It's pleaseing in a way that Atomicans send in i/o letters. It is a common mis-conception that Atomic readers know all there is to know about PCs and tech. Seeing these letters shows that Atomicans are able to display the humility needed to admit ignorance in certain matters. Like our IOOTM winner Alan, an i/o participant, who has earned a Logitech MX-500 shinymouse for his contribution to humanity.
IOOTM: Cooking with chips
I: Your comparison of heatsink/fans for the Pentium 4 and the Athlon was interesting enough but for one major exception, and that is your baseline room temperature. Only in the depths of winter do I have anything in the order of your 20 degrees; in summer I'm lucky if the indoor temperature is in the mid-30s, and sometimes it's higher (outside is a lot hotter than that).
I generally find that I must go to considerable effort to keep my computer stable in summer. Not all of us have the luxury of air conditioned buildings, so how about including some extreme conditions in your testing to give a more real world appraisal of what is being tested?
Alan Wilkinson
O: You can apply the numbers from the big comparison in issue 23 to any ambient temperature easily enough. Just take into account the difference between the ambient temperature you're dealing with -- 45°C, say, for the temperature inside a computer case on a hot day -- and our 20°C test temperature, and add it to the result. So a cooler that scored, say, 59°C at 20°C ambient, would score 84°C at 45°C ambient.
There's not actually a lot of point to doing this, though, because the 'Chernobyl' test rig's results aren't directly comparable with CPU results. Like all 'CPU simulators', the Atomic rig just provides a basis for comparison, so you can see what cooler's better than what other cooler and by how much. The only thing that behaves exactly like a CPU is a CPU, and different CPUs have different heat outputs, even before you start overclocking. CPUs are also inherently uneven heat sources, in computers that do real world tasks; they'll be hotter when they're doing some jobs than when they're doing others.
If you need a cooler for use in hot conditions, you should simply buy the best-scoring one you can lay your hands on. Provided the cooler's installed properly and the case ventilation is good, you should be able to keep your computer stable up to around 40°C room temperature without any trouble.
If your PC gets flaky when it's hot, bear in mind that the CPU cooler isn't necessarily the culprit. Overheated chips on the motherboard or expansion cards may be at fault, for instance. A simple but less than totally elegant solution for heat-wave computing is to just take off the side of the case whenever the weather's really hot, and point a desk fan into the computer's guts.
500! 600! 700! BANG!
I: After reading the article about GeForce4 Ti4200s in 'Holy Grail' (as Atomic is known to me and some of my friends) issue 23, I thought overclocking my graphics card might be a good idea. I have a 128MB ASUS AGP-V8420 GeForce4 Ti4200, running on a Gigabyte GA-6VXE7 mobo with a P-III 800MHz and 640MB SDRAM.I downloaded PowerStrip 3.29, but then realised that I didn't know how far I could safely push my GF4; being only 14 limits my cash inflow a little so I can't risk anything too much! That's why I decided to mail you 1337 people. What signs can I look out for that show that the GF4 is going too far? Any tips will be much appreciated!
Daniel Chambers
O: You won't blow it up -- at least unless you go hog-wild and start fiddling with hardware mods to boost the card's core voltage and such. Otherwise, when you over-overclock a chip, it'll just stop working until it's wound down again.
When you overclock the GeForce4, increase your RAM and core speeds by small amounts -- say, 5MHz at a time -- and when you go too far, your computer will just hang. It'll probably be OK in 2D mode with the core speed wound up a bit too far, but will hang in 3D mode; over-overclocked RAM will probably give you noticeable twinkling-pixel image corruption before the computer hangs.
Once you establish the ceiling speed for the core or the RAM (fiddle with them separately), just reset the hanged PC, re-set the card speed to something a bit more conservative, and you're done.
What's MBR when it's at home?
I: Yesterday, we got this IBM NetVista PIII in running WinME at the workshop. It had an error message: "No Operating System Found. Please Insert a Boot Disk and press F1.", or something like that. Anyway, the BIOS could detect the HDD A-OK, but FDISK said that there were no defined partitions. The HDD was on the way out (it was clucking every now and then -- about every five to 35 minutes), but the computer was still detecting it so the data should be there.
To make a long story short, I ended up typing FDISK /MBR at the command prompt to rewrite the hard drive Master Boot Record, after which the PC could boot fine. I cleared about five viruses off the hard drive before copying its data to a new drive.
My question is this: did I make the right choice in using FDISK /MBR? I don't know much about it and it seems to be, for the most part, undocumented. Could I have destroyed all data and partitions? What is the Master Boot Record anyway?
Alftura
O: Rewriting the MBR when it's been trashed by viruses or other mishaps is The Right Thing To Do. In any case, it's unlikely to do any harm.Conveniently, Microsoft have done the question-answering job for me here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q69013.
Un-RAIDable?
I: In issue 17, in the "Speed for the masses" article, you mentioned that when two Seagate Barracuda IV drives were in a RAID setup '. . . they scored far lower than a single Barracuda IV drive'. In the words of Timon the Meer Cat: 'What's goin' on here!?'
I've got one 80GB Barracuda IV, and was planning on buying another for a RAID 0 setup, but since reading Atomic's advice – '. . . if you plan to RAID, don't rely on the Barracuda IVs' -- my hopes for increased speed were vaporised.
Has Seagate jibbed a few hundred dollars off unsuspecting customers by producing drives that cannot be used with RAID? Is there any way to resolve this problem? Has Seagate done anything? Do I have to live without the extra speed boost of RAID 0? Say it ain't so.
Simon Vuu
O: According to Seagate, the Barracuda IVs are just too darn fast for RAID.Helpful reference (including much Seagate we-are-cool-we-are-bad-arses-speak):www.viaarena.com/?PageID=80
Crossover incompatibility?
I: Are Ethernet crossover cables guaranteed to work in every situation?
Bear-Dog comes online one day saying that he has two network cards joined with a crossover cable, but they can't see each other on the network. In spite of network troubleshooting attempts, he is unable to get the machines going. I told him I am 100% certain that long ago, either Atomic or PC Authority ran an article on small networks, and they touched on this very issue. The article basically stated something to the effect of not all cards supporting the use of a crossover cable. The reasoning (from memory) was something to do with the way the cards physically release the signals onto the network media.
The use of a hub or switch eliminated the problem, as these devices HAD to comply with some standard, but the cards did not. However I haven't been able to find any information about this particular issue.
Darrkon
Issue: 137 | June, 2012