white noise

I’ve had a Logitech G7 wireless mouse for about 3 and a half years. While every other piece of my gaming rig has been replaced and upgraded, I still am lovin this mouse. The sensitivity is great, the weight is nice, and the body is just right. You can even still get new rechargeable batteries for only 5 bucks and a new, slick set of feet for $2. But after all these hours of gaming (and some work) it’s showing signs of wear. Mechanically, it’s held up great, but the finish in a few spots has worn off leaving a somewhat rough surface at the palm and fingertip areas. So I decided before the past MML I’d refinish it.

I started with taking it apart and cleaned it up. There were 3 pieces that needed painting (since I didn’t care to repaint the bottom. To remove any dirt and oil from the three pieces I give them a wash in dish soap, then a thorough rinse. Then I used a small piece of 400 grit sandpaper to remove the former glossy coating and smooth the areas that were roughly worn. Then I donned a pair of latex gloves and gave them another rinse, dry, and then used a swab of mineral spirits to remove any last residue.

I decided to use Dupli-Color’s gloss black Vinyl & Fabric Coating. This stuff (also known as vinyl dye) is unlike usual spray paints. Instead of making a coating over a surface, it sinks into the object, and because of that it’s more flexible and durable. From what I’ve read, vinyl dye is the nicer way to plaint most plastics and especially any that will be handled a lot. I thought about using multiple colors and stencils, but opted to keep it simple and go with gloss black and clear coat. The clear coat to use is Acrylic Lacquer, not the Enamel Lacquer they also make.

Thin coats are key since it can easily run and there’s no need to pile up a think coating (since it’s going to sink in anyway). I started with about 3 black coats, then wet sanded with 800 grit, and repeated the process. After that, I sanded and coated the center piece one more time. You only need to wait about 15 minutes between color coats so the whole process doesn’t need to take too long. Once the black had time to dry very well, I started with the clear coat. After about 3 thin coats I wet sanded with 1000 grit and finished with two more coats.

After re-assembly (with new feet!) I let the whole thing sit for a week before using it. I even put it out in the sun a couple afternoons to really cure it. The final result is like a new mouse. By varying the number of coat-and-sand cycles I got a nice subtle distinction between the center and the sides. Maybe next time I’ll go for something more graphic.

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.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been on vacation and then sick, so the box building has certainly slowed down, but I’ve some progress over the past couple days.

First off, I picked up a couple final parts. After doing better in Vegas than I expected, I picked up a 300GB 10k rpm Velociraptor hard drive. I benchmarked it against the 80GB 7200rpm Barracuda drive that I already had installed and the Velociraptor is about twice as fast in every metric. It doesn’t really get that warm either. It’s a pretty awesome drive in a tiny package. I also got my wireless card and installed it. I went with the Linksys WMP300N PCI card – roughly the same as the Belkin wireless N card that I had been using, but a little beefier antenna and a bit cheaper. It took some getting used to the management of wireless networks in Vista, but so far performance is looking great.

And then there’s the continual wiring work that I’ve been doing. Most recently I installed my old 3.5″ device for front panel USB and audio ports. The USB lines got bundled and sheathed. Unfortunately, the audio cable was a few inches too short to make it to my sound card, however. So for that I spliced a piece of outdoor sprinkler wire (it had more than enough conductors at approximately the right gauge). Then I mounted a switch next to the 3.5″ device for controlling the fan speeds on the PSU / HDD side of the case. After a little soldering I can now switch those two 120mm fans between a low setting of 5 volts to a high of 12 volts. One last project will be mounting a second switch to control the case lighting.

Now, about this green circuit board on the network card…hmmm

A quick update after a bunch of work last weekend.

I spent about five hours on Saturday working on the box. I started with putting the mobo tray back in the case before continuing with any wiring. Well, that didn’t go so well. It may not be apparent from the previous pics, but the CPU cooler stands higher than everything else, and as I (un)lucked out, it was about 1/4 inch too tall from making it back into the case. So I had to remove the motherboard and the expansion cards from the tray, insert the tray, and remount everything inside the case. That was a better option in my book than taking off the cooler and cleaning and reapplying fresh thermal compound.

After all that was done I went back to wiring. I shortened the wires of four of the case fans and added new connectors. I also spent quite a while soldering up a couple Y-adpaters which let you connect two fans to a single motherboard header (except only using the rpm wire of one of them). I also sheathed the main front panel wires (power switch, power led, reset switch, HDD led). With all that done, the motherboard side of the case is looking decent; the psu side is still a big mess.

Sunday I decided I needed a break from wiring and started with some other stuff. First I pulled the DVD drive from my old machine to move to the new comp. But the greyish drive enclosure just didn’t look right, so I masked it up and painted the case black. It’s about this time that I realized things had gotten completely silly. Then once the drive was dry I put it in and started….finally…loading the OS. After a couple hours I had 64-bit Vista and the basic drivers installed. After another couple I had a second partition set up, anti-virus loaded, and all the OS and driver updates installed. And don’t be hatin’ on Vista, after all, check out the available RAM 🙂

Since then I’ve only been loading system apps/utilities. I have to move another hard drive into it before I can load the major stuff, and only after that will I worry about system tweaking and overclocking. Not to mention there’s still a bunch of wiring work left.

After a couple days away, tonight I pulled out the motherboard tray and mounted the mobo and the graphics card. To be honest up until a couple days ago I wasn’t even sure the tray could easily come out, then I noticed that five thumbscrews is all it takes to yank it from the case. Currently I’m planning on using the lower PCI express slot for the video card. This should allow the southbridge to keep cooler. You can also see the Creative audio card that came with the motherboard.

The IO panel fits in with the appearance really well – even if it is on the back and will be covered with plugs.

Installed the CPU cooler last night. You can see how it’s a tight fit and that my cooler options were limited.

Just a quick update on the last couple days of building. A few peeps have been wanting photos along every step to vicariously live the geek thrill ride. So photos, you shall have…

At this point the fans and PSU have been installed. Pay no mind to the wires, they haven’t been dealt with yet. All the fans are from Enermax and rated around 18dBA.

I used mesh fan grills on the front which also work somewhat as filters, and basic wire grills on the back. For the first time I’m trying to dampen any noise between the fan and the case. I used the included rubber mounts for the rear fans, but to keep the front sleeker I used a combination of pan head screws and rubber washers (inside and out).

The new CPU came yesterday so I started prepping it. The black fins on the heatsink are sick, but the fan includes two bright green LEDs. That wouldn’t fly with this whole red and black scheme, so I had to get in there and disable them. I thought about subbing in red LEDs, but finding the right type (size, voltage, and current) was a little more bite than I wanted to chew. I’ve also added a shot of the mobo with the mounting hardware added (plus another look at the RAM and northbridge coolers).