Monday, September 29, 2008

New PC build - It's alive!

Here are the specs for my recent PC build:

- Antec P182 Gun Metal Black PC case
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1333MHz FSB
- PATRIOT 2GB kit (1gb x 2) PC2-6400 800mhz, 4-4-4-12, 240-pin DDR2 DIMM w/heat spreader x 2 = 4GB total
- EVGA LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Mobo
- EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready
- PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W, single 12V rail 60A, 80 PLUS Certified
- SEAGATE 500gb Serial ATA-300 HDD, 32MB buffer
- LG Blu-Ray & HD DVD Serial ATA Internal Reader / DVD Burner
- LITE-ON DVD Burner

With the exception of the PC case, I purchased all my components from Mwave.com. They are very comparable to Newegg in terms of pricing but they are more local to me and feature a will call pick up which I like and in-store support. The in-store support actually came in very handy as you will read about below.

Now, if you made it this far, I assume you have at least some interest in PCs. If you don't care about why I chose the components that I chose, just skip on down to the last paragraph but I personally find it very interesting in understanding what led a person to purchase what he or she decided to purchase. So hence, a somewhat long write up from here on out.

My PC from 2004 was as loud as a vacuum cleaner during a full load and fairly noisy during idle. So this time I really wanted to build a "quiet PC". The Antec P182 comes with three layer "sound deadening" panels for the sides and front door and three 120mm fans with three adjustable speeds (mine actually came with a few extra spare fans due to known fan issue on early production models) so I installed 2 fans at the top rear to draw heat from the CPU and Northbridge, one in front middle to draw heat away from the GPU, and one in front of the PSU to draw heat away from the HDD. The fans are very quiet at the low setting and even though I have four fans running, the overall system is much much more quiet compared to my old PC. What is also a nice design feature is how you can stash cables behind the motherboard panel which really improves the air flow as well as making a much cleaner looking layout inside the chassis. And another unique feature of this case is that the PSU is mounted at the bottom of the chassis and not the top.



I had debated whether to go quad core or dual core since they are both currently similar in price but the quad core runs at a lower clock frequency. I ultimately chose to go dual core since my primary application is gaming and dual core is arguably better for this type of application. The "Wolfdale" (45 nm) E8400 hit my price-to-performance target so I went with it. The fact that the Wolfdale's are based on the 45nm process and thus draw less power and less heat and therefore the cooling fans produce less noise is a nice plus. A few months back, I thought I was going to wait for Intel's next gen Nahalem architecture, but in looking at the 2009 roadmap and given what I wanted to do today, I didn't feel the wait was worth it.

I read a lot of praise as well as some rants about EVGA's 780i based motherboard but I felt the good outweighed the bad. I suppose I could have saved a few bucks with the 750i chipset instead of the 780i but I figured it was not too much more and just went with the 780i. There really isn't a whole lot of performance difference between the two. So yes, I admit it was not a real data driven decision in this instance.

The time I didn't spend in scrutinizing the motherboard I made up for in selecting the GPU. My short list was 1) dual Nvidia 8800 GTs in SLI 2) AMD/ATI HD 4870 3) Nvidia GTX 260. Long story short, the power draw of the 4870 vs the GTX 260 made me rule it out. A pair of 8800 GTs can in fact beat a single next gen Nvidia GTX 260 and the 8800 GT SLI pair is in fact cheaper but I really wanted a single GPU card that was fast enough to run the game Crysis at high res and high setttings but also have the option to go SLI later on if I wanted to. A $40 MIR on the GTX 260 made the price gap small enough vs the 8800GT SLI set up to push me over the edge. If you look at GTX 260 card, you will notice how big it is. That's because it is freakin' big! So big in fact that I could not mount my hard drive in the middle chamber near the front of the chassis. I guess with these latest gen cards, you no longer see the PCB anymore. Just all solid plastic housing which is kind of cool as it gives it a nice, rugged feel.

For the RAM, I played it safe and only went with what was approved on EVGA's site. So while I originally wanted 2 x 2 GB sticks, I ultimately went with 4 x 1GBs from Patriot with 4-4-4-12 timings which are pretty fast. I am still using Win XP Pro so the OS is only seeing 2.7 GB. I am just not ready to go to Vista yet.

This is the first build where I budgeted for the PSU as a seperate unit. I've seen a number of cheap PSUs go bad that I now know not to skimp on this component. I like PC Power & Cooling's single 12V rail design and the beefy 60A rating. And it's 80 Plus certified and the PSU does live up to it's "Silencer" marketing. Despite what Nvidia's official SLI certification site says, I should be able to add another GTX 260 GPU in the future if I want to.

Hard drives are always relatively inexpensive. I tend to stick with Seagate for their overall performance, low noise levels, and 5 year warranty. For a fleeting moment, I thought about going Raid 0 but it wasn't a priority for me and it would have broken my budget. However, I am considering a future upgrade to a pair of WD 300GB VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM SATA drives if the price is right.

I've come this far - Hey, I want to be able to watch Blu Ray and HD DVD too! The LG dual format reader does in fact play back both Blu Ray and HD DVD. The GTX 260 came with a DVI male-to-HDMI female adapter. I can see my Windows desktop on the plasma TV upstairs but when I tried playing back an HD DVD this morning, I received an HDCP error which I am not sure why at the moment since both the GTX 260 and my TV are HDCP compliant. I need to research this issue.

It wasn't easy to get my set up up and running. I seem to have bad luck when it comes to getting things to work right the first time. A week ago I spent all of Saturday physically putting the PC together. Upon power on I had hard time passing POST - sometimes I could get to the BIOS but most times I was stuck in POST. As you can imagine this was extremely frustrating since I checked and re-checked every component and made sure it was properly installed. A nice feature on the motherboard is a two digit LED display of the POST code. It allowed me to better isolate the possible issue, reference the manual for a description and go on the forums to kind of narrow down the issue. But long story short, I ultimately had to take my PC back to back Mwave. According to the tech (Hector), I had bad DRAM. I found it hard to believe that all four of my DRAM sticks were bad at the same time. But even I tried to boot with one stick of RAM at a time and couldn't pass POST. Hector also replaced the motherboard and PSU. They may or may not have contributed to the problem but Hector got my PC up and running and saved me a LOT of time with the trial and error and RMA hassles so I obviously was not going to question whatever he did. In fact I have nothing but praise for Mwave's service overall. Hector gave me regular status updates and updated my Windows XP to SP3 and updated my BIOS and drivers to the latest versions. He went beyond just getting my system to work. As another footnote - there is a good reason why Antec provided those extra fans. It turns out the chassis fans that were pre-installed were flaky (known issue) and if they were plugged in to the PSU, I would often not be able to see my monitor display upon boot up. When I replaced the "bad fans" with the spares, my system would boot up fine every time. I am still appalled by how many issues I ran into with this build! It really is amazing.

So here is the final box with everything installed without any sign or indication of the time and effort that went into it.


I actually didn't know Mwave offered custom build and troubleshooting services until -after- I had ordered everything, picked up the parts, assembled at home and ran into my issues and then went on the forums where some guy had posted a link of Mwave's support services. Maybe I am oblivious but to me, these services were not advertised well on their website. If I had to do it all over again, I'd definitely pay to have Mwave build it for me. Don't get me wrong, PC building can be fun and challenging but it can be very very time consuming when things don't work as they should as in my case - if you ask me, it's well worth the cost to have the same vendor do the entire system build who can easily isolate any issue and easily replace any part as needed.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Resurrecting my old PC

Ha, I'm feeling pretty idiotic but happy at the same time.

I made a PC components "wish list" back in Nov 2005 since the PC I had built in March of 2004 could not run a game I had wanted to play at the time, Battlefield 2 .

$125 - AMD 3000+ (Socket 939)
$127 - Asus SLI motherboard
$85 - Corsair Value 1GB
$99 - Antec Sonata II w/ 450W PSU
$175 - WD Raptor 74GB
$333 - eVGA 7800GT 256MB
$333 - eVGA 7800GT 256MB
$46 - NEC ND-3540A 16X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
$1323 - Total cost as of Nov 2005

However, frugality prevailed. At that time, I couldn't justify the cost of building a new PC given that my PC from spring 2004 was less than 2 years old and it would just be for one game. Historically, $1300 has been my target budget. For that amount I could indeed get much better GPUs (I wanted SLI) but I could only afford the same CPU (my 2004 AMD 3000+ CPU is a socket 754 version) and the same amount of RAM. I thought to myself, "not a big enough upgrade for $1300." So in March of 2006, I ended up getting a 7800GS AGP GPU card as a stop gap which has served me very well.

Fast forward to Sept 2008. This year has shown some amazing price-to-performance on all PC components and I've amassed a backlog of more recent PC games as my old PC simply did not have enough horsepower to run them.

So I thought to myself that I would take my time and snap up on deals for components if the price was right. I picked up the Antec P182 case that went on sale and wanted to try out the case by moving the motherboard over from my older 2004 PC. In the process of doing this, I thought I had fried my old PC motherboard. I was working on the carpet in our loft and me being stupidly lazy, I did not properly ground myself. Yes, *smack my hand*. Before I moved anything from the old chassis to the new one I unplugged a few cables from the mother board such as the chassis power switch cable and the reset switch cable. Not too long afterwards, I changed my mind on moving over my old components to the new chassis and plugged the old cables back in to the old chassis. I then re-tried powering on the old chassis. The PC would not boot up at all. *Doh!* The light on the motherboard would show power but when you pressed the power switch, the chassis fan and CPU fan would move a little but that's it. I unplugged all the motherboard cables and reseated the hard drive IDE and power cables, the GPU card, and the power supply from the motherboard. This went on for a while until I was convinced that I had fried my motherboard.

I said to myself, "Great. Looks like I'll need to cough up for a new rig soon." I was frustrated and disappointed in myself since 1) I thought I had destroyed a good working PC and 2) I was now going to spend money much sooner than I had anticipated.

It didn't take me long to create a parts list for the new PC. You can read my follow up post above for the specifics.

To the reader who is familiar with PC building, you might have noticed that I did not mention whether or not I re-seated the DRAM. That's because I didn't and it turns out that a week later I had thought about doing it since it was the one of the two things I didn't try - the other being re-seating my CPU . I thought re-seating the DRAM would unlikely have any affect since I did not touch my DRAM at all during the previous week. But sure enough, I re-seated the DRAM and voila, my PC was able to boot up fine and it worked again! I am still unclear as to why this worked. By this time I had already ordered all the new PC components from mwave.com and there were no refunds on the retailed box CPU. I decided to just keep my order as it was and not return anything. Part of me felt like such a dunce! But to be perfectly honest, I got over it pretty quick. Having waited almost 3 years to build a new PC, I was actually more excited knowing a new PC was going to be made.

Praying Mantis on our porch

Stood right in front of our door. I wonder what was going on in it's mind.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Bank Safety Rating

If you don't feel like stuffing your mattress or if you have a tiny backyard, check this out and make sure your hard earned money is safe!

Monday, September 15, 2008

No place to hide

Bear Stearns, Indymac, Freddie/Fannie, Lehman, Merrill Lynch (I'm sure I'm missing quite a few more here) - Today's 500 pt Dow drop is the biggest in recent memory. Since March of this year, I've felt that the stock market has been an extremely dangerous game of catching falling knives. I had thought the smart money has been in FDIC insured savings accounts. But with the scale and speed of recent events, I'm not even sure about that anymore. Nervous times.

Nixon (Blu Ray)



Out of all the Oliver Stone's films that I've seen (JFK, Born on the 4th of July, Platoon, Natural Born Killers, Alexander, World Trade Center), Nixon is my personal favorite. I disagree with the critics who accuse Oliver Stone of being a history revisionist or a conspiracy theorist. I think those critics forget that Stone had set out to make a film (not a documentary) exploring the man, Richard Nixon. As you watch the film you can tell that extensive research was performed to make the events as accurate as possible but again, a film of this nature requires dramatic license - Stone even discloses this in the opening frames.

I've always loved Nixon as a character study as well as a Shakespearean-like tragedy. In the hands of another director, Nixon probably would have been reduced to a mere caricature but Stone paints a sensitive, moving, even-handed portrait of the much maligned president. Anthony Hopkins delivers an overwhelming performance as Nixon. It's amazing how seemingly easy that Hopkins inhabits the role of the former president - the intelligence, the ruthlessness, the paranoia, the manipulation, the awkwardness, the ambivalence as well as the humanity. Hopkins performs every gesture, nuance, inflection, and subtle expression that is as telling if not more that what he speaks verbally (ie Nixon's facial expressions often didn't match the words or what he was really thinking/feeling showing the inner conflict). The supporting cast are also amazing. Joan Allen more than holds her own as the first lady Pat Nixon. Mary Steenburgen as Nixon's mother Hannah Nixon, Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger, James Woods as H.R. Haldeman, the late JT Walsh as John Ehrlichman, Powers Boothe as General Al Haig... all top notch performances.

The screenplay is so awesome from beginning to end that it's really hard to pick a favorite scene. There are so many memorable scenes but the ones that come to mind as I write this,
- Opening bible verse from Matthew 16:26 .. very fitting for this film.
- Flashback scenes between Nixon and his mother - again, Mary Steenburgen is just wonderful here.
- Nixon vs CIA Director Helms - this was a deleted scene now restored into the film. I love the cat & mouse game here, the tension in this scene is awesome.
- Nixon & Manolo in the white house kitchen during the middle of the night. I love the reference to JFK and how Nixon was always under the shadow of JFK.
- Nixon & his staff on the presidential yacht - great writing here -> "triangular diplomacy," "bold moves," and "Nixon the madman."
- toward the end of the film where Nixon turns around and stares at the portrait of JFK -> that lingering "shadow of JFK" ... love it.
- Nixon and Kissinger in the Lincoln Room near the end of the film.
- Nixon's farewell speech - this was the actual speech from the real Richard Nixon. great speech. very emotional & heartfelt.

What ties the film together is the lovely score from John Williams. Most people know John Williams scores from movies like Star Wars but I think his score here is equally impressive and underappreciated.

Nixon moves at a very brisk pace with crisp editing and all the various montages. So even though the films clocks in at a staggering 3.5 hours there really isn't a dull moment. There is just tension, tension, tension from the get go and Stone keeps it that way throughout.

Stone's audio commentary is also a great listen. I love all the factoids as well as the insight as to why he composes the various scenes as he does. He's also very level headed especially in response to his critics.

Before this release, I've been "getting by" with the non anamorphic SD DVD and let me tell you - the SD DVD transfer left a lot to be desired. But the film itself is so strong that the experience with the SD DVD was better than say...VHS *gasp*. The Blu Ray, without a doubt, is a huge upgrade and really heightens the experience. Sure I could nitpick on the DNR but the overall upgrade in picture and sound is remarkable.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Mike's visit

Eating at Tom's #1 World famous Chiliburgers

This weekend Mike had a wedding to go to in Long Beach and crashed at our place. It was a bit of a drive for him from our house to the wedding but hopefully it was worth it for him. We had some interesting conversations on a variety of topics, played demo clips on the home theater for a good part of Sat evening, ate Shakey's pizza + mojo potatoes, had Lucille's BBQ the next day, and Tom's #1 World famous Chiliburgers the day after that. I feel a little guilty about subjecting Mike to all that unhealthy food this weekend but man, it sure tasted good. It turns out that Mike is also a fairly "selective" eater like me but in different ways.

With Mike's visit, I finally need more than two hands to count the number of bay area visitors. Mike could very well be our last visitor before we move back to the bay area. How special he is!