Tag Archive for 'Intel'

Links for 2009-10-09

Published by wjl on October 9, 2009 in uncategorized. 0 Comments

My fellow LXer author Sander has written an interesting article about Open Core Software, which he describes as “The worst of both worlds“.

And Debian developer Barry Hawkins pointed me to Steven Levitt’s interesting talk about child carseats on TED.

Some of you may know that the term “Red Book” doesn’t only stand for a description of the de-facto audio CD standard, or for the famous IBM Redbooks, but also for a book from psychologist C. G. Jung, which was published recently. Should make an interesting read. Here’s the Wikipedia entry about it.

The Intel developers’ and engineers’ blog has some interesting articles about Open Source, Cloud Computing, and Virtualization.

And for those of you who still run Microsoft Windows, or who maybe are waiting for Windows 7 and its “XP Mode”, or who’d never think about trying anything else - how about having both worlds? Tom’s Hardware shows one way of how you could do just that, together with lots of screenshots.

Enjoy your weekend, like I will…

The cooling of an HTPC system

Published by wjl on August 26, 2009 in @home, computers, debian and zareason. 1 Comment

As I’ve mentioned before already, I just built a Scythe Big Shuriken CPU cooler into my PC, which was equipped with a Scythe S-Flex 1200 case fan already. This is how it fits:

Big Shuriken in the Antec 2480

Big Shuriken over the northbridge of the Asus P5N7A-VM

It’s a tight fit, but it fits, and assembly of the cooler onto the CPU and the mainboard isn’t really as difficult as people say it is - but then, I had some help of Zuleikha of course ;-)

It’s a wonderful cooler, and the most quiet one I’ve heard so far. The guys over at FrostyTech just tested it, and they said here:

“The Scythe Big Shuriken heatsink’s 120mm x 12mm thick fan spins at 1600RPM by default, and this is practically silent with only 39.6 dBA noise. Because it is equipped with a PWM fan, the Big Shuriken can reduce fan speed to as little as 900RPM, or 34.6 dBA.

Anyway you look at it, the Scythe Big Shuriken is a dead quiet heatsink.”

When you run it managed with a board like mine (the Asus P5N7A-VM), it’s practically inaudible. I’m running it unmanaged at full speed at the moment, to cool down the north bridge with the integrated Nvidia 9300 graphics, and still the (managed) case fan at around 950 RPM is more audible than the CPU cooler at ~ 1600 RPM.

One thing to consider because of the close proximity of these two in the Antec 2480 case is that if things really heat up and both fans are at full speed, there is some kind of interaction between the two. You can clearly hear some kind of turbulence then. So for a really quiet HTPC, consider two or three things, like:

  • don’t take a 95W CPU like the Intel Q8400 or higher - take a slower E6300, or the (expensive) “S” models of the quads with a TDP of 65W if you really need them
  • consider a smaller CPU cooler like the Shuriken Rev. B (with a 10cm fan instead of 12cm) and/or one or two of the new slim Slip Stream fans for the case, or
  • take a bigger case, like the one from our Mambo (which will be revised soon), or the black “Solo” version of it (which will probably end up as something like the “Black Mambo 2″ or so).

Anyway, for the HTPC part, I’m pretty much through with my work. I’ll write to Scythe EU to see whether they would send me test samples of their slim Slip Streams and such, but for the moment I’m quite happy with what I found out so far. Running BOINC at some 50% CPU for the whole night resulted in 45 degrees Celsius (max) of the quad core, and 59 degrees Celsius (max) for the integrated graphics, which is really cool for a 95W CPU in a relatively small case. While writing this, temps are back to 41 and 56 degrees - perfect. When the machine has nothing to do, temps are like here - 29 to 38 degrees for that CPU is just awesome IMHO.

New hardware

Published by wjl on August 9, 2009 in @home, computers, debian and zareason. 1 Comment

I was recently asked about our product line, and why we don’t offer something like an HTPC-like machine.

Well I have been thinking about that for quite a while already. In fact, I *do* have something like that myself. With an Asus M2NPV-VM mainboard with integrated Nvidia 6150 graphics and an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ EE, this isn’t the most modern machine anymore, but still it’s a quite decent dual-core, and it served me well during the last years. It is/was both my main work machine as well as the inhouse HTPC TV server, and since some two and a half weeks, it was even letting other good projects make use of its CPU cycles while I didn’t need them.

Antec NSK 2480 HTPC caseWhile this is still a nice machine, I can of course not offer it at ZaReason Europe. The hardware simply isn’t available anymore, at least not the mainboard and the processor. The case shown here is the one where my machine found its home; it’s the Antec 2480 HTPC case, and that one is really nice if you mod it a bit. Out of the box I found it too loud, so I replaced the two Antec TriCool fans with a single Scythe S-Flex 1200, which gets attached to the mainboard via a 3-Pin connector. Once you enable the Q-Fan in the BIOS of that Asus mainboard, there is silence. At least with this rig.

So I was looking for alternatives for that mainboard/CPU combo, and during the past weeks I have written some lines about that already. I finally made up my mind and ordered and tried this one:

Asus P5N7A-VMYes, that’s the Asus P5N7A-VM, about which I have written at least two times already, and which was also my initial thought for a replacement of mine.

When opting for a processor nowadays, you have to think about what you are doing with the machine. For a simple HTPC, you would best get something like a cheap and efficient dual core. Here we have a board for Intel CPUs, so with something like a Pentium E5200 or E6300 (the latter one can do virtualization in hardware), you should be fine. For a gaming rig, at the moment a fast dual core (3+GHz) would be the best choice between power and price. A Quad, or even one of these new Core i7 (or i5; both won’t fit onto this board)? Only if you really use the machine for tasks which *can* be threaded to actually make use of all of these cores.

And this is what I sometimes did in the past, namely video encoding, like with nuvexport from mythtv. Recording a 2 hour movie is no task at all for any modern CPU, but to re-encode it to some kind of .avi format using xvid or other fine codecs took up to 10 hours sometimes even in normal SD resolution (720×576 here in Europe). That means 10 hours with the CPU on 100% on both cores; that is really kind of a stress test, and it also got loud during that time.

Tasks like these are where quad core processors are fine. They simply get the job done much faster; see AnandTechs’ Bench (beta) for a comparison of your current CPU (or the thing closest to it if it’s not listed anymore), and the one you think of buying.

Still I didn’t want the Q9550; that would simply be overkill for a small machine and case, so I opted for the Q8400. That’s Intel’s smallest quad which can do hardware accelerated virtualization, and the price is about the same these days like the one for a dual core E8400 (which runs single tasks faster with its 3GHz). For me, 2.66GHz and even only 4MB of L2 cache seemed plenty, so I went for it.

It went surprisingly well. In some of last year’s last c’t magazines I read about that board, that for the sound you need at least kernel 2.6.27 (I had 2.6.26 with Lenny), but sound seemed to work. What did *not* work out of the proverbial box was the network. So no chance to install some newer drivers or anything after the hardware swap; at least not without another building back and forth session.

I remembered Debian developer Kenshi Muto’s backported d-i images, which let you install Debian Lenny with a custom 2.6.30 kernel and some newer firmware files, but sadly that one didn’t work for me. It simply didn’t load the first installer page, but stopped with some “UTF-8″ message. So I tried both Debian Squeeze, and Ubuntu 9.04.

Both worked out of the box. The differences: while Ubuntu is close to perfection, Squeeze actually surprised me a little bit: the installer itself (I had some daily build from some time in June or July) runs with a 2.6.29 kernel (Ubuntu brings a 2.6.28 btw), the actual installation still gets a kernel 2.6.26. And it works! Gnome’s network manager says something like “not managed by me”, but the eth0 interface gets an address via DHCP, and is working. As well as the sound, tho there are some situations where that one “stutters” (some people have reported about that in some forums already, I think it’s simply a question of whether you have the latest ALSA stuff or not. I’ll work on that one later, when I have the time to do so.).

Ubuntu takes more CPU cycles, because it activates more gimmicks like Compiz once you have the drivers which can handle those, but the multimedia experience is stunning. Movies like Big Buck Bunny are awesome, and so are games like Torcs or any other stuff you throw at it.

Debian Squeeze is still far from being frozen for the bug fix period; it’s still WIP, and that is good. I’ll wait and see, and I hope it will get the 2.6.30 kernel from Sid soon, and the latest and greatest ALSA and Nvidia stuff as well.

So my machine rocks. But halt: not all is good in Intel land yet. The CPU with its nominal 2.67 GHz can only slow down two steps, to 2.34GHz, and 2.00GHz (some 75% of its maximum speed). My old Athlon was better in that regard; it stepped down do 1GHz while it had nothing to do (and that is often, believe me!). So the Intel CPU is actually burning much more power than would be needed IMHO, keeping the fans busier as well. In my case, and with my current setup, that Scythe S-Flex runs with about 840 RPM (it did some 670 or 680 with the Athlon on an idle desktop), and the CPU fan rotates with some ~ 1250 RPM while it has nothing to do (with Debian; mind you. Ubuntu’s X.org and other programs sometimes burn some 25% of the CPU resources; don’t ask me why - the list of tasks seems endless). So maybe for that Intel configuration I would try an S-Flex 800 instead of a 1200 next time.

Antec NSK 4480 II mini tower caseThinking about my old machine: it found a new home in an Antec NSK 4480 series II case, and will go to my brother Willi, who still has a single core AMD Duron running (with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS). Then his old one will go to an aunt, who also has a machine of that class, but hers is unreliable, and does weird reboots and stuff, also with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. My last guess was her hardware, like a really cheap case and power supply and all that, so she will gain from my brother’s machine, while he will certainly improve with my old dual core.

I’ll miss that machine. And I hope it will serve him as well as it did serve me during the last years.

I told Mitchie to offer that new board at Za EU, as one of the new products. Don’t actually know for how long that will last, because Core i5 is in front of the door already, but we’ll see. For me, it definitely looks like one of the best currently available IGP boards, so we should sell those.

Update 1, Mon Aug 10, 2009:

Since someone just asked, and since I just measured it and confirmed / read about the rest:

Power consumption (measured with a not very exact power meter) is like follows:

  • Standby: 6W
  • Ubuntu idle: 67-70W
  • Ubuntu DivX (H.264): 73-76W
  • Ubuntu with Extreme Tux Racer: ~ 85W
  • Debian idle: 66-69W
  • Debian with Boinc (CPU ~ 60%): 65-105W

It’s actually a bit more noisy than my old system at the moment, since I just switched off Asus’ Q-Fan feature in the BIOS, so the CPU fan is currently spinning at around 2.300-2.400 RPM (with Boinc running), and the case fan at around 1.220 RPM. Why did I switch it off? According to a forum at Asus’, the Q-Fan feature is still buggy in that it doesn’t really govern the fans, so I’m currently trying to reproduce things… and yes, of course I filed a support case to get a BIOS update for it.

Update 2, Mon Aug 10, 2009:

After a bit of testing, I’m ok with what the BIOS provides, at least with the “Performance” setting of the Q-Fan 2 utility. Maybe it didn’t work with Windows for the guys to whom I linked to, but here in Debian Squeeze, the CPU is at the moment at ~ 1250 RPM in idle mode, and at around 1700 RPM when running Boinc on all its 4 cores. With a better CPU cooler, like the Scythe Shuriken (which fits on this board, see here), noise *and* temperatures should go down even further. In a case with damping, like our Mambo (the Antec Solo / Sonata Designer 500), it should be inaudible then; in my 2480 it has to be tested. More to that when I have some other fan.