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I recently bought an Intel Quad Core Q6600. I’ve been doing a lot of Video Encoding for the Apple TV, and while a fine chip, the E2140 just wasn’t cutting it time-wise for quality encodes.

I grabbed some pics of the process with my new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W35 (if the blurry pics from my previous posts made your eyes bleed, these should help alleviate the pain). I also got idle/load temperatures both before & after.

Part 1: Lapping

1A: The Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (lapped using sandpaper against an already-lapped waterblock small enough to fit between the mounting pegs)

Here are a few pics of what this thing looks like when you pull it out of the box (click the thumbnail to open a larger image):

You can see they include thermal interface material on the heatsink, which I’ve read is MX-1 - apparantly it’s pretty decent stuff. Naturally, i took it off (rubbing alcohol worked well enough). Pay close attention to the 4th picture. You can see the heatsink surface is pretty rough - it’s much rougher than the Intel Stock Cooler. You can notice it in the 3rd as well. Not that it’s necessarily a *huge* deal. Smooth would be preferable, but the more important question is “is the heatsink FLAT?”. We’ll find out soon enough, time to start lapping the heatsink…. Read more…

It’s been well known for some time now that heatsinks aren’t always perfectly smooth and flat. Sometimes the machining process used when making a heatsink leaves much to be desired. A poor surface means poor contact with the CPU, which translates to less effective cooling, and thus, higher temperatures. “Lapping” the heatsink is a technique that has become common practice with modders and overclockers. It’s generally accepted that a properly lapped heatsink performs better than one that isn’t, except in the case where the heatsink was already quite smooth and flat.

But what about the IHS (integrated heat spreader) on a CPU? Read more…

While writing up an article and scrounging for information on all the BIOS settings, I came across a couple Anandtech articles for other ASUS motherboards that have *very* similar settings to the P5K-E. If you’re looking to find out what most of the memory/cpu/fsb/frequency/voltage/timing options do, check out the articles here and here.

In a prior article, I was playing around with OS X installs on regular PC hardware. I’ve kept a couple of the installations going for the time being, and have been using one of them to recode some videos that we have in DivX and XviD format into H.264 for the Apple TV I recently bought.

Recoding is a time consuming process, and with this particular system, using 2-pass encoding resulted in around an hour per 1-hour episode that’s been recoded. Looking for a way to speed up the system a bit (the E2140 is known to be a pretty decent overclocker), I looked to the BIOS. Read more…

I bought the 20″ SyncMaster 206BW to replace an old weak 17″ CRT that was showing signs of age. I also wanted something that would show a little more screen real-estate.

Monitors are one of the few things where I’m very hesitant to buy online. Picture quality can vary drastically between monitors, and in no way is one $250 model guaranteed to be anything close to another. Preference comes into play a lot here too. Something as simple as glossy vs matte can make a world of difference. I head into the nearest Future Shop, and spent a pretty long time looking at their displays.

There were 2 major things I was looking for: Read more…

Setting up an HTPC to run Media Center, I was looking to get an optical output so that I could hook it up directly to our receiver. Current sound cards with an optical out unfortunately run around $100 at the low end. I had a couple motherboards that actually have optical outputs, but for the life of me, I couldn’t get the one in the NF7-S to work in Vista, and while the Gigabyte 7VAXP-A’s worked with drivers from Realtek’s site, that motherboard didn’t like the mobile Athlon XP-M very much (it would only work if i set the onboard switches to a 100Mhz FSB which didn’t tickle me in a pleasant way). The 7VAXP-A wasn’t totally useless though… it provided me with one of those little cables that plugs into the motherboard and provides an output via a rear slot.

Problem of course was that the little accessory had 3 pins and plugged into the motherboard. The Audigy 2 I had kicking around (and wanted to use) had a digital out, but it was unfortunately a 3.5mm jack. I needed the TOSLINK style. It did have an SPDIF_IO section on the card, but it had a whopping 8 pins to contend with, as opposed to the 3 pins I had to work with. Pin-wise they didn’t look at all plug and play, but fortunately there’s a way to make it work. Read more…

A couple years ago, I bought a Logitech wireless desktop that included a keyboard as well as the MX700 mouse. It had the advantage of being cordless, used 2 AA rechargable batteries in the mouse (for which it included a charger), and used 2 regular AA batteries in the keyboard which usually lasted around 6 months. I put a lot of wear on it. Within about a year, I’d worn off the mouse feet. Eventually the silver paint over the mouse buttons wore off, leaving white plastic beneath. However, over the past few months, it started showing signs that it was at the end of it’s life. The keys on the keyboard would act as though they were stuck, or wouldn’t work at all. Sometimes the mouse buttons wouldn’t work at all, and sometimes one mouse press would actually act as 2. Click-dragging often wouldn’t work well, as it would “release” while I was dragging for no apparant reason.

As you can guess, I started looking for a new keyboard and mouse. Since the old wireless was a pretty heavy “brick” (those batteries add a lot of weight), and because batteries themselves can be annoying (especially when they die at inopportune times), I decided to go with something wired. For the keyboard, I just settled for an el-cheapo $20 USB keyboard. For the mouse, I decided to go with the Logitech G5.

The mouse itself was $60 CDN (regular price was $85). Read more…

I wanted the following in a printer:

• Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X support
• Print-to-CD ability
• Low cost ink cartridge replacements
• Low printer cost (less than $100)

That was really about it. Read more…

I needed to connect 3 printers to a computer that was about 20-25 feet away (depending on which printer you looked at). Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough USB extension cables, and since the maximum cable length is around 5 meters (or about 16.4 feet) anyway, I decided to look for a cheap powered USB hub.
I headed to a Computer Boulevarde store and picked up an i-rocks IR-4300 for about $20 CDN. In the don’t-slice-your-hand-while-cutting-it-open package was Read more…

Very recently (due mainly due to finding out that Epson and HP printers are the most well supported within the Linux community), I decided it was time to spring for another printer. Unfortunately, things have changed since I last looked. Printer manufacturers really don’t like the prospect of people filling their own cartridges, and are making things even more difficult than before. For example, there used to be a way to reset  the ink warning on most HP cartridges with a couple pieces of tape. That’s now gone, so if you refill those cartridges, you have to live with the warning. Even Canon has started “chipping” their cartridges. Read more…