Technology for Mortals

Fry’s (San Francisco Bay Area stores only) has a great deal on an Intel i3 540 CPU and Gigabyte H55m-S2H motherboard for just the cost of the CPU.  That basically saves the cost of a $90 motherboard (price at Newegg) and the cost of shipping if you live near a Fry’s.  Here’s a positive review of the Gigabyte H55m-S2H motherboard in case you’re wondering if the motherboard is worthwhile.

This is a low-power Intel “Clarkdale” system with a 32nm dual-core Westmere-class CPU and a 45nm Intel G55-class graphics processor built into the CPU package.  Power consumption is very low for idle and peak and Clarkdales are known for extreme overclocking potential.  The motherboard has DVI and HDMI so it is a great HTPC candidate.

The Clarkdale graphics is has full dual-stream 1080P offload and probably more than double the 3D performance of the older G45 based graphics from Intel.  That’s still not good graphics performance by any stretch of the imagination, but decent for an integrated part for casual gaming like World of Warcraft type games but not too good 3D shooters.

At my job, we have a second, hardware-identical chassis backup server sitting in our rack. In case of failure on our main server, we can just move all of the disks from the main server to the backup machine, fire it up, and solve the failure on the main machine at our leisure. A few months ago, we decided to purchase a second CPU for the backup machine. We have enough VMs running at this point to justify it. So, we ordered a secondary CPU with the exact same part number, put it in, and thought nothing of it. When we had the chance to test it, we just could not get it to work. Windows would not come up, it would just reboot halfway through startup. A dummy install of Linux seemed to work. But no matter what we did, Windows just wouldn’t come up.

We spent dozens of hours on this issue. One thing we noticed was that it didn’t matter which CPU was removed, or which socket was populated, the system worked with only one CPU in it. A motherboard swap didn’t do the trick. At one point, we noticed that one of the CPUs did not seem to show up in the BIOS’ temperature readings. Eventually, someone discovered that the CPUs had slightly different revision numbers on them. More research showed that the different revisions to “identical” CPUs might have well have been different chips entirely; there were huge differences in their capabilities and feature sets. No wonder Windows was taking a hike! It was detecting features on one CPU and trying to use them on the other. My suspicion is that Linux wasn’t trying to use those features.

So, if you buy a CPU for a system some time after you bought the others CPU(s), check the revision carefully. There is a special manufacturer’s order number to differentiate them. Check what your original CPUs have, and make sure that the place yo order from has identical parts in stock. It took us many, many tries to find a vendor willing and able to actually verify this information before shipping, but now we have two perfectly identical CPUs in the system, and it works like a charm.

J.Ja

As a follow up to the past problems I’ve been having with the XFX nForce 630i model MG-630i-7159, I upgraded the BIOS on the recommendation of Adrian.  It was a good recommendation and I should have remembered to try updating the BIOS to see if these problems went away, but unfortunately I have to report that it didn’t work.  Not only did it not work, I had to jump through a lot of hoops to install the BIOS update which is a procedure I would NEVER expect any normal person to put up with.

First of all, I had to register on XFX’s website to be able to find the update.  Once I got the update, it came as an ISO image which on the face of it is pretty convenient.  All I had to do is get an ISO burning software like Nero or the free ISO Recorder to burn a bootable CD.  Once the disk was burned, the disk can be booted on any computer or at least that was the idea.  But the optical drivers failed to load on my computer which had a Blu-ray ROM drive so I had to replace the optical drive with a regular DVD drive to get the disk to boot properly.  What’s scary about the disk is that it automatically runs the BIOS flash utility with no user interaction so it might be a good idea to toss the disk after you’re done because you don’t want to automatically flash something else.  Maybe there’s a safety mechanism and maybe there isn’t but I wasn’t eager to test it out on another motherboard.  I would have preferred just getting the BIOS update and I would have created my own boot disk without this nonsense.

Once updated, Vista puked big time and every single driver in the computer had to be remounted and reinstalled.  This is something that always drives me nuts about Windows.  I mean you just plug in a webcam to a different USB port and the damn thing makes you reinstall the drivers.  You would think that Microsoft would be able to detect that it’s the same stuff and just seamlessly remount those things without freaking the user out.  Anyhow, this computer had to reinstall every driver in the system and after all that was done, the problem probably got worse.  Before the update, I could at least wake the computer and log in and then it would lock up.  Now it just wakes up but you get no mouse and keyboard and the cursor on the password prompt would just blink.

What’s the problem and do we blame this on the motherboard vendor or NVIDIA?  I don’t know since neither XFX or NVIDIA has an explanation.  I understand that computers are very complex and there are bugs, but I don’t understand how this problem has been permitted to go on so long without a resolution.  I remember talking to Gigabyte about a problem with one of their motherboards failing to post when a Blu-ray ROM was hooked up to the system and Gigabyte responded a few weeks later with a BIOS update that fixed the problem.  That’s a model of how you’re supposed to handle these problems.

The NVIDIA 7150 integrated graphics motherboard and chipset is giving me more problems.  This is the XFX nForce 630i model MG-630i-7159 motherboard I’m testing which has a lot of potential when I overclocked an Intel Allendale to 2.93 GHz effortlessly.

I really want to love this motherboard and chipset for all its potential at an affordable price, but I still can’t get S3 sleep state working and the system locks up after I wake it up and log in.  I still can’t get a good answer from NVIDIA nor have I heard from XFX regarding the problem.  I don’t know if it’s the motherboard implementation or NVIDIA drivers.

Now I’m having problems with the NVIDIA desktop resize utility which is impossible to use on a DLP screen that overscans the edges.  For some reason I can’t see all the controls on the resize screen and the continue button is probably off the edge of the screen.  Even when I manage to change the settings, it snaps back to the default setting as soon as I click apply in the NVIDIA control panel.  I resized the screen to a slightly lower resolution that’s about a little more than 1700×900 pixels and that makes it slightly more usable but it’s less than ideal.

This is also a good reason to really dislike rear projection screens because they chop the edges off.  My particular model is also interlaced even though it claims to be a “1080p” display.