Happy Fourth

Wishing everyone a happy and safe July 4th holiday weekend.

Blue Gene/L

The world's fastest computer is called Blue Gene/L. It's located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which is only about an hour's drive from my place. This supercomputer was built by IBM for the U.S. government. It's optimized for molecular dynamics applications. It has total memory of 32 tebibytes and total power of 1.5 megawatts. The full system has 65,536 dual-processor compute nodes. Last week, Blue Gene/L broke its own world's record for real world applications, by sustaining 207.3 TFLOPS. That's 207.3 trillion floating point operations per second. Pretty fast, I'd say. ;)

Best 32M

This is my best 32M time with single-stage cooling. Going to probably take a break from benching. Have to return to work and the real world soon.

P5W DH vs. Bad Axe

I've had a sneaking suspicion the Asus board has faster clock/clock than the Intel "Bad Axe". Here's some proof. Same RAM and timings used in both tests. The Asus needed 106 fewer MHz to get the same 32M time as the Bad Axe.

Ice Not Nice

I was trying to run my Vapochill on the P5W DH. But it's so hot and humid today that I was getting ice build-up on the CPU and around the socket. Did manage to run Conroe at 4100MHz before board refused to cooperate anymore. Will try again later.

This board has no mods to it. Unmodded board may be better for air-cooling, methinks.

Hibari

It's impossible to talk about Japanese popular music without mentioning Misora Hibari, considered the "Queen of Singers" in Japan. Hibari was born in Yokohama. Her career began when she was just a child and stretched all the way to her untimely death in 1989 at the age of 52. She had so many hit songs, including Kawa no nagare no yō ni (Life is like a flowing river) which was released in the year of her death. It was voted the greatest song of all time in a poll by NHK Television. She sang sad songs like Kanashii Sake and also inspirational ones like Yawara. She may be considered old-fashioned now, but I still love her songs.

BIOS

The BIOS on the P5W DH needs some maturing. The board doesn't run 4:5 ratio particularly well. There may be some settings I'm missing. But for now, I'll probably run 1:1 most of the time until I can figure out some things.

Turner

J.M.W. Turner has always been one of my favorite artists. And this is probably my favorite Turner painting, Norham Castle Sunrise. Turner's style in his later works would have a major influence on the Impressionists.

P5W DH Testing

The Asus P5W DH Deluxe feels very solid. My Conroe CPU would not boot with the shipping BIOS. I had to update to a newer BIOS in order to run Conroe. The board uses a heatpipe and radiator to remove heat from the northbridge. The learning curve with this board is much easier than the Intel D975XBX.

Too hot

I had the day off from work but stayed home most of the time. The temperature outside was around 106-107F. It's really hard to feel energetic when it gets that hot. It's like walking around inside an oven. Also, the air quality was really bad today. Even our cat is taking it easy. I guess I could have gone to an air-conditioned mall, but I hate malls.

Next Board

Going to give the Asus P5W DH a try next. Should be getting the board in several days.

DDR2 Latencies

I've heard a lot of talk on the forums about how DDR2 memory timings are not that important on the Intel platform. Here are some tests run at 3-3-3 versus 4-4-4 using Corsair 6400C3 and Yonah. You tell me if there's no difference. Running SuperPi IM is not very revealing because the test is so short. 32M shows latencies do make a difference. Think about track and field. The difference in time between the fastest and slowest runner in the 100 meter dash may be less than a second. On a longer race like the 1500 meters, the difference may be 15-20 seconds.

Cold

How I yearn for winter right now. I don't mind warm weather. But when the temperature gets above 100F in my area, it just saps all my energy. There isn't a lot of humidity. But when you walk outside, it feels like opening the door to an oven. The hot air just hits me in the face.

Hot

The hot weather has arrived in my area. Expected to be close to 100F today and even higher the rest of the week. Conditions are not conductive to overclocking. I lowered the voltage on my main system and reduced the speed from 2.9 to 2.8GHz. Quite frankly, I've noticed almost no difference in performance. I also threw in my old G.Skill FF's because they had been collecting dust. I still have lots of DDR1.

Enka

Those of you who've followed my blog know that I like Japanese Enka music. Four of my favorite singers are shown above: Godai Natsuko, Kozai Kaori, Fuji Ayako & Sakamoto Fuyumi. Most young people in Japan don't like Enka, though it's still popular in the karaoke bars. My parents listened to it all the time. When I was young, I didn't have much interest in Enka. But now that I'm older, I like it. I guess I've become like my parents.

Best

This was the best SuperPi and PiFast results I was able to get before my Bad Axe board died. The problem may be condensation-related. I was using Corsair 6400C3 which is very fast DDR2.

32M

Conroe E6700

Have begun testing Conroe E6700 ES. Needless to say, it's fast.

Tarosa

Amazing achievement by Tarosa in Japan. 500 FSB with Conroe E6700 and a modified Intel "Bad Axe" board.

Balthazar

Another one of my favorite movies is "Au Hasard Balthazar" by Robert Bresson. The story centers around, of all things, a mistreated donkey. His plight allows us to see the cruelty of the world around him. This is a very moving film. I first saw it many years ago at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, California. For many years, it was not available in the U.S., until Criterion finally released a DVD version.

Lorrain

One of the my favorite artists is Claude Lorrain, a 17th century French landscape painter who did a lot of his work in Italy. The painting shown above, "The Judgement of Paris" sits in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. When I was living in the D.C. area I used to visit the museum and this particular painting. Lorrain's paintings have a soothing effect. The great Russian writer Dostoevsky made reference to another Lorrain painting in several of his novels, including The Brothers Karamazov and The Devils.

Fat Body

You hear a lot of talk about Micron D9 "Fat Body" IC's. What makes them so special is that they can hit high speeds with tight timings. People think D9 and Fat Body are one and the same thing. They're not. D9 is just Micron's code for DDR2. The real Fat Body chips have "D9DQT" or "D9DQW" etched on them. Unfortunately Micron no longer makes these IC's.

Fastest

The fastest car in the world, the ThrustSSC which set the land speed record at 763 mph back in 1997. It was the first land vehicle to break the sound barrier. The car was powered by Rolls Royce jet engines. It was going so fast, a shock wave actually developed in front of the car.

Vapochilled Cedar Mill

Hooked up my Vapochill LS to the Cedar Mill & Bad Axe board. 86% overlock :)

I had to buy a new clamshell mount for the Vapochill. My old clamshell is for Socket 939 & 478 boards and doesn't fit on Socket 775 ones. As you can see, it's a tight fit. There are lots of capacitors on two sides of the socket. You can't see the caps because they're on the other side of the clamshell. Also, there's that huge northbridge heatsink which presents a problem if you're using a large HSF.

5.1GHz

Chips seems to be settling in nicely. Now at 5122MHz on air.

Higher

I increased VCore to 1.575v. Almost a 70% overclock on an air-cooled Cedar Mill.

Components used:
Intel D975XBX "Bad Axe" Rev.304
Intel 631 (Cedar Mill)
Corsair 6400C3
Tuniq Tower 120 HSF
EVGA 6600
OCZ PowerStream 600W

5GHz

Have begun testing my Cedar Mill 631. The default speed of the chip is 3GHz. No problem getting it up to 5GHz with air-cooling. Using Intel's Bad Axe board.

Cedar Mill

Picked up a Cedar Mill 631. Not in the same league as Conroe, but generally a good overclocking chip. Will give it a test drive this weekend.

Kyosen

I had to post this because the score is simply amazing. Kyosen of Japan got a score of more than 74K in 3DMark01, a benchmark that measures both CPU and GPU power. He was using a Conroe E6700. Congratulations to him.

Bad Axe

My Intel D975XBX Rev.304 board arrived this week. Thanks to Blue who did a few mods for me. This particular Intel board is nicknamed "Bad Axe". The Rev.304 supports Conroe processors. Hope to have it up and running this weekend. Will be testing with a Cedar Mill chip and maybe Conroe too.

Desk

I found this photo of one of my desks right after I assembled it. I didn't recognize it at first because it looks so tidy. Of course it looks a lot different now. Most of the desk is covered with stuff.

Mahir

I was reminiscing how the Internet used to be more goofy and fun 6-7 years ago. I still remember the Mahir craze that started in 1999. Amazing how a small website in Turkey could turn into an international phenomenon. Mahir was ranked #2 in CNET's top web fads. I guess we've all become jaded to things like that. The Hamster Dance and the Dancing Baby never did anything for me. But I thought Mahir madness was rather enjoyable.

http://istanbul.tc/mahir/mahir/

Hubble

I've always been fascinated by outer space. Maybe I watched too many Star Trek episodes. lol. Anyway, the Hubble Telescope has taken great pictures of the universe. It should be noted that although most of the photos you see on websites are in color, the actual pictures were taken in black and white and later colorized. Still, they're cool to look at. The first photo shows the Eagle Nebula. Columns of interstellar gas are creating stars. The columns, dubbed "elephant trunks," come from a huge cloud of hydrogen.

http://hubblesite.org/

DDR2-884 @ 3-3-3

I pushed my 6400C3's a little higher. DDR2-884 @ 3-3-3.

X-Fi

Okay, I'm late to the party. ;) I've always been hesitant to buy Creative Sound Blaster cards because of the compatibility problems they are notorious for having. But I finally decided to give the X-Fi ExtremeMusic card a try since so many people have said good things about it. It was also on sale with a good rebate attached. After playing some of my favorite CD's, I've had to agree that it's a very good sound card. Has lots of options for tweaking the audio. I'm happy so far.

4X1GB

I wanted to see if my system could handle 4GB of memory, so I combined my Corsair 6400C3 with my Super Talent DDR2-800.

Japanese Iris

There used to be a farm in my area that grew numerous varieties of Japanese Iris. I bought a number of plants there and they're still going strong in the garden. I've never really liked the American Iris varieties. But the Japanese Iris flowers are like floating clouds.

DDR2-887

Haven't had a lot of time to play with the 6400C3's. Highest so far is DDR2-887 @ 3-4-3 which are the rated timings. Can also do DD2-880 @ 3-3-3.