A bit of a development.

It's 2011! Is it just me or did 2010 just kind of slip by?

Some developments already in this new big one. It's been a busy week for me. Trying to get one of those real jobs people say comes after college. Add that to my current full time job and my unfathomable lust for new parts and you've got a four course meal that I'm too full to eat.

Unfortunately I seem to know no limits.

My DC-PC project is wrapping up nicely. At this very moment it is playing a movie through VGA on my shiny 24" LCD. I'm currently using a wireless keyboard to control XBMC, as my Bluetooth dongle is being used elsewhere. I already have another on order. I've sampled Wiimote control though. It was painless to set up and is a joy to use.

That's my setup. Yes I'm watching Friday, get over it :P

Spy my Wiimote lying dormant and my stainless Smartphone Coaster next to the wireless keyboard.

The internals have had a few changes in the past week as well (busy eh). I've swapped the RAM to 2x1GB sticks of DDR2-667. The size of the RAM isn't important, as this is a fairly stripped Linux distro. More important was the physical size change. The old RAM had massive heatsinks. Remember I mentioned it was tight in there? I've also removed the 2.5" hard drive that was attached to the lid. In its place is a SATA to CF adapter with a 4GB CF card. XBMC Live is installed on the CF card, and the machine has no problem booting to it. It has cooled the interior off significantly. Sadly though, I can no longer fry an egg on the northbridge heatsink. Good thing I'm full.

There's no longer a slab of hot metal above the CPU heatsink and fan, so that's always good as well. It's nearly there. Next is to come up with a way to keep the lid down. Before I was using the weight of the hard drive, but the CF assembly weighs considerably less. Also missing is a way to keep the case itself together. As long as it sits in one place there are no issues. Touch it though, and it's noticeably not secured. I'm sure some acrylic will make it's way into both of the solutions to those problems. Hopefully those will come soon, the laziness may set in. I'm afraid I'll leave it as is.

The laziness hasn't struck just yet though. This past week I've also swapped my main desktop to a smaller micro ATX case just for fun. A Cooler Master Elite 341 to be specific. I've also been playing with a Phenom II x4 SFF (small form factor) machine from a big name manufacturer just to keep my AMD needs nourished.

P.S. Speaking of AMD, anyone see those Fusion mini-ITX motherboards that were announced? Is it normal to rebuild a computer that isn't even finished yet? Sigh.

Simple pleasures.

My new favorite drink as of late: instant hot chocolate (with milk) and a half-shot of coffee liqueur.

Keep it simple. Super rich and borderline too sweet, right where I like it.

My Dreamcast Mini-ITX project is near completion. The verdict? That shit is tight. And hot. Literally. I had originally planned on running my 5400RPM 2.5" drive from the Gateway LT3103u, but its position directly over the CPU heatsink/fan only adds to the problem. I figured since this will most likely serve as a media center for my new TV that I could skimp on the storage space for the sake of cooling. I'm now waiting on a bootable SATA to CF adapter and a 4GB CF card. XBMC Live is sitting on a disc waiting to go on. I've already tested it, and it runs beautifully. Even plays 1080p in XBMC, something I didn't see happening.

It is currently sitting with a Pentium Dual Core e5300, 4GB DDR2-800, and that integrated GeForce 7050 video chipset. As for space inside the case, there's next to none left. I was going to attempt some front USB and audio ports, but the space is extremely limiting. The exterior of the case is completely stock, and I fully intend for it to stay that way. A Bluetooth dongle and Wiimote are in its near future.

Here are some more in depth shots for those interested:

Here there be dragons.

Early Christmas in..December.

UPS guy played Santa today and dropped off some new toys.

That's a Samsung SSD, a Zotac mini-itx motherboard, and a Rosewill CPU cooler. The important one is this:

That's a Samsung 470 Series 64GB SSD. I recall mentioning that I wanted to get one recently (2 days ago?). So I ordered it Monday (yesterday) at 10am. Newegg had a sale, and I snagged it for right under a hundred bones.

I was so excited when I got it in today at lunch that I had to install it. Had Win 7 Pro up and running in half an hour. Got everything tweaked and started testing this bitch.

Quick verdict? It's fast. Surprised?

For reference, last night I ran HD Tune on the stock Toshiba 5400RPM 250GB drive, and the average transfer rate was 79.9MB/sec.

Then I re-ran CrystalMark 2004R3:

Check that HDD score, shit is off the scale! My total CM2004 score went up by ~22,000 because of it.

Now though, back to reality. How does it feel? Well it boots up to Windows + Chrome open in 23 seconds, compared to nearly 50 seconds before. The palm rest is now cool to the touch instead of slow cooking my wrist. The most noticeable thing so far is just how reactive everything is. There literally is no waiting for things, it just happens as you release the mouse button.

Granted, if you don't mind the 4 seconds some things take to open, then a pricey SSD may not suit you. I bought this one because the rated power draw is incredibly small and I'm hoping to do some battery tests. A hundred bucks for 64GB seems a tad steep, but the 128GB one is still hovering around $300 so I figured this was a more responsible way to dive into SSDing. Speaking of 64GB, I was a tad worried about space. I'm not anymore:

This isn't a laptop I'll be storing my entire music or video collection on anytime soon, but I never did that anyway. I've got a 500GB external drive for all of that nonsense and a 750GB server hosting even more.

Now that I've got my feet in the water though, I'm already looking to cannonball. Two of these in a RAID0 on my desktop? Yes, please.

As for the other things the UPS guy left me. There's a Zotac NF610I-K-E motherboard. A socket 775 mini-itx motherboard with onboard Geforce 7050 graphics. Also theres a Rosewill RCX-Z775-LP CPU cooler. That's a low profile socket 775 cooler with an 80mm fan. What's all this for? A new project I've started. Here's a preview:

+ = ?

LT3103u Benchmarks - Athlon x2 L310

Ran a few of my benchmarks again. All hardware besides the Athlon x2 L310 is the same.

CrystalMark 2004R3

SuperPi

My first benchmarks are here. It's pretty easy to see where the extra CPU muscle comes in, especially in CrystalMark. I recall mentioning that the Athlon L110 was being beaten by the Atoms in CrystalMark because of the Hyper Threading of the Atom. That advantage of the Atom is now gone with a dual core Athlon. The CPU scores have doubled, and that pushed the total score to nearly double its original rating.

The lead in SuperPi is, well, not there. They are, for the sake of argument, identical to the L110's scores. So single core performance is the same. Duh.

A few things strike me as odd once again. The HDD score this time nearly doubled as well. The memory score went up as well. However, the graphics scores actually went down in the D2D and OGL tests. I'm thinking the graphics part has to do with drivers. The first time I ran these benchmarks I was using ATI's Legacy driver package, and this time I'm using the ones from Windows Update. I couldn't seem to find the same legacy package that I used before, so I gave up after 5 minutes of looking.

And just for a bit of fun, I ran HyperPi (multi-threaded SuperPi) on my recently built Core i3 540 rig. 1M was done in 22 seconds and 2M was finished in 49 seconds. This was with 4 threads being used (Core i3 is dual with HT). Really illustrates the performance gap between old mobile AMD chips and shiny new Intel desktop parts. I love apples to giraffes comparisons.

Athlon x2's in my sleep!

It's late. Or early, rather. Quite early at nearly 5AM here. What better time to write eh?

This screenshot was taken on my LT3103u. I have two tabs open in Chrome (Gmail and Google Reader) and Pandora playing some music. My speakers are set to 50% and my screen brightness is set to something like 20%. As you can tell from the included CPUz info, I'm running undervolted .712v @ 800MHz.

The important bit here though is the discharge rate in BatteryMon. See that? 11.2W. That's low. Now granted, the machine is basically idling while I'm taking that screenshot so it isn't at 11.2W all the time, but still. That's Atom netbook low. On a normal day my Aspire One is usually sitting close to that during use. When I'm using the machine actively that discharge is hovering now between 12W and 15W. That's still low, especially considering that the rated consumption of this CPU is 13W by itself.

What gets better, is that this will be my third full rundown of the battery after installing the new Athlon x2 L310. My battery life hasn't dropped. At least not to a point where it's noticeable at all. That's quite shocking actually.

Can that battery life improve? Sure, if I don't touch the computer and let it idle all day. Realistically though I'd say this is as good as I'll get it. I can't lower the CPU voltage anymore, anything below .712v crashes under load. I'm planning on a SSD upgrade in the near future though, but I'm not sure it'll help enough to notice.

The really important thing here is how this machine feels now. With the single core L110 the machine was faster than an Atom netbook with no argument. When underclocked and undervolted the machine felt more on par with a netbook. And considering that whenever it ran on battery it was undervolted just to get battery life to a usable level, that was disappointing.

The dual core really woke this machine up (as you'd expect it to). Even undervolted and underclocked as I'm sitting now it feels fast. Earlier, I pulled it off the charger and started checking my feeds as I usually do. Then I hit YouTube quick and checked my subscriptions. I found a video and clicked. I instinctively clicked 720p and pressed play. I didn't realize I had done that until half way into the 5 minute video. It just worked. Not full screen, but still. It didn't stutter or hiccup at all, and that felt great. Why did that feel great?

Recently I decided to try out replacing my Acer Aspire One 8.9" Atom netbook for school purposes. This semester I had a 12 hour day of class and an 8 hour day of class so the battery life of the Aspire One made it my school-tote once again. I wanted something a similar size but with better battery life and even more usablility, so I bought an Asus 1005PR. 10" form factor with a 1366x768 screen resolution and a Broadcom HD decoder and a big battery sounded great to me. Sadly, it didn't live up to expectations, but I'll save that for another long-winded post. The performance of that netbook hit me hard and made me start to notice how sluggish my Aspire One was as well. And how small the resolution was. It seems that in order to get decent performance out of a netbook you really can't drive a 1366x768 screen all day. But I knew of a machine that had no trouble driving that size screen: this one.

Now fortunately my 12 and 8 hour days of class have ended so battery life isn't as much of a deciding factor as it was only just last week. I am really looking forward to running some of the same benchmarks I did when I first bought it. If I run any battery tests like I did before I'll use my same methodology, but it won't be an accurate comparison. My battery has lost a bit of capacity since then.

It was a 57Wh battery, now it's a 53Wh battery. Now it has a dual core though :p

A worthy investment?

After my last attempt to show my LT3103u a little love failed I was disappointed. I really wanted that Athlon TF-20 to give it a shot in the arm. Instead it fizzled and I died a little inside. I said "oh well, it was only $$ bucks, no big deal." Something wouldn't let me leave it at that though. So after a few weeks of scouring eBay, I've got this:

Nice.