No, it’s been acting all fruity. And it’s done this periodically since I first got it actually. Any time I start messing with clocks and/or voltages, if things go bad and I go-back-to-start and reset the BIOS, things don’t work even at stock settings (OCCT fails, Prime95 fails, etc).

Until they do. Magically. Mess around with every setting, find some that aren’t ideal but happen to work. And then I don’t touch anything for a long while for fear the motherboard might have another tantrum.

—

While undervolting the CPU, it started doing it again.

It worked at 1.20V.

It worked at 1.18V.

It worked at 1.14V.

It didn’t work at 1.10V (I got greedy).

Then it didn’t work at 1.14. Or 1.18. Or 1.20. Or at “Auto”. Or after a BIOS reset. What the heck? These settings all worked fine 30 minutes ago! Now the board would boot into Windows, but as soon as I ran OCCT or Prime95 it would fail within 5 seconds. And then if I ran OCCT/Prime again immediately, it would sometimes work.

Killing the power, resetting the BIOS, and glaring angrily at the motherboard had no effect.

Frustrating.

—

Anyway, before this turns into a sob story, it looks like I’ve come across a fix of sorts.

Above, you can see I had previously left most stuff at “Auto” (except the iGPU I was playing with at the time).

If you’re particularly astute, you might notice that VCCIO and VCCSA are combined into one voltage setting. If you’ve delved into info on these though, you’ve probably found that:

• Stock for VCCSA is supposed to be 0.925v (min 0.879, max 0.971).
• Stock for VCCIO something in the neighborhood of 1.05V (+/- 3%).

Now since these are different values, it probably seems odd that they’re combined. And it is. Somebody called ASUS out on it, and the response was  ”the rails are tied…this is the way it is done on all Z68 chipset boards…. VCCIO and VCCSA become tied to the same buck controller“.

Anyway, the auto voltage on my board for this was a bit higher than what either are really supposed to be. I’d tried bumping the voltage up slightly previously (my RAM was having issues and VCCIO is supposed to help with that, particularly with 4 banks full), but I had never thought to try bumping it down.

Since I was going to bump that down, I figured I’d look around on the web to check my options and undervolt a few other things at the same time.

After all, when faced with the prospect that changing something may-or-may-not work, change everything.

—

I ended up bumping down a few things:

• VCCSA/IO went down to 1.0v
• CPU PLL took a mighty drop to 1.5v
• PCH voltage took a tiny drop to ~1.02v (didn’t want to go crazy here – it shouldn’t matter for stability, and going too far might mean data corruption. I did this one just-because-I-felt-like-it).

While in the process of under-volting these, I also thought I may as well try undervolting my RAM. I figured this would be a fool’s errand since my 4x4GB Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B memory had barely been making it at it’s rated DDR1600 @ stock timings at the stock 1.5v so far as I could tell. I wondered if it would even POST at 1.49.

I tried 1.45v on the RAM, which shocked me by both POSTing, and passing Memtest.

Then I tried 1.40v, figuring “this will never even POST“. To my surprise, it did. And to my much larger surprise, it passed in Memtest too.

—

So suddenly, by dropping the voltage on other stuff, I had stability. Stability that I hadn’t seen on this board until now. Less-than-default-voltage means that Prime95 is running flawlessly in the other room right now.

At this point, I’m pretty sure that all the issues I’ve run into on this Maximus IV GENE-Z were due to the voltage on something being too high. If I had to guess, I’d assume it was the VCCSA/IO. I suppose I could test further, but this MB has managed to put me in the mindset that if something’s working, I probably shouldn’t try to break it again.

—

In retrospect, higher voltages does make sense for a board of this nature – it’s designed for overclocking. That’s probably why the moment I turn something (like the iGPU frequency) up, it cranks up the idle vCore to about 1.5v (at least until I notice, freak out, and manually turn it down).

I think I made a false assumption long ago. An assumption that an enthusiast board would work swimmingly when I have most things at/near stock, and simply give me headroom when it comes to under/overclocking. As it turns out, the board assumed I was a hard core overclocker, and when I wasn’t, we didn’t quite get along.

—

In any case, if you’re using this board and running into issues underclocking, undervolting, and/or near stock, try dropping a few of the voltages a little bit.

You might be surprised.

But I persevered. Creating a custom DSDT, I got the thing booting into OS X, using the HDMI port on the motherboard, with sound coming from HDMI.

—

But let’s begin. Put on your pajamas, it’s story time.

—

UniBeast

First, I needed an installer. tonymacx86 and MacMan have put together an awesome utility called UniBeast to create a bootable OSX Lion USB install stick from your purchased copy of OSX Lion.

They go over the USB creation process better than I ever could, so if you’re reproducing what I’ve done, just go to their site, read up, download, and get your UniBeast USB stick ready.

http://tonymacx86.blogspot.ca/2011/10/unibeast-install-mac-os-x-lion-using.html

—

BIOS

With that prep-work out of the way, I had to grab a patched BIOS for the MAXIMUS IV GENE-Z to avoid potential KP issues.

Fortunately, thanks to the work of many (RevoGirl, TheKing, samisnake, brycv, and I’m sure many more), a compilation of patched ASUS BIOS’s have been made available.

If you’re reproducing the install and need the patched BIOS, I suggest starting here:
http://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=49340
The above thread includes a link to the patched BIOS repository, and stuff you should read – warnings, and a mention of additional options if you’d rather not risk flashing.

If for whatever reason that thread gets lost, or they ditch the modded ROM I used (v3203) for my DSDT in lieu of the newest BIOS version, or (insert the zillion other things that can happen over time), I put up a copy of the modded BIOS I used for my DSDT here.

Warning: Before you get lazy and simply download the copy I put up, flashing is dangerous. You can brick your motherboard. You’d better be bloody sure this is the right BIOS for your motherboard and hope like heck that I didn’t forget to mention something important. Consider yourself warned. Heavily. Really, I suggest going to the tonymacx86.com forum thread linked above instead. The only reason I put a copy here is in case the originals disappear from the web someday.

So, downloaded the BIOS from the repository, flashed the BIOS, it seemed to have worked.

The next problem I ran into was BIOS settings that caused massive headaches.

A few notes for the “final” settings that got me up-and-running:

• I enabled all the power saving goodies in the Advanced/CPU_Configuration area (C1E, C3, C6), and Execute Disable Bit, SpeedStep, Intel VT. I don’t think any of that really mattered, but I mention it just in case.
• In Advanced/PCH_Configuration, I enabled HPET. Again, don’t think this one mattered.
• SATA was obviously set to AHCI (Advanced/SATA_Configuration).
• Memory Remap Feature was enabled (Advanced/System_Agent_Configuration). Don’t think it mattered.
• In Advanced/System_Agent_Configuration/Graphics_Configuration, I set AUTO, 512M, Disabled, Disabled. This was pretty critical – if you set the iGPU memory to 1024M in the BIOS, the installer won’t load – 512 is the highest you can go. Note that I had 16GB of RAM, and I believe that at 8GB+, Lion will use 480M. If you’ve got much less RAM, maybe setting lower values will work better (but maybe it won’t make a difference).
• In Advanced/USB_Configuration, I set Enabled, Disabled, Disabled. The USB 3.0 stuff was causing massive issues for me, so I turned off the Legacy USB3.0 Support (as well as the controller I mention next).
• In Advanced/Onboard_Devices_Configuration, I enabled the HD Audio Controller (we want sound!) with HD/SPDIF as the options. I turned JMB Storage Controller OFF (seemed to cause issues). I turned the Asmedia USB 3.0 Controler OFF (USB3.0 was causing serious problems). I enabled the Intel 82579 LAN but disabled the PXE OPROM part.
• In the Boot section, I set the PCI ROM Priority to EFI Compatible. I don’t know if it mattered – it was one of the things I changed when I was trying to trial-and-error my way into making things work. Under “Option ROM Messages” I used Force BIOS, but again, may not have mattered.

So, with those settings, got the installer to boot and run. If you’ve never hackintoshed a machine before, the UniBeast writeup on the tonymac86 site walks you through formatting the drive and all that stuff.

—

Post-Installation – DSDT mayhem

This was a nightmare.

On the tonymacx86 site, they offer DSDT’s for many motherboards (note: you must be registered & logged in on their site to see them), including the GENE-Z. However, they’d found that the DSDT’s for many of the ASUS boards had errors in them, and pulled them all while they fixed ‘em. I didn’t really want to wait, so I kept searching.

Now, the good folks at olarila have an DSDT Editor & Patcher (with a java-based version that works on Windows too!), and have put together DSDT patches for many motherboards at http://olarila.com/forum/packs.php (must register/log in on their site to see them). Including a patch for the GENE-Z!

So, I popped into Windows, used the editor to extract the DSDT, and applied the patch. Unfortunately, it ended up riddled with errors when I tried to compile. The GENE-Z patch wasn’t working with the DSDT from my modded GENE-Z BIOS.

Here are the errors I’d get:

• ResourceTag larger than Field (Tag: 64 bits, Field: 32 bits) (this one doesn’t really matter)
• Invalid object type for reserved name (found ZERO, requires Buffer) (the editor will fix this)
• Object is not accessible from this scope (CRS_)
• Non-hex letters must be in upper case (pnp0c14) (this is easy to fix – just capitalize)
• Name already exists in scope (HDEF)
• Name already exists in scope (_ADR)
• Object does not exist (\_SBPCI0.HDEF.DCKS)
• Object does not exist (\_SBPCI0.HDEF.DCKA)
• Object does not exist (\_SBPCI0.SBUS.HSTS)
• _HID suffix must be all hex digits (GH)

I spent hours playing with it – patching, then trying to fix the errors. Didn’t work. At one point I tried patching with other ASUS Z68 motherboard patches, which gave less errors, but still wouldn’t work.

This was even more time consuming because despite tonymacx86/MacMan having an awesome rBoot utility, I didn’t use it (always thought “I don’t need to download it – this time my DSDT will work!“). So  with a DSDT that would freeze the system, I’d end up formatting/reinstalling instead to try each new DSDT.

—

Post Installation – DSDT success

Eventually, I realized that the DSDT patch for the GENE-Z was *trying* to do the right thing – it just wasn’t *happening*. I also suspected that maybe some stuff was copy/pasted from another ASUS patch instead of being tested on the GENE-Z.

Anyway, these patches are basically scripts. I opened it up in a text editor, and carefully looked through to see what each “section” was trying to accomplish. I then opened up another patch (for an ASUS Maximus Extreme – one that didn’t give so many errors when applied to my DSDT) to compare.

I eventually cut “pieces” from each that I thought were “good” (no issues), and which I believed applied to the GENE-Z into separate TXT files, and applied them individually, using the “Preview” to make sure nothing wonky was happening.

For more complex pieces that weren’t working (the HDEF and _ADR for example), I looked to see what the patch was trying to do, and then manually made the edit myself.

While working on the HDEF section, I had noticed that toleda on the tonymac forums had an excellent write-up to enable ALC889 sound stuff (including sound over the Intel HD3000 HDMI). So I integrated these edits.

By the end, I had a few minor errors.

• The “_HID suffix” one looked like filler junk (ABCDEFGH), so I just changed it to (ABCDEFFF) to make it all technically hex (lulz). Hopefully nothing actually looks for or expects “ABCDEFGH”.
• The HDEF.DCKS and .DCKA error is because in the original HDEF, those things exist (and the patch pretty much rewrites that section without them). There’s an “if” statement later on in the DSDT that looks at them which causes the error since the patch removed them and they don’t exist anymore. While at first I tried keeping that DCKS/DCKA section in HDEF, I wasn’t getting audio, so I ditched it from HDEF entirely and just deleted that 4-line (including brackets) “if” statement altogether.
• The other stuff was auto-fixed by the editor.

Compiled fine!

Low-and-behold, I now had a WORKING DSDT!

(I’ll link to it at the bottom of the write-up)

—

Post-Installation – DSDT with HDMI audio

Turned out, when creating the DSDT above with the HDEF edits, I’d used the settings which enable the most “versatile” sound options, but not through HDMI. So sound worked through speakers plugged in, but not to the TV I was using.

Thus, I continued through the HDMI guide on the tonymac site, read through a few posts in the forums there, and made further edits. Essentially, beyond tweaking a couple values in the HDEF section, and making additions to the GFX0 section (to tie them together)… I also renamed the GFX0 device (and all references) to IGPU.

…another working DSDT!

(this DSDT will also be linked to at the bottom of the writeup)

—

Post installation – Installing working DSDT with MultiBeast

Obviously, I’ve gone a bit backwards here (since I obviously used MultiBeast to install the DSDT’s I’d tried).

In any case, I:

• Installed
• Booted to the UniBeast memory stick to get the bootloader, and then chose the Lion partition.
• Installed the 10.7.4 combo-update (downloaded from another machine and copied over).
• Ran MultiBeast…..

For MultiBeast, I essentially plugged in the following:

• UserDSDT (had DSDT.aml on my desktop)
• SSDT for Intel i5 2500k (not overclocked)
• ALC889 patched audio (the one that mentions toleda – note that because of the DSDT edits I made, I do NOT install enablers or anything else – just the patched ALC889)
• Intel 1000 series network
• System Utility Tasks

(note: these aren’t exact names – they’re from memory – I’ll update with correct ones when I do a reinstall for my SSD hard drive – if I forgot anything I’d selected, I’ll mention that as well).

That was about it. I played with using the “Mac Mini” smbios.plist (since it’s supposed to be required for the Intel HD 3000 to work correctly), and it worked without it too, but I didn’t test thoroughly enough to see if it has an effect.

Sound worked great. For anyone who might be confused as to why I installed the ALC889 audio, your confusion is understandable – The Maximus IV GENE-Z claims to use a “SupremeFX X-Fi 2″. However, it’s just software running over the ALC889 audio chip on the motherboard. I haven’t physically looked, but I’m pretty sure the sticker on the motherboard is covering up a “Realtek ALC889″ logo.

Haven’t plugged in the network (I use a wireless adapter).

The Intel HD 3000 was prone to being “glitchy” – sometimes not properly updating a small “square” on the screen. As mentioned earlier, using the MacMini smbios.plist may help things. When I popped open Chess (to see if QE/CI was working), chess kinda worked for a couple moves but was super choppy and froze. I’ve taken to overclocking the HD 3000 (and bumping up the RAM speed) to see what effect that may have.

The machine is waiting on a re-install (currently stress-testing my overclocks in Windows). If there are any further hiccups/issues, I’ll be sure to update (hopefully with fixes).

—

—

As promised, here are the DSDT’s I put together (which thus far appear to be working) – pick whichever you prefer:

MaximusIV-GENE-Z-regular-889-audio-DSDT.zip (most audio options but no HDMI audio)
MaximusIV-GENE-Z-with-IntelHD3000-HDMI-889-audio-DSDT.zip (HDMI audio but fewer audio options)

(reminder: these are for the MODDED ASUS Maximus IV GENE-Z bios version 3203)
(reminder: you’ll need to install the toleda-patched ALC889 kext from MultiBeast to get sound)

You’re free to use/distribute those as you like, assuming they work for you & you find them of any value.

Because the DSDT’s are probably less-than-perfect, you may want to extract your own DSDT and use the ones above as a template if you get stuck – I may have applied fixes to these that were unnecessary, missed fixes, deleted things that should have been worked-around instead, etc.

—

If you’ve had a successful install on a Maximus IV GENE-Z (whether with these DSDT’s, or not), feel free to post a comment below with anything that may help others!

Playing with iGPU overclocking yesterday got me interested in undervolting the CPU. Due to the gains I saw yesterday, I planned to up the frequency of the HD3000 even more.

However, before doing that, I wanted to get as much thermal headroom as possible on the i5 2500K. Hence, I started looking into undervolting.

Now unfortunately, info in this area (undervolting the i5 2500K) is sparse. As you can imagine, most people with the K series are using them to overclock, so searches were coming up empty.

Thus, it was time to do my own testing.

—

Default behavior

Important to have a rough idea as to what happens by default (when everything is left at stock speeds and auto voltage).

Essentially on my CPU:

• At idle, voltage drops to slightly under 1.0 V
• At load, voltage goes up to just under 1.4 V

Offset vs Manual behavior

Luckily, the difference here is very easy to understand. Note that this applies to the ASUS Z68 GENE-Z I’m using.

Manual – If you choose this in the BIOS, the voltage you set is always applied. If you set 1.2V, you’ll get 1.2V at idle, and 1.2V under load.

Offset – This modifies the default (Auto) behavior. As I mentioned above, by default I was getting just under 1.0V idle and just under 1.4V during load. For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend I was getting *exactly* those numbers. If I were to set the Offset to -0.1v, I would now be getting 0.9V idle, and 1.3V load. On the other hand, if I set it to +0.1V, I would now be getting 1.1V idle, and 1.5V load.

Essentially, by default your voltage fluctuates within a range. Offset will undervolt that entire range (if you go with a negative value), or overvolt that entire range (if you go with a positive value). Manual basically gets rid of the range altogether.

—

Testing

I used the Intel Extreme Tuning utility, as well as CPU-Z.

I’ll start with a comparison chart, because it’s less reading for you.

Update: after some further testing, the middle graph below (system power consumption from the wall), is not completely accurate. I couldn’t find the Kill-a-Watt meter, and instead used the output reported by the UPS I was using. Unfortunately, the UPS seems to “round” to the nearest 8watt value. Thus, the power consumption values have an inaccuracy of +/- 4 watts (assuming it’s at least rounding properly). The other 2 graphs (left/right) should be accurate.

Because throwing this all in 1 chart (instead of splitting it nicely into a few) doesn’t exactly fall into the category of “Matt’s best time-saving ideas ever“, a little clarification to make it easier to read…

Blue bars represent “auto” (default) voltage – the stuff that fluctuates with the load from 1.0v-1.4v.
Purpleish bars represent the fixed (manual) 1.2v setting.
In each set, the first 2 bars are at idle, and the last 2 bars are at load.

Ok, so what do we notice?

1. At idle, there’s almost no difference between 1.0v and 1.2v.
   -CPU’s TDP is a low 5/5 watts.
   -Total system power draw is the same at 32/32 watts (*inaccurate).
   -There is 1 degree difference in temperatures. 24/25.
2. At load, there’s a rather significant difference. Having the load voltage at a fixed 1.2 v instead of letting it auto-up to 1.4 v shaves off 4 degrees load temp, and shaves off 16 watts (* +/- ~8 watts) of system power. However, the processor’s TDP does not go down much (only by 1).

Basically, there are gains to be had by lowering voltage at load. There aren’t really gains to be had by lowering voltage at idle.

Applying the findings to the “offset vs manual” question

We went from load voltage of 1.4 down to 1.2 by using “manual” voltage. To do this via the “offset” voltage, we would have to use an offset of -0.2V.

However, the problem is that an “offset” of -0.2V would also lower the idle voltage by the same amount. Remember, the default is 1.0 volts, so by changing the offset to -0.2, we’d have an idle of 0.8 volts.

..and 0.8 volts is getting so low that the system may not boot.

—

Conclusion:

Offset is commonly seen as the “recommended” method for overvolting (for overclocking), and it makes sense as to why – if you need 1.5v to handle your overclock at load, you probably don’t need that much at idle. Offset in that case might still bring up your idle voltage, but not nearly as much as if you just used a fixed “manual” value.

However, when undervolting, we have an entirely separate issue – if we use “offset”, it’s possible to push the idle voltage too-far down. And as we saw in the charts, there isn’t really any advantage to lowering the idle voltage anyway – the substantial benefits are from the reduction in load voltage.

So… manual voltage appears to be the best way to under-volt. That said, remember that all processors differ. You may want to test your own CPU. For example, if…

• …your default idle voltage is quite high…
• …the default “spread” between your idle/load voltages is small….
• …you’re only undervolting a slight amount….

…then offset might make more sense for you. For example, if your default idle/load voltages were 1.2/1.3, you probably wouldn’t have to worry about the idle voltage getting too low by using offset, since you’ll probably run into voltage problems at load long before dropping idle below 1.0.

—

Other tidbits

Since I’d collected a good bit of data during the process, I’ll leave you with the following:

• I continued dropping the voltage (manual) below 1.2 v, in small increments.
• While the load temperature had been 48 degrees at 1.20 v, by the time I hit 1.14 v, the load temperature was down to 45 degrees. However, the CPU TDP as reported by Intel’s tool did not change (still peaked at 68 watts each test).
• I’d used a UPS to measure power drawn by the computer via it’s display. Unfortunately, I’m not sure of the accuracy – while the “idle” wattage was completely stable at 32 watts, the load wattage actually fluctuated quite a bit, usually between 3 values (for example, 81/89/97). As I slowly dropped the Vcore, at load it still fluctuated between those numbers, but started “favoring” the lower values. I may have to run the tests again with the kill-a-watt meter instead, just in case a worst-case-scenario is happening (maybe the UPS has got a fixed set of numbers it displays and simply rounds to the nearest one).

The most tangible benefit seems to be the temperature decrease – by dropping from the default load of ~1.4 v down to 1.2 v, I’d shaved off 4 degrees. Then, another 3 degrees by dropping further to 1.14 v.

I had been bumping into periodic glitchiness with the HD3000 in OSX, and had recalled reading on Anandtech that when overclocking they’d believed the HD 3000 was memory bandwidth constrained (though I eventually realized they made a boo-boo which made the situation look much worse).

So I popped into Windows and started testing the frame rate in TOR as I played with the DDR3 settings, and then eventually overclocked the HD 3000.

I’ll start by summing things up in point-form (that way, you can skip the details if you’re particulary uninterested in the how/why). Note that this is based on testing in 1 game (SWTOR):

1. When overclocking the HD3000, the FPS scales very well. A 27% increase in clockspeed garners between a 20-26% increase in FPS.
2. Bumping up the RAM frequency (which the HD300 uses) gives a much smaller improvement.
3. Tightening RAM timings gives no improvement.

Note also this is for the HD 3000 on the i5 2500K which has 12 “EU’s”. The non-K desktop versions of the i5/i7 only have 6, so you may not get the same results if you’re using one of them – I really have no idea if they’ll scale the same.

Long story short, for a 27% overclock, I was seeing between 20-26% gains in FPS on the HD3000. I’ll plunk down a couple charts to save some typing (and save you some reading):

The above is simply to give you the numbers (the frame rate in this case). I’d taken them to 1 decimal, but it wouldn’t fit in the bars, so you’re seeing the rounded numbers.

The next image should give you a clearer picture as to the actual scaling in regards to the clock speed and the FPS.

As you can see, fps in Star Wars: The Old Republic scaled very well with the iGPU overclock, particularly when the game was played at “Low” settings. In addition, the resolution didn’t matter – it scaled equally regardless.

At the “Medium” quality setting, it didn’t scale quite as well, but if you glance up to the 1st chart again, you’ll notice that the FPS was really poor to begin with – I’d be willing to bet the HD 3000 is running into a wall elsewhere – I suppose it could be a memory bandwidth issue, but I would have expected a much smaller (or non-existant) gain in that case. Instead, we still got a respectable boost percentage-wise.

For anyone who is confused because they looked at the HD 3000 chart on Anandtech’s site, and the story looked much worse there, to clear things up, they mentioned that:

The 82.4% increase in clock speed resulted in anywhere from a 0.6% to 33.7% increase in performance. While that’s not terrible, it’s also not that great. It looks like we’re fairly memory bandwidth constrained here.

The boo-boo they made was that 82.4%. They inaccurately used 850Mhz as the base in their calculation, when the reality is that they should have used 1100Mhz (the default turbo of the 2500K they used – when you overclock, you’re overclocking the max turbo, not the base). It doesn’t look like anybody caught it, and the article’s over a year old now.

In any case, if you use 40.9% (the correct value for their overclock), their chart makes a little more sense. That said, they still only saw an average improvement of 19% in their games for that 40.9%, which isn’t nearly as good as the gains I’m obviously seeing in TOR. Perhaps TOR just benefits more than other games (or maybe Anandtech was using really high quality settings vs my low/medium)?

Anyway, if you’ve done your own overclocking/testing on the HD 3000, feel free to leave a comment below with the results.

—

Speeding up the memory!

Overclocking the GPU was actually at the end of my testing (but I listed it first, because it’s more interesting!).

Now, for the gains by playing with your RAM speed.

As you’re probably aware, the HD 3000 uses your system memory. In fact, if you plop open the latest version of GPU-Z, you’ll find that the memory speed it lists for the HD 3000 is that of your system RAM. 800Mhz for 1600Mhz DDR3, etc.

So, initially, I had bumped up the RAM speed in the BIOS from DDR1333 to DDR1600 to see what gains there were to be had. Here were the results:

The move from 1333->1600 is a 20% increase in clockspeed.

However, you can see that the frame rate did not scale as well. If you include the outliers, you’re looking at about a 6.3% increase in framerate.

That’s not very much. It worked out to a 2-3 fps increase at the “low” quality settings, and under 1 fps increase at the “medium” settings in TOR.

But that said, it is something. To be fair, it’s a better improvement-per-clock than you see by overclocking video memory on most dedicated video cards. And while technically part of that 6.3% might simply be a system-wide benefit (just like overclocking your CPU), usually games are the last thing to benefit from a simple bump in RAM speed, particularly on Intel systems (AMD systems tend to benefit a little bit more).

Putting it into perspective, normally, going for high DDR3 clocks doesn’t provide much benefit at all on Intel systems except in certain benchmarks. This is the most I’ve seen it actually benefit. So if you’ve been missing the days where pushing for high RAM speeds had value, the good news is, you now have an excuse to do it! The Intel HD 3000 does benefit quite-a-bit-more-than-one-might-expect from what I can tell.

—

Tightening RAM timings – a lost cause

Here are some (abbreviated) numbers from my notes to let you know how this went….

8.8 – 8.8 – 8.7 (med 1680)
10.2 – 10.2 – 10.2 (med 1440)
13.2 – 13.2 – 13.2 (med 1024)
41.3 – 41.3 – 41.3 (low 1024)

…obviously, no changes to speak of. They were surprisingly consistant.

At first I’d dropped the Command Rate from 2T to 1T (I expected an improvement of some sort!). Nothing. Then I tried tightening the timings, loosening the timings, etc. At most I’d end up with 0.1 fps difference.

Now I did not go crazy – maybe if I’d gone super-crazy-tight or super-crazy-loose I’d start seeing some fluctuation, but every indication I was getting told me that there’s no benefit to messing with this.

However, the good news is that usually you have to make a choice between fast speed, or tight timings. If your focus is on eeking out as much performance from the HD 3000 as possible, that choice is made for you! Go for speed, even if it means loose timings! When it comes to RAM, frequency seems to be king.

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Conclusion:

As mentioned earlier, overclocking the iGPU (HD 3000) gives the strongest gains the fastest. Just be sure to overclock gradually (remember, you’re overclocking the graphics TURBO setting, so just because it boots doesn’t mean it’s fine – stress test it so it actually turbos up).

Beyond that, if you start looking at the RAM, go for clock speed, even if you have to go with looser timings. Don’t spend too much time here though, as the gains are pretty mild.

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For reference, the system used for these tests was:

• ASUS GENE-Z
• Intel i5 2500k (not overclocked)
• 16GB Corsair DDR3 1600 RAM
• original RAM speed was set to DDR3 1333Mhz, 9/9/9/24/2T
• RAM speed for comparison set to 1600/9/9/9/24/2T
• RAM speed for HD 3000 overclocking was set to 1600/9/9/9/24/2T throughout that entire test series.
• RAM timings modified for various testing. Voltage constant at 1.5V
• Intel HD 3000 was set to base (1100Mhz turbo), set to 1400Mhz for overclock test. Voltage was left at motherboard’s “auto” setting.
• TOR framerates were taken in the middle of the night on the Republic fleet station with nobody around, camera zoomed out to max. Additional framerates on the “very low” setting were attempted, but they pegged at 60fps for all 3 resolutions I tested (vsync stuck on at that setting). I didn’t bother trying to test high because “medium” was already at unplayable levels of fps.
• NOTE: if you have the same motherboard (GENE-Z), watch your CPU voltage – for some reason as soon as I change anything regarding the RAM it cranks up the CPU voltage to insane levels if left on Auto. I have it manually set it to 1.2V to avoid unintended consequences.

It involves some fairly major disassembly. Worth noting a few things before we get started here:

1. The Q460 is one of the harder notebooks to disassemble. There are many plastic clips and you’re going to have to do a lot of careful prying.
2. Even if you’re careful, you may end up with some cosmetic damage around the case seam, particularly if you use a sharp object to do the prying. Oh, and you’re probably going to have to use a sharp object to do the prying.
3. I didn’t see gains by replacing the paste (details at the end). YMMV of course.
4. This will probably void your warranty. You’re doing this at your own risk. If you’ll be extremely sad/mad if you break the system, and/or you’re not comfortable doing this, you probably shouldn’t attempt it.

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So, let’s get started!

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STEP 1 – the easy stuff (you probably haven’t voided your warranty just yet….)

Click on the image below for a larger version.

You’ll see I’ve already removed the access panel. It’s removed by taking out the screw in the orange location, and carefully prying it out from the clips.

Purple – The battery. You should probably remove this before doing anything unless you’re hoping for a spark show when you slip with the screwdriver (2 spring clips, covered in the manual).

Orange – This is where the access panel screw was. In my previous post, I mentioned they overtightened mine at the factory and I had to use a dremel to cut a new slot. Hopefully you have better luck.

Blue – The “blank” in the memory card slot. Slides right out.

Green – Remove the remaining 2 screws that secure the hard drive, pull the drive out slightly, and slide off the SATA connector/cable.

Pinkish/red – 1 screw (a little smaller than the others) holds in the DVD drive. Once you remove it, slide the DVD drive out.

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STEP 2 – A mess of screws (don’t lose them!)

Click on the image below for a larger version.

You’re essentially removing every screw you see.

Green – Most of these screws are the same size, though you should try to keep them separate so you’re able to put each back in it’s original place anyway. None were very tough to get out with a standard philips screwdriver. While I think I labelled them all, it’s possible I’ve missed a couple in the above picture, so if you see one that isn’t shown, you may need to remove it – fortunately, they’re all pretty obvious.

Orange – These 2 tiny screws are located where the DVD drive was before. They’re tiny, so don’t lose them. They can also be a pain to get out – mine were overtightened at the factory. I had to attach a vicegrip to a tiny screwdriver to get the torque I needed to crack them loose. One hand turned the vicegrip while the other pushed down the screwdriver to keep the screw from stripping. If you manage to strip the screw, you’re probably going to have to use a dremel to cut a new slot or drill the head off the screw and try to remove the shaft later.

Pink – this is the hard drive SATA connector from step #1. You don’t have to do much else, but remember it. It gets in the way later when you try removing the bottom of the case, and will get in the way when you try reassembling it.

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Step 3 – Removing the bottom panel (unclipping the clips). AKA “the worst part”

This part sucks.

Click on the image below for a larger version.

I found it easiest to start at the front. Open the screen/display a bit.

The way I went about this was using a thin, sharp knife. I stuck it between the silver/black at an angle, and pryed the black “away” from the clips, working my way around slowly. As you get some of the clips disconnected, you’ll probably have to use 1 hand to keep them from popping back in.

Next, I worked my way around the sides, going from the front of the machine towards the back, working both sides at a time. The side you see above was the “easier” side. That said, prying the clips near the DVD drive location was a little tough – the plastic is really thin and I worried it would crack before the clips came.

The side above was a pain (again, click on the image for a larger picture). The problem is that not only do you have to pry the black plastic away from the clips, but it catches the microphone, headphone, VGA, and power connectors. You have to pry the black plastic away from them too. I put orange arrows at the trouble-spots.

The power connector in particular is a huge pain – you have to pry an awful lot to get the black plastic over it.

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Once I got the the front/sides unclipped, I simply pulled the black case bottom up, it pivoted, and the rear clips came un-done on their own.

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STEP 4 – The guts of the machine (getting easier again!)

Click on the image below for a larger version.

With the panel off, all we’ve left to do is remove the CPU cooler and heatsinks. It’s all 1 piece (I’d incorrectly guessed the CPU and GPU had separate heatsinks in my previous write-up)

Purple – Remove the screws for the heatsinks. Generally, you want to unscrew all of these a little bit at a time so that you maintain even pressure on the chips. Give 1 screw a turn, give the next screw a turn, etc. Go back to the 1st and repeat.

Orange – This connector is for the fan. It should pull out easily, but it doesn’t. I had to use a small screwdriver to gently pry it out of it’s fitting a bit at a time.

Once everything’s removed, it should lift right out.

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STEP 5 – the heatsink paste

Click the image below for a larger version.

Here you can see the existing thermal paste. If you’re replacing the paste and haven’t done it before, you may want to read the many guides on the web elsewhere before continuing.

Orange – The CPU and GPU locations. Surprisingly, the factory stuff was already fairly thin. Some excess had squeezed out the sides, but for a factory-job, it was pretty decent. I cleaned it off with rubbing alcohol and used Artic Silver Ceramique as the replacement.

Purple – The thermal pad on the chipset. I would not suggest replacing this with paste, as it won’t be as thick as the pad and probably won’t make good contact (if any). Leave it alone unless you’ve got a mod in mind.

Maybe I just got lucky, but the clearances machined into the heatsink for the GPU and CPU were nearly perfect. I applied a small amount of paste to each chip, temporarily reattached the heatsink, and both transferred perfectly. +1 to Samsung for this. That said, make sure you temporarily attach the heatsink and check for paste transfer in case you weren’t as lucky as I was.

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STEP 6 – Reassembly

Unsurprisingly, it’s the opposite of removal. A few things to note though:

• The hard drive SATA connector I mentioned earlier…. if you’re reassembling now and the case just won’t go back together, it’s probably in the way.
• Remember to pry the plastic back over the power/sound/mic/VGA connectors.
• Assuming both the above aren’t causing you problems, it snaps back together quite easily. Once I got it started, I was able to pretty much put the thing on the floor, push down, and everything snapped back into place.

When the machine is back on, you might want to run a couple temperature-monitoring programs just to make sure everything looks good. RealTemp is good for testing the CPU, and the monitoring section of GPU-Z is good for testing the GPU.

You may also want to run some stress testing programs while monitoring the temperatures carefully. If you messed up and things are overheating, it’s better to find out right away (while you’re monitoring the temps) than it is to have something burn itself out a week later.

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RESULTS

To put it simply… there weren’t gains, at least under load. Here are the numbers:

GPU
Before:  79 degress (load)
After: 78 degrees (load)

CPU
Before: 81 degrees (load)
After: 83 degrees (load)

Basically, the GPU was 1 degree cooler, and the CPU was 2 degrees warmer. Both pretty much within the margin for error. No real change to speak of.

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A few possible reasons for this:

1. The Arctic Silver Ceramique I used – the tube’s well over 5 years old (it’s all I had available where I am at the moment). It’s known to result in temps a couple degrees higher than other more-recent thermal pastes. It’s thicker, and I certainly didn’t manage to spread it as thin as I can with other pastes. It may also need time to cure (temps could very well go down in a few days).
2. Application – while it looked pretty good, I may have used more/less than necessary.
3. The original paste Samsung used might have been just as good as anything else.

In any case, time will tell. I may disassemble the machine again later and try some other paste.

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CONCLUSION

For being quite the pain to disassemble, it’s a little disappointing that there weren’t temperature gains to be had this time around. It’s possible that a few mods to the bottom panel might help airflow, but it’s something I’ll look at another time.

In any case, if you need to disassemble your system, hopefully the guide has helped you. If you’ve attempted this and have any tips of your own (or replaced the paste and saw better results than I did), feel free to leave a comment below!

I picked up the NP-Q460 from Best Buy Canada ( both BB and FS list it as a Q460-JS01CA ), as I needed a relatively cheap laptop to replace my previous MacBook Pro, which got owned by a glass of milk. Unfortunately, reviews on this model were slim. As far as the price and specs went, it looked like a pretty solid deal though at $699 CDN so I decided to give it a go.

I’ll assume if you’re reading this you’ve already checked out the specs, but just in case… the short version is that it’s got an Intel i5 2430m, 6GB RAM, nVidia Optimus GeForce GT540m with 1GB mem, and a slow (5400RPM) 640GB hard drive. All the other typical stuff you’d find in every recent laptop is there, though it’s worth noting that it’s got a standard DVD burner (no Blue-Ray).

First some boring unboxing pics, and then some commentary:

Click on any of the thumbnails above to see the large version in a pop-up window.

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I’ll sum up a few pros and cons I observed rather quickly for those who just want the ‘gist’ of it:

Despite the cons list being longer than the pros list, I’m really quite happy with the system.

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Now for a few random details:

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THE 1 SCREW

The 1 screw you remove to get at the HD/RAM… It’s a small philips screw, and on my notebook it was insanely tight. I tried a dozen small screwdrivers that were all the right size, and it just wouldn’t come.

As it turned out, I had to use a dremel to cut a slot into the screw so that I could use a larger flat screwdriver, get a good grip, and use a pile of force. It was tough, but it eventually came.

I don’t get why:

a) The screw was put in so tight. This is *supposed* to be a user-servicable panel.
b) They used a smaller screw than they did for the rest of the bottom panel. A larger screw would have fit and would be less prone to stripping.

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THE FIRST START

The first startup takes quite some time. At first you’re presented with a very well-polished partition manager of sorts that allows you to size (or completely remove) a backup partition of sorts. Takes a few seconds, and is explained well enough that Grandma would probably understand. After that, you wait a good long while as it prepares Windows – I’m assuming that it’s either restoring the Windows image, or installing the whack of trial-ware you’ll spend even more time removing. Waiting for it to finish is like watching paint dry, so go get some coffee. You might even have time to drive to Starbucks. Maybe even the one in the next town.

Once you’re finally at the desktop, you’ll find an Intel utility running in the upper right, letting you know when the CPU turbo’s up. It seems a little out of place (it’s an odd thing to have greeting you), but it can be closed easily enough. Be sure to change the settings before closing it if you don’t want it to auto-run every time the laptop starts.

Despite Norton bugging you pretty quickly, and despite the large number of items in your taskbar, it actually feels like a pretty clean installation (though I’m used to 5-6 programs bugging me on most notebooks during the first boot).

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THE SAMSUNG PROGRAMS/UTILITES

For the purists out there who have another copy of Windows and like to format/reinstall without the bloatware, be sure to grab the drivers from Samsung’s site first (the Samsung tools/utilties are also available there).

For the other minimalists who simply tend to uninstall the trialware they don’t want/need, don’t go uninstalling all the Samsung-related stuff. Some of it’s useful (check the installed manual to see what each does). You don’t need all of it, but a few things (like the software that enables keyboard features) you’ll probably want. That said, if you find you’ve removed something you want back, you can grab it again on Samsung’s site.

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TEMPERATURES

Using OCCT and FurMark, I tried to get a rough idea as to what temps I’d be looking at.

Both the CPU and GPU could be nudged to the 80-85 degree C region (GPU goes a little hotter than the CPU). I’m guessing they have independant heatsinks, though I’ll confirm this when I disassemble the thing. The fan doesn’t start really kicking up until the 80 degree mark, though at that point, it’s still much quieter than my previous MacBook Pro.

The temps are a bit worrysome – intense games are probably going to get the thing hot, and based on previous experiences, after dust has had a couple months to accumulate I wouldn’t be surprised if either the CPU or GPU started to hit over 90 degrees.

Since I don’t want to be the victim of throttling or system shutdowns, when I disassemble the notebook, I’ll probably take a look at the airflow design, heatsinks & heatsink paste and see if something can be done.

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GAMING

The only game I’ve tried so far has been BioWare’s MMO, SWTOR (Star Wars: The Old Republic). Played around for a couple minutes at the fleet station. TOR is known for being fairly demanding – if you browse the forums you’ll find many complaints pertaining to low fps, particularly by laptop users. It’s also notorious for pushing the CPU/GPU when it comes to heat output. Again, you’ll find many complaints about users who have systems shutting down, crashing, throttling, and restarting due to heat while playing this game.

I was interested to see how the notebook fared in terms of both fps and heat when playing at the native resolution.

At high settings, the game tends to sit a little above the 10fps mark. Technically playable, but not really practical.

At low settings (though with shadows off completely as well), the framerate becomes respectable, hitting 60fps at times, and generally bottoming out at just above 30fps. Movement is fluid, and I’d expect combat should remain fluid as well.

I didn’t try out medium settings, as most people will probably benefit from tweaking the individual settings and finding which give the most benefit when it comes to the quality/fps tradeoff.

After about 10 minutes on the fleet station, I took a look at the temperatures. The nVidia 540m had topped out at 71 degrees C. The CPU had capped at about 84 degrees C. When I disassemble the laptop I’ll see if new heatsink paste results in a reduction.

For being a low-medium card, the GeForce 540m looks to be more-than-adequate for casual gaming, and as a whole the Samsung Q460 notebook should be just fine for those who may use it for periodic gaming.

I wouldn’t call the Samsung Q460 a gaming laptop by any means, but if you’re content to get good framerates under low quality settings, I doubt it will disappoint.

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TO SUM IT UP

It’s a good laptop, and a purchase I’m quite happy with. At around $700, The Samsung NP-Q460 is a fantastic compromise between the $300-500 budget-laptops that can barely game, and the $1000-1500 laptops that game well but at a high cost.

I may pop in an SSD one of these days, and will definitely be replacing the RAM with 2x4GB sticks that I have kicking around.

At the time of this writing, the only laptop that would give the same specs for less money would be an Acer for around $50 less, but I’ve never been pleased with the build quality of Acer’s stuff.

Anyway, that concludes the review. If you bought a Samsung Q460-JS01CA and have thoughts to share, feel free to leave them in the comment section below.

I was looking for a case to replace my current Antec Sonata III. The Sonata’s not bad, except that it’s incredibly heavy (I dread moving the thing, especially since I somehow lost the rubber feet and the bottom now wants to scratch everything), and when I decided to run an Intel i7 and Radeon 6950… well… the PSU’s top-placement meant that it was getting kinda hot. And loud.

A huge plus to the Sonata was the plastic, removable air-filter. I’d gone from pulling out handfuls of dust, to opening up the case after 2 years and finding all the components still looked brand-new. A filter on the new system was a must. In any case, these were the requirements for a new case, in order of priority:

• Easy to move/transport. This meant a handle of sorts.
• Bottom-mounted PSU. Cooler air = quieter PSU.
• Intake air filters. I hate lugging the thing to the garage so that I can use the compressor to get all the crud out. I’d rather just keep the crud out from the start.
• Large fans. 80mm fans are just too small/noisy, and they don’t push as much air anyway.
• Reasonably priced. Around $100 is fine. Beyond that, I’ve built a custom 100% silent, perfectly cool case in the past out of MDF and spare case parts for around $50. The most expensive part was the furnace-filter it used. Of course, it weighed about 60 lbs and was pretty huge (so not portable) but it worked better than any case money can buy. So $200+ is out of the question. I’d build my own case at that point.

Anyway, Cooler Master had a decent looking case that seemed to meet the requirements (the Storm Scout), so I picked it up. This is the one I’m referring to:

So I opened it up, and had a look. Before going any further, it’s important to note that despite what you might infer from my furnace-filter case-building endeavors mentioned above, I don’t expect a HEPA-quality filter or anything on these things. The old Antec’s plastic filter worked well when it came to dust, and really, anything that’ll catch the majority of the dust is fine by me.

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First, the filter for the bottom-mounted PSU (click for a larger image):

It’s attached to the bottom intake from the inside. I have no doubt it’ll perform well enough. It would have been nice if they made easy to remove/maintain (as it is, you’ll have to yank the power supply out to clean it), but they put some thought in, it’ll keep dust out, and that’s what counts. It didn’t require any modification.

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Next, the front panel. It comes off easily with a hard yank (a + to CoolerMaster there). Again, click for a large image.

As you see, they have a foam filter over the fan grill, and filters over each of the drive bays, held in by metal tabs. They definitely didn’t take short-cuts here, and I have to say, I was pretty impressed.

This really was well-thought-out. Air can come in anywhere from the front (a lot of surface area), and it all gets filtered. If you need to clean it, just yank the front panel off – quick and easy.

It’s not perfect though – if you look in the right side of the image, you’ll see that where the handle is, you’ve got a big space. Here’s a look from the bottom with it installed:

While air from the front is filtered, air sucked in through this space at the bottom isn’t filtered. Since there’s very little resistance to airflow here, and since the fan is located very close to this space, I expect a lot of dust to make it’s way in here over time. Remember, the filters are on the right side of this space – the intake fan’s on the left.

Time for the first mod!

This one’s pretty easy. Get some screen and either tape or glue it over the hole. Here are a few pics (clicky clicky for large versions):

A few flaws with my mod that I’ll point out for you:

• As you could probably tell, I didn’t cut it perfectly straight. It’s not perfectly flush.
• Since the screen is flexible, it’s possible that it’ll be sucked up a bit and create a larger gap.
• It’s more of a pain to pull the panel off without pushing the screen through – you can only grip the ridge of the plastic.

Alternate ideas if you’re looking to mod this area:

• If you don’t have access to screen, you can simply use black electrical tape to cover the area and block airflow from the bottom altogether. That way all the air will be pulled from the (filtered) front. If you don’t have electrical tape, duct tape would probably work fine too – it’s at the bottom, so nobody’s going to see it anyway.
• Rigid perforated plastic would be more durable, and wouldn’t flex with the airflow (instead of using screen).

Ideally, Cooler Master would have done one of 2 things:

1. used rigid perforated plastic here, mounted at an angle so that it doesn’t interfere when you’re reaching your hand in, or
2. had this section sealed off, with a handle moulded in.

Really though, I was so pleased that they filtered the entire front (individually on each drive bay!) that I can’t fault them too much for this oversight. Just block off or filter the bottom yourself and you should be set here.

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Next, the side-panel, where you’d generally put 2 intake fans (the only fans that are not included by the way):

It’s worth quickly noting that CM put protective plastic on both sides of the panel. Just another indication that they put some care into the case. Also, if you’re not planning to mount fans here, you can simply leave the plastic on and it’ll keep dusty air from sneaking in here. Oh, and check the height of your CPU cooler – if it’s tall, you’ll probably only be able to install a bottom fan.

Anyway, if you’re putting fans here, you can see the flaw. Once you remove the plastic, this area’s completely unfiltered. Time for another quick mod!

Above (again, you can click for larger images), you can see that I’ve again cut some screen.  I used the existing push-rivets to hold it in place, and then some electrical tape on the sides to make sure it’s held flush (and to hide the screen edge). Installed the fans, and voila!

Again, alternate ways to do this:

• perforated plastic (or solid metal screen) – you could cut it to size, drill 4 holes for the fan mount, and rather than having to use tape, the fan would hold it on. It’d probably look even better too.
• if you go with the screen/tape method as I have, some colored tape might look a little more appealing depending on the color of the LED lights you’re using.

Before anyone asks why I used ugly brown/beige Noctua fans, they’re fairly quiet and I happen to like them :p . Obviously if you want to use some fancy LED fans, it’ll look a little prettier.

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I’ll fault CM for the side panel – they really had nothing here, which is a shame seeings how they took care of the PSU intake and front. If you’ve installed both fans here, around half the air that goes into the case will be from the side-panel. It won’t be dust-free.

At the very least they could have included a couple metal screens (similar in size to the ones used at the PSU intake) with 4 holes drilled for the fan screws/mounts. Anyone who bought the case for filtration-reasons would probably use them (and anyone who doesn’t want filtration is probably ripping out the PSU/front filters so it doesn’t impede their airflow anyway).

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Minimizing dust:

That’s it for the mods (only 2 were needed!), so on to other things.

Aside from making sure your air intakes are filtered well, aim for positive (but close to neutral) case pressure. Don’t know what that is? It’s the opposite of negative pressure of course! In basic terms, you want more intake air than exhaust air. Why? If your exhaust is “stronger”, it’ll suck air into the case from every crack and crevice it can, which means you’ll find dust in all the cracks and crevices – most noticably around CD/DVD drives, case seams, etc.

On the other hand, with positive case pressure, (more air being “pushed” in than being “sucked” out) air will be pushed *out* those cracks/crevices/etc. Because the air in your case has been filtered, this air being pushed out wont leave dust in all those crevices.

You could of course aim for “neutral” case pressure (intake air = exhaust air), but it’s a little harder to attain, and as your filters plug up it’ll start to become negative pressure.

Now, before somebody goes and turns all their fans into intake fans (“Hey Matt, I read your article and now I have 7 fans all blowing in so I have lots of positive case pressure!”)… that’s a bad idea. You also want air-flow too which means a mix of intake and exhaust fans. Just make sure more slightly more air is being pushed in than is being sucked out, and you’ll get the best-of-both-worlds; good, efficient air flow, and you’ll minimize dust.

To accomplish this, you’d generally match the # of intake/exhaust fans, and have one of the exhaust fans set slightly lower in speed. In the case of the CM Storm Scout:

• the front intake and top exhaust are the same size (should equal out)
• because the PSU gets it’s “own” intake and exhaust, it’s intake should roughly equal it’s exhaust
• 1 intake side fan should offset the rear exhaust fan
• 1 (the other) intake side fan should hopefully not only offset the video card’s exhaust, but add some additional air to create positive pressure.

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Conclusion & other stuff….

All in all, it’s a pretty good case – not perfect when it comes to filtration, but as you see above, it’s close enough that it’s pretty easy to mod the rest of the way.

I was surprised at how quiet the case actually is compared to the Antec Sonata III – don’t get me wrong, the Sonata III is quieter (very quiet) when you’re dealing with low temps and low fan speeds, but as soon as you add heat to the equation and need the fans turned up, you really start to hear it.

That said, comparing it to the Sonata III isn’t quite fair. A better comparison would probably be the Antec 900 which is priced similarly and aimed at a similar audience. While I don’t own a 900 (though buying one for a CM Storm Scout vs Antec 900 comparison sounds enticing), looking through the details the CM Storm Scout seems like a better buy. I say that, being quite the Antec fan by the way.

The Cooler Master Storm Scout looks to beat out the Antec 900 in…:

• front filtration
• 4 front/top USB ports (vs only 2 on the Antec 900)
• carry handle
• CPU cutout on the motherboard tray
• separate air intake for PSU
• tool-less design
• better cable management – space to hide wiring behind motherboard tray (though not perfect, it’ll hide away a few wires at least)

The Antec 900 does have adjustable fan speed switches (which the CM unfortunately lacks), and a monster 200mm top fan (CM’s is only 140mm and I’d venture to guess it’s louder). Aside from those, the Storm Scout blows it away feature-wise. You’d have to step up to the more expensive Antec 902 to get the front filters and cable management, though even that model’s still behind in the other areas.

Regardless, I’m quite pleased. If your priorities are similar to the ones I mentioned at the beginning, the Storm Scout won’t disappoint. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly on it’s way there. And hey… maybe we’ll get a Storm Scout 2.0 one day :p

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Prep

To jailbreak the Apple TV (2nd generation), you’ll need the AppleTV, the cord to plug it into some electricity, and a cable that converts regular USB to MicroUSB-B (not the “A” version of MicroUSB, and NOT the more common MiniUSB).

Yes, you’ll have to buy the cable separately. Yes, they’re a BEAR to find – I have a zillion cables that do MiniUSB, but couldn’t find any around here that were MicroUSB. For a low-cost online option, you might want to check out MonoPrice.com – you shouldn’t have problems finding them at most online retailers, but MonoPrice is usually pretty cheap (they ship to Canada too btw). I ended up looking around locally and 1 local computer place happened to have them (ComputerAvenue on St. Mary’s if you live near Winnipeg).

You’ll also need a computer with a USB port.

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The Jailbreak

NOTE THAT JAILBREAKING MAY VOID YOUR WARRANTY. IT MAY SCREW WITH FUTURE APPLETV UPDATES. IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG, YOUR APPLETV MAY NOT BOOT. DON’T DO THIS UNLESS YOU’RE SURE.

I didn’t have much luck with GreenPois0n. After about 100  attempts (and while it walks you through it, the timing is brutal to get right, though it “claimed” to be successful many times when it wasn’t), and a few firmware flashes, and a couple different versions of GreenPois0n, I decided to keep looking for an alternate untethered jailbreak.

Turns out that Seas0nPass was the way to go. Currently it can be found at http://support.firecore.com/entries/387605 but in the event you’re reading this months later, try Seas0nPass.com and see if you can find it there (note that it’s a leet-speak-style zero in Seas0n, not the letter “o” if you type it in manually). Both Windows and Mac OS X versions are available (I happened to use the Mac version)

There’s a guide as well at the above link(s). Follow it, but note that you need to do very little. It does most of the work, and it’s pretty freaking easy.

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Once you’re jailbroken… disable updates

Now that you’re jailbroken, you don’t want an Apple TV update to catch you and throw you back in jail (overwrite your jailbreak).

NOTE THAT YOUR APPLE TV WILL NO LONGER UPDATE. THAT’S GOOD FOR YOUR JAILBREAK, BUT BAD IF APPLE PUTS OUT AN UPDATE YOU WANT (you would have to undo the following changes).

First, you’ll have to SSH into the AppleTV. Connect the AppleTV to your network if it isn’t yet.

If you’re on a Mac, and if this is the only AppleTV on your LAN, it’s as easy as opening Terminal and typing:

ssh root@apple-tv.local

OR

ssh root@whatever-ip-address-your-atv-is-on
(Example: ssh root@192.168.0.100)
(you can find the IP address in the Settings section on your AppleTV)

It’ll give you a warning (which you’ll say yes to), and then ask for a password. The default password is “alpine” (no quotes). If you’re using Windows, you’ll probably have to install a program like Putty to SSH in (in other words, time to do some Googling).

Now that you’re logged in through SSH, you’ll need to edit a file to disable updates. First, you’ll need to install an editor though! I decided to use “nano”, so to install it I typed the following:

apt-get update
apt-get install nano

The 1st one updates the list of things that can be installed (takes a while, make sure your network is connected to the internet). The 2nd installs nano.

Assuming that went well, you’ve got to edit the /etc/hosts file on the AppleTV. Since you’re still SSH’ed in as root, it’s a matter of typing:

nano /etc/hosts

You should be in a clunky-looking file editor now. It probably looks like this inside:

You’re going to add 3 lines to the bottom so it looks like this:

Then it’s CONTROL-O on your keyboard to save it, and CONTROL-X to exit.

Note that this change will not take effect until you restart the AppleTV. You can restart it now if you want (just type “restart” and hit enter), but remember to SSH back in before continuing if so. If this has all been pretty complicated for you so far, don’t restart yet – you can do it at the end (by unplugging it and plugging it back in if nothing else).

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Installing the Plex client (finally)

I’m assuming you’re SSH’ed into the ATV (whether you restarted and SSH’ed back in, or have just finished the previous step but haven’t restarted).

The next instructions can be found in the Plex forums:
http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/26064-08-beta-releases/

Note that it’s for the BETA release. It’s probably changed by the time you read this, so I suggest going to the Plex forums and reading up on the current procedure.

Anyway, to install the BETA version that I did (which may not be a great idea when you read this since a newer version may be out which you’ll probably want to use), I went about it like this:

echo “deb http://www.ambertation.de ./downloads/PLEX/” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plex.list
(the above is all 1 line, in the event it gets split up into 2 lines by the blog)

apt-get update

apt-get install com.plex.client-plugin=0.0.8.0.4

3 lines total. There were a couple confirmations messages.

AGAIN, I recommend reading the plex forums for this last phase/step. Once it’s done, you may have to reboot the AppleTV (either type “restart”, or simply yank the power cord and plug it back in)

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Thoughts on Plex via the AppleTV

Plex for the AppleTV is fairly streamlined (compared to the full version on the computer). It looks great though – maintains the easy navigation, and you still have all the scraped TV/Movie information available. Some bits can be customized (turning on/off theme music when browsing TV series, a couple layout options, and a fair bit more).

I actually couldn’t quite figure out whether the AppleTV’s version of Plex is more “Plex Light”, or more “Plex designed to seamlessly integrate with the AppleTV”. It feels like a bit of both.

Note that the big downside is that there’s NO PLEX SERVER for the APPLE TV. Just the client. I’m assuming the AppleTV’s hardware just can’t handle it. You need a computer running the Plex Media Server, and it’ll stream to the Plex CLIENT on the AppleTV. Plex will happily watch whatever folders you want it to (including on machines/storage across your network), but the server itself has still got to be running on at least 1 machine, somewhere.

1 stick was good, 1 stick was faulty. RMA service to Canada is kinda awful.

2 sentences. If that’s all you needed to know, you can go on to the next review now. You’re welcome.

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Now for the details.

I ordered the RAM through NewEgg (about $80) for my Macbook Pro. It came with a $10 mail in rebate, so after a couple days of everything working, I cut out the UPC code and mailed it in.

Unfortunately, when I booted into Windows for a game some time later (League of Legends if you’re wondering), I found that the game kept crashing. I didn’t immediately suspect the RAM, but eventually broke down and started running some tests to narrow down the culprit. Turned out it was the RAM.

I tested each stick individually with a couple memory testing programs and found the bad stick. Tried it in other machines, and it failed there too. Great.

–

The RMA Process

Now normally, I’d send the thing back to NewEgg. I was still barely within the 30 days for exchange. Unfortunately, I’d already cut out the UPC code for the mail in rebate which according to NewEgg’s terms makes me ineligible (fair enough). I had to deal directly with Mushkin.

Now for a Mushkin RMA, you have to create an account on their website, and submit a ticket. Creating the account’s a bit of a hassle, but submitting the ticket’s alright. Here’s the note I added within the ticket:

1 stick is faulty (other one is fine). System instability, and fails both the Apple Hardware Test, and Memtest86+ 4.20. Tested in multiple machines (together, and then 1 at a time to narrow down the bad stick). ***Replacement stick must be sent via USPS if being shipped from the USA (via Canada Post if shipped from Canada), as this is a rural address.*** CANADIAN ADDRESS: Matt Gadient <address removed> Please provide the RMA address and any additional information required for return of the defective stick. Thanks.

You’ll notice that I placed pretty heavy emphasis on the USPS/CanadaPost part.

They sent a reply, asking for proof of purchase. A bit odd for an item with a lifetime warranty, but I sent them a PDF of the NewEgg invoice. In a few hours they replied that the RMA was approved.

I packaged up the bad stick, and mailed it in the “rigid box” they required. About $8 to ship it back to them.

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The hiccup

A few weeks later, I got an email stating that they’d have to charge me an extra fee to ship the replacement back through USPS as I’d requested. I responded that I was very disappointed to hear that, as I’d been quite clear in the initial request that USPS would be required, and expected that this issue would have been mentioned *prior* to me returning the RAM.

I went on to say that if it was under $20, I’d be paying by Mastercard, and otherwise just to throw the thing out. Turns out the fee is $31.95.

–

The math

Now let’s do a little math. The set was about $80. That works out to $40 per stick. I paid $8 to ship the dead one back to them, and they wanted to charge me $32 to mail me back the replacement. $8 + $32 = $40.

Had they told me this up-front, I wouldn’t have sent the stick back. It’s smarter just to buy a new one.

Granted, I was already out the $8, but at that point I preferred eating the $8 loss as opposed to paying for more potential surprises.

–

Conclusion

This certainly doesn’t look good on the company.

I didn’t spring a “surprise, I need USPS” on them. I was very clear and upfront from the start. They sprung the “surprise, that’ll be $32” on me.

They could have said upfront that “your RMA request has been approved, but note that there may be an additional fee for shipping your replacement via USPS“. They didn’t.

To ship via a USPS-branded box would have cost $11.95 (I looked it up just now). For their own box would have been $5.58. Both are a far cry from the $32 they were looking to gouge me with.

To be fair, they wouldn’t have charged me to ship via FedEx, but I wasn’t about to cave in and spend half a day taking a $20 drive to the FedEx depot at the airport in the next city to pick it up (and probably pay customs-clearing-fees on top of it).

–

Mushkin sold me a defective product, made a mistake in not informing me about the cost to ship via USPS. Rather than rectifying that (and waiving the $5.58), they decided to try and profit further from me by charging a whopping $32.

Needless to say, I won’t be spending money on a Mushkin product again. It’s clear they don’t mind selling defective products and aren’t willing to own up to their mistakes. That’s fine. I don’t mind calling them out on it.

I’ll take my $32 and put it towards a stick from a better manufacturer.

I’ve used Logitech mice almost exclusively over the years, but they haven’t been without their issues. Poor Mac software, inaccurate scroll wheels, and (more importantly) feet that either wear off or aren’t held on well by the glue.

Razor’s built a pretty good name for themselves, so I decided to give a Razor mouse a try this time around. I got the DeathAdder – fairly basic mouse with 2 thumb-buttons and a clickable scroll-wheel.

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I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary, but was so impressed within the first few minutes of use that I thought the experience was worth sharing.

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The Good

Like virtually all USB mice, it was functional the moment it was plugged into the Mac, and worked perfectly well in the Mac OS.

The DeathAdder is extremely accurate. I’m using it on a table-cloth (technically a bed sheet, but it’s a long story…), full of wrinkles and creases. Not an ideal surface, yet I quickly realized I was getting more accurate tracking than my Logitech which has the benefit of a real mouse pad. A little PhotoShop work confirmed this. I really don’t think I could go back.

The wheel’s precisely calibrated. It’s tight (unlike the logitechs which have always had some play in movement), and there aren’t any anomolies. No dead spots in the wheel, and you always get exactly 1 movement per click. Trying to nudge the wheel forward or backward (without actually clicking it) didn’t cause scrolling. It’s very precise.

I installed the Mac software (downloaded from the site). Here’s what it looks like:

RazerDeathAdder software on Mac OS X (installed in /Applications). Click on the image above to see the larger version.

Unfortunately, the software required a restart after installation (one of the few things that actually needs the Mac to restart). However, it installed seemlessly, and even added an easy-to-find-uninstaller in Applications/Utilities.

I opened up all the options for the screenshot. It has a bit of a cluttered feel to it, but all the options are there. Changing the Polling Rate caused the mouse to freeze for a few seconds while it applied the settings, but beyond that there weren’t any surprises.

A small nicety is that the lights can be turned off from within the software. If you need complete darkness for whatever reason, both the scroll-wheel light and the logo light can be switched on/off independently. I suppose switching off the lights might save a microscopic amount of power as well, which might be marginally helpful if you’ve got flakey USB ports or are running on a laptop’s battery.

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The Bad

I’ve only had a few days of use, so keep in mind that if long-term issues exist, I haven’t had enough time to run into them…

There’s no install disc in the box (PC or Mac). You have to download the software from their site if you want to install it. You may not need it, but if you want it, you’ve gotta find it. That in itself isn’t all that bad – usually CD’s have outdated versions of software anyway, so you’re generally better off throwing those discs away and downloading the latest version online. That said, there’s a pile of other junk in the box already, so since “cost” or “environmental reasons” don’t seem to be the rationale behind it, they may as well have thrown a disc in there anyway (perhaps having the installer check for an updated online version first before installing).

Reversed up/down at the Mac’s boot-option screen. If you hold “Alt/Option” down at startup to choose a drive to boot to, up/down are reversed. Really a minor detail, but still strange.

Soft feet. The mouse feet glide smoothly, but the material’s very soft. Even the tablecloth I’m using has scuffed them a bit. That means a coarse surface might wear these feet off over time. It’s clearly a design-choice – the material is soft, but glides smoothly. I’d be careful about choosing a mousepad to go along with it though to be on the safe side.

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The Ugly

22MB installer, and 40-50MB installation. Wowzorz. I know disk space is abundant these days, but that seems a bit large for a driver and mouse software.

Scroll wheel acceleration conflict between MacOS mouse settings and Razor software mouse settings. After you install the software, the scrolling acceleration is insanely fast. Normal speed for the first few lines, and then WHAM it zips down the page, easily to the end of most documents. The FIX is to change the “Scroll Speed” in the Mac’s SystemPreferences/Mouse section. Turn the “scrolling speed” there down to the bottom, and the mouse behaves the way you’d expect it should – a moderate amount of acceleration. I list this as “ugly” because it requires you to adjust the Mac OS X default mouse behavior, rather than simply being adjustable from within the Razer utility (where you’d expect it to be). It actually took some trial/error to figure out this fix.

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Conclusion

It’s only been a few days, but this is quite possibly the best mouse I’ve ever owned. We have a number of machines here, all using different mice. I’m generally not very picky – I can make just about anything work.

The fact that the DeathAdder actually caught my attention enough to make me really appreciate it is… well… both unexpected and unprecedented. Coming with software for Mac OS X is an added bonus (I could have really done without it to be honest).