How I was over-clocking.

Okay. Today I wanna share with you experiences I got when I was trying to overlock my computer. It's next technical-like blog in line and I hope next one will be about books or culture. 

So what's the big deal? Sometimes every few months I get a need to play some kind of computer games. Problem is that my computer isn't powerful enough to play modern 3D games. Now I'm using Celeron D 3 GHz with 1 Gig of RAM and Radeon 9600 PRO graphics. Works great for me, I'm usually just watching movies or using Apple iLife on it but it's simply not enough to fluent run of games like Call of Duty 4 or Crysis. Problem was that those exactly games I was interested in. I didn't to spend any money, so I decided to over-clock my machine.

I had some experiences with overclocking CPU before, but after measuring my FPS at CoD 4 I found out that overclocked CPU wasn't big improvement so I decided to overclock my graphics card. My card looks very similar to this. Note the small cooler. It was very small, powerless and noisy. I wanted to avoid noise first, so I made up some artificial cooler, showed on next pics.

Cooler is connected using just some tape. Easy, cheap and powerful but very very ugly. I made this up just for testing. For my big surprise the card didn't burn out and worked pretty well. I got some artifacts during playing, so I extended fan cooling. Look at the huge fan. It's Russian, made in '70 I guess, has 30 Watts, and made strange very strong noise.  

I found out that in this is temporarily usable for some experiments with overclocking and for few minutes of playing. But then the sound started to be too annoying. So I decided to redesign cooling and made up some control system. I wanted to be able to turn fans off when I'm not playing and using processor for 100%. I decided to build the best top-of-the-line homemade just-fan cooling system possible. I didn't wanna spend money on this jerky computer. So I got 4 fans, two for graphics, one for hard-disks and one for general case cooling. It's simple, works, was cheap and pretty silent when are the fans turned off, which is 95% of time my computer is running. I also designed control system for fans. Firstly I wanted to built it up with micro-controller and with variable rounds-per-minutes but then I decided to make is simple, just with 2 buttons and 2 relays. It's more reliable and simplier.

Photos of done work:

Graphics itself:

Case overview. Extra fans are in red circles

And control panel with fans turned off and on

Okay that's it. And what is the conclusion? I'll try to report you few numbers:

CPU 

originally 3060 MHz

now  3510 MHz

GPU

originally 398 MHz

now 513 MHz

Graphical RAM

originally 222 MHz 

now 256,5 MHz

Those are numbers I reached. May be better, but I have no extra time for this staff. I'm happy with this, I can play CoD4 at 800x600 with maximal antialiasing and Crysis at 800x600 without antialiasing on more than 20 FPS. Pretty cool. 

I'm finished today. I just wanna say, I'm sorry for miserable quality of pictures. Now I have only my cell-phone camera.

How I Bought New Hard-drive

Few days ago, I figured out, I'm running out of disk space. I hate DVDs and CDs for general-data storing. I'm using them just for back-ups of the most important files. I had owned 4 hard-drives, 2x250GB, 80G and 60G when I found out I have no more space. Now, I'm running Mac OS X installed on PC and I'm saving money for Mac. That's why I refused to buy internal SATA drive. I wanna connect it to Mac in future. So I have chosen external USB2 drive. I wanted 1TB WD Mybook2 drive, but it had been currently unavailable. So I had chosen Seagate Freeagent desk with size 1TB, and price €110, that was shipped next day. 

I like the drive. It's pretty fast, nice, have some special LED effects indicating it's activity. It's not boiling, even after few hours of full-speed copying it's temperature won't be high. I like it. I've read few overviews that this drive usually dies after one month of usage, but I hope mine will be fine. 

The drive is absolutely cool. Fast, nice powerful. Only problem is with my jerky computer. I have about two-and-a-half years old computer, Celeron D processor 3GHz, 1 Gig of RAM and some cheap As-Rock motherboard. It was very cheap, cost about €350 at all. It's old, but I'm using it only for watching movies and as a music player. The plan was to connect new external drive to this computer and use it to store movies. When I plugged the drive in, it wasn't working. System found it, but didn't mount it. Sometimes it has been mounted, but data transfer was no possible. I thought that problem is on the side of new drive, but after some testing I found out, that no drive, but my USB sub-system is death. I've tested drive on other computer and worked fine, I also connected USB stick to defect USB on computer and didn't work. 

So now I have external drive connected to my laptop and using it thought network. It's much slower but still highly usable and I hope to buy Mac Mini in few months. I'm also thinking about buying one of these PCI > USB extension cards, but I probably won't do it, because I needs more drivers, and makes system unstable especially because I have system cracked to run on ordinary PC. 

It works, even if it's jerky, and I hope it will run for at least 2 years. If you wanna buy this external drive I can just recommend it, looks solid, it's small, silent and I hope will be reliable. 

Image Gallery

Me and My Saxophone.

I have played have saxophone since january '09. Pretty short. First idea to start playing saxophone came from my friend, who own one, I tried and loved it. From fall '08 I had been thinking about bought of some sax, my small dream came true, and I bought one for €200. For it's low price it has amazing sound. I have also joined musical school and I absolutely love it. 

Music is a gate to world, all you have to do is open it. Music connects countries, nations and worlds. You can express almost everything using just few bars of sheet music. Have you seen The High School Musical? I know, it's sort of fairy-tail, but the idea was interesting. Music had connected two people and completely changed their lives. Everybody should try it. I'm not very gifted, bud I hope I'm doing well. If I can do it, everybody can. If you are not sure what I'm talking about, just watch The High School Musical. 

Everybody should have some secret passion. This passion can really help you to become a better person, dedicated to something that have really value. Grow, getting better. That's what you are suppose do on this world. You, me, everybody. Don't try to make impression. Just get better. 

And now, I wanna share some informations about my saxophone.

I own old Weltklang tenor saxophone. I bought it for €200 in great condition just after general repair.  I'm using Czech metal mouthpiece Amati, usually Rico-Royal or Vandoren reeds, normally number 2 (sax players know, what I'm playing about. If you are interested and you have no idea what I'm takling about, just e-mail me). I like Weltklang's tone. It's not sharp as new Yamaha's tones. I can easily play full range. That's it. No big deal, but it makes me feel insanely great. If you are interested, there are few photos (made just by cell-phone camera, sorry for low quality)

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