white noise

This past weekend I put the finishing touches on the big red box. Here’s a rundown of all the last projects in pics.

Added handles. These are standard drawer handles from Lowes.

Added soft grips to feet. The original feet were clear acrylic – nice looking, but hard and smooth. These pads add some grip and may quiet things a bit.

Created green board cover. Remember how the wireless network card had a green circuit board? I made this cover from a piece of acrylic, some black mesh, and an old ISA slot cover.

Using the same mesh I covered the top of the front panel bay device just to clean up the appearance.

Added third hard drive. Brought one more drive over from my old machine. This one sits behind the front 120mm fan.

So what’s to be made of all those numbers in the previous post? What kind of difference has all that tuning made to performance? Let’s take a look.

3Dmark06

This is the previous gen benchmark from Futuremark and is still useful for comparing against older DX9 systems. Here I could compare my stock and overclocked scores from the new I7 machine to my previous best score from my old 939 system (AMD X2 4400+ OC’d to 2.6, 7900GT OC).

3Dmark Vantage

Vantage is the latest benchmark from Futuremark and it puts a good test on the graphics system (including DX10 features) and the CPU (including physics processing). Incidentally, during the overclocked run the CPU temp peaked at 76°C and the GPU hit 65°C.

Crysis

Since it was released in Nov ’07 the game has been making graphics cards cry uncle. Using the CryEngine 2 engine it takes advantage of the latest DX10 features and makes extensive use of physics processing. The game includes a built-in benchmarking utility which makes for reproducible test runs. The temperatures reached in the overclocked configuration were 65°C on the GPU in the graphics test and 54°C on the CPU in the CPU test. Both tests were run with 64bit high quality settings, 1920×1080, and 2x anti-aliasing.

Team Fortress 2

TF2 is a fairly low demanding game graphics-wise, but one I play a lot. This benchmark (as well as for the other games) was averaged from multiple runs of typical gameplay at max quality settings.

Left 4 Dead

L4D is one of Steam’s newest game set in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The number of on screen models and sophisticated physics and AI engine make the game fairly demanding on the highest quality settings (1920×1080, 4x anti-aliasing, 4x filtering, high quality)

UT3

Unreal has been a staple of fast-paced FPS for years. UT3 is a couple years old now, but still provides a decent graphics test with high settings (1920×1080, max quality).

Audio Encoding

For this test I ripped an audio CD to mp3 (13 tracks, 256kbps, CBR, Lame encoder).

Video Encoding

For this test I converted a 40MB flv video to mp4 H.264.

WinZip

Here I compressed 223MB (17 files) into a new zip archive.

In summary, while the synthetic benchmarks show sizable gains from overclocking, most games already run so smooth on this platform that there is only a relatively small difference in frames per second. The improvement tends to be about 10% which is in line with the overclocking on the graphics card. The big boost I made to the CPU simply doesn’t factor into in-game performance since there is already ample processing power. In comparison, the encoding and compression tasks that rely on the CPU showed a nice 20-30% performance bump.

With the hardware side of my build nearing the end, I’ve been working on system tweaking and overclocking. The new I7 platform has a lot of new overclocking facets to it over the AMD architecture that I was used to. I7 overclocking revolves around the base clock frequency (Bclock) a pretty close analog to the Front-Side Bus speed of the old days. Changing the Bclock affects the speed of the CPU, the L3 cache, the on-chip memory controller, and the RAM and each one of those is further tailored by a multiplier. Another new player is the Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) which is like the HyperTransport that AMD has had for years – in lieu of a Front-Side Bus, the QPI connects the CPU to the motherboard chipset. Generally the QPI has plenty of bandwidth so you can keep it scaled back a bit as you crank up the CPU and memory. And of course with overclocking comes voltage tweaks to feed the power that’s necessary.

The bios on my new machine gives access to tweak all these thing and is laid out very well. It also supports storing overclock settings to different profiles to make it easy to switch around and compare. Here’s the screen that deals will the clocks and multipliers (with the default settings). Besides this there is another screen for changing voltages and another for RAM timings.

In my first tweak session, I initially pushed things too fast without the necessary bump in voltage and it wouldn’t post. After edging some voltages up (Vcore and VTT) and the speed (Bclock) back down I starting having more success. After several more trials over a couple weeks I got things dialed in pretty well, while not raising the voltages (and the temps) too far. Currently I’ve raised the CPU up around 43% to 3.8GHz. That’s over a full gHz over the stock speed (for free!) so I’m pretty pleased. I have speed stepping still on so it doesn’t run at that speed full-time, though. I also have Intel’s Turbo feature enabled which means at times one core may jump up to about 4Ghz!

I also cranked the graphics card up just a bit. My GTX260 is already EVGA’s factory overclocked model, so I didn’t want to push it too much further, but with decent cooling in my case I knew I could get by with a little.

While the overclocking and tuning continues, I did manage to finish the case lights over the weekend. I choose to use white lights so the colors of everything (which have been all nicely coordinated, after all) wouldn’t be washed in any particular color. I got a couple 12″ Logisys LED sticks. They are just like the more common cold cathode tubes, except inside the tube is a very slim circuit board with LEDs mounted to it. It tends to be a little cooler than the CCFL route and more importantly takes 12 volts directory without the need of an inverter module.

The only trouble with these lights is that with 18 white LEDs each(!) they are crazy bright, especially in a darkened room. So I decided I’d create a little screen over each one to tone them down. I found this decorative mesh at Home Depot which had the open to closed ratio I was looking for. I cut off a couple chunks with tin snips and folded it into a U-shape, then painted it red to match the case.

Then I slipped each LED tube into its screen and mounted them to either side of the top of the case with zip ties. I also soldered everything up to the switch and mounted it to the front panel. I’m pleased with the final effect. The light is white so you can see the red and black theme inside nicely, but you don’t feel the need for sunglasses.