16 gigabytes of server on the wall

So, without any kind of explainations, here's my Server.

Which hardware is the best?

"It's not about the Hardware anymore, It's all about the Software."

Robin Andersson

One of the things that never changes in this fast paced modern IT world that we now life in, is that people will always argue that "their" system is much better than "Their" system.

We all grew up listening and taking part in the arguments why the C64 was better than the Sinclair, or why Amiga was better than Atari. and still today we listen to, and take part in arguments why Computers are better than consoles, or why Mac is better than PC.

Back in those days, performance was dictated by the hardware the software ran on.

But the truth is, that today any hardware has the capability to run anything any other piece of hardware can do.

Linux gurus keep topping themselfes and amaze the world by installing Linux cores on pretty much any hardware they can get their hands on, be it PC, Mac, Consoles, Mobile phones or pocket calculators.

Even Apple these days runs on the exact same hardware as Windows machines does.

Any new programmable machine released this side of the millennia, has within months of its release been running Linux, and atleast 3 different Emulators on it.

Truth is, The Hardware is irrelevant these days. What is now important is, "Does it have 'this' software I want?", and even that is no longer an issue as software is being ported freely from any platform to any other platform, if not by software studios, then by open source communitys.

Platforms and Formats are becomming a fashion statements, rather than being a piece of hardware that let's you do "This".

The younger generations has grown up being used to the idea that anything can be transfered to a different format or platform.

Something to think about next time you see Microsoft or Apple releasing one of their chilidish, sandbox argument adds.

Agrogeek

Squeakypedia - Agrogeek

And so, Suddenly inspiration struck with deadly force.

I shall Invent a whole new subculture. (or atleast give it a name and pretend like I know what I'm doing, which is basicaly how most things are invented.)

Agrogeek.

Agrogeek is basicaly your average geek with an attitude.

What gave me inspiration or this was when I reformulated an old geek joke.

There are 10 kinds of people in this world, Those who knows binary, and those who are too stupid to get the joke.

The Agrogeek is like that skinny, foaming at the mouth mad, crazy kid nobody dares to touch, except he is also well educated. so he, or she, will not just rip your arm off and shove it down your throat, but "remove your limb in a violent fashion, and insert it into your upper aerodigestive tract.", after which you have been pwnd!

This is a behaivour that is common enough online, but quite rare in actual Meatspace.

The Geek shall inherit the properties and methods of object Earth, except the Agrogeek already ninjalooted it.

The Agrogeek lives by the theorem that "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.", usualy followed by *falconpunch* at whomever made that first action.

Geforce 8400 GS Mod

It's been a while since I posted any videocard mods here, So I guess it's time to show what I'm currently using.

I never got around to show what I did to the 6200 i had for a while, but maybe I will show that some other day.

Anyhow, I got myself an 8400 last summer, and since then I've done several tweaks and mods to it.

First of all, the factory cooling sucked, so the first mod I did was to swap the radiator from the old 6200 with the 8400 one. 

The problem now was that the 6200 radiator did'nt have a fan, and I was all out of superglue.

I had an old fan which once upon a time was used to cool an pentium CPU.

I dug around in my "loose screws" box, and finaly dug up one screw that fit rather ok'ish, and another screw that just did'nt fit at all. 

I managed to fasten the fan by simply screwing it ontop of the radiator, using the spaces in the radiator to hold the screws.

However, that did'nt quite work out, since the screw was poking out and made me unable to mount the card in the PC. 

After some tweaking of the placement of the screws I finaly managed to fit it, although the fan had to be mounted sort of sideways.

It's ugly as hell, but it works, which is good enough for me.

One thing I might mention here, is that normaly, fans are mounted so that they blow air onto the radiator, While modding other cards, I've found that mounting the fan to suck air from the radiator works better.

The next thing I did was to add a "box" around the card.

If you look at new cards, they pretty much all got boxes,which sucks air through a hole and blows it out of the computer.

My version works pretty much the same way, except it sucks air from the outside of the PC and blows it out through the hole.

This is much better, since the GPU will be chilled using fresh air from the outside, rather than using second hand, already warm, air from inside the PC case.

Another thing about this design is that the underpressure in the case, helps to suck air in aswell.

the old 6200 had a similar box, but no fan, all the airflow was sucked in by the casefan and the PSU fan, which greatly increased cooling, without adding an GPU fan.

Anyhow, the "box" I added, was made from an old box of ,, I think it was an energylamp or something like that, which was roughly the same size as the card.

After some cutting and ducttaping, this is what I ended up with.

As you can see, it's ugly as hell, which a huge screw sticking out.

The "box" is shaped so that I have a gap which is aproximately the size of the cardslot in the case, which I left open to left air in.

There is a hole for the fan to pass air out, and the whole thing is just held in place with duct tape.

Ugly, but it works.

When I got this card, It had a radiator made from cardboard with a tiny fan, all held in place with some grey chewing gum as cooling paste, and 2 tiny plastic things.

Well , atleast that's what it seemed like, because the cooling it did was horrible.

65°C at Idle!! , and over 80°C at load.

After My mods, it went down to around 45°C at idle. and 65°C at load.

Time to Overclock this thing!

I'm using Rivatuner to overclock this thing.

The GPU clock increases in 27mhz increments, so I've tried to overclock in 27mhz increments.

The default clockings for this card are..

Core clock = 459Mhz

Shader clock = 918Mhz

Memory clock = 400Mhz

For testing the preformance, and more importantly the temperatures of the card, I'm using Furmark, which is an OpenGL benchmark that will Realy make your card run hot. I have'nt seen anything else that can make the card run hotter.

The Furmark score for running the card at default settings is 850 http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/score.php?id=f2660010dd7880b9ddc05b13f03a75bf

I've managed to clock the card to ..

Core clock = 675Mhz

Shader clock = 1380Mhz (or 1404Mhz)

Memory clock = 486Mhz

I'm unsure about the shaderclock, because the Rivatuner only goes up to 1380, that reports the shader clock speed as being clocked 1404Mhz, however GPUZ reports 1380. I'm guessing the real speed is realy 1404Mhz because of clocking intervals, but I can't confirm this.

This gives me an Furmark score of 1241 http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/score.php?id=f2660010dd7880b9ddc05b13f03a75bf

here are the GpuZ details http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/dy53a/

The Temperatures of the card is 51°C in Idle , and 72°C at full load with Furmark for 15mins.

Which is quite acceptable considering that after gaming for hours, the GPU temp is usualy around 67°C.

Furmark is realy good at testing how hot a card will get.

This is the fastest, stable configuration I have managed to get, and I'm using it all the time for gaming and stuff.

Rivatuner lets me clock the Core clock up to 690Mhz, which gives the nearest interval at 702Mhz. However this gives some tiny artifacts while running Furmark, so I'm sticking to 675Mhz.

The memory can be increased in smaller intervalls, but will create havok with the apps over 500Mhz. (freezing, flickering and so on.), so i'm sticking to the 27Mhz interval of 486Mhz.

The speed of the video ram mostly affects how fast it can load textures and stuff, so its mostly affecting Loading times, with very little effect in benchmarks.

All in all , it's not bad for a card I spent about 33€ on =)

Game on

More Netbook

AAO tweak #2

Optimising the SSD I/O

Normaly the I/O algorithm for writing/reading to/from the disk is optimised to read blocks from the disk in an sequential order.

This is so that the heads in the disk doesnt have to jump, for example from block 3 to 189 to34 to 947 to 4,,and so on... , instead the head will read/write the sequence 3 to 4 to 34 to 189 to 947,,,, speeding up access times and so on.

Which is all good and well if you only have one harddrive.

However, since the AAO is using an SSD, there are no heads that needs to be moved around, the SSD will read anything, in any order you want, so what we can do is to disable that sequencial algorithm and free some CPU cycles for more important stuff, like blagging. =)

It is quite important to get thing right here, since if something goes wrong the netbook might become unusable, if you have any doubts about what youre doing,  just dont do it. (that should be enough for the obligatory disclaimer)

- First open up the RUN window with ALT+F2

- write "xterm" and press RUN, to open up the terminal

- and write "sudo mousepad /boot/grub/grub.conf"

  this will open something that looks suspiciously just like notepad in XP

- Find the line that says "kernel /boot/bzImage ro root=LABEL=linpus vga=0x31 splash=silent loglevel=1 console=tty1 quiet nolapic_timer"

- to the end of that line, add " elevator=noop"  

   (there should be a space between "nolapic_timer" and "elevator=noop")

- make sure your edited line looks just like this "kernel /boot/bzImage ro root=LABEL=linpus vga=0x31 splash=silent loglevel=1 console=tty1 quiet nolapic_timer elevator=noop"

- save the file and close all the windows , or close and select save,, which ever works for you.

Once the netbook has rebooted, it should no longer be optimizing the read/writes for the heads of the harddrive that doesnt exist in an SSD. =)

Netbook

Got myself a netbook, a nice and shiny Acer Aspire One  (also known as "AAO").

Eventualy I'm going to do some modding to it, but for now it will be limited to software.

One thing about it, is that the default setting for Linpus Linus that comes with it, is'nt very tweak friendly.

You got a bunch of icons for some programs, and that's pretty much it.

So the first tweak will be to enable the rest of the OS.

Tweak #1

Enabling the advanced menu

- by pressing ALT+F2 we can bring up the RUN panel, which looks just like the XP one. (infact the whole OS is skinned to look like XP, which makes alot easier for Linux no0bs like myself to work with. =)

- In the run panel, just write "xterm" and click RUN.

   This brings up the terminal for linux, which is just like the command promt in XP

- In the terminal window, write "xfce-setting-show" and press enter.

   this will bring up the GUI settings manager.

- Click on the Desktop icon to bring up the Desktop preferences.

- Under the behaviour tab, check the "show the desktop menu on right click" option.

- Close all the windows.

Now, whenever you click the right mousebutton (or right touchpad thing as the case might be), it will show you a menu, listing all the installed apps you can use. any new apps installed will also show up here.

More to come i'm sure =)

Gillette Fusion Razor USB

So once again I got bored and decided for some reason that I should Overclock my Gillette Fusion razor.

Let's begin by taking it appart a bit.

Here are some pictures of that process. (taken with my crappy cellphone camera.)

Now then , how to best overclock this rather weak razor.

A quick test with the default battery (1,5V) + an 9V battery worked amazingly well.

Notice how the light for the battery indicator is actualy glowing, something it's never done before.

However, holding a 9V battery like that is a bit cumbersome to shave with. (well, not that it shows well in the picture, but the battery is held at the end to form a circut with the existing battery and the ground.)

So I had to comeup with an better idea.

And what better idea than to connect it to the USB port =)

Here is an USB cable I cut of the end on, freeing the powerleads.

The power leads was connected to the areas circled in red here

And here is the finished result.

One Overclocked USB Gilette Fusion Razor

Does it shave? 

Yes it does. the extra powerful vibrations helps to cuts the hairs rather than pulling on them, making shaving with this thing a much smoother experience. (well appart from having to bring an laptop into the bathroom so you have somewhere to plug it into)

A tip for the experimental ones, If you remove the blade, you can use it to massage tired areas of your body,, or something like that. =)