Eden.fm

This is a follow-up on my previous article

I commented the card was really hot, around 85C on idle and over 100 on load, so decided to open it up and see what was wrong.

Here’s the culprit:

Bunch of dust blocking the air intake and some horrible paste was the cause. After I cleaned it up nicely and re-applied paste, idle went down to ~65-70C, and the fan now automatically goes down to ~45% (1415 RPM). Up to 60% it’s mostly silent. It took me a few hours to take it all appart and re-assemble the card, this is no joke; counted about ~50 screws.

I had been wanting to buy a new case for quite a long time, and finally got around to doing it. My old Thermarltake Armor LCS just couldn’t do the job anymore after I switched to air cooling for the cpu. Also took the chance to get my first SSD and a new video card. This isn’t intended as an extended review or anything, just a small post to show pics to friends etc. Let’s begin:

The chosen case was the Cooler Master HAF 932. Its main features are excellent cable management and nice airflow. The case is slightly bigger than the TT, although half as heavy.

The new case:

They include some wheels (with a brake); I won’t use them though, the case just barely fits under my desk.

Disassembling the old one:

I became to hate this case for quite a few reasons. One being the location for the hard disks: you can either put them in a removable cage (room for 3) which is placed right IN FRONT of the PSU, which is placed vertically thus.. blocking the PSU fan. Retarded. The other option is to put them in the lanes from pics 1 and 4 above which are attached to the radiator, so you gotta pull it out from the front and it’s a huge pita to do so.

So, let’s continue with the new case:

I always wanted a case with the PSU slot at the bottom, removable hard disk trays and the cable plugs either on the front or the back.

I started by installing the motherboard, then doing some cable management, PSU, hard disks, and cards.

Notice the hole in the 3rd picture. This is apparently so you can change heatsinks that require a backplate without having to remove the entire motherboard etc. Obviously either they didn’t consider AMD sockets, or Gigabyte is at fault with the location (doubt it). Also notice in pic #4 how the fan is placed.. it can be either above or down, not on the sides which would be ideal (possible with the Intel brackets only). Utterly retarded from Thermalright.

yep, f@cking huge.

My razer barracuda ac-1 and terratec ht pci (sound card and tv card). The razer used to be quite expensive.. but I don’t think it’s all that great. My older Terratec Aureon Space 7.1 had much better quality. Too bad they don’t care about customer support/drivers etc (it doesn’t work very well with W7, and I had to bother them for more than a year to get a BETA working driver for Vista, so I won’t even bother for w7; they even removed any contact options from their website). They are n.. german btw. The TV card however works really well in W7 and they keep updating its software.

Now something I dislike about this case:

They include an adapter to install a 3 1/2 unit, but they didn’t include any special cover for it, so there’s a hole on each side. Also, the 5 1/4 bays have a system to very easily remove them by pressing on either side, as you can see on pic 2, however, once you install a drive.. yeah, looks ugly :/ They could have included something to cover that with.

The system to easily install 5 1/4 devices without screws works pretty well compared to most others I’ve seen, just press the button and it’s locked. However.. it’s a bit loose on the right side, so I used a few screws there. They should include those push things on each side imo.

Back to the adapter.. there’s only 1 included, so I couldn’t install my fan controller. I’ll buy some adapters from ebay I guess and update the article later.

The hard disk trays are great (sorta delicate though, probably easy to break). You extract each tray and ~place the disk in, no need for screws. They also include some rubber stuff to minimize vibrations. For the SSD I used a converter I bought sepparetely.

I used my <3 eee while installing the case so I’d still have internet and such. Susprisingly.. it worked fine plugged to a 24″ LCD @ 1920×1200

The brackets to install PCI cards are just awesome. Seriously. I’ve assembled dozens of pcs and encountered a multitude of different “easy-install” systems, they all sucked. This one rocks though, it works really well. Thermaltake’s suck and they always made removing any card a nightmare. These however work as they should.

My 8800 GTS (I haven’t received the 9800 gx2 yet). I had never used the stock cooler, purchased the water cooling kit at the same time back then (was quite expensive). (Yes, I won’t be using water cooling on the card anymore, since the entire wc system is part of the TT case). The stock fan works nicely, barely noisy at all. With WC it was always around 55-60C, even under load. With air now.. it ranges 60-75.

And we are done:

Now some benchmarks of the SSD:

* Installed w7 in about 7 minutes, from first install click to a booted desktop.

Yep, amazing. Look at the I/O in the HD Tune results.

To help its lifetime I followed I few recommendations from the OCZ forums, such as a few registry tweaks, disabling prefetch/superfetch, search indexing, auto-defrag, system restore, pagefile (never used it anyway since I had 8GB), and moving firefox cache, windows logs and temp files to a RAM disk (I have 8GB ram so used 2GB for it). I purchased QSoft’s product for it. It seems to have been made by a single individual, no real business etc, but works extremelly well where other products fail. Even works for 64-bit W7 with no problems. I think it was around ~$12, just the right price.

UPDATE: finally received the 9800 GX2. Also the 5 1/2 tray converters and a pci-e card with 2 sata ports.

So, 2-3 weeks after I first wrote this post (saved it as draft only), received the rest of pieces to complete my new system. Let’s see:

* XFX Geforce 9800 GX2 Black Edition. I bought this used from ebay. I was thinking of a 260 or 275 first, but decided for this. The 8800 GTS was still doing ~fine, however sorta lagging with high quality settings etc in 1920×1200. I will probably ebay it now. So, the new card:

The card is extremely heavy and large. I was worried about the power plugs.. read everywhere the card needs 1×6 and 1×8, no conversion from molex and such. Fortunately my PSU is quite high-end and had no trouble powering it up (Corsair HX620).

Took the chance to test an old xfx 7600 GT that died on me years ago. Thought maybe it was the mobo at the time.. so worth giving it a try; no luck though, it’s dead.

Bay converters: they SUCK. Apparently they aren’t standard size, so I had to cut them a little bit on the sides and keep trying till the devices could be placed. Same thing with the screw holes, they didn’t fit. I will leave the appropriate feedback to the ebay seller. Anyway, I bought 2 of them, used them for the cards reader and the fans controller. They don’t look great, but beats a hole on each side.

One thing that bothers me now.. the card runs extremelly hot. ~75-80C on IDLE, ~100 on load. I’ve read on some forums from other people’s experiences, and this seems to be acceptable Oo The fan is also quite noisy at 100%, so I put it down to 60% manually when I’m not gaming (it auto-adjusts itself, but being the idle temp. so high it’s always loud). I also tried lowering the core/memory/shader frec. but it didn’t help much. I guess I need a more powerful case window fan (it’s very low rpm to keep the noise down, about 650 RPM). Maybe I’ll open the videocard and plug the fan to the controller sometime, so I don’t have to use the nvidia control panel for that every time.

As for gaming.. it’s really nice, played some Aion beta and Oblivion, was great and smooth with max settings.

Now the PCI-e sata card. It was cheap. So cheap they didn’t mention you could only use 2 of the 4 ports at a time. It has 2x e-sata on the back, and 2 internal sata ports. You need to switch some jumpers to use either. I bought this card since my motherboard has only 6 sata ports and I needed at least 8 (5 hard disks, 1 dvd drive, 1 e-sata + 1 sata on the front panel). I don’t think I’ll ever have a use for e-sata, but I often use the other normal sata port.

This was quite a screw up. The card is so small.. the sata cables barely reached, I had to place over the video card :/

It didn’t work right away on W7-64, and the included drivers failed. Trying to update the driver online from device manager failed to find anything. The drivers from the Silicon website failed also (the card is a Sil 3132). Oddly though.. windows update did find the driver, installed it, and then it worked great (beats me why trying from device manager failed).

Light catodes.. w/e they are called: I had 4 of these in my older case, 2 blue, 2 violet, connected to a controller (off/on/alternate blue-violet, on by sound). I decided to use the 2 blue ones, without the controller (it’s small and leaves half a 5 1/4 bay empty). The problem was where I’d place the on/off switch. The case has some sorta opening on top below a plastic pad, which is advertised to be used for filling a water tank for wc (no clue how you’d install that there.. seems like bs advertising). The button was too small, but then I saw this bubble plastic stuff I had lying around and had this idea..

This area is normally covered, so it doesn’t matter if it looks ugly, it’ll be always covered (I can still press the button).

The lights:

And we are mostly finished. The backside with a few more cables:

And we are done. Thanks for reading!

BBC NEWS | Health | Killer parasites’ genes decoded.

Scientists have decoded the genetic blueprint of two parasitic flatworms responsible for thousands of deaths worldwide every year.

Researchers working on the genetic blueprint of S. masoni, the most widespread of the schistosomiasis parasites, found that it was made up of 11,809 genes – about 10 times the size of the malaria parasite genome.

In particular, they identified a large number of genes which produce enzymes that break down proteins, giving the parasite its ability bore through tissue.

Subsequent analysis revealed 120 enzymes that could potentially be targeted with drugs to disrupt the worm’s metabolism.

The researchers also identified 66 drugs already on the market which might also be effective against schistosomiasis.

PC Pro: News: Exposed: the PC repair shops that rifle through your photos and passwords.

The exercise was simple. Create a simple fault on a laptop, load it with spy software, take it into several repair shops, then sit back and see what happened. Would they arrive at the same diagnosis and charge us a fair price to fix it?

First, Sky News engineers installed professional spy software on a new laptop. Spector Pro was programmed to load on start-up and silently record every ‘event’ that took place. If the mouse was moved, a folder opened or a file looked at, we would know about it. Every event would also trigger a screen snapshot to be taken.

We also installed Digiwatcher. This devious little tool auto-runs on start-up and quietly tells any connected webcam to secretly film whoever is at the machine. The process is invisible and the video file is hidden on the hard drive and password protected.

To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn’t load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.

Laptop Revival in Hammersmith initially offered us a free diagnosis when we dropped our laptop off. Yet the spy software later revealed something extraordinary. The webcam shows that almost immediately the technician discovers our loose memory chip and clicks it back into position [based on recorded boot and shut down times]. The machine is rebooted and the problem solved.

Yet he then begins browsing through our hard drive. A folder marked ‘Private’ is opened and he flicks through our researcher’s holiday photographs, including intimate snaps of her wearing a bikini. He stares at picture after picture, stopping only to show them to colleagues.

He then picks up the phone and calls our researcher. He tells her our motherboard is faulty and will need to be replaced. Usually it costs £130 but he’ll do it for £100. We tell him we’ll think about it and call him tomorrow.

After more snooping, he logs off. But a few hours later, another technician boots our machine. He also begins searching our hard drive until he finds log-in details for our Facebook and Hotmail accounts. With a cackle he removes a memory stick from around his neck, plugs it in and then copies them across.

He also discovers our holiday photos and copies those of our researcher in her bikini.

Most worryingly, when he discovers log-in details for our online bank account, he logs onto the bank’s website and attempts to break into the account. He only fails because the details we created were false.

There were also difficulties with PC World in Brentford. The technician triumphantly diagnosed a faulty motherboard and insisted we needed a new one. We were told unless we paid £230 in advance, we couldn’t have it repaired. We agreed. But when we collected the laptop and got it home, we discovered only a memory chip had been replaced and not the motherboard.

at Evnova Computers in Barbican the loose memory chip was also spotted and fixed. But the company also told us we needed a new motherboard. We declined the offer and collected our laptop. When we examined it, we discovered technicians had soldered the memory bus pins together to recreate the original fault.

DailyTech – Students Embed Stem Cells Into Sutures for Tendon Repair.

Biomedical engineering students from Johns Hopkins have demonstrated a way to use stem cells from a patient to help repair serious orthopedic injuries such as ruptured tendons. The students demonstrated a method of embedding the patient’s own stem cells into a surgical thread that the surgeon uses to repair torn tendons.

The new process doesn’t change or impact the way that surgeons repair the injury. Currently the new process is undergoing animal trials and will hopefully make it to human trials in about five years. The new process has great promise for speeding healing from serious injuries.

Matt Rubashkin, the student team leader said, “Using sutures that carry stems cells to the injury site would not change the way surgeons repair the injury. But we believe the stem cells will significantly speed up and improve the healing process. And because the stem cells will come from the patient, there should be no rejection problems.”

DailyTech – ESA’s Venus Express Beams Back Evidence of a Wet Past.

Venus may have looked like Earth, just not for very long.

After a November 2005 launch, the European Space Agency’s scientific satellite, Venus Express, reached the planet in April of the following year and settled into its working orbit shortly after in May. Since then, the orbiter has been beaming back many kinds of data about the cloud-covered planet, enabling researchers to better understand its lifecycle and past.

Venus Express left Earth with seven instruments bent on unmasking Venus and revealing to us her secrets. All seven instruments were derived from the previous projects Mars Express and Rosette. ASPERA-4 analyses neutral and ionized plasma; MAG takes magnetic field measurements; PFS uses infrared Fourier spectroscopy to take vertical pictures of the atmosphere; SPICAV also uses spectroscopy to measure atmospheric content by using sun or starlight occultation; VeRa uses radio sounding to measure atmosphere; VIRTIS maps the atmosphere and surface of the planet via spectography; and VMC images in ultraviolet and visible light ranges.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Wireless power system shown off.

A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference.

The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.

Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford.

He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.

“There is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or feet of where there is very inexpensive power,” he said.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Hubble pictures Jupiter’s ‘scar’.

Hubble has trained its new camera on the atmospheric disturbance on Jupiter believed to have been caused by a comet or asteroid impact.

The telescope used the Wide Field Camera 3 fitted on the recent shuttle servicing mission to capture ultra-sharp visible-light images of the scar.

The dark spot near the gas giant’s southern pole was noticed first by an amateur Australian astronomer.

2.02 – July 30th 2009

With this little tool you can very easily upload pictures to www.tinypic.com, www.imageshack.us and www.messyshare.com without having to go through their website. You can enable shell link integration and simply Right-click the file and select “Send to TinyPic/Imageshack/MessyShare“ or drag the file to the app. window and it will automatically start uploading.

Features:

• Send multiple files in a queue
• Crop an area of the screen
• Send existing files via context-menu (32-bit only), selecting them from a dialog, or dragging them to the application window
• Capture the active window when you press F11
• Select a window from currently running applications via Aero live thumbs (Vista and W7 only)
• Send your clipboard contents (image)
• Send to either Tinypic, Imageshack or Messyshare, and get the direct link copied to your clipboard automatically
• Auto-resize pictures and/or lower quality automatically if file exceeds a given size, to speed-up uploads on slow connections (like non-Japanese)
• Store captures from cropping or paste etc
• Supports multiple monitors in any configurations (spanned horz/vertically etc)
• Works in Linux via wine libraries
• .net framework is NOT required
• Supports specific Windows 7 features (taskbar progress)
• Store a log with comments and its link about every upload
  

[download#96#format=2]

[download#96#format=1]

Mirror download in Softpedia (might be an older version):

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/File-Sharing/TinyPicUploader.shtml

Single exe file, no installer (also no context-menu available):

[download#107#format=2]

[download#107#format=1]

Important for 1.x users:

Disable context-menu in 1.x and uninstall it first before installing 2.x

2.02: fixed upload to tinypic.com

So much for google’s “do no evil” motto.. (I guess supporting the censorship of human rights and civilian massacres seems alright to them), they’ve done it again, screwing up its customers. I loaded my Picasa site today, it was empty. No notice, no instructions, no warnings, no nothing.

If you have a paying Picasa account and have a single picture you think might be against what they deem innapropiate in line with their terms of service, you might as well take it down and think it twice before renewal. They removed my entire 35k pictures gallery, which included only art (screenshots) and personal photo albums. It’s all gone.

– You’ll get no warning
– They’ll delete everything, even personal pictures
– You can’t contact them, at all. I mean it, try a search “how to contact google”
– If you paid for storage you are not getting your money back, even if you were on their $500 plan
– You won’t be able to upload to your account again, even if your paid storage plan is still active.

So yeah, they won’t be seeing my few $ upon the next renewal.

DailyTech – Study Shows Drug Rapamycin Extends Lifespan of Mammals.

Researchers have discovered the first drug that has been proven to extend the lifespan of mammals when taken late in life. The drug is called rapamycin and is derived from bacteria that lives in the soil on the remote and legendary Easter Island most well-known for its gigantic moai statues.

Rapamycin is already used to treat disease in humans and is an antifungal compound that is approved by the FDA as an immunosuppressive therapy to prevent rejection in organ transplant patients. The drug is also undergoing clinical trials at this time as an anti-cancer drug. Previous studies had proven that the drug was capable of extending the lifespan of invertebrates.

The new study gave the drug to mice starting at 20 months of age, the equivalent of 60 human years. During the study, the researchers found that the drug was able to extend the life of male mice by 9% and by 13% in female mice.

BBC NEWS | Health | Coffee ‘may reverse Alzheimer’s’.

Drinking five cups of coffee a day could reverse memory problems seen in Alzheimer’s disease, US scientists say.

The Florida research, carried out on mice, also suggested caffeine hampered the production of the protein plaques which are the hallmark of the disease.

Previous research has also suggested a protective effect from caffeine.

DailyTech – Researchers Developing Robo-Bat With Metal Muscles.

Researchers from North Carolina State University are developing a new robotic bat with a metal skeleton that one day could have a wide range of uses in the civilian and military industries.

NC State doctoral student So Bunget is working alongside a mechanical engineering professor to develop a next-generation of micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) that have increased maneuverability, better aerodynamics and with small sensors used to possibly pick up biological, chemical or nuclear agents in the United States and on the battlefields overseas.

Lawyers plan class-action to reclaim “$100M+” RIAA “stole” – Ars Technica.

The recording industry has spent (and continues to spend) millions of dollars on its litigation campaign against accused file-swappers, but if two lawyers have their way, the RIAA will have to pay all the money back. Not content simply to defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset in her high-profile retrial next week in Minnesota, lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer.

The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged “$100+ million” it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long.

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman.

Cool article from the bbc.

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks