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As 2011 wound down, I did a little work to the Big Red Machine. Since its i7 (1366 socket) platform is still holding up well against Intel’s SandyBridge (v1 and 2), there’s no need to do a clean sweep for another year or even more. But as it gets close to it’s third birthday, a few updates were in order.

First up was a graphics card update. The overclocked gtx 260 has been holding up well, but is starting to show its age by not supporting DX11 for the latest releases. With Radeon cards outperforming their Nvidia counterparts dollar to dollar, I jumped over to team red and picked up a beefy Asus 6950 with 2GB ram. The card hits a good price point (right about what I spent for the 260) and matches up well with Nvidia’s gtx570. Even if it’s not the baddest boy around, this thing is a monster.

It sets up shop over three expansion slots and is about a foot long. Just a couple years ago I thought the 260 was huge, but now it looks modest. The 6950 also has a total of 6 outputs, for running more displays at once (with AMD Eyefinity) than I’ll ever need.

This particular 6950 excels at staying cool. It has a huge heatsink under that metal cover with several “direct contact” heat pipes, and two 100mm fans. I can definitely push this hard without cooking the box. New benchmarks for the graphics card will be posted soon.

After the gfx upgrade only one other thing was bothering me – the SSDs that were still sitting loose in the case. So, I finally popped for a 5.25 bay device to house up to 4 drives. Ok, I may have paid a bit more for one that matched my case perfectly, but it is a nice dock. Each drive can easily be swapped and locked, has it’s own activity LEDs, and has a direct backplane connection. I had to rearrange the other drives in my case a little to make it fit, but it’s so much cleaner now. My two RAID 0 SSDs are in there now, and I’ve got two more slots already connected up should I want to drop in a couple more.

Once the two SSDs were installed and recognized by Windows in RAID 0, it was time to move my boot partition from its 80GB 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda to the new RAID volume. First I used a Ghost boot disk to image the partition to a different drive. Then I used Ghost to take that image file and set up a new partition on the SSD volume. That second step of deploying the image took only about 10 and a half minutes to copy almost 31GB from the compressed image file. Not bad at all. Then with a quick trip back to the BIOS, I reordered the RAID to be the first boot drive. Then back in windows I just shuffled a couple drive letters around (moved the original c partition to the last letter – later I will clear this and merge it with another partition on the same disk). To wrap the setup, there were a handful of windows tweaks to streamline the use of the SSDs. All in all, super simple.

The difference was noticeable from these first couple reboots. While not the nearly-instant boot some youTube videos show, it was a marked improvement. Before and after the upgrade I timed the duration from power-on to the login screen and then from hitting enter on the login screen to a fully loaded desktop (and I have a LOT of services and tray apps that start). The pre-login time was improved, but so much of that is spent in POST steps the RAID only really kicks in when it gets to loading windows. On the other hand, the speed increase after logging in was awesome. The desktop comes up instantly and the tray apps (most of which are loaded on C), services, network connection (and login in to many services like steam, live, twitter, etc), are all ready in just a few seconds. The performance of other apps (on other drives) and games isn’t affected much, of course, but the OS overall feels snappier (even better than a brand new and optimized windows install). I’m looking forward to my upcoming Win7 upgrade to compare even further.

I ran several other benchmarks before and after. Some benchmarks are designed for spindle disks and others specifically for SSDs, and just a couple are decent at both, so I used:

• ATTO and Everest Disk Benchmarks for both
• HDtune, specifically for the Seagate HDD
• AS SSD Benchmark, specifically for the RAID

I also included a test of my 300GB VelociRaptor now and then just to add some sense of scale. All of the data shown below is average and sustained to be conservative (for short bursts the metrics may far exceed this – for example, Everest reported reads as fast 482 MB/s).

Every year I’m compelled to make at least one or two upgrades to my computer(s) — whether I need them or not. Related to my main rig (“big red”), the upgrades always occur before the summer MillionManLan so I can take full advantage of them during the 4 day game fest.

This year’s plan is to upgrade to Windows 7 (from Vista). But I couldn’t stop there. Solid State hard drives have been dropping in price and improving in performance and reliability over the past couple years. All the manufacturers are a couple generations into it, and new additions like wear leveling, TRIM and aggressive garbage collection have made SSDs a viable option for everyday use. Once I saw the 30GB OCZ Vertex drop to $80 on newegg I knew this was an upgrade that had to be done before upgrading to Win7.

It was only after I received the Vertex in the mail that I realized my C partition was occupying 35GB. I was able to trim it back a little, but with hardly any apps on that drive, the bloated 64bit OS was mostly to blame. It became clear that shrinking my boot partition to a size that would still leave a comfortable amount of worry-free room on a 30GB SSD just wasn’t going to happen. I decided with two SSDs in RAID 0 I would have plenty of space (~60GB), PLUS I’d seriously increase performance even further. After plenty of research on the pros and cons, it was decided and I bought another. Sure, I could have send the 30GB drive back and opted for a bigger disk, but the two smaller drives were actually no more expensive.

These guys are small! Here’s a comparison of both next to an old iPod.

The first step was physically installing the drives, which is easy because they are tiny. I was able to plug them into any remaining SATA ports on my motherboard (since the BIOS would allow for reordering later on). Since I was on Vista, all the necessary software to define the RAID volume on the ICH10R controller was already loaded. I just had to switch the IDE mode in the BIOS to “RAID” and then define the new RAID 0 volume from the two disks in the Intel Matrix Storage tool. So far so good…until I tried booting to Windows. BSOD. Every time. Setting the IDE mode in the BIOS mode back to AHCI fixed the problem, so there was clearly some RAID-related driver issue. But Vista is supposed to have that loaded by default, right? Heck, I could even see it in the system32 directory. I tried reinstalling the latest RAID driver for the ICH10R, switched back to RAID – same thing. I spent a full night reading different threads about people with similar problems. Turns out, even though Vista (and Win7) install the RAID driver, it’s actually disabled if you don’t use it from the start, and takes a Registry modification to enable. You’d think that changing the BIOS IDE mode would flip the driver in use, but it doesn’t. After a quick regedit, I was in business. Windows was booting in RAID mode (although at this point my ssd volume was still empty). In the next update I move the boot partition over and generate some fancy graphs.

As Christmas was rolling up at full speed, I set out to prep a decrepit PC for a second wind. Over the summer I came into the possession of a Gateway Astro (circa 2000) to be handed down to a lucky seven year old girl. This is one of those PCs that really should have been trashed a few years ago, but there is a certain kitsch factor to it – like the PC equivalent of a Mac SE.

Given the intended use there was no need to gut everything and do a full-fledged update, after all that 13.9″ CRT wasn’t going anywhere. I investigated what I was dealing with (besides many scary dust ferrets hidden inside):

• 433MHz Celeron CPU
• 128MB PC100 RAM
• 60GB HDD (obviously updated somewhat recently)
• CD ROM and Floppy drives
• Windows 2000

Huh, pretty pathetic, but it’d be fine for running a web browser. First order of business was a complete tear down and clean up. Then on to a few updates inside. I replaced the CD drive with a CD/DVD player (no need for a burner here). Then I bumped the RAM to 256 – unfortunately the max the system could take. I removed the floppy altogether – just part of my civic duty to eradicate them. Lastly I moved on to dumping Win2000 and loading XP.

The next phase was more fun, and frankly what would matter most to a first grader. It was time to make this odd duck fit for a princess. I decided on a two tone pink color scheme and began giving all the case pieces a light sanding. After several coats of paint and lacquer it was looking downright…cute. I proceeded to amp it up with a hot pink cold cathode which would illuminate the now vacant floppy slot.

I ordered a new keyboard and mouse to go along with it – the old ones were SO old. And beige. Unfortunately, when the new mouse/keyboard combo arrived it was more purple-ish than bright pink as expected. Not one to compromise, I disassembled the mouse and keyboard and painted them to match! You can see a bit of the color difference in one of the pictures of the keyboard.

I was happy with how everything turned out, but our niece was even happier judging from her Christmas day squeal of excitement.