Useless Microoptimizations Homepage Forum

[Useless Microoptimizations]

Info in first post is outdated, this is the current state:
http://cracauer-forum.cons.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=102#102

[this list is mostly for reference in forums I post on]

The "old generation":

Server/VCR (socket 478):
- Asus P8C800-E deluxe with CSA ethernet
- Pentium-4 2.8 GHz Northwood
- 2x 512 MB Kingston Value ECC
- GeForce 5900XT + 5200 PCI
- stuffed with 4-port Ethernet, additional ATA etc.
- Seasonic 460W PSU
- Linux Fedora Core (don't actually like it, need to convert it to FreeBSD)

This box does very well as a server. Hyperthreading is on, so you can watch a movie undisturbed while doing something heavy in the background. Disk throughput is great, and the GbE network is not on the PCI bus, so you can actually serve that data you read off the disk out to the network. Next to PCI-X this is as good as it gets. Linux and NVidia do very well with that quad-head setup. Most of the box is passively cooled, there is a wind created by 4 low-RPM panaflos and the components do very well in it.

Of course everything onboard including sensors work with my OSes, but outside AMD board that's not so surprising.

Software experiments and games (socket 754):
- Asus K8V-X
- Newcastle 3400+ (2.4 GHz, 512 KB cache), usually running at 2.6
- 2x 512 MB Kingston Value ECC
- GeForce 6800 Ultra
- Seasonic 460 W PSU
- FreeBSD-current, various Linuxes, Win2k

Nice box. The mainboard in particular is a very positive surprise, it is very cheap and everything works in all my optering systems (wish I could say that about my A8V-E SE), including all sensors. Although this board does not have a PCI/AGP lock I have beaten it up as hard as I could and couldn't notice a problem with my 8% overclock. Buy this board if you want a nice cheap FreeBSD box, but do not buy it if you need to overclock more than those 8%.

Keep in mind this is dirt cheap material by now but very fast, especially for gaming and scripting languages.


The "new guard":

New FreeBSD development box:
- Asus A8V-E SE
- Athon 64 X2 3800+ (dual-core) at 2.5 GHz
- ECC RAM
- Zalman 400B PSU
- FreeBSD-current

That dual-core chip rocks, I sold my dual Opteron after I got it. That Asus board is a piece of undersupported, underfeatured and overpriced junk, however, it is one of the few socket 939 boards that gives me ECC RAM. It works pretty well if you figure out the clocks for your parts in the DFI board and then you move the whole bunch to the Asus board. If I ever fail to download a BIOS from Asus's so-called website I'm gonna get mad, though.


Linux workhorse/data munching:
- DFI Nf4 SLI-DR
- Opteron 148 CABNE @ 2.9 GHz stock volts
- 2x 256 Geil One TCCD
- OCZ 520W powerstream
- Linux Fedora Core 4

This is my "sports computer". That Opteron at stock volts is doing great. I like that board, from my experience none of the horror stories about DFI are true, it works very well and has a ton of great features. The NForce4 chipset is partly annoying but not as much as I thought after my NForce3 experience. The Geil One memory is very nice, too. Not that high-speed memory gives you better application speed but at least you know what you can do.

%%

My power supplies are all Seasonic Super Silencer 460W, except for one Zalman 400B and an OCZ 520W Powerstrem. The Seasonic are by far my favorite, they are 10-15% more power efficient, have all the connectors with PCIe, SMP/8-pin and what have you and they are very quiet. The Zalman is good, too, not much louder but has a 20-pin connector. The OCZ I dunno about, it is pretty loud and through cross-testing I verified that it doesn't improve my overclocks by a single MHz (obviously because the other PSUs are also good).

My recommendation is Seasonic, but if you have a DFI board, make sure you get a version that likes the DFI boards, early versions didn't. (Seasonic will trade your PSU if you run into one that doesn't). Also note that I think that the dual-12V-rail PSUs are rubbish for most uses. If you want to overclock or have a heavy SMP system (dual Opteron), then one single 12V rail is what you want. Dual-rail only makes sense when you have a lot of disk drives. So don't get one of these 600W dual-rails unless you know what you do.

Most of my CPU fans are Zalman CF-7700-CU (which I like best overall), but I have some Cooler Master Hyper 6 (these heatpipe towers), which do very well on my non-overclocked P4 Northwood (passive or very low RPM fan). For overclocking I have a Thermaltake Big Typhoon (very quiet and good cooling, but boy does the mounting material suck, I have mine mounted with leftover Zalman parts).

If you want my recommendation, get the Zalman CF-7700-AlCu, unless you overclock very high. The problem with the Big Typhoon, apart from bad default mounting material, is that it is heavy and high and though lever forces pulls on your mainboard considerably, and crushes one side of your CPU into the socket if you have the mainboard upright (tower case). The Zalman is equally heavy, but it is flat on the mainboard, so no extra lever forces. The pure copper variant is unneccessarily heavy, the AlCu will do fine cooling-wise and will allow for safe computer transportation. Mounting material and instructions are first-class, this is a very rounded product.

Performance results:

Benchmarks of my machines can be found here:
http://cracauer-forum.cons.org/forum/crabench.html

Other pages:

If you want to know why I use ECC memory, check this out:
http://cracauer-forum.cons.org/forum/ecc.html

[Useless Microoptimizations]

Stable overclocks on the overclocking parts:

• The Newcastle 3400+ does 2592 MHz at stock voltage . More voltage does not improve overclocking. For some reason the whole box works fine even for intensive disk and network activity with the Asus board with no PCI/AGP lock.
  
• 3200+ in the DFI is stable at 2550 at 1.55 volts set in the BIOS.
  
• 3800+ in the Asus is good for 2.5 GHz at 1.45 volts set in the BIOS
  
• Opteron 148 CABNE does 2.9 GHz at stock volts (1.4 V)
  

Caution note:

All my Asus boards screw up memory dividers when you go from one overclocking setting to another. Somehow the BIOS jams the autodetection and your settings together, leading to memory settings higher than you said. The result is an unstable overclock. Using a memory bandwidth benchmark I verified that the memory is in fact running higher than I said in the BIOS.

New memory divider settings on both my Asus boards always require to go back to the BIOS defaults and then entering everything from scratch, with your new RAM settings. I have seen that repeatadly both on the K8V-X and the A8V-E SE.

The A8V-E also has a greater than 1:1 memory divider, allowing you to put the RAM higher than the HTT, overclocking the RAM without raising the HTT. Don't use this, settings > 1.1 have never been stable for me. It might be that this is suffering from the above BIOS reset problem, didn't check yet.

[UPDATE: a BIOS update seems to have made memory speed fiddling in the A8V-E SE stable]


And another caution note:

The DFI board reports lower voltage for the CPU than what you set in the BIOS. Some people then overvolt more so that the reported voltage is what they want.

Don't do that.

I verified with a voltmeter that the BIOS settings are what you get, it is the sensor which reports nonsense. Several other people reported similar findings. So don't set your Venice to 1.7 volts thinking you get the 1.6 that the sensor reports.

[Useless Microoptimizations]

Lots of chances, not enough time to update.

Server

My server is now a dual-core Opteron 170. I was unlucky to be the only person on the planet to get a 0530 Opteron 170 that didn't go high at high volts. But it goes very well with very low volts, 2500 MHz at 1.35 dual-prime stable.

The board was supposed to be an Asus A8N-E SLI premium but it broke and Asus RMA is taking its sweet time, so it is running on a DLI Infinity SLI right now. The Infinity has BIOS problems that make me not recommend this to anyone. Also, the CPU is placed stupidly, it blocks the harddrive frames even in my large case and leave lots of room between the back of the case and the CPU.

Overall this was a rockier ride than I thought. There is no end to the problems you can have with non-AMD chipsets for AMD no matter how good the processors are.

I should have built a socket 940 system instead but I happened to have 4 GB unregistered RAM for the new server and wanted PCIe. If I want PCIe I can't use AMD's chipsets. Duh.

Performance is awesome, of course. We are talking a dual 2.5 GHz AMD64, non-PCI GbE, non-PCI SATA with three Seagate 7200 rpm disks. Disk and network performance can be seen here:
http://cracauer-forum.cons.org/forum/raid.html

I discovered that at least under Linux a passively cooled $50 PCIe GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB is more than enough to drive my 24" Dell display at 1920x1200 with DVD while working on the second display. Drivers are also trouble-free for me. Good work, NVidia.

Gaming

No gaming. Duh. I do actual work these days, programming etc.

Once CM:SF comes out I'll probably assemble a gaming machine from the DFI Infinity SLI (if Asus ever sends back that RMAed board for my server...), my 3.0 GHz CABNE Opteron 148, G.Skill 2GBHZ (also RMAed at this time...), and a 6600GT I have. I bought that eVGA 6600GT that has dual-link DVI in preparation for maybe getting a 30" Dell display. But that display was more expensive than expected and input options are unconvincing, so I stayed with a 6200 TC in my server.

FreeBSD/Linux development

Asus A8V-E SE with an Opteron 175 at 2.7 GHz, 4x 1 GB ECC, Zalman 400 B PSU.

Very fine machine, my personal favorite.

That board is the most trouble-free socket 939 board I have ever seen. Unfortunately I can't use it for my server because it is severely I/O challenged. It has GbE on the PCI bus, only two SATA, only one x1 PCIe slot. There is no way to get data in and out of this thing fast. What a waste.

I am building an 8-core (4x dual) Opteron with a Supermicro H8QC8. More info later or on request.

Overclocking eSports

DFI SLI-DR, Geil One TCCD, either above mentioned Opteron 148 CABNE at 3.0+ GHz or a dual-core Opteron 0546 XPMW. OCZ Powerstream 520 W.

I hold second place in the world record for 2x 256 MB TCCD. Who-ho! What do I win?

[Useless Microoptimizations]

OK, here is a little rant.

What is *&#&# is going on with quality control these days?

This is the list of hardware that I bought in the last months that I had to return for refund or exchange because it wouldn't work:

• Asus A8N-E SLI premium - broken southbridge, heavy I/O hangs machine. RMA takes it's sweet time and no updates by email either.
  
  
• Dell Inspiron 9300 - Dell unable to ship a notebook with even remotely acceptable backlight bleeding, with several attempts. Long hours (and I mean hours) on the phone. I should actually post the full story sometime, it is better than television.
  Photo here, of two notebooks they sent me:
  http://www.cons.org/tmp/dell/img_3174.html
  
  
• G.Skill 2x 1 GB HZ - one stick broke after not using it for a while. RMA process uses stupid MS word document that won't open in Openoffice.
  
  
• PC Power & Cooling 1 KW custom build - had to return because it won't power up my H8QC8 (which powered up fine with the OCZ Powerstrem 520W). That is after I got a wrong build exchanged first.
  
  
• OCZ Powerstream 520 W - dead on arrival. Replacement works great, though.
  
  
• Athena 850 W PSU - so light and small that I didn't trust it to be a quality 850 W PSU. Also, straight lie about it being silent. Maybe compared to a Mig-25. Returned for refund after I have seen severe instability on an overclocking run. The instability might not be their fault but combined with the other obersvertions there is no way I would trust my H8QC8 with this PSU.
  
  
• Mushkin PC4000 something - no post on several socket 939 boards. Ok it was cheap but no post at all?
  
  
• Mushkin ECC semi-registered. The idiots at buypcdirect.com have their Mushkin professional RAM mislabeled, so I ended up buying unregistered when I needed registered. Took a while to straighten this out. At the time of this writing the listings on buypcdirect.com are still not fixed, although I told them both in email and on the phone and I also told Mushkin twice that they need to make these guys fix it. No dice.
  
  
• The DFI Infinity SLI I didn't return, but only because it was kind of working and I needed it when other equipment was out for non-working. But it is certainly very close to unusable with BIOS bugs (have latest non-beta BIOS).
  
  
• Bought several sets of ECC registered RAM used that were not registered either although I very clearly asked about this and explained that ECC and registered are two different things.
  
  

Note: Mushkin appears several times here but that doesn't mean they are a bad vendor. I just happen to buy a lot of stuff from them, statistically they are actually very good. Their ECC Registered RAM works great for me. But they really need to work on their own website (search never works) and crack down on these buypcdirect fools.