quad-g5

Because of a recent lightning-strike, my gaming-rig literally spiked... and died...

But, thanks to very nice family-members I got replacement components, very quickly ;) :P since I was getting quite a few bucks in insurance (eventually, may'16) I decided to completely upgrade the whole rig.

After spending an afternoon researching (after months of contemplating on models and makes), I eventually landed on the following choices:

Component selection

• Gigabyte Z170MX-Gaming 5 motherboard
• 2 x 8GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 2666MHz RAM-modules
• Intel® Core i5 6600K 3.5GHz CPU
• Intel® 535 SSD 240GB SATA 3.0 game-storage
• EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB GDDR5 PhysX graphics-adapter
• Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO CPU-cooler 

No fight to assemble the beast, at least not a lot. The CPU-cooler took some getting used to only having to screw together the mount(s), and pressing it into the motherboard (Cooler Master's *brilliant* Intel-type push-plugs -_-).

All components assembled into north+south-bridge(s)

It also helps to be prepared for a future lightning-strike, by using a 80-PLUS-Gold-certified PSU that sports: over-voltage protection, under-voltage protection, short circuit protection and over power protection.

Corsair RM850x PSU (Power Supply Unit)

Combined with a power-strip sporting surge protection, I'd say I'm much better equipped for the ominous scandinavian weather-system now, than before.

Giving a combined performance-boost of ~50% in heavy 3D and rendering cases :) and (roughly) around a 45-50% reduction in heavy-load temperatures as well as idle temperatures (Intel < AMD), I'd say I'm really pleased ;)

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Quite the OP setup, at least compared to my earlier rig (h3x). Geekbench3-results confirm this:

• quad-g5 geekbench3 multicore-score:
  13380 ('2016)
• h3x geekbench3 multicore-score:
  8305 ('2013) 

*** FINGERS CROSSED ***

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Update May 11th:

Added extra 92mm Cooler Master cpu-fan as exhaust-booster

h3x - upgrade part II

Upgrade-time! :) ...and this time h3x is undergoing a complete cabinet+gfx upgrade. From a rather minimalistic HTPC starter-cabinet, into a completely new 2-sectioned, airflow-designed multi-cabinet :)

Fractal Design Node 804 cabinet
Corsair CX600 PSU
3 x Corsair SP120 "Quiet Ed" fans

My new XFX Radeon R9 270X 2GB GDDR5:
1xHDMI - 2xDVI-D - 2xDP

Disassembly

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Silverstone MILO (ML03) when first built (nov'2011)

Silverstone MILO (ML03) disassembled.

The above picture shows my old HTPC cabinet after being almost completely stripped. Only things still left inside are the system-SSD (Corsair ForceGT) and the 400W PSU (Silver Power).

I did not foresee how hard it would be to dismantle the MILO HTPC mATX-cabinet, everything was so close together that it made it near impossible to figure out where to start off.

After viewing it from different angles, and bringing in a fresh set of eyes; everything got pulled out eventually

Then, the time to re-mount everything again came around.

Re-assembly

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• First: the PSU.

Right side.

Back-right profile.

• Then; motherboard + RAM + CPU.

Front-left profile.

Left side.

• And to finish it off: graphics-accelerator + HDD + SSD.

Left side: Component-compartment.

Right side: Storage- / power-compartment.

I now have a overhauled gaming-rig / workstation / hypervisor with 3-4x more graphics-processing power than I previously had :P and it WILL get tested ;)

I opted to using the 3 Corsair SP120 fans in the front, to complement the total airflow going through the cabinet. So that's a total of 4 fans in the front for intake and 2 in the back for exhaust.

VMware ESXi 5.0 upd1

I haven't been that consistent about posting on this blog lately. But here's a little re-cap of my computing escapades for the last months:

I've updated my WD 4GB USB dongle with VMware ESXi 5.0 update1 hypervisor. Yes, I've set out into the virtualization cloud ;) running through 1.8TB X-RAID array via iSCSI.

I have also upgraded the graphics-setup in "h3x", it now sports a brand-spanking-new Nvidia GeForce GT520 Silent. Testing out this card blew me away :D then again, last time I invested money in a decent gfx-setup was back in the AGP-days :p PCIe 2.0 x16 definitely kicks ass!

I had to add certain PPA-repositories (apt-get repos) to get a driver that would work in Linux Mint 13, but it was no hastle, and it worked like a charm :)

NVIDIA & Linux

Phoronix.com recently interviewed one of NVIDIA's core linux driver engineers --Alan Ritger-- along with their technical marketing manager --Sean Kilbride-- about their development processes, IDE's, test-tools, etc. It proved to be quite an interesting read.

According to Ritger, NVIDIA engineers uses 'Perforce' for code management on big projects and/or big modifications, but are also able to maintain their own source tree with either git or quilt before submitting their changes to Perforce for quality assurance and to be included in the mainline code tree @ NVIDIA.

Phoronix also asked which IDE's and/or text editors they use, and Ritger said most engineers @ NVIDIA use either emacs or vim for their day-to-day development work. We're talking hardcore oldschool command-line development tools here.

Ritger also said most engineers use x86 as their base platform for driver development, but also focus alot on x86_64 for testing because most OEMs utilize 64bit nowadays.

Testing (which won't come as a shock to most linux-enthusiasts) is mostly done with in-house OpenGL test-tools, modified by engineers to reflect additional OpenGL extensions that are added and to accomodate for new GPU cores to be thoroughly tested. Games used in testing range from Quake 3, Doom 3 all the way up to ETQW. Testing frameworks include Viewperf, Unigine Tropics, Maya and yes, they even tend to use glxgears as a simple sanity test from time to time ;)

What DID shock me in the intervew however, was the question of how much codebase is shared between Linux and Windows, and the answer is, the OpenGL codebase shares A WHOPPING 90%! Yes, both Linux and Windows share a massive 90% of the NVIDIA OpenGL codebase. The X Windows driver is more UNIX-focused, but shares some code from the NVIDIA display drivers from other platforms and systems.

The main focus of the Linux NVIDIA driver development groups are for the Linux workstations used in the TV/movie-industry for advanced 3D work. But since their test-tools include a few popular computer games, the gaming aspect of it all is not completely forgotten :)

Even Ritger himself does a round of xpilot from time to time ;D

Link:
http://www.phoronix.com/ - 8-page interview