Category: Hardware

When I went downstairs to check for water leaking into the basement during the storm last night, Zombie 1 was making weird noises. I powered it down and today found that it seemed that the PSU, not the optical drive or hard drive, was making the weird noises. This is a shame for many reasons. I don’t really need an optical drive in the thing, I have many spare 3.5″ IDE hard drives, and the PSU is a weird one that’s the wrong shape. Even if I bought a normal PSU and connected it from outside the case or something crazy like that, it would likely cost more than the machine cost me in the first place. At this point I’ve turned it back on and I guess we’ll just see how long it will last. This feels oddly sad.

EDIT: It is no longer making strange noises, at least for now.

XFX sent me back a replacement for my PCI-E 7600 GT with 256MB RAM. I was delighted to find that the replacement was a 9500 GT with 512MB RAM!

Benchmarks – average of FPS of two runs unless otherwise stated:

Lost Coast Stress Test:

1280×1024 Recommended: 68.92

1280×1024 Maximum: 52.54 (three runs)

1024×768 Recommended: 66.83

1024×768 Recommended with color correction and vsync: 52.52

Counter-Strike Source Stress Test:

1280×1024 Recommended: 126.49

1280×1024 Maximum: 59.48 (three runs)

1024×768 Recommended: 126.40

I suppose I ran the max tests three times each because they were so very pretty. It’s weird that a lower resolution with vsync and color correction would run more slowly than a higher resolution set to that and more. In the past, every time I ran maxed tests, its reflections contained the easily recognized purple checkers of missing textures. When I went from maxed to recommended settings and the purple checkers persisted, I realized that the missing textures never had anything to do with the abilities of the machine, and were indeed missing textures. I restarted the game to reload the textures, although I think mat_reloadtextures might do the same thing faster. (Found here.)

It is interesting to note that dropping to 1024×768 doesn’t provide too much of a boost in framerate, if any. This may be because 1280×1024 is the native resolution of the LCD, so no scaling is needed. After running tests, the console had an error about bench_upload being a cheat command. I enabled cheats in the hope that it would successfully upload my benchmark statistics. I could probably run a packet sniffer to see if it’s actually uploading. In Counter-Strike:  Source, sv_cheats 1 made the benchmark’s movements accelerated: the camera moved faster, the blocks spun faster, the water flowed faster, the flames flickered frantically – and the overall framerate was lower.

Windows fell back to software rendering when first booting with the new card. When my card died, Linux fell back to open source drivers for the onboard. I installed ATI’s propritory drivers in the hope that they would make the thing slightly more useful. It seems although NVIDIA’s drivers stepped aside when their card was unaccessable, ATI’s did no such thing, reducing X to an unsettling and intermittently flickering blank screen. The uninstall script in /usr/share/fglrx was nowhere to be found, which was odd because I manually installed the drivers from ATI’s installation script. Removing xorg.conf had no effect as it seemed to still use fglrx. I had not installed the propritory drivers from the repos. I ended up starting in single user (aka recovery) mode, starting an ssh server, resuming the boot process with telinit 3, logging in from elsewhere to stop gdm, then installing NVIDIA’s driver and rebooting. It works quite well now. I was even informed of telinit 3 by the NVIDIA driver installer itself, which was very nice!

EDIT: I found the uninstall script in /usr/share/ati.

I think I just fried my graphics card by trying to put on a new heatsink. It only booted up once, and for a few seconds before the screen went blank. Now it won’t POST with the card in.

I was having problems with the fan making annoying noises. Over a period of a few months, XFX managed to send me a new heatsink. There were no instructions, so I looked up some guides on YouTube. I think the problem was that the coat of Arctic Silver wasn’t complete when I first booted up. I’ve had bad things happen every time I’ve used Arctic Silver. With it, I’ve gummed up a processor, killed a motherboard and CPU, and now fried a graphics card. Maybe I should get generic thermal paste and just leave Arctic Silver alone.

No more wireless! I finally managed to crimp an end on the cable that we pulled up through a crack in the floorboards inside the wall of a closet. My hands were shaking because I was too lazy to eat enough today and I had Pepsi, which had caffine. I think I’ll stay away from Pepsi now. The baseboard had been taken off from earlier. I’m now connected at gigabit speeds, although from what I’ve read (in the rant linked to below) when I’m running Windows I won’t be able to saturate that link. 🙁 Everything seems faster now. ‘Tis awesome. ^^

I installed the 1GB DDR 400 RAM I bought from newegg for $24.98 after shipping. That’s why I had 2 cents left on one of the Visa gift cards, which I then couldn’t add to PayPal. The machine initially wouldn’t POST, but I moved it to the other open slot and it worked. I haven’t found the time to run memtest on it, but it decreased my Linux boot time by 2 seconds. I hope I don’t understand bootvis, because it seemed to increase my Windows boot time by 3 seconds! Framerates were unaffected in Lost Coast and CSS stress tests at recommended settings.  The framerate went up by .5 for Lost Coast, and went down 1.4 for CSS, and because I only ran each test once, I guess it’s statistically nothing. Hopefully this will help with slowdown during memory-intensive things.

Thanks to lshw, I avoided buying too much RAM for my motherboard. I wanted to know for sure what type of RAM I was running, and luckily it also listed my motherboard RAM capacity: 2GB.  It lists loads of other stuff too: detailed information on system devices, (PCI, USB) BIOS, and even disk partitions! This is more about my machine than I ever knew. I really wish I could find a manual for my eMachine’s motherboard. I’m not sure if it even came with one. I’m saving up to replace this with a self-built machine, but it’s going slowly.

My Netgear gigabit switch didn’t come with a fan, (“Silent operation!”) then requested to be kept in moving air. Jerks. I bought a 120mm from Vertex, and just now got around to setting it up. Zombie 3 gave up its CD drive so that the molex could reach outside the case.

I was reminded of my hasty job crimping the server cable when it went down with seemingly any nudge.  -_-

I initially pointed it the wrong way because I didn’t bother to check the arrows, but the end result is a 120mm case fan taped to the top of the case adjacent to the switch with a partial boxboard air duct.