February 27, 2005
A reminder that I should build Liebherr sooner than later
I tried to install my iPod today which seemed to make my PC go mental. Ultimately nothing but a cold boot would revive it. While it was rebooting, the nVidia nvRaid utility screamed, "MIRROR ARRAY DEGRADED".
So what the hell does that mean? The computer (slowly) booted up but otherwise did not complain. So I turned on the windows client for nVidia nvraid to see what it would tell me. It basically did nothing. It listed two drives and two "Mirroring"'s. There was no way to run diagnostics or anything else. There was no wizard to walk you through the, "so, your mirror is degraded" process. There's nothing online either. All I could do was dig out the K8N Neo2 manual and read their appendix on nvRaid. Unfortunately their step for "rebuilding" a raid didn't work -- that option wasn't even available.
So I ended up rebooting and jumping into the Bios-level nVidia nvraid software. It wasn't much more helpful but after a while I realized, "oh, it seems to think there are two mirrors here," so I deleted one, then I was able to tell the mirror to rebuild itself. It said, "healthy" instantly after that.
Then when I booted into windows, I turned on the nVidia nvRaid client and see that the current status of that mirror is "Rebuilding". The manual warns that rebuilding a mirror is a very slow process and can take almost a day to do. In the meantime I am letting the pc sit there and do whatever mysterious business it's doing, but keeping all other programs turned off until it finishes.
Ghhhh. I do not need this sort of shit. I need to get Liebherr built sooner than later.
As a sidenote, the crappy client software provided to manage this raid is another reminder that these cheap consumer-level motherboard RAID systems are not that great.
Followup, I found this manual to nvdia nvraid windows software
Followup September 2005. I started regularly having this degraded mirror problem with my nvidia nvraid system. I'd rebuild for 6-12 hours and then almost immediately have it corrupted(?) again. I was really getting disgusted. It wasnt' even clear what was failing, a drive, the driver?
In the event log I found messages like:
EVENT source: nvraid
The driver detected a controller error on.
and
The device 'NVIDIA MIRROR 279.46G
(SCsI\Disk_____NVIDIA__MIRROR___279.46G\2 disappeared from the
system without first being prepared for removal'
Ugh. I didn't even know where to start. What I ended up doing was running the MSI LiveUpdate program, which is supposed to goto MSI and ask, "what updated drivers, bios, etc are available?"
It tried to download a fresh motherboard chipset driver. But then I figured I better upgrade the BIOS first.
Upgrading the BIOS was harrowing. It took me a while to realize the motherboard won't allow me to get onto the BIOS using 'delete' unless I have COLD rebooted. Just hitting reboot and then selecting delete for the BIOS dumps me to a frozen, blank screen. Anyway, I upgraded the BIOS to 1.b. (Curiously the page I link to only has a BIOS upgrade to 1.A. The MSI LiveUpdate gets to 1.b. Not sure what the matter is.
Then I went back to install the mainboard/chipset drivers from nvidia. I couldn't find them. Not sure wtf is happening. Maybe they did somehow get installed without my realizing it, and then cleaned up after themselvs or something. Not sure.
Anyway, I stopped pursuing the matter (I couldn't find the thing to downlaod a second time and LiveUpdate seemed to think everything was now in order anyway) when I realized that after a final rebuild of the array, the array was healthy and seemed to be staying healthy. Now 4+ days later it is still functioning fine. Knock on wood. So hopefully the bios upgrade, or an accidental chipset/mainboard upgrade did the trick.
February 20, 2005
Basic Rule of Life ... Part of a Series
I don't know how many hundreds of dollars of gear I have to lose before I learn this lesson...
...quit leaving stuff on the roof of the fucking car!
The tally of stuff lost in just the last nine months...
1) Pair of large binoculars ($200) [June 2004, Australia]
2) Par of Rayban sunglasses ($200) [January 2005, Singapore]
3) Stainless steel dog bowl ($25) [Today, Singapore]
This is getting really, really old.
Inescapably miserable and hot
It hasn't rained seriously in a month. All the grass is dead and I'm dying in the heat. It's 90F all the time. Even at 0100 ,if I leave one of my airconditioned rooms my t-shirt is soggy and I have to take the nth shower of the day. It's really wearing out its welcome.
February 13, 2005
For long-suffering Shannon...
I spent all afternoon preparing Valentine's Dinner while Ling taught two afternoon dog training courses and let Mister and Mona play in the dog run (a park for dogs). By the time Mister came home his "white" fur was totally brown. Even his collar was filthy. Ling washed him and then sent them to my study where they both prompty fell asleep.
*Mister is much easier to photograph while sleeping. Mona is a guard dog at heart, and awakes at the slightest tremor. Mister is so groggy when he wakes up that you'd think he's waiting for a morning coffee to start the day.
Kamaz final pricetag: $3039USD
Heat Sink Compound Bell Systems 9
Nexus Breeze Case Advance PC 185
Nexus AMD Fan/Heat Sink Advance PC 85
Nexus HDD dampeners Advance PC 70
Zalman 400w PSU The Hardware Place 155
2gb DDR 3200 400hmz memory MemoryWorld 888
MS Digital Media Pro Keyboard Laser Distributor 45
15-in-1 Memory card reader Cybermind 39
External USB HDD Enclosure Inforcom 59.8
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum w/ AMD Athlon64 4000+ Cybermind 1848.24
2x Seagate 300gb SATA 7200+8mb NCQ Cybermind 826.2
1.44MB Silver Sony FDD Cybermind 16.32
Sapphire Radeon 9800SE Cybermind 389
Sony DRU-720A Cybermind 147.9
MS Windows XP SP2 OEM Cybermind 260.1
sgd 5014.56
usd 3039.12
*individual prices in singapore dollars... currently 1.65SGD/USD
Tonight's dinner...
As I'm not free during workday nights, I made Valentine's dinner for Ling this afternoon.
Baked carrots with cumin, thyme, butter and Chardonnay (from Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef Takes Off)
Futher mentioning 'butter' in my recipes is unecessary... I seem to burn through a few sticks per meal.
This was easy to prepare but took forever to make. The other baked dish required lower temp, so I had to bake this for longer to compensate.
Epinards A La Basquaise or 'Gratin of Spinach and Sliced Potatoes with Anchovies' (from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking)
This tasted nice. The preparation (especially 'braising' the spinach) was a bit involved. If I made this again I probably would not preboil the potatoes, or at least not as much -- they were fairly mushy in the pie, although they tasted quite nice.
Pasta del Pescatore or 'Fishermans Pasta' [made with cod and dory fillets] (from Francesca D'Orazio Buonerba's Pasta in a Wok)
I used a good brand of penne pasta and olive oil, stir fried with the dory, cod, plum tomatos, and what was left of chardonnay I hadn't guzzled from the bottle earlier today. It was simple but nice. Would like to know how to prevent the plum tomatoes from disintegrating so much.
Strawberry Applesauce Cake (from Anne Byrn's The Cake Doctor)
Once again, a killer cake recipe from this incredible recipe collection. The batter called for frozen strawberries in syrup. I pureed 12$ worth of fresh strawberries and added confectioner's sugar instead. Likewise, for the frosting, instead of using jam, I used more fresh strawberries and sugar. The applesauce gave the cake a beautiful firmness and moisture. The icing was strawberries and cream cheese and much lighter than my traditional Duncan Hines Jar-of-Sugar-and-Fat icing. I cooked two layer cakes rather than a bundt cake. I didn't bother trimming off the cap of the cakes. This formed an immense strawberry rotunda that the icing and extra strawberries vainly fought to cling to, defying gravity. In the menu card I prepared for Ling, I euphemistically called it a 'loosely constructed layer cake'.
Cannot get paper profiles/media type working properly
I recently had to reinstall windows xp on my pc. Getting my Epson 2100 and Photoshop PS7 to work nicely together is proving daunting.
From inside PS7 when I try to print, I'm in the 'Epson Stylus Photo 2100 Properties' 'Main' menu. Under Media Type, I'm only getting a few media types: plain paper, archival matte paper, watercolor paper (radiant white) and CD-R.
I remember on my previous installation I had it set up so that it would show all the correct papers, archival matte, glossy, premium semigloss. I got these paper profiles from http://tech.epson.com.au/downloads/product.asp?id=stylusPhoto2100&platform=w2k&submit=Search%2B%3E%3E.
Multiple web sites say that all I should need to do to get these paper profiles installed is drag them to c:\windows\system32\spool\drivers\color
But like I said, that does NOT make them show up in the "Media Type" pulldown menu of the Stylus Photo 2100 properties window. The only place I can see them is on the Print menu under "Print Space" if I change the profile away from 'Stylus Photo 2100/2200', I can choose any of the paper profiles.
This is NOT how I used to have it working. It used to be that I kept the Print Space Profile as 'Stylus Photo 2100/2200' and controlled the paper type from inside the Stylus Photo 2100 menu.
Any ideas how I can get this working again?
Answered Revealed.
A helpful guy at Luminous Landscape mentioned, "You probably already know this, but just a guess: do you have the matte black or the photo black cartridge installed? With the matte black only a few media will show up, like what you've listed."
His remark made me second-guess myself. I had remembered the Media Types showing all the paper types regardless of which cartridge I had installed, but maybe I was wrong. I switched out the matte cartridge for the photo black cartridge and sure enough the Premium Semigloss and the Glossy paper types were now visible. Curiously, the Archival Matte was still listed.
As a test, I replaced the Photo Black cartridge with the Matte Black cartridge. Now the Media Type showed all the papers, Archival Matte, Premium Semigloss, Glossy Photo Weight, etc.
So I guess the full answer is that the Epson Print Properties window only loads the paper profiles when the correct cartridge is in the printer, but once it's been installed once, it doesn't remove them, regardless of what cartridge is currently installed.
February 12, 2005
First Kamaz.... now Liebherr
When I built my latest PC, I designed it to be fast, stable, and reliable. Since it's windows-based and only has lightweight RAID capabilities, I don't have confidence in keeping all my user data on the box. I prefer a standalone file server for that, one that's large and secure.
Liebherr is going to sit in an unairconditioned, unused bathroom adjacent to my study. Its samba fileserver will talk to Kamaz and my laptop through gigabit ethernet.
Durability
I targetted Kamaz to be usable for three years. I'm going to make a stretch and target Liebherr to last five. I think it's possible. After all, it just serves files. If it serves files fast enough today, that speed ought to be satisfactory five years from now. The only thing likely to change is that I need more space. I should be able to add space to the system either by swapping out drives or by adding larger drives.
I want to select high quality components that are less likely to deterioriate. Then I want them kept in the best condition, which means good power conditioning with battery backup and surge suppression, as well as plenty of quenching cooling. I also don't want overkill power consumption from a needlessly powerful VGA or CPU.
Redundancy
I want a serious RAID that I can trust fully. This means no software raid systems and no motherboard-based raid systems. It needs to be a standalone raid card with a good modern RAID featureset.
To really sleep well, an encrypted copy of the mirror sitting on a geographically separated machine would be nice.... for example, a copy of my data, PGP-encrypted, sitting on a machine in Seattle?
Operating System
The OS of the machine needs to meet several criteria
- Secure from hacking attacks. I want to get it to a secure configuration and then it's locked-down, and without MS-style weekly patch updates.
- Excellent drivers and compatibility with the hardware. There's nothing that makes me more insane than hardware/os issues.
- Ease of maintenance and management. I don't want to babysit this box too much. I want it to mostly take care of itself.
Those were the parameters... now how do I implement it?
The first draft idea is to combine:
- a known stable pc build
- a known stable linux OS
- a well-made hardware raid card (3ware?)
- a linux-friendly battery backup system
into my machine, Liebherr East.
31die will build roughly the same monster in Seattle, Liebherr West.
Then we'll glue together some colocated mirroring using PGP and rsync.
Any suggestions before I start picking through forums looking for well-regarded components?
I've posted this question on a few linux forums
February 09, 2005
Taiwan Rubbish
I recently discovered why Unimog died.
Once I finished Kamaz, I started sniffing around Unimog's carcass. My intention was to see what speed processor I had added, but in picking around, I noticed a funny looking capacitor -- it had dried brown foam on its head. I found other capacitors that were approximately the same size and make which didn't have any foam. Then I found a few other instances of foamed, leaking capacitors. This sounds like a strong candidate for the cause of my strange cascading file system failure (three drives in two days). When I checked the harddrives on another system, aside from some bad sectors, the Western Digital Diagnostics gave several of them a clean bill of health.
It took almost no research on Google to discover that many makes of motherboards manufactured around 2002 were made with cheap Taiwanese capacitors whose electrolyte was made on a faulty, stolen recipe. Consequently it was only a matter of time before they burst, ruining my board.
Abit apparently had the most problems, however they recently settled some sort of class action lawsuit. Gigabayte (the shameful maker of my ga-8pe667 Ultra 2 mobo) has kept totally quiet about the problem and offered no compensation. Shame on Gigabyte. Glad I didn't buy another one of your stinky boards.
February 08, 2005
Pictures of My Beagle for Shannon
The whole reason I built a new PC was that my old system, The Unimog, suffered a cascade of drive failures.
The whole reason I built a new PC was that my old system, The Unimog, suffered a cascade of drive failures.
I started out with:
- A) 2x80GB Western Digital WD800 JB Caviar drives in a Promise Raid Mirror configuration
- B) 1 80gb Maxtor D740X-6L
- C) 1x 80 gb Western Digital WD800 Caviar.
A directory on the #C singleton started acting seriously flaky. As I was trying to salvage its data to my #A RAID one of the elements of the mirror was announced to have failed. Good grief. So I bought a Western Digital 80GB drive (WD800JB SE), swapped out the apparently-broken element, and told the RAID to rebuild itself. 10% into the rebuild cycle, the remaining element died. I managed to suck off most of the user data onto a 300GB maxtor firewire drive and then I threw away the computer.
Now that I have Unimog's successor, Kamaz, working, I started sifting through the data I had rescued from Unimog. I was horrified to discover that I had somehow overlooked my 30GB music/ directory! Then I remembered a suggestion Stas made -- load the drives on an external USB enclosure and see what data can be recovered.
These USB enclosures turn out to be really simplistic -- a cheap case, a power cable, a usb cable, and a small IDE -> USB circuit . I can't even find a brand name on the box! But who cares, the things work. (*) I went through each drive to see what data I could recover.
I loaded up one element of the #A raid. There were a few directories in My Photos/ that took a long time to copy data from. I could hear the drive making a lot of strange high-pitched straining noises. I had to abandon one large photoshop file in one directory, but I think I eventually got everything else.
The #B Maxtor drive was fine. It never failed while it was on Unimog. I was shocked how incredibly loud it was compared to the Western Digitals. It had a piercing, shrill, high-pitched whine that sounded as if I was runnign a turbine under my desk. Although it's apparently sound, I can't imagine using this drive anywhere near me -- the noise is terrible. In contrast, the Western Digitals are essentially silent.
The #C Maxtor is apparently totally dead. I plug it in. I hear it spin up. I hear the PC give the "USB appliance plugged in" noise, I see nothing, and then I hear the "USB appliance unplugged" noise. So I guess this drive is seriously smoked.
Ok so what to do?
I think it's pretty clear #C is a total write off.
The replacement WD800JB drive I bought for the #A RAID never had a chance to get tainted (*well..... unless the motherboard was frying drives with power?), so I just reformatted it, and I guess it can be a #2 external backup drive. The Western Digital Diagnostics utilities gave it a clean bill of health.
The #B Maxtor, although usable, is too loud to be bearable. If I was honest with myself, I'd just throw it in the garbage right now, but probably it will end up in a forgotten drawer somewhere, to be thrown away in a couple years
Now what to do with the original two elements of the #A raid. The one that failed first I didn't test in the USB enclosure, maybe it's cooked, I don't know. But what about the other one, which I was able to get almost all the data off of, but there were some patches that were very slow to read? I guess the question is "is there fundamental physical/electronic damage to the drive?" or "is the problem with the drive some corruption of the filesystem that a reformatting would solve?" The concern being, "yeah, reformat the thing, but there is still secret damage and this drive is going to recorrupt itself later." Again, I guess if I was being smart, I'd just say, "this drive has been tainted. It's a tiny and comparatively old drive anyway. It should be immediately tossed in the trash." I guess I'll run the diagnostics on it anyway, just for the hell of it.
Ok, I just finished the diagnostics. During the first run it said it detected bad sectors "that might be fixable." So I told it to fix them. It seemed happy. Then to double-check, I re-ran the 45 minute test suite. It ran fine and said the drive passed. It's not really clear to me what a 'bad sector' is anyway, so I am not sure what my comfort level should be with this drive. Second-string back up? Scratch disk?
I might as well run this on the other Western Digital element of the raid, the element that originally 'failed' and see if this drive can be salvaged too.
I should run the Maxtor Diagnostics on the #B Drive.
* well, works to a point. This morning as I was trying to remove a hard drive from the enclosure I managed to shear the pin-head from the ribbon cable, ruining it. Fortunately it looks like I replace the entire (2" long) eide cable. I'll make sure the replacement has a small ribbon handle on one end.
February 06, 2005
KAMAZ is now sitting on my desk
My new pc appears stable and is now sitting on my desk waiting to be uploaded with useful software, old user data, and to have the accessories plugged back in. It roughly followed my plans.
My plan was to spend my wednesday lunch hours picking up all the parts from around Sim Lim Square. Last on the list was the Nexus Breeze case. I was highly annoyed to find there were none in the store and I'd have to wait until Thursday to collect it. Thursday night I assembled the pc. I started late, 2030, and was busy with other stuff, so I wasn't ready to turn on the power until 0130. I was rational enough to say, "it's too late to get this finished tonight in any case, and if I wait till tomorrow it will give me some time to spot mistakes."
The Breeze case was a good recommendation by endpcnoise.com. The outer casing walls make it nice -- both the panels are sound-insulated plates that slide on with positive lock-down levers on the top. The front casing is also insultated and snaps on cleanly and positively. The top plate was tricky to get off the first time (it slides towards the rear). The case looks smart, although the plastic has a film to it that needs a good windexing.
The main chassis is quite average. Unlike my old HEC case, the 5-1/4" drive bays don't pull laterally out of the casing. It means that adding in components might be tougher with other stuff getting in the way. I mounted my two harddrives using Nexus DiskTwin Disk Vibration Dampener. There was an internal support strut that I removed to install the motherboard. The idea is that it supports heavy, bulky PCI cards. I didn't add any heavy, bulky PCI cards, so I just left out the stut.
The 120mm Nexus Quiet Case Fanis mounted on the bottom of the tower, helping to convect hot air up from the bottom out through the top rear powersupply duct. It gets in the way of many connectors on the motherboard (two USB headers, two 1394 headers, and those enormously annoying pins to the front casing led's and switches). The solution is just remove the fan until everything else is installed, then put it on last.
Being able to easily take off both side walls makes organizing the final wire harness easier. After I confirmed the PC worked, I cable-tied the hideous tangle into a modestly restrained tangle.
Not much needs done to the MSI K8N Neo2 platinum motherboard. The ATX-format case and the ATX-format motherboard matched fine. I do complain that the little tin plate that covers the plugs hanging off the back of the motherboard (keyboard, mouse, usb, speakers, firewire) is enormously cheap and flimsy. I could have made something just as good with tin snips and a coke can. Later I discovered I could buy aftermarket plates that would have been a lot sturdier, but there's no way I'm going to undo everything just to replace it.
I ended up getting an AMD 64 4000+. I tried to buy the top-end AMD 64 FX55 but Cybermind were out of stock, as were all their alternatives. It's a moot chip now that the AMD FX 57 comes out after Chinese New Year. The 4000+ is essentially an AMD 64 FX 53 w/o the ability to easily overclock. It runs at 2.4GHz with a 1MB L2 cache. I bought the 'box' edition. It includes a fan/heatsink and a three year warranty. I don't want the fan, but the chip by itself (no fan/heatsink) only comes with a one year warranty. I wanted a warranty that lasted as long as my target lifespan of the Kamaz.
I chose the Nexus AOP-6400 cooler combination heatsink/fan for AMD 64 CPUs. It was another good recommendation by endpcnoise.com. I didn't need to do any modification to the backplate of the motherboard. The heatsink didn't intrude in any other components' airspace. I wound up using generic silicon thermal paste. I had hoped to find the highly regarded Arctic Silver, but didn't look hard enough.
The Nexus 4090 power supply was too wimpy, as were the other ones recommended by endpcnoise. Instead I bought a Zalman 400w psu. Nothing tricky about the installation. Hopefully it draws as much air out of the case as the Nexus fan does. It varies fan speed as a function of temperature.
I bought the bulk of the products at Cybermind. I was dismayed to find they didn't have 1GB dimms in stock. I wanted to buy 2x1GB so that I could add an additional 2x1GB to the remainingi two sockets later. They recommended I go to MemoryWorld. It's one of the more professional-lookign stores in Sim Lim. The concern I had was their memory brand, 'Transcend', I couldn't recall being on the lists of known good memory for this finicky motherboard. I was hoping to find Crucial or Kingston. The guy assured me that they were good memories and that I could return them if they didn't work anyway. The motherboard came with a component test report. It listed 512MB transcend dimms, which was a good start. They listed very few 1GB units and Transcend was not on that short list. I figured/hoped that the list was made early, before 1GB dimms were common and that if Transcend could make a 512MB dimm, then the 1GB should work just as well. For what it's worth, the salesman told me the chips were manufactured by Samsung. As 31die pointed out though, what matters as much is the certification thresholds the manufacturer uses to declare the capability of the chip. In any case, the chips worked fine and were no problem.
I wanted to get the top recommended Seagate MaXLineIII drives but they didn't have them in stock. The $/mb sweetspot among the main harddrive makers is 200GB. I ended up getting a 300GB seagate instead because the 200GB models didn't have NCQ (Native Command Queueing). [Ooops, turns out NCQ is not supported by my HD drive anyway]Futhermore I didn't want to be too stingy on this drive because I don't want to add any more drives to this box and turn it into a noisy heat machine. I have never used a SATA drive before and no instructions came with it. By either good guess or dumb luck I managed to connect the power correctly. These drives have two types of power points, a SATA connector and a traditional 4 pin connector. If you connect both power points you'll destroy the drive. I only connected at the SATA connection.
(singapore dollars per gigabyte)
For floppy disk (necessary to load the SATA raid drivers during installation) I bought the Sony model (two dollars more and a weird silver color) because it's a Sony. I figured that reduced some risk. I was annoyed, however, that the floppy drive's plug was not 'keyed' -- you can connect the IDE cable upside down. 31die confirmed my guess that the little triangle/arrow mark on the plug should be matched with the red-striped side of the cable. Another disaster averted.
I had the intention to buy a Leadtek Geforce 6600gt-based graphics card. Cybermind didn't carry them. The sales guy pushed me to getting a Gainward 6600gt-based AGP card. He said they were better than the Leadteks anyway. I was a bit apprehensive about this choice, but I decided to trust them. It installed trivially in the AGP slot. It's not a big card. The only assembly mistake I made the first night was forgetting the plug in the secondary power to the video card. I recognized this mistake the next morning. At any rate, these cards don't fry if you underpower them -- they either complain at the BIOS level and don't let you boot, or they run at a crippled speed and complain at the Windows level.
I used my old Microsoft 'Basic Optical Mouse' (usb) and a new USB/PS2 Microsoft "Digital Media Pro" keyboard (tons and tons of extra buttons for launching applications and commands).
Now everything assembled, it was time to power up.
The procedure is a bit trickier than normal, as the two SATA drives need to be recognized as a RAID array. To achieve this you first tell the BIOS to enable the SATA Raid on the appropriate channels. Then when you install windows you provide the nVidia raid drivers. It took me to long to figure out how to enable the SATA Raid inside BIOS. The instruction manual didn't give literally exact instructions on how to do this and the BIOS interface is hardly intuitive. So I sat there for 20 minutes pulling my hair out "why is the option for enabling the SATA Raids grayed out!?!?!?!?!?" Finally I realized that if I enabled the presently-disabled option at the top "enable IDE Raid" it allowed me to enable the SATA Raid options I needed.
The manual told me to then reboot and go into the nVidia Raid configuration menu during the boot up, by hitting 'F10'. It absolutely wouldn't go into the configuration. I wasted ten panicked minutes trying until I decided to yank the keyboard out of the ps2 slot and use the USB slot instead. I had noticed that in the BIOS itself it apparently had support for USB mice and keyboards. It worked! (note: in retrospect, I may also have toggled this fancy keyboards equivalent of a 'F'-key num lock) Once in the nVidia raid setup I told it to treat the two drives like one big mirrored drive. Nothing fancy like combining striped and mirrored partitions, just reliability.
Installing Windows was quite turnkey. I fed it the special nVidia Raid drivers floppy disk. The only questionable choice I made was telling windows to format the partition regularly, not a 'quick' ntfs format. So I had to sit there for an hour or so while it formatted everything. I guess now I can have confidence that there are not secretly-bad sectors lurking in the filesystem, adding one point to the reliability/stability score.
Now that Windows was installed I was figuring that loading and updating some of the drivers would eliminate some of the strange screen effects I was seeing. I was having streaks of bad pixels shooting horizontally for a few centimeters across the screen. However, even after loading all the drivers the problem persisted. I tried different resolution settings. Only in lowest resolution would the screen be free of these streaks. Any higher resolution was worse. At some resolution settings, the monitor (Sharp LL-T2020-b) gave up and complained "OUT OF TIMING V:37hz and H:38hz". Reseating the board, cables, power did nothing to help. I started getting scared when I realized, "this problem was occuring even before I installed windows -- thus it's either a card, motherboard, or bios problem."
I called the only Gainward office somewhere in the Bay area. A Taiwanese guy answered. They were obviously totally not setup for technical support there. You would have thought that I had called direct to their engineering room or perhaps pantry. He told me that they don't even sell this card in the US and I needed to call Taiwan. Since it was 0200 in asia, this was not viable. Instead I installed the old ATI card from Unimog. It instantly snapped into full 1600x1200 mode and was happy as Larry. This was a relief in that it indicated the problem wasn't too serious (broken motherboard, broken monitor, etc). I called Cybermind the next morning, hoping that they'd tell me what mistake I was making. His single lame suggestion didn't work so he told me to return the board. Before I went in, I researched and decided I'd buy an MSI geforce 6660gt. These boards are regarded well also and I figured it maximized compatibility... nVidia chipsets on both VGA and Mobo and both boards designed by MSI.
You can understnad my dismay when the exact same problem appeared. I felt like vomiting.
I couldn't find a solution online. The Cybermind people said bring the system down and their tech support guys would sort it out. My guess was that I had some subtle driver or configuration problem. When I got to Cybermind, I was dismayed by the tech support 'desk' in the back of the store. It looked much more like the workshop of the slightly-deranged man who has four thousand old lawn mowers in a big barn. Politely, the help had 'dull eyes'. I had hoped they'd do some clever thigns with Windows to diagnose the problem. Nope. They plugged my pc into a crappy old CRT monitor, popped it into 1600x1200 mode, and when it worked, pointed at my Sharp monitor and said, "must be a monitor problem." I had a good alternative to going apeshit when they tried to shift blame -- I produced the ancient ATI Radeon card that does work. That trapped them into admitting it was a different problem. We tried another MSI 6600gt card. Of course the same problem. It was plainly something with the chipset. A leadktek 6800gt also didn't work (same problem). Ok, so what the hell to do? Try a radeon. We plugged in a Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Atlantis board. Worked perfectly. Apparently the 9800 series is inferior to the 6600, but the next step up in the radeon line is double the price. There is no point for me to buy a 800$SGD VGA card. Not just a waste of money, I don't want a loud howling fan in my machine. Since this thing seemed to work, I accepted it.
I was highly annoyed with the Cybermind store, though. The Sapphire card was sixty-odd dollars cheaper than the MSI Geforce. I should have expected to be given only 'store credit' for the excess, but what really set me off was that the credit was only good for seven days! Outrageous. Doubly so since next week is Chinese New Year, so half the week the place will be closed and the other half it will be a zoo. I got them to extend the credit for a longer duration, but I was in a fit at that point. The money is essentiall lost anyway. I have no more big ticket items to spend on (well, I guess the StorageBrick project, but I don't know what parts that will need) and I despise forcing myself to spend 'gift certificates' on little trinkety rubbish. This is a store that sells components, not small items. What am I going to buy, six bottles of screen cleaner?
Anyway, now the PC is working and I have the long slog of updating drivers, installing software, and fine-tuning the thing.
"Yes," the answer is it's damn quiet. Quiet enough that my room airconditioner is now a contender for most annoying room noise. As far as the 'pareto' noise source in the PC it must be the VGA card fan. It's really only audible when the side panels are off -- its pitch is a fairly annoying high frequency. I also noticed an intermittent annoying buzzing/za-za-za sound emanating from the powersupply, but that went away after a while. At any rate, it's a dramatic and satisfactory improvement from the Unimog. I don't think any further sound enhancements are necessary.
Heat? I installed the MSI 'CoreCenter' application. It's designed for overclocking the CPU, something I don't need to do, but it does provide some other telemetry: CPU speed, CPU Temp, System Temp, CPU Fan Speed, and NB Fan Speed.
The diode-best CPU temp sensor has ranged between 40c and 65c+. I have read mixed reviews about its accuracy (tends to read low?), but apparently AMDs run pretty hot, so none of these numbers are a big deal I think. Average speed seems to be around 45c. System temperature is monitored from I-don't-know-where. It's average 34c, so that should be fine. The CPU fan speed always reads zero because the Nexus fan doesn't report its rpm like the stock AMD fan does. The NorthBridge (NB) fan seems to always run at 5113rpm.
I turned on Cool'N'Quiet settings (needs to be enabled both in Bios and in the 'CoreCenter' windows application). The CPU seems to run at 1000mhz most of the time. A copy of "Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow" came with the video card, so I played it for a while. (hint: BORING) The machine worked smoothly. Unfortunately I couldn't monitor CoreCenter while I was playing and by the time I exit the game it usually has slowed down the CPU, although it's still comparatively hot. Right now the PC is doing absolutely nothing and it's operating at 1004mHz, 40c CPU and 33c System.
add:
X zalman power supply
X quietness
( ) price listing
( )