or even production 2D Photoshop work – is silent thanks to the passive cooling design and only draws somewhere between ~6-9W on idle and ~27W under load. For systems which are generally headless you should probably be looking at a server board which incorporates onboard graphics, but if you have a setup which requires a graphics card that will go largely unused the low idle power draw is quite appealing here. It does require a x16 physical slot but works fine in slots which are lesser electrically, e.g. x8 or below.

     

    The card doesn’t run particularly hot at idle so the passive cooling system should fit in with most setups without causing significant additional heat load to nearby components.

     

    It’s also worth a look-in if you have hit the maximum number of monitors your current setup requires and don’t plan on gaming or doing 3D work on the additional monitor – no point in spending up big on a noisy gaming card for that purpose. At around AU$40 this card represents good value for someone who doesn’t need a great deal of graphics performance but wants to minimise the noise and power consumption of their system, and it’s our current go-to card for this sort of requirement.

  • BIOS update: Asus P9X79 WS

    For those customers with a workstation or server based on one of these boards you may be interested in the latest BIOS update. The most notable part of the update seems to be improved RAID mode compatibility.

     

    For the full list of updates and to download the update see the update page.

     

     

  • Napp-it update: 0.8g

    Napp-it has another update – this one is a little different as it adds the ability to encrypt pools on OpenIndiana and Illumian on ZFS v.28. You can update from the menu – napp-it->update. For more info see the changelog.