Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Airborne here I come!
I had a fitful sleep, tossing and turning in bed, though I was exhausted and tired, I couldn't fall asleep. I had a weird disturbing dream, and the weather just got more and more chilly.
I think now that my new water-cooled computer is finally up and running, there isn't much I can do about it now. It's almost permanent and will be a real hassle if I were to change parts. Except for the hard-drives and ram though. Since computer parts constantly change and prices drop so fast, I think it's too expensive and time-consuming to just keep upgrading. Since parts now need to be complimented, I had to actually get a new motherboard just to accommodate my 8800GT graphics card and a new processor along with it. So guess this rig will be permanent for now.
The performance of my rig has been disappointing. Yes, I managed to clock to 3.8Ghz, but anything above that was quite unstable. I don't dare to push my Vcore above 1.4v, and I think the 8800GT DD Maze4 water-block cannot conduct heat away effectively, maybe the internals have already corroded, but I doubt it's the connection between the copper and the chip, since the board is already starting to warp, it's got Artic-Silver5 and the w/b is lapped. Just a little bit of over-clocking and temps hit 70 plus again, the 8800GT is also unstable at 750mhz, 1100mhz for the rams and 1700Mhz for shaders. Anything below that was fine, but temps hit sky-high.
Or maybe it's just my single-120mm radiator being unable to take the extra heat-load. I added blue-ice, managed to bring the reservoir temperature down to 25 degrees with max-fan speeds and got my final 3Dmark06 score of 15k+. 2Gb Crucial BallistiX PC-8500 rams running at 4-4-4-12 latencies.
Performance is so-so, looks like it'll be like that for now. If I go overseas to study, I won't be working on another rig till 4 years from now. Sigh. Looks like I've hit my thermal wall even with blue-ice. But I am starting to design my next new rig! The idea is still conceptual for now. My idea is to use the vortex reservoir as the centre of a swirling “volcano”, topped up with a small-form factor fan on the top to give the effect of flames, behind the volcano reservoir will be the 3x120mm radiator, also with crepe paper and red-orange illumination to give the effect of flames. All components will be fully water-cooled, the casing sprayed granite-grey, with black, and red-orange streaks to give the effect of lava.
Clay and silicone will be used to make the effect of solid rock, and of course with fading moving-leds below to give the effect of flowing molten lava. The internals of the casing will feature a chilled-water reservoir to be pumped to the CPU and SLi GPUs, it will be illuminated red, and there will be flickering flame bulbs to give the illusion that the casing is on fire inside. How exciting! If I stay in Singapore and study, then I'll go about making this grand new volcano rig.
If I go overseas to study, “hopefully”, then I won't be making a new rig for another 4 years. But a lot of things will change from now and it's hard to say for now. But this is an idea I am quite excited to work on as a really cool project.
I envision all the top-notch parts will cost at least a cool $3000 now, not including the water-cooling parts and delivery, plus all the extra stuff like switches, bulbs, clay, leds, custom reservoir, and stuff. Probably at least another $1-2k. Total $5k? Seems reasonable. But with $5k I can buy 2 JetCat turbo-jet engines and a bicycle now that would be really cool as well!
The day was relatively relaxed, I took my own sweet time to go to Plab from home, and apparently one of my understudy's screwed up the morning, it wasn't really his fault though, just that he didn't handle it very smoothly or effectively and the tonner left camp after 7am. Because of that I was slightly implicated. Never-mind about that, it's a small thing that I shouldn't dwell on, but naturally someone up there was only concerned about covering his own ass.
I didn't do anything at today since the new officers were taking over, so I just sat there supervising the whole thing, in other words, merely watching the guys do their training and only intervening if something went wrong. Which came soon enough, today's operation had a slight twist, some of the guys needed to go back to camp and the initial plan was to utilize 2 civilian vehicles.
The problem is that we have over a dozen people to move, and that wasn't feasible so I intervened and got the tonner to go back to camp instead. Why must I be the one making all the decisions? But its good to make firm decisions and get the thing done fast. The rest was a breeze and after that I was told that only 3 out of 5 of us we selected for the Airborne course. The MO certified us fit for that course and that was a relief.
Airborne here I come!
Posted by MK at 9:14 AM
