demodulated

I’ve got a pair of Seagate ST3500630AS SATA hard drives - 500GB, 7200 RPM, 16MB cache. They’ve served me perfectly well until recently I noticed some applications loading exceedingly slowly, but not others. After a small file transfer took far longer than acceptable I decided to employ Sisoft Sandra to investigate.

The physical disk test took so long on my first drive that I tried cancelling, assuming it was going to fail, but luckily hitting the cancel button simply greyed it out until the test concluded successfully and reported its findings. Here’s a screenshot of my first disk’s speed analysis:

As is depicted in the graph, my hard drive (the red dot) is right on par with similar drives in terms of access (seek) time, but is extremely slow in sustained file transfers. For comparison, and to eliminate the possibility that the problem existed on my motherboard or elsewhere, I tested my second drive as well:

The red dot is missing from this graph for some reason but the numeric values in the legend show that while the access time on the working drive is similar (slower, actually) than the first drive, the Drive Index indicating the read speed is nearly 12 times faster! That’s a no-no.

While I’m almost positive the problem is with the drive itself, I’ve noticed some strange behaviour from my PC in general. It seems that applications that read from this drive will sometimes cause my computer to freeze up for a fraction of a second and my sound card will make a strange buzz or beep or will elongate whatever sound was coming out of it before the freeze. I also noticed the sound card making a buzzing noise while trying to copy a large file from that drive. Perhaps this is a power attenuation issue?

I’m kind of stumped here and a little concerned. This hard drive is only about 2 months old so it’s falls well within Seagate’s 3-year warranty, but what if the broken hard drive is a symptom and not the sole cause of my troubles? I’m really lucky not to have lost any data yet and I’m backing up my precious music collection this very moment, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll make it all the way through. This is my system disk too so if it goes kaput I’ll have to reinstall Windows. I’m also concerned that I’ll have to run some kind of rigorous diagnostic software that will stress my hard drive and possibly break it entirely.

Ideally I’d like to advance RMA a replacement, copy my old drive to the new one, and then mail back the broken one. I’ll report back on Seagate customer service. PC Village assures me they’re a very professional and especially punctual company. Wish me luck!

Mashed potatoes with Crème brûlée.

Rice pudding, tapioca, and cake icing.

Split pea soup with table cream and honey.

Wash it down with a glass of peach cocktail mixed with lychee juice.

That’s how smooth my new computer runs.   Here’s the specs:

• Intel Core Duo 6750 (2.66GHz, 2×2MB L2 cache)
• ASUS P5KC (Crossfire, supports up to 45nm CPUs and DDR2 or DDR3, fanless, Intel AGTL FSB)
• XFX GeForce 8800GT Alpha Dog XXX 512MB (factory overclocked, 1 slot width)
• 2 x 1GB OCZ DDR2 800MHZ (5-5-5-15, sexy heat sinks)
• 2 x Seagate 500GB HDD (SATA2, 16Mb cache, both running standalone)
• Antec EarthWatts 500w PSU (120mm fan, silent)
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2
• Antec Sonata III 500 Quiet Super Mini Tower (sound dampening case)

Initially I was just in the market for that 8800GT but figured I’d do my wife a favour (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) by snagging a few more parts so that she could build a new PC with my leftovers.  They’re decent leftovers too, as outlined in a previous post.   It’s interesting to look at that post too, since I’ve apparently spent about $400 less on pretty much the same parts about 18 months later.

The 8800GT is pretty scarce these days so I nabbed the CPU, mobo, RAM, and case last week from PC Village.  Thanks to my partitioning scheme I only needed to back up a few things, so I copied My Documents to another drive as well as some backups using FEBE and Mozbackup for my browser and Thunderbird email archives respectively.  Lickety split.  Took me 10 minutes.  I later learned that I’d forgotten to back up Miranda IM, which is frustrating because it has a zillion preferences and plugins, but I’d smartly retained an older backup which got me right back on my feet with no configuration or even installation required.

I opened up my old Antec Sonata 1 box and yanked out all the goodies to be transplanted, and laid out my new parts on the floor.  I installed the RAM and CPU into the new mobo (that Core Duo comes with a huge, easy to install heat sink) before screwing it into the case.  Gotta love Antec - the gold riser screws come preinstalled in the case and ready to go!  I connected the various wires from the case to the motherboard, which was easier than ever thanks to the great manual (a big surprise for a motherboard - they’re usually quadrilingual yet indiscernible in any language) and clear markings on the PCB.  In went my old 7950GT and I plugged it in, making sure not to replicate a previous mistake of forgetting the GPU and 12v power cables.   My new Sonata III was a similar form factor as the original Sonata so it was a trivial matter of removing my old drives and sliding them right in to the new case without having to adjust the rails I’d screwed on previously.

I closed it up, held my breath, and powered on.  Magic.  Until now I’d never done a successful build on my first try.  Very satisfying.

My very first impression - silence.  The CPU fan is very quiet, as are the 120mm case and PSU fans.  The GPU fan spins up to full speed at POST but quited down to idle speeds shortly thereafter, leaving little more than an zen garden of breezy silence.

My second impression - AMI BIOS!  I hadn’t seen that logo in quite some time.  I flipped through all the settings and verified my hardware was installed and detecting.  Everything was kosher.  Interestingly, the Intel CPU doesn’t seem to run at 100%  in the BIOS, as did the AMD Athlon X2, which ran about 12 degrees hotter according to the hardware monitor, and the Core Duo’s quiet fan corroborated this.  I liked all the flexibility in the BIOS but stuck with fairly safe settings (I’m not an overclocker) and pressed onward.

Windows installed rather quickly.  Surprisingly, fewer onboard devices detected with this mobo than with my previous ASUS M2N-Deluxe so I started up with no network connectivity.  Sorry, Windows Genuine Advantage, you’ll have to wait a while.  I easily installed all the onboard hardware with the driver CD, all in one go thanks to “ASUS InstAll”.  I rebooted a few times and installed the newest drivers from ASUS’ ridiculously slow and problematic website.  I also successfully updated the BIOS with ASUSUpdate.

I restored my backups and copied over my documents and it was almost as if I’d never formatted.  FEBE FTW, seriously.  Most impressively, I downloaded and installed Steam over top of its old directory and it immediately detected all the games I had installed before the format, and they all worked immediately!  I didn’t notice much of a performance improvement, though.

In fact, things didn’t seem mega speedy in general.  Not much faster than before, except for the pristine Windows install.  However, hovering the mouse over the control panel for the first time populated the icons very, very quickly.

My favourite CPU benchmark

I happily puttered along over the weekend.  My video card was over a week late.  I called to check in a few times and this Monday PC Village said the model I wanted, an EVGA, still hadn’t arrived but they had others in stock including my second choice, XFX.  I couldn’t wait.  I bought it the next day.

It’s a really attractive video card.  Long and heavy with a single slot heat sink.  I deleted my old drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro in safe mode, powered down, and opened up my case.  It took me a while to unsnag the old one from the PCI-E slot (not sure what it was snagged on) but it finally came out and the new one installed as easily as the old.   I booted up and excitedly selected the 8xxx series drivers from NVidia’s well organized web site.  The install went off without a hitch.

The moment of truth.

Holy freaking crap.   I can’t challenge this video card.

I threw everything I had at it.  Call of Duty 2 and 4.  Guild Wars.   Half Life 2: Episode Two.  Team Fortress 2 (with 16x AA and AF!!!).  All child’s play.  60 frames throughout.  Butter.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  These games ran so well, at their highest settings, that it actually detracted from them.  This video card is a behemoth.  It needed a real workout.  Crysis.

I tried the Crysis demo with my last machine and it was depressing.  I put all the settings on medium and got about 5 frames per second.   Low settings did little better.  Not so anymore.  I allowed Crysis to autodetect (which usually produces ridiculous suggested settings) and it suggested running everything at high - the highest you can set the game without “upgrading” to Windows Vista.  I was incredulous.  Okay, Crysis, if you insist.

I got about 20 frames per second, which, for this game, is bonkers.  It’s insanely gorgeous and the vastness of the world, the scope of all the realtime action and physics, ought to be enough to humble any dream machine.  There’s no computer in the world today that can run Crysis at full detail, I’ve heard from many sources.  I can’t even imagine  how this thing must look on the “very high” settings.   I don’t find Crytek’s games very engaging, though, so I may not care to find out.

My computer is damn fast.  The graphics blow my mind.  I can play games with 30 processes chugging away in the background.  All in all I spent less than $900.  Why anyone would ever play console games is absolutely beyond me.

In all honesty, when I see such a powerful computer, and I know it’s mine, I feel, in a way, reborn.  It’s a religious experience for me.  What a sweet hobby.

The very moment I got home from work a couple of Fridays ago (marking the beginning of my vacation, naturally) I barely nudged my mouse and was treated to a Blue Screen of Death. My oddly problematic WinXP install was on its last legs. After over an hour of troubleshooting including installing a second copy of XP on my other hard drive I was finally able to boot back into my first one. I refrained from rebooting until I returned from my vacation.

Rather than leaving this tenuous situation unchecked I decided to buy a new hard drive and start a fresh new install on that. I bought a 500GB 7200RPM Seagate SATA2 HDD with 16MB of cache. I installed it with no issues. It’s not blazingly fast so it took a couple of hours to shuffle my files around after installing the OS, but I’ve come up with a lovely organized partitioning scheme spanning both my physical drives. Coupled with my 300MB disk I’ve got 800MB of storage at my disposal now! Yay for overkill!!

I asked PC Village for advice and they said that Seagate and Western Digital had the best drives out there, but Seagate offered a 5-year warranty whereas WD only offered 3. 2 years of warranty was worth the additional $4. The drive was $119.99 before tax and they even threw in a SATA cable. Great store.

Over the past 8 years or so I’ve owned 3D accelerator video cards of varying performance, each supporting antialiasing but rarely capable of implementing it at an acceptable frame rate. Even my two recent powerhouse video cards, the Sapphire Atlantis 9800pro and the Asus GeForce 6600GT, were forced to sacrifice antialiasing in favour of 1280×1024 resolution for the new games of the time. This is no longer the case thanks to my uber-beefy BFG 7900GT – I play even the 0-day warez (not literally, of course) with antialiasing now.

Just how much has this silicon Jezebel spoiled me?

Isn’t it just fitting that I’m playing a game on Steam immediately following the recent break-in fiasco and subsequent denial thereof by Valve? Dreadful fear of my identity being pilfered aside, I’m having loads of fun playing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines by the now defunct Troika Games. Now that I get the chance to replay after a few much needed patches it’s easier to see what a well-crafted and open-ended RPG it is. Despite it being the first licensed Source Engine game the eerily lifelike character design and motion-captured animations, plus the carefully crafted architecture combined with a sunglasses-at-night take on modern Los Angeles do a great job of obscuring the age of the framework.

It’s the game’s enormous yet sharp textures that left me wanting more. I was getting just about 60 frames solid at my monitor’s max resolution with the “setting cranked” (the only option in video preferences is a toggle for bump mapping) so before even watching the entire opening sequence I quit, forced 4x antialiasing at the driver level using the NVidia Control Panel, and started it back up. The result was quite pleasing.

And yet, it wasn’t good enough! Frame rates were still excellent at 4xAA so I decided to traverse the final frontier – 8xS antialiasing with 16x anisotropic filtering!! You’re positively melting as you read these words, I know.

Here’s an illustration of the difference between “vanilla” 4x antialiasing (left) and 8xS antialiasing with 16x anisotropic filtering (right). I recommend opening these screenshots in separate tabs or windows so that you can compare them fullscreen, switching from one to the other. The difference is quite dramatic:

It’s interesting to note that the screenshot at the left is a half-megabyte smaller than the one on the right, so one can imagine how much more work it must be to render in real time!

It’s been 2 months since moving in with my ladyfriend and at long last I’ve hooked my stereo to my computer so that I can resume DJing. However, before I can begin I’ve got to allow Traktor DJ Studio 3 to analyze my MP3 collection.

Analysis isn’t entirely necessary before I can start mixing, but if I don’t do it in advance it will analyze on song load which puts more strain on the CPU (increasing the chance of skipping) and it progresses much more slowly since playing an MP3 is a surprisingly system-intensive function. Plus, it’s nice to have analyzed MP3s because this provides a peak graph (which visually shows the song waveform) and automagically detects the beats per minute (about 95% accuracy).

So I’ve instructed Traktor to run a batch analysis on my entire DJ collection, weighing in at a hefty 30-odd gigs. It might take all day.

Large batch multimedia processing is a job best performed by Intel processors, while AMD chips are usually the best for gaming. I do a lot more gaming than multimedia so I still stand by my choice to buy an Athlon 64 X2, but today I’ll pay the price while my system speed is degraded during this long processing job.

Or will it?

I admit I’ve seen little or no improvement in speed with my new CPU - most of the HUGE improvements I enjoy are thanks to my tear-jerkingly incredible 7900GT. Today, however, is a happy exception, as illustrated below:

As you can see in the upper two graphs, dual core has saved the day! My audio analysis job is isolated in the second core, maxed out at 100% load, while the first core stays cool as a cucumber. This means that I can enjoy nearly full speed computing while the second core is dedicated to the monumental task of processing 30 gigs of audio peaks. What a treat!

A recent ad for Dell or some other crappy manufacturer markets dual core CPUs as something that allows you to watch a movie, rip a CD, browse the web, and edit documents all at the same time (like a menstrual pad advert for nerds). This is true, I suppose, but don’t run out to buy a dual core CPU due to this hogwash. I am a power user through and through and today is the first time in about a month that I’ve really taken advantage of it. Dual core is probably a moderately future-proof technology - it will run games and apps pretty well for the next year or two - but if you’re looking to upgrade I think it would be wise to wait until later this year when quad cores come out. No doubt Dell will recommend being schizophrenic, double jointed, and ambidextrous in order to get the most out of one of those babies.
Can’t wait to start making loud banging noises once again! Let’s see what the neighbours think!

And if you’d like to enjoy some free origianl electronic music songs and mixes check out my web site and DJ blog.