Xblog

So, what has gone well? The case has been nice and compact, although this would be better appreciated by those that I live with if I kept my desk clear. The power supply on the case died (the main improvement of the updated NSK1380 seems to be the enhanced 80 PLUS Certified PSU). The cheesy slot fan they provide started to die on me, so I took that out. I haven’t yet measured the thermal impact of that, but I must acknowledge that the air flow in the case, what with my two hard drives, DVD-RW and the passively cooled 7600GS video card is somewhat lacking, and I have noticed the case gets quite hot at times (though that might have something to do with stacking junk on top of it, inhibiting airflow out the top vent). My two gripes about the case are a) the front panel doesn’t do advanced audio, instead using a funky variant of the AC’97 standard interface (it has both front and rear audio channels, but there are only two mini-stereo plugs in the front, one for headphones and one for a microphone… what gives?), and b) the sata power connector on it is so short it can’t really reach any of the drive bays unless the drive cage is all the way in, making opening and closing the drive bay tedious.

The graphics card remains an excellent investment (thanks for the pointer Danny). I get zippy performance, stable drivers in both Linux and Windows, and generally no complaints. I will say that for such a compact case it might have been wiser to go with a smaller card with an active cooling system, as it would improve airflow.

The Patriot memory did end up having one stick go bad on me. I’m going to retest it shortly to see if it really was the memory stick that was the problem. The extra voltage needed by the RAM has been an annoyance and probably the source of additional heat. Note to self: pay more attention to voltage needs of sticks when purchasing RAM. In practice I don’t stress the memory subsystem much, so having slower RAM that just works as is is probably the better call.

The Zalman CNPS-8000 continues to plug away. It isn’t doing a great job of cooling the CPU, which might partially be driven by the fact that a chunk of it is jammed directly under the PSU, and partially driven by the fact that the rest of it is right between the PSU and a hard drive, with a CD-ROM right above it. It might also have something to do with the paste I used for it, which doesn’t seemed to have spread as well as it should have. I wish Zalman had bundled their “Super” thermal grease that they bundled with my other Zalman HSF, as it was less viscous and spread easily. Someday I may pick some up along with something else and reapply it to see how CPU temperatures are effected.

My cheap mechanical mouse gave out on me, so I replaced it with a Logitech wireless mouse. It is a very nice mouse with one feature I despise: the fast scroll wheel. I’m sure gamers love it, but it makes it difficult to use the scroll wheel to scroll through web pages precisely. It also seems to not work as a middle mouse button. I’ve been left-right pairing it so far, but at some point I need to read the manual to see what the deal is with that. I’m going to kill someone if this thing doesn’t have a middle click button at all.

Those of you watching carefully have probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned the motherboard. Even shrewder observers will recall I mentioned that the motherboard seemed “a bit touchy”. Well, you can scratch the “a bit” part. It is was ultimately died on me. Reading reviews elsewhere, it seems I am not the first. Things I didn’t like about this motherboard:

• It would periodically fail to power on. If anything this got worse over time. Thank goodness I wasn’t using Windows much, so I could just leave the machine running all the time.
• The IDE connector is horribly positioned. This is an ongoing problem with modern uATX motherboards for some reason, but the F-190 takes the cake for worst positioning yet. It’s pointed to the front of the case, even though no self respecting uATX case would have drives or optical disks anywhere but above the motherboard, with the connectors probably hovering over the middle of it.
• No firewire. This is supposed to be a high performance gaming/AV system. Heck, it has an HDMI connector, but no firewire? Are you kidding me?
• The network controller seemed to not be well supported by Linux. It would work with some kernels (Ubuntu’s in particular), but not others (like vanilla kernels).
• Similar problems with the USB controller. *Every* USB driver I tried with it would eventually hang with large data transfers. No problems from Vista, so it appears to be a software issue. This seems to just be part of ATI’s SB-600 southbridge. It’s so rarely used that nobody cares.
• The built in graphics is too lethargic to be considered for anything other than MAYBE playing videos. uATX folks seem to insist on always having a built in graphics controller, but the built in ones are always too weak to be of much use for anything but basic graphics. This makes sense for some uATX boards, but for a “high performance gaming” board, you should expect people will use the PCIe slot.
• The smaller second ATX connection on the board is placed very close to the CPU socket. This makes it get in the way of non-OEM HSF’s like the one I had. Doubly painful with the NSK-1300 because you’ve got the PSU hanging over it too.
• The board reputedly resets its BIOS settings for RAM voltage from time to time. I never saw this happened, but just having to consider this possibility annoyed me.
• Poor support. The a-bit USA web site never seemed to have any information on BIOS’s/drivers/etc. for this board. It’s almost like they aborted the launch. I had to go to the Taiwan website’s english section to find what I was looking for.
• Ultimately, the board died on me and just wouldn’t boot at all, even thought POST was passing.

After much hemming and hawing, I ended up getting an Asus P5E-VM HDMI. I was originally going for Gigabyte’s GA-G33M-DS2R, but the board appears to have been discontinued, with no apparent heir. I really don’t need the benefits of the G35 chipset, but the G33 uATX boards all seem a little suspect after reading reviews (Intel boards seem like the best bet, but they seem to have low tolerance for high voltage RAM, which I have 4GB’s worth of…), and I just wanted a board that was going to work perfectly after all the F-190 hassles. This board probably cost $30 more than I could have spent with other boards, but that seems like money well spent for piece of mind.

Things I am liking right away about this board:

• It works
• See above
• Asus Q-connector makes it easier to handle all those pesky little connectors from the case
• The secondary ATX connector isn’t too close to the CPU.
• The IDE connector is still inconveniently located, but at least it is pointing in the right general direction (“up”).
• Comes with built-in firewire.
• Comes with fancy enough graphics that I might just consider unplugging the Gigabyte card and maybe use it for another machine. It’s still not good enough for gaming, but it appears to be good enough for everything else.
• Speaking of graphics, how about VGA text not losing a column on the left side with my monitor? ;-)
• It has a nice little mode where it will pause for ten seconds on the BIOS boot screen where it dumps out all that it found out about your system.
• Overclocker’s paradise. I’m not really a big overclocker, but it is nice to know that it is possible.

Things that have annoyed me so far:

• It has 6 internal SATA ports. Come on! This for a **u**ATX box. I can’t imagine a uATX case I’ve seen that could fit 6 SATA devices. Why not move a couple of those SATA ports to the back plate as eSATA ports like some other boards have done?
• Two of the fan connectors are awkwardly positioned by the CPU, this isn’t nearly as annoying as the F-190’s secondary ATX connector, because those wires tend to be long.
• When the BIOS is set to automatically set the correct voltage for RAM, etc., it doesn’t provide any feedback as to what settings it decided to go with. I may just need to read the manual more to figure out how to do this, or set it all manually.
• Vista wouldn’t boot. I need to “repair” the system to fix it. I almost don’t care, so I haven’t investigated this more, but it is entirely likely that this is really a Vista problem, and not a P5E-VM problem.