My Ultimate Upgrade

Its that time, I have been maxing out my machine repeatedly, I had two options upgrade or build new.

Money determined that an upgrade is all I can afford, between the server rebuild earlier in the year, building myself a new rack-mount table and just generally being skint my budget was low, super low, like £200.

Lets go over what the machine is....

I'm running an Intel Core i7 950 3.0ghz.  This is a four core (eight thread) chip, it cost the earth when I bought it as an early adopter of the newly released Core i7 series.  My upgrade comes in the form of an Intel Xeon X5670, clocked slightly slower I do plan to overclock the chip, but it lifts me to 6 cores (12 threads).  There's also a whopping increase in L3 cache, I see this as the last and only upgrade path for this machine.

The motherboard hosting this is a very trusty Asus P6X58-e, I've loved every minute of this board, and hope that applying the overclock will be as easy as everything else working with it.

As I am overclocking however, it's going to be a full tear down of the machine, a full clean, replacing the heatsink pads & compounds throughout and cleaning it all up.  This will be the first time I'll have taken the motherboard out of it's residential case since I built the machine.

For RAM I've been very happily running 6 x 2GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 at 1333mhz, actually underclocking the memory as it's 1600mhz rated, but running it any faster than 1333mhz I ran into heat issues and instability.

With the rebuild however, I've bought second hand sticks of the Corsair XMS3 DDR3 but 4GB sticks, since I want to retain triple channel functionality I want six matching rated sticks, however, the number of sellers with matching sets is hard to find, there's lots of XMS3 about, but you get a speed spectrum from 1600mhz to 2000mhz stick, I've gotten some listed as different versions too, so I'm hoping everything will be okay and I can homogenise the sticks I have.

The power supply remains the Corsair I have had a while, but I am going to try and clean it out.

Brian over at TechYesCity on YouTube, often recommends using WD40 to coat parts and keep them working longer, I may have to check this on my secondary Core 2 Duo machine to see if it works before going for it on this my main machine.

The final upgrade is to sort out and replace the filters with something high micron rated, HEPA filter pads across the bottom.

WD Disk DOE & Dust....

I recently ordered a new WD Blue disk, it duly arrived and had the strangest problem I've seen in many a long year, no matter what I did the disk showed as 64MB total and it lost all data upon power cycling.

I puzzled over this briefly, until I pulled the disk back out the caddy and saw it had exactly 64MB of cache, yes, no platter space was being shown, just the cache showing up as disk space.  I have never ever seen this before, cache has always been a transparent intermediary for me in production and so to suddenly have the cache being the only exposed space was odd.

However, dead on arrival hard disk, a quick RMA and a new one winged its way into my hands, they actually gave me a slight upgrade as I got a WD Black by return of post.

Tonight I planned an hour to fit the new disk and add it to my workstation.... This machine has no cable management, and its a nightmare to add drives, there are six built in 3.5" bays but they have a set latch and screw mechanism, which forces you to fit the drives to that the power connectors are actually straining the distant power plugs. (I do plan to buy a pair of SATA power extenders on pay day).

What struck me as a massive problem however, is the amount of dust inside there.  Clearly, since fitting the 1080 GTX I've had something change or fail or open as there are copious amounts of dust in there.

Now my work area is not optimum for a workstation, I have a full tower case, so it has to go under the desk and the floor is carpeted.  Now this had been mitigated by the Coolmaster Cosmos 1000 case having lifting rails, taking the whole thing 1.25" off of the floor level, and two ground level filters, as well as a rear and front filter set.

But clearly things have not gone well, as just dust dust dust.

My original plan for the start of the year was to re-case the server, then re-case this PC as a server as well, retire one of the aging DELL 2950's for this machine itself, and put myself a new workstation together for my 40th.

Trouble is?... I'm skint, like proper skint, so I can't afford the workstation I was planning on...

And now I need to sort out this machine... I smell another re-casing task a head... Hmm, which case?  I'm thinking about the Corsair Obsidian range... Anyone have any other suggestions for a full height tower?... 1 x 5.25" at least 6 x 3.5" internal mount points and at least 2 x 2.5" mount points internally.  Front Panel USB would be a boon.

Dust seems to be my enemy.

Project - Socket 775 to Socket 771 Xeon - Update

As an update to my original post, I got another socket 775 motherboard and took a video of how to cut the tabs off the socket, making it able to accept a socket 771 Xeon, but doing so with the original chip in place, to protect the socket pins.

Check it out here:

And the original post here: http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/project-socket-771-to-socket-775-xeon.html

GNU C/C++14 Installation & Codeblocks 16.01 from Source (Command Line)

In yesterdays post I explained a C++14 user was having instant issues with the vanilla install of gcc/g++ on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Getting a C++14 Compiler
So, here today are my command-line steps to update the GNU Toolchain v5.x.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-5 g++-5

If you already have compiler alternatives you may need these lines.

sudo update-alternatives
sudo update-alternatives --remove-all gcc
sudo update-alternatives --remove-all g++

But, everyone will need to swap the default gcc and g++ command-lines to the new paths to make them the defaults.

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-5 20
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-5 20
sudo update-alternatives --config gcc
sudo update-alternatives --config g++

These last two --config commands are only needed if you have multiple alterantives, so don't worry if it tells you it's failed as you only have the one.

Now, if you perform g++ --version, you should see it's a version 5.x series compiler.

Codeblocks 16.01
Older versions of Codeblocks may start to error on the code completion with some of the C++14 specific commands.  So, we need install some prerequisites, and then build the latest 16.01 version from source.

sudo apt-get instal gtk+-2.0 automake libtool libwxgtk2.8-dev libwxbase2.8-dev

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/codeblocks/files/Sources/16.01/codeblocks_16.01.tar.gz

tar -xvf codeblocks_16.01.tar.gz

cd code*

The next step is interesting, we need to iteratively check:

./bootstrap

Running this will show you anything wrong with your machine environment, any missing dependences etc... However, once bootstrap runs cleanly, you can continue below.

./configure
make
sudo make install

The make step takes quite a time, the more cores & RAM you have the better, on an 4 core (8 thread) machine with 8 GB of ram, I've found it takes about 10 minutes.  On a single core machine as the poor VM I had was assigned, it took a lllooooottttt longer.

Once complete we needed to use the text editor of our choice, in sudo mode....

sudo nano /etc/ld.so.conf

And to this we need to add the line:

include /usr/local/lib

Save the file, exit the editor and run:

sudo ldconfig

Once this was complete, we can run up Codeblocks, and see it's version 16.01.

And we can further see the nice new C++14 options in the build options:

Even the code highlighting recognises the make_shared operation:

Voila, if this helped, do check out my other posts, and code, leave a tip with my new tip jar!  And I'll be making a video of this one soon, as it's so useful.

PC upgrades, and more coding ideas

As you can see, I'm in the middle of working on some PC kit.  Upgrading the in-laws old kit and retiring one of mine in the process.

I'm going to be working on the second part of my functional programming post later today, covering some alternate languages and better explaining maintainable code with relation to those parameters being passed.

PC Upgrade - SSD

Main PC overhaul, it's been a long time coming, but I finally have an upgrade for my main PC.  It comes off of the back of Black Friday where I got 48% off of the list price, so got to indulge.

It's of course, a new SSD, I've bought a SanDisk, 6g/sec SATA, 2.5" unit.  Windows has been installed on it, Linux is not going on this directly, that'll go on another of my drives as a dial boot option.

For this SSD is for gaming.

WarThunder was 90% downloaded last night before I caught myself drifting off to sleep in my very chair, but other games have to follow, and I need to set up my Track IR (again) and my Sietek Hotas.

The driving force behind the upgrade has been oneof the drives (I carry 6 in the machine) has developed a clicky, sometimes whine, so I wanted to replace the main boot disk and then work out which was making this noise and retired it.

I only have to be very careful now in backing up all the data I want to store.

Vmware player at home will be my next task, I love vmware player, at work I've been supplied with VmWare workstation, and I use it so much to do different things with whole different systems, that at home I've also taken to being used to firing up Linux inside windows, or windows inside linux, it's just so much easier.

Anyway, main machine is literally up on blocks... Tonight, is sorting out the cabling and packing it all back together.

Personal Update: Network In Action

Today, well tonight, has been the first time I've put any stress onto my new network infrastructure.  Going form a wireless N solution to a true wired 1Gbps solution has been like night and day, and of course, unlike the office network this is 1Gbps where I know exactly what is going on.

So, I've had my old Pentium 4 based server, done a stream of 30mbps from it, whilst pulling 50mbps down from EA online (the Star Wars battlefront Beta), and I've also been streaming HD video from YouTube.

It has been an extremely lush experience.

Playing Payday 2 I've also been enjoying that, with the added stability of the network,

Unfortunately, my workstation needs a lot of work, and I think this weekend it's going to have to be a down time, I need to clean the PC, I've got a fan squeaking, and I've also got one of the mechanical HDD's making a real noise.

I am thinking of sneaking an order for a £30 120GB SSD from Amazon into the mix, and the same next month, to sort something better out for my Stream storage drive, unfortunately, I have two sets of car tax to buy, so this maybe nothing more than a pipe dream.

Network Hardware Time

Yes, we've been back in the old house for a while now, and since I stripped all the networking gear out of the man lab in the other house and returned I've not touched it.  It's all been sat on my desk doing not a lot for over six months.

This weekend however, it's time to run a new Ethernet cable from the virgin cable feed, up through the first floor into the front bedroom, this cable is a bit of a beat, I've bought a double shielded cat5e, so I should finally be getting an unfettered full bore connection from my main rig.

The big tasks are going to be drilling the hole, from above this is simply through the floor board, and I've got a wire/pipe detector to make sure it is safe.  But from below the hole in the ceiling has a pelmet and the room is immaculately plastered... I kind of wish Ken had of listened to me when I asked for wiring conduits to be added, but hey ho.  So, hopefully I'll get through the pelmet and border and through the plaster board and into the lath & plaster Victorian ceiling without issue... Once I've gone up like that I'm going to use a plastic pipe to feed it through the hole and cut it off, giving a clean smooth drop for the cable.

Finally, I'm going to feed this shielded cable along the skirting in the room to the desk, and then spend Hours... and I mean HOURS.... sorting the cables.  My cabling solution is just all hanging at the moment, so I might look for some cable tied, tie a bunch into position and then hot-glue those bundles onto the underside of the desk.

Wish me luck...

In other news, you can view my last play sessions on Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/xelous/manager/past_broadcasts