vakkotaur

It finally dawned on me that the memory controller, or a significant part of it at least, is on the CPU rather than the motherboard. And that the Sempron is bottom of the line and the Phenom II X6 is top of the line. I went looking for information about that and found a bit saying that the Sempron and the X2 on which it is based were only rated for 1066, though the X2 could handle 1333.

When I'd first installed the new RAM, the motherboard's autodetection set things to 1333 rather than 1600. The 1333 setting worked and the 1600 setting I tried by manual override was... all crashy. The crashes showed up fairly quickly, too. I could only run Phoenix a few minutes before things went screwy.

Tonight I set things back to automatic and the motherboard decided that the RAM was indeed 1600. I've been running things for a few hours now at that setting and things seem stable. While supposedly the 1333 setting and the 1600 setting are about equivalent due to timing and cycle quirks, there's something psychologically satisfying about running things at the advertised speed.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: CPU fan whine...

When I built up the new belgian in something of a hurry last Winter, I skimped in a few places. I bought just a little fairly slow memory (by today's standards....) and the cheapest CPU I could fit in the motherboard. I re-used my hard drive and a video card jmaynard was no longer using. A while back I changed to a nice new 1 TB Hitachi UltraStar hard drive.

A little less farther back, I upgraded the RAM from 2 GB of 1066 MHz to 16 GB of 1600 MHz, though it turns out I can only reliably run it at 1333 MHz due to motherboard limitations - I think. The good news there is that the response times are such that there's no real loss of speed.

The change was noticeable right off: belgian seemed to boot up faster and I have yet to hit swap - which can really bog things down.

And the latest change is removing the Sempron and replacing it with something much fancier. It did not all go well:

A:Bzxzxzxzxzxzxzxz... whirrrrrrRRRRRR- ***silence***"
Q:What are sounds you do NOT want to hear after just installing an expensive CPU?

Wednesday my new processor arrived. For those who know the fiddly bits: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition. For everyone else: I went from 2 slow cores sharing some cache (slowing things down), to 6 faster cores each with its own cache. Or simply: Whee! More, and faster, computer!

Thursday morning I installed it. Or thought I did. Everything looked good. Then there was a raspy uneven buzzing - for a moment I though a cable was brushing up by some fan blades. Then the fan audibly increased speed: louder and louder, higher and higher pitch. Then silence. I had managed to somehow not properly attach the heatsink assembly and it fell partially off of the processor. This is not a sight making for relaxation. It makes more for worry and cussing.

The good news: The thermal protection on the motherboard works. It shut things down before any real damage could occur. After securing the heat sink, and being REALLY sure it was indeed secure, things worked as hoped, much to my relief.

The only downside so far is that the fan is (more than just) a bit noisy and has a nasty, high-pitched note. When everything is idle it's not too bad but is still noticeable. When I start using the system some, it gets louder and more annoying. Thus I now am looking at getting a different CPU cooler. The price range is quite something. At little at $30 or so, up to over $75. And even the fancy, expensive ones have a potential problem (even beyond being so big they won't fit some cases): They might interfere with one of the DIMM sockets. I'll be measuring things before buying anything. I am not reducing the amount of RAM I am running. It's so very easy to get used to having 16 GB and not seeing the system hit swap, even when I throw about everything I can at it.

While on IRC with

yakko to ask about cooling solutions, I mentioned a problem I had with streaming audio in Second Life (with Phoenix - I have yet to hear any streaming audio at all out of Firestorm on 64-bit Linux). That was, while I finally had streaming audio working and it didn't clobber other audio (such as that from youtube) until the next system restart, the fix somehow caused all SL audio to be delayed about 20 seconds. For streaming audio this is not a big deal. For user interface audio it's annoying as the sound happens well after the triggering action and seems unrelated to anything.

Yakko suggested running Phoenix via padsp. That, with rollback of some edits to the Phoenix startup script, got things working right. Now, at last, I have UI audio that makes sense, streaming audio that is near instant (adjust volume with a 20 second delay sometime... yeah, I used the system audio control to get around that one), and I still have other audio.

How it's done on 64-bit Xubuntu (I figure it should work on about any distribution):

Instead of invoking Phoenix with something like this...

/usr/bin/phoenixveiwer/PhoenixViewer-i686-1.5.2.1102/phoenix-startup-script

by itself, do this:

padsp /usr/bin/phoenixveiwer/PhoenixViewer-i686-1.5.2.1102/phoenix-startup-script

This is, of course, a thing set in the menus so normally there's no need to worry about it unless a version upgrade happens. The key to making the sound actually work is then to edit the startup script (named snowglobe by default) and uncomment one line. At least in my case that is all that's needed:

## - Avoids using any OpenAL audio driver.
export LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x

And that's it. I used to have one or two other lines regarding sound faults uncommented, but with padsp, those changes aren't needed and might even have been causing me some trouble.

Current Mood: tired

Due to some curious circumstances (a mix of bad & good) my new computer hardware is almost paid off, which means it's time to at least think about what to do next. I am no longer sure, but I had thought that the best bet was add memory first, and upgrade the processor later. Right now I am running a dual-core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. I want to go to, eventually, a six-core CPU and 16 GB of RAM.

I find I am using some swap, so more RAM is probably the right way to go. That still leaves a question or two. I can go cheap or I can go fast, but is the difference even going to be noticeable? The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3 which according the manual can take DDR3 1866(though it may need overclocking work, which I am a bit leery of)/1333/1066 MHz. From Newegg:

$189.99 DDR3 1066 (PC3 _8500) CAS: 7 Timing: 7-7-7-18
$249.99 DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) CAS: 7 Timing: 7-7-7-21
$299.99 DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) CAS: 9 Timing: 9-10-9-28

For what it's worth, I am currently using 2 GB of 1333 with a CAS of 9.

While I'm currently using a "slow" CPU (Athlon II X2 4400e, which is an unlocked Sempron at 2.7 GHz) I will be going to something faster all around. My suspicion is that if it weren't for Phoenix (or Firestorm or other Second Life client) it wouldn't matter at all. But with that there, there might be some advantage to the faster RAM. I don't know. I am not versed in gaming-type system requirements and specifications.[1] Any advice?

I'm not asking about the CPU as things might change by the time I get to that part. Also, the price differences between the least of what I would consider and the fastest thing I can (now) get and use isn't all that big.

[1] I know the choke point is the graphics card, but if I change that it will be after everything else is taken care of. While I'm not utterly thrilled with what I am using, it is pretty gonzo and will do for some time, I expect.

Current Mood: curious

This applies to more than RCFM, but it did come up at RCFM a few times. People recognized me (am I that distinctive, really?) even before I had a badge on to readily identify myself. That's fine and I have no problem with that. But there is the implied expectation that because someone knows who I am, that I reciprocally know who they are. This is seldom the case.

If I were famous or even merely well-known the situation might make more sense, but I am not certainly not famous and I don't consider myself well-known. I sort of like it that way. The well-known have stories told about them, and those stories are not necessarily complimentary.

What happens here, is that unless I meet someone several times and for an extended time I tend not to remember them very well. I can be introduced to someone in a crowd and a few minutes later be going, "I've met him, but I have no idea who he is." I've been used to this sort of thing for years. When someone greets me in passing, I try to at least say "Hi" or such in passing, though often we're then far enough past each other that it's rather pointless. I'm not trying to be aloof or cold or distant. I tend not to be the first one to say something. It's safer as then I don't have to deal with, "Oh, sorry, I thought you were someone else.." or such.

I had been saying that I needed to see people fairly often to recognize them, and that's mostly true. I can pick up on some folks if I see them outside of a crowd. It's part of the reason I like smaller groups when something is going on, like going out to eat. It's just more manageable.

So, if you see me somewhere and introduce yourself.. and a few hours later I act like I have no idea who you are, please don't be offended. I'm not blowing you off or being intentionally rude. People have to earn that - and very few have put forth the amount of effort required to cross that line. Just don't be surprised or offended if I talk for bit trying to get my bearings and finally give up and ask, "Who are you?"

Current Mood: kind of embarrassed, actually

Entries tagged with memory

1600 after all.

Hardware and Software changes

Anyone know what RAM specs actually matter?

"I don't mean to be rude, but who are you again?"

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March 2024

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