Assembling yet another computer

I recently put together a new computer at work. It consists of an Asus M4A89GTD Pro motherboard in a Codegen M-610 case and some other components, including two 1 TB hard disks in a RAID 1 setup.

Compared to my personal computer, you could definitely tell the case was a cheap one. You were supposed to raise the motherboard up and away from the side of the case with 8 or 9 gold-colored screws, I think, but included with the case there were one too few of those. There was also only some four proper large'ish screws to secure the motherboard to those raising screws, so I had to use some smaller screws for the rest. They were possibly meant for hard disks but had the same diameter anyway.

Also, it was impossible to install the optical drive from inside the case, as the case is small and the power supply unit was too close to the front of the case. As a result, I had to yank off the entire front panel of the case. (Well, it was re-attachable.) There were some rubber things that you could push to the holes on the sides of the optical drive to secure it in place, but those quickly got mangled and I had to shuffle them around a bit to get them to stay in shape while sliding the optical drive past them.

The most show-stopping issue came then: the PSU only had two sockets for giving power to SATA drives! So I had to choose between (a) an optical disk drive and one hard drive or (b) two hard drives. I needed the optical drive to install the operating system (CentOS) but I also wanted a RAID 1 configuration.

This turned out to be a non-issue after all, as the motherboard's RAID controller easily created the configuration after I had installed the system, powered off the computer and swapped the optical drive for the hard disk. It was actually so quick I thought it did nothing, but I had to believe it after I powered the computer off again, pulled off the cable of the first drive -- and successfully booted the computer into the operating system, with a brief warning from the RAID controller.

So, what did we learn? Don't buy the cheapest case around there if you intend to build your computer yourself. The cheap cases are small, they might not have enough screws, and their power supply units will lack connectors. You probably couldn't fit a large video card into this case either. The motherboard seemed OK though, and the RAID controller appears to work very well.

I forgot already, but either the motherboard or the case came with a small socket thing into which you could connect the little wires from the case: the disk activity led, the power button, etc. Then that socket could be attached into the motherboard at once. That's a hundred times easier than connecting all those wires directly into the motherboard and I'm a bit jealous that my more expensive case did not have such a socket, even though it's not a new invention.

Finally, here's a bad quality photo of the case with the motherboard. There's also an AMD Athlon II X4 640 processor with the boxed heat sink and fan installed. You'll see that they are approximately as tiny as with my own quad-core Intel's boxed accessories that I recently replaced.

Thermalright Silver Arrow in a Nexus Version1 with Asus P7P55D-E LX

In November when I bought a new computer I wrote that I should've also bought a proper CPU cooler instead of going with the boxed heat sink and fan. Now with the summer and warmer weather coming I finally did that. After reading some reviews I chose the Thermalright Silver Arrow which had received some favorable reviews. I checked the specs for the thing and saw that it was 163 mm tall. Well, good! There is approximately 168 mm of space above the motherboard in my Nexus Version1 case, so there's plenty of room (well, 5 mm!) for the cooler. At most I'd have to rip some of the noise absorbing material out.

The installation would have been easy with a brand new computer. However, as I had already once assembled it, I now had to remove almost all of the components so that I could install the supporting prop thing under the motherboard. Without it, the heavy cooler would most likely just bend the entire CPU socket out of the motherboard, destroying it.

Now I had finally disassembled and assembled my computer again. But d'oh! It turns out that the cooler is indeed 163 mm tall, but it is installed to the top of the CPU, about 10 mm above the motherboard! So, now the case cannot be closed as the heat sink extends out 5 mm too much. :(

You wouldn't think a normal case would pose a problem to any heat sink, but the Silver Arrow is just huge! I was more concerned that it wouldn't fit on the motherboard as there are many components that might be too tall and prevent the cooler from being installed. I looked up some random Thermalright Silver Arrow Motherboard Compatible List which said my motherboard, an Asus P7P55D-E LX, would be compatible with the cooler. Turns out, that list was slightly optimistic. In theory the Silver Arrow can be installed in two ways and in those two ways the two fans can have two different configurations. However, it appears that only one fan can be used with the motherboard! The fan would fit above the heat sink but the metal rods that secure it tightly in its place would make a contact with the bottom of the graphics card. The fan cannot face the back side of the case as the Ethernet, USB and other connectors don't leave any room for it. The bottom side is out of question as well because of the interestingly placed hard disk holder of the case, and the fan cannot be placed towards the front of the case either because that's were the RAM modules are.

Luckily the cooler works fine with only one fan that's installed in the middle of it. With the boxed cooler running the system at a 25 percent load would bring the CPU temperature up to 75 to 80 °C. With the Silver Arrow and just one fan the same temperature isn't achieved even at a 50 percent load and even then the noise is much more bearable than with the boxed cooler. The system idle temperature is also 10 to 20 °C cooler than with the boxed heat sink and fan.

Bottom line: the cooler works very well but now I have to use my computer without the side panel of the case. Because of this I unfortunately cannot recommend the Silver Arrow if you happen to have a Nexus Version1 case or any other case thinner than 210 mm or so. With a sufficiently large case, however, it is undoubtedly one of the best coolers out there.

Finally, here are some photos. The first photo shows the boxed heat sink and fan, right there in the middle:

The second photo shows the system with the boxed cooler replaced with the Silver Arrow:

New computer for playing Civ5

So, a month went without any updates, sorry about that to both of my readers. What have I been up to? Well, I bought Civilization V but found out that my computers wouldn't run it. The game wouldn't even start on my 9-year-old desktop computer. It did start on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook, but it took no less than 15 minutes to get into the game with all the loading, and even then the game responded to mouse clicks with a one second lag. So, I was forced to buy a new desktop computer.

My new desktop computer is built on an Asus P7P55D-E LX motherboard into a Nexus Version 1 case. It has got 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, an Intel Core I7-870 processor and a silent Gigabyte R575SL-1GI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card. There's also an OCZ Agility 2 90 GB SSD data storage device. The computer is fast and rather quiet. :) A small mistake was that I bought the processor as the boxed version, i.e. with a heatsink and a fan. A separate, larger heatsink would've been in order as under full stress the CPU core temperature rises above 90 °C, when the idle temperature is around 40 °C! :O Intel customer service did assure me that modern processors can take high temperatures and that the CPU will shutdown itself to protect itself before any damage occurs, but I'm still a bit skeptical... Maybe I'll buy a better heatsink (something like this) later.

So anyway, the new machine runs Civilization V (and other games) very smoothly. :) In case you are interested in my experiences with the game, see my blog post at the Civilization wiki. There's also another game log I posted.

HD videos

Slashdot recently featured an article called How to play HD video on a netbook by PCPro. It includes buying a codec for about $10 (although someone commented on the original story that Shark007's codecs do the same thing for free). However, I'm happy to report that the Asus EeePC 1101HA plays HD videos out of the box! I tried it with a 1920×816 (1080p), 23.967 FPS trailer of The Bourne Ultimatum, found from H264info.com. As is mentioned in the PCPro article too, some stutter in the video is inevitable, especially in the scenes where a lot is happening at once, but basically it is perfectly watchable anyway. The sound plays very smoothly and there was no stutter to be heard.

Sounds

I noticed that I haven't written anything about the speakers or the general quality of audio regarding the Asus EeePC 1101HA, so I guess it's time to fix that. In short, the speakers are no better than with any other laptop you may have used. They are definitely not designed for listening to music. They do well enough when playing speech driven games such as Monkey Island which only has ambient background music, but otherwise you're better off just muting the device altogether.

That being said, I find that the netbook's audio jack's output quality is from an entirely different world. Plug it into a proper amplifier and speakers and I, for one, couldn't tell it from a more professional audio source. :) The same goes for proper headphones.

While we are talking about audio, here are a few links to Spotify songs that you may use to either torture or gentle your ears, depending on your speakers (and personal taste):

System Of A Down – Vicinity Of Obscenity

Queen – Don't Stop Me Now

Trio Töykeät – Pizzitaxi

The Offspring – What Happened to You? 

ReadyBoost

Trying to improve the performance of my netbook led me to try out the Windows ReadyBoost feature. ReadyBoost is a feature that utilizes a memory stick or a memory card as a fast cache, in addition to using the slow hard disk. This works because flash memory is usually faster than a hard drive, at least in random reads/writes. So, I used my USB memory for a while and, while I did not commit any actual measurings, I felt the computer was indeed more responsive, especially when multiple programs were running simultaneously.

Because a memory stick sticking out from the side of the netbook is not a very nice feature I went ahead and bought a fast SDHC card (Class 6, 8 GB, ~14 €) to be permanently stuck into the memory card slot (which, by the way, in Asus EeePC 1101HA's case only supports SD, SDHC and MMC cards and not, for example, MemoryStick cards..). Then I formatted the card into the new exFAT file system and gave it to Windows to be used as a ReadyBoost disk.

You may think that this is a waste of money and time but as far as I can see it is never a bad idea to buy SD cards. Firstly, many, if not most, digital cameras support those. Secondly, 8 GB is quite a lot of space, so the card could well be used for copying files from one computer to another. Thirdly, you could just use it like any other drive in your computer and, for example, install another operating system (namely Linux or Chrome) to it. Running an OS from a flash disk should save the battery because flash disks only consume a fraction of power compared to the regular, spinning disks. So who knows, I might do that some day. And if I do, I will be posting about my experiences here.

Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 review & X-Mouse Button Control

I started writing this post and noticed that I was never getting to the actual point, so here it is in the first paragraph. Software of the day: X-Mouse Button Control. Why? Read on if you are still interested.

I believe that everyone prefers a real mouse to a touchpad. I do too, and with a portable computer I wanted the mouse to be portable as well, so I bought a cordless one. More specifically a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, since I had bought a Bluetooth dongle too.

The mouse is quite small but feels good and it comes with a neat protective bag. I have two main problems with the mouse, though: firstly, it only has one extra button and secondly, Microsoft drivers do not even support this mouse at all! It is a problem recognized by Microsoft too, and I doubt they will be doing much about it. The extra button, that is on the left side of the mouse, is set to do the "Back" action by default. That's all nice and well but I use mouse gestures with my browsers so I don't do anything with a back button.

With my desktop computer I use a mouse that has got two buttons on the side. I have binded those to Ctrl and Shift, because you often need to do ctrl-clicks or shift-drags or something similar. It is a Logitech mouse and I was able to do that with Logitech software.

But, as I already wrote, the Microsoft software does not support the Bluetooth Mouse 5000. I started to look for another piece of software that I could use to rebind my mouse button functions and found X-Mouse Button Control. And it turned out to be even better than I expected! Not only are you able to rebind all the buttons, you can do that on a per-program basis. In a Media Player you could have the wheel adjust the volume and in all other programs to scroll. In games you can adjust the buttons to whatever key combinations you please, etc. So don't wait anymore, go download it!

Asus EeePC 1101HA review

I wrote this review when I had had the netbook for a month and published it elsewhere in Finnish. People seemed to like it so I have now translated it into English.

***

I have had this netbook for a month now and I've been pleased with it. I've never really liked the keyboards of laptop computers but writing with this one can even be a joy, even though some ergonomic bending would still be nice. Only darkness causes problems: the keyboard has no backlighting and it is very difficult to see the markings in the glow of the screen only. Good details, on the other hand, are the placements of the Delete and Ctrl keys: right in the upper right corner and in the lower left corner, respectively. After using this layout you will be at loss with any other laptop keyboards.

I believe that the EeePC 1101HA comes in two versions: one with a Bluetooth receiver/transmitter and the other without. Because I did not read the specs carefully enough I happened to get one without, so I had to buy a separate Bluetooth dongle. That one has been working perfectly both with my cellphone and with my cordless mouse, though.

The netbook in itself is silent and the fans can only be heard in a quiet room. The keyboard is rather noisy though and you wouldn't want to type a lot in a silent room with other people in it.

The computer does not get too warm and you can, for example, use it comfortably on your lap in jeans in a subway. In a warm room and in thin pants it may still get too warm. Because the computer is so small it is not too stable and when using it on your lap you should keep your legs at least almost together, and certainly not one leg over the other.

The computer is not too fast to wake up from the hibernate mode, at least if there are several programs running. Waking up from the sleep mode is fast.

The netbook came with Windows 7 and you were allowed to choose your language from, if I recall correctly, the Scandinavian languages, Finnish and English. I chose English. Windows 7 is otherwise a nice operating system but you must not let it choose the graphics settings by itself. Some of the bells and whistles of the interface should be toggled of immediately to ensure smoother experience.

The touchpad can do a few two-finger mouse gestures: scroll, zoom and rotate. However, the zoom works quite slowly (or not at all) in many programs and the rotating gesture has even less support. Scrolling works fine, as you'd expect.

The viewing angles of the screen are horizontally in an acceptable level, but if viewed from too high or too low the screen quickly gets darker, so sometimes you wish you could tilt the screen back even more.

As I'm writing this the computer is in power saving mode and informs me that there's 80 percent or 7 hours of the battery left, so the battery life time seems very good.

The 250 GB hard disk is, in my opinion, way too large. I would've liked to have an SSD drive because those are way faster, more durable and less power consuming than regular hard disks. Even 64 GB would've been plenty. Too bad you cannot customize netbooks when you are buying them.

As a 11.6" computer I find this netbook very handy and small but not too small. The laptops with screen size less than ten inches don't really improve the user experience compared to, say, a cellphone. The native resolution of the screen is 1366x768 which is guaranteed to produce too small text for some people by default, but you can always adjust the text size so it should not be a problem.

Finally some raw data about the performance for those who are into numbers:

The Windows Experience Index: A rating calculated by Windows for the various parts of the computer. 1.0 is the lowest rating, 7.9 is the highest.
Processor: 2.1
Memory (RAM): 4.3
Graphics: 2.9
Gaming graphics: 2.3
Primary hard disk: 5.7

BOINC CPU benchmarks:
Number of CPYs: 2
489 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
1005 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU