I began with the basic necessities first: the ThermalTake tower case and Antec Power Supply. I liked the ATX case with plenty of room for the motherboard and hard drive cages. The power supply is a good (orange) looking 750W with extra 6-pin plugs for Crossfire capable video cards.

Next, oddly enough, when I began the research about 5 months ago, I thought it was a good idea to buy the Kingston HyperX RAM because there was a rebate promotion at Newegg. Then RAM prices dropped dramatically, by almost half!  For sure, a painful lesson learned here. [Updated: Photo]

In the last 2 weeks, the shopping went into high gear, with the indication there were more online sale after Black Friday/Cyber Monday.  It was the time to start buying the ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 motherboard.

In order to test the motherboard, I had to make a quick decision to buy the CPU.  During my research, I was originally going with lower end AMD Phenom II X6.  But I read an awful lot of negative reviews on the AMD. There are many glowing reviews on the Intel i7 2600-K. I decided I needed to spend the money on a much better chip.  The CPU is the brain of the operation, so it needed to be the best one.  The Intel happens to be good at overclocking without requiring much power and producing heat. Additionally, I also got the Cooler Master 212+ CPU cooler, with a large heat sink and fan, to cool it off.

Next, I had to get the video card.  This was an interesting decision that I had to make. The choices were high-end Radeon 69XX series, the recently discounted Radeon 68XX series, or go with new territory of Nvidia GTX series.  I also had to decide on getting a card with 1G or 2G RAM.  Since my 23″ monitor only has 1920×1200 resolution, I thought the 1G RAM version is sufficient.  Anyway, I decided to get the discounted ASUS EAH6850.  My strategy here is to get another one so I can link them in a Crossfire configuration, at a later day when prices have gone down.  I need to watch the prices regularly because if the supply is gone, availability will be scarce and prices won’t come down. It’s a lesson I learned from the last build with Radeon 4850.

Finally, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try out the latest craze: Solid State Drives.  It promises faster boot up time and operation. Reviews only said to stay away from first generation SSDs, so I ended up buying the more recent OCZ Vertex 3 90GB drive. I knew it’s going to be a big improvement over hard drives.  Also, in the future, I may be able to use this as a cache for RAID hard drives².

Part of this exercise is to discover the advantages UEFI “BIOS”.  Microsoft touted Windows 8 to take advantage of UEFI to secure the boot process.  It can also (possibly) speed up power-on bootup, as shown in their video.  Right now, I haven’t explored this possibility since there’s no Windows 8 public beta, at least not until February 2012.

The ASUS’s UEFI is quite beautiful.

I always overclock my CPUs.  With the new motherboards and CPUs, this has become an easy exercise.  I overclocked the i7 2600K from 3.4 GHz to 4.6, with relative ease. This P8Z68 motherboard made it painless: just change the multiplier and set everything else on Auto. It’s so easy, my Grandma can do it.

Of course, with overclocking, I’ll need a good cooling system.  Putting in the massive CPU cooler was not the only thing I needed for my overclocking adventures. I had to make sure the case has good air flow.  So I made sure there are three 120mm fans blowing in from the front.  I also sealed any holes on the sides and the top of the case.  Now, when the computer is on, it’s pretty noisy – even when I close the cabinet door, where I stored the PC. I’ll need to tweak the chassis fan speeds to make it more quiet.  It’s going to be a balancing act between better cooling and lower decibels.

But for now, I can get the CPU cores to operate around 70°C under full load³ at 4.6 GHz.  Later, I’ll go search for that holy grail of 5.0 GHz.

Here was my shopping list.  The only thing left to do is putting in another Radeon HD68XX based card for CrossFireX configuration.  I can definitely wait for the price to go down a little more.  Otherwise, I’m pretty much done with this setup.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

PC Build 2011

1. I still used rebates and looked for discounts, whenever I can, as the first rule of thumb.
2. Using Intel’s SRT software.
3. Using prime95

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2008: Part 1
2. PC Build 2008: Part 2
3. Building An HTPC

My experience with Microsoft Windows varied quite a bit.  I could recall the milestones in my life when I deal with the operating system. It started off with Windows 3.1.  I supported it professionally as a Toshiba laptop tech support person.  It was still based on MS-DOS and buggy as hell – it would often crash!  I wasn’t paid enough to support it.  However, it taught me patience and perseverance, not to mention the experience for a career move.

Microsoft improved stability tremendously with Windows NT.  But it was bloated and support from vendors was dicey.  The drivers had to be tightly controlled to maintain a stable OS.  With NT, it gave me the chance to dabble into high end PC parts (that required certifications) and running Windows Server’s applications such as Exchange, MS-SQL, and IIS.

When Windows XP came out, it was popular because it ran well on smaller systems and drivers were widely available from all vendors.  It was the de-facto Windows setup for many.  I stayed with XP for the longest time since 2001.

To digress a little bit, I have to mention Vista. I heard horrible things about it, so I stayed away from it.  I finally played with it in 2008 when I build my latest PC. It has a pretty GUI that rivaled (copied?) Mac OS X.  But it was like the NT days: too bloated.  I had to bump up the RAM to 8GB for a more comfortable experience.  Installing games like Half Life and Crysis were a chore, sometimes with unpredictable results.

So now, with Windows 7, I’m back to that comfortable spot with a Microsoft operating system.  My current XP apps and games are working perfectly on it.  Already it’s the best selling pre-order and gaining install base.  Sites, like Lifehacker, dedicated posts on how to use it.  On the Enterprise level, companies are gearing up to convert from XP directly to Win7.

I’ve never been so excited about Windows before, until Windows 7 is here.  Start me up!

Oh, as a side note, there’s a reason why I skipped Windows 95:  It sucked!

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

Start Me Up Again With Windows 7

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2008: Part 2
2. Building An HTPC
3. Cloud Computing Hype

So, with existing parts and new ones, I started to put the HTPC together:

• Intel Pentium 4 Duo running at 3.2 Ghz
• ECS G31T-M(1.0) LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
• Corsair 2x2Gb PC2-6400 DDR 800 RAM
• ASUS EAH3450/DI/256M ATI Radeon HD 3450 Low Profile Video Card
• Western Digital WD6400AAKS WD Caviar SE16 SATA Internal Hard Drive – 640 Mb
  
• Seagate Barracuda® 7200.11 SATA Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS – 1 TB
• Rosewill RCR-IC001 40-in-1 USB 2.0 3.5″ Internal Card Reader w/ USB port
• CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified
• VisionTek ATI TV Wonder HD 650 Combo PCI Express
• Old firewire PCI card
• Old Logitech Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
• Old LG DVD/CD RW drive
• Old black mini-tower Antec case

For the most part, this setup works pretty well:

1. Re-using old PC parts is one of my main goal.  It’s my way of “recycling”.
2. The setup is quiet.  The Corsair Power Supply is whisper quiet.  The Q-fan control on the Rosewill HSF kept the CPU fan noise down too.  There’s no fan on the video card.
3. The PCIe 16x video card is more than capable of handling YouTube and Hulu videos, as well as videos played using VLC player.
4. The VisionTek’s TV Tuner comes with ATI Catalyst Media Center that lets me record live TV to mpeg, Divx, and H.264 codecs.  It’s more liberating than Windows Media Center’s “dvrms” propreitary format!
5. I got a good deal for the Seagate 1TB drive for $90!
6. Also took advantage of the dropping RAM prices. I maxed out to 4G for $30!
7. The Rosewill all-in-one card reader is useful when Ineed to sneaker net files around using CF and SD cards.
8. Since I’m connected to the network via a Linksys wireless repeater, I can start experimenting with streaming-anywhere apps like Orb.

However, I still have a few kinks to work out:

1. I couldn’t get the ATI TV tuner card to work with Windows Media Center 2005.   It’s not a big deal, but it would be nice to have the option to use WMCE.
2. It’s having a hard time keeping up with 1080p HDTV playback.  I’m suspecting it’s the CPU fault (see below).
3. The Intel CPU (given by Matt) is an “experimental” test CPU.  It’s a dual-core Prescott chip, but it has a tiny 200 Mhz BUS!  This is an obvious performance bottleneck.
4. The TV tuner is not able to control my satellite dish because the DishNetwork set top box remote is RF based.  I’m sure someone out there has a gadget to interoperate IR and RF.

The beauty of a PC is the upgradability:

1. Get a better wireless keyboard/mouse combo.  I need them small and have more range.
2. Get a new CPU with a bigger bus.  Perhaps upgrade my other PC to a Quad, and use the Dual in the HTPC.
3. Upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7 Media Center.  Hopefully ATI will update their drivers to support it.
4. Get a Blu-Ray Disc drive.  However, with the unstable flux of Sony’s BD firmware revisions, I doubt I’ll get into this any time soon.

I enjoy putting a PC together, much like playing with a giant jigzaw puzzle.   With this one, I learned that a custom made HTPC is not so easy to build on a budget.  It takes time and patience, and a lot of experimentation.  Other HTPC enthusiasts will attest to that.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

Building An HTPC

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2008: Part 2
2. PC Build 2008: Part 1
3. PC Build 2011

To ensure my power needs are being met, I went out and got a new UPS.  This time, it’s a whopping 1500VA UPS from Best Buy.  It’s a re-labelled Cyberpower brand, into Geek Squad.  It can  handle a collosal 900 Watts of input, so I should have plenty of head room.  Another nice thing about this power supply is the LCD in front to show me the load and battery condition.   I really don’t need the supplied USB cable and software to monitor the UPS’ condition.

The outage also gave me the opportunity to clean up the tangle of cable mess near my server.  I only have a 15″W by 24″D space to work with, so it’s pretty cramped in there.  It’s like playing a jigsaw puzzle, trying to figure out how the mini-tower server, UPS, subwoofer, and the light fixture fit into the small corner.  After a couple of hours, it’s finally sorted out. Now it looks much tidier.  I still can’t avoid the gazillion cables back there, but I’m managing them using flexible tubes and twist ties.

My wife predicted in a few months, I’ll redo this setup.  I think she may be right.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

Outage

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2008: Part 1
2. Linux and hardware upgrades
3. Building An HTPC

With 4G of RAM, Vista is actually performing quite well.  I proceeded to install the essential drivers for the motherboard (including ethernet and sound), and the ATI video driver (including the Catalyst Control Center).  After getting the basics installed, I then install my essential applications, such as FireFox 3, Adobe Flash Player 9, ULead Burn Now, VLC Media Player, IrFanView, MWSnap, WinSCP, Putty, Twhirl, and Yahoo IM.  So far so good, system still performs well.

There is still more work to do.

The fun stuff is missing: video game.   I want to try out Crysis, Call of Duty 4, and Team Fortress 2, so I’ll need to pickup a copy of each.  These latest games should take advantage (or humiliate) my new video card.  I’m also preparing for the inevitable Starcraft 2.  The original game provided many hours of fun with friends and co-workers.  There are also my old favorite games that I’ll eventually re-install, such as Half Life 2 and Lord of the Rings: Battle of Middle Earth.

Finally, I’ll need to use video editing software.  Haven’t decided what to get yet, but suggestions are appreciated.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

PC Build 2008: Part 2

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2008: Part 1
2. PC Build 2011
3. Start Me Up Again With Windows 7

• CPU: Intel E7200 Core2 Duo 2.53 Ghz Socket 775 1066 Mhz FSB
• Motherboard: Asus P5Q Pro LGA 775 Intel P45 -2 PCIe 16x with 8x Bridge
• Memory: 4 Gigs (2×2) Patriot DDR2-1066
• Hard Drive:  Seagate Barracuda 500 Gb 7200 RPM 32mb Cache SATA
• Video Card: Powercolor ATI Radeon HD4850 Crossfire
• CD/DVD Drive:  LG 20X DVD/CD Burner SATA
• Case: Antec Three Hundred
• Power Supply: Cooler Master 750W-80Plus Crossfire Ready

The difficulty, of course, is to find bargains for the new parts.  In order to stay a little ahead of the technology curve, I have to spend a little bit more on parts like the video card, power supply, motherboard, and memory.  In my setup, the standard is set with the ATI HD4850 video card.  The Crossfire capable card enables me to gain more speed by piggybacking another of the same card to boost performance.   To have dual cards, I need a half decent motherboard, like the Asus P5Q Pro, with two 16x PCIe slots.  The potential bottleneck is the 8x bridge between the two PCIe slots, but tests revealed the speed gained is quite good – almost comparable to X38 and X48 boards.  In addition, the HD4850 has high power requirement (at least 325W), and dual cards setup needs another 150W.  This is where the behemoth 750W power supply comes in.

The choice for a Core2 Duo, instead of a Quad, is more towards pricing.  The Intel Q6600 is $190 vs. the E7200 $120.  A $70 difference for a questionable performance increase (in most applications) is not worth it.  I may end up trying to overclock the E7200 to 3.0 Ghz to increase performance.

Another potential upgrade is the memory.  The board has room for another 4Gb (2×2) of RAM.  I’ll get some more when the prices for PC8500 memory go down below $50.  It’s currently hovering around $100.

Also, with hard drive prices falling down so fast, there’ll be a chance to upgrade to terabytes of disk space.  So it looks like for the next 3 years or so, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to tweak this new build.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

PC Build 2008: Part 1

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2011
2. PC Build 2008: Part 2
3. Building An HTPC

• The “fusion” finish look of the new Toshiba Satellite U405 laptop.
• Live survey in the all hands meeting, based on a third-party company assessment. My choice of career advancement is “Work from home”, which is not a popular choice, apparently.
• American Express still has great customer service. Not perfect though.
• Taiwan healthcare system. PBS did a comparison report and said it’s great.
• Hospital volunteers in Taiwan are helpful. Miss J has firsthand experience with the Buddhist volunteers in Taiwan. They serve tea and group singing for entertainment, among other things.
• A lot of doctors in Taiwan. During Japanese occupation of Taiwan, most Taiwanese became doctors because they couldn’t get into politics or arts. Found a book in Amazon that sort of confirms this:

The achievements in colonial medicine provided one of the most pivotal examples of Japan’s “scientific colonialism” in Taiwan. During the early years of the colonial age, upon the realization that the success of colonial medicine relied heavily on the existence of a body of well trained, native agents, the Japanese state made a great effort to promote and institutionalize medical education in Taiwan. As a result, in less than two decades, doctors emerged as the first modern native professionals in Taiwan, and their professional practices endowed them with very favorable market positions and high social status.

- Ming-cheng M. Lo, “Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan“, Page 5.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

Lunch Bits – Edition 15

Related posts:

1. Lunch Bits – Edition 14
2. Web Site Tuning – Let’s Start from The Bottom
3. For Those Who Come to San Francisco

• Upgrade the PC hardware.
• Add more hard disks.
• Update to the latest OS.

This web site seems rather straight forward from a reader’s point of view. It’s actually a pretty complex system underneath it. It’s made up of many different components. It starts from the hardware, operating system, database, all the way to networking equipment. As the first part of my series of web site tuning, I’m going to start examining the “bottom” layer and move all the way up to the web application.

For starters, I have to choose the right hardware to run a server. Since I’ll be running a database and web application, I don’t want to pick too small of CPU with little memory. I am not running a Windows based machine, so my choice for hardware is more flexible. Most Linux/Unix based Operating Systems out there don’t require much in terms of hardware. I was previously running Fedora Core Linux on a 650Mhz CPU machine with 320Mb of memory. I expect the same hardware to be good enough for Ubuntu Linux. Of course, giving it more CPU and more memory will only help speed up the application’s performance. So, upgrading the hardware is always a good first step to improve web site performance.

Also very important is the choice of hard disk to use in the PC. The web applications (and OS) constantly retrieve from and write to files on the hard disk. If the disk access is slow, it will impact the performance of the software. I started with a 5400 RPM 40Gig Maxtor hard drive using ATA66 IDE interface. Linux is generally a compact OS (unlike Windows) and server-based applications are generally small in size. I managed to survive with the old disk for quite some time.

When there’s a lot of disk activity (aka Disk I/O), such as swapping, database access, or log writing, it is a very good idea to get a second (or third) physical hard disks to separate the data, swap, and OS files. Sysadmins sometime call this practice “putting them on a separate spindle“. With the invention of faster and smarter RAID controllers, this may not be necessary anymore. But for old school, true-and-proven results, having multiple disks will only help improve performance of a web site.

As for this site, I’ve upgraded to a 2.4Ghz CPU with 1 Gigabyte memory. I’ve also recently upgraded to 7200RPM Seagate disk drive using SATA100 interface. Plus I’ve upgraded to the latest Fedora Core Linux. The server’s hardware works so well, I can even start using it as a desktop, a backup machine to browse the internet.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

Web Site Tuning – Let’s Start from The Bottom

Related posts:

1. Web Site Tuning – The Database
2. Web Site Tuning – Web Server and WordPress
3. Trying Out Fedora Core 10

Using the tools available at my disposable, I’m going to scrutinize my web site. I’ll start with a free Full Page Test tool from Pingdom. Testing my site with it reveals the main blog page loads rather slowly: averaging 6-7 seconds. I’ve noticed the pieces affecting the load times are ShareThis button plugin, graphics, and CSS files.

To confirm, I’m going to use a commercial software from Keynote Systems to provide the numbers from sites all over the world:

• From Toronto (Bell Canada), the average response time is 5-6 seconds.
• Singapore (SingTel), averaging 13-14 seconds.
• London (British Telecom), averaging 7-8 seconds.

There are possible caveats to these simple performance snapshots:

• Time of the Day
  Network traffic varies at different times of day. North America can be very active during work day, saturating the bandwidth on the network backbones to my site’s downstream ISPs such as AT&T.
• Local Bandwidth
  I share my server connection with my outgoing DSL broadband connection. Whenever I use it to browse from home, network response time is going to degrade.
• Load Testing
  The numbers above are averages from loading the page 5 times. In a real performance test, it has to be scripted to hit various pages (not just one), ramp up with multiple users (depending on requirements), and run continuously over a period of 30-60 minutes. However, since I run a light-traffic site, load testing is not necessary.

In summary, it looks like my blog’s main page is not loading very well. Without changing my server’s network bandwidth, obviously some things on this page have to be changed or eliminated. There are things I can do to optimize this page, which I’ll cover in the next few weeks. It’s going to be an interesting challenge.

How slow is my page loading in your browser?

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

Web Site Performance

Related posts:

1. Web Site Tuning – Web Server and WordPress
2. Web Site Tuning – Let’s Start from The Bottom
3. Web Site Tuning – The Database

I upgraded the hard drive before, so at least I could preserve my Apache, PHP, and MySQL setup. However, Fedora 7 wouldn’t boot with the new hardware, especially the on-board S-ATA controller on the ASUS motherboard. It would not find the VolGroup00 RAID setup and threw a kernel panic. I used the rescue CD and examined the /mnt/sysimage/etc setup (and a bit of google searching). I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I even tried to use the Fedora 7 disc to do an “upgrade” over my current setup. But the kernel update won’t happen because I had several kernel patches since the original install.

So my only way out was to do a real upgrade to Fedora Core 8. I downloaded the DVD ISO off bittorrent for 3 hours, ran the upgrade setup, and recompiled PHP/Apache. Now I’m back in business! Phew! Hopefully this setup will be more stable. I’m going to watch that uptime!

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

Linux and hardware upgrades

Related posts:

1. Trying Out Fedora Core 10
2. Ubuntu Linux – Very First Impression
3. Web Site Tuning – Let’s Start from The Bottom