Something is wrong with my Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B CPU cooler!!!

I love silent computers. IMO, loud PCs are PCs with bad build quality. Hence, I’ve removed most of the fans that used to reside in the case, and further have lowered the RPM of the fans below 1000RPM. Well, right now, the loudest fan in the PC is the PSU fan when I’m not gaming, which of course isn’t controlled by me. When gaming, fan on the video card ramps up its RPM, making its presence very noticeable. Scythe Kaze Master Ace fan controller is the hero of the show.

The CPU cooler (Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B) is very loud when the fans is running at full speed. The stock RPM is 1700RPM and that’s insanely loud. So much for CNPS title! CNPS stands for “Computer Noise Prevention System”.

The CNPS9900MAX-B is not the best cooler out there. The Thermalright Silver Arrow, for example, is much better. But there were few reasons for choosing this cooler.

1. It didn't intervene with absurdly tall RAM sinks on my Corsair Vengeance sticks. Finding a decent cooler that passed this criteria was very hard. But now I think that I should have removed those RAM sinks (apparently, you can do that quite easily.) and bought a bigger cooler back then.
2. The cooling performance wasn't really bad. It was up there with the best air coolers, only 5C or so behind the best of the best. It was definitely in the 85th percentile. 
3. It looked nice. The fan was illuminated in blue. And it didn't look overly large (but that was a misjudgement. It is a HUGE cooler, and unfortunately, most of it is air. The surface area of the cooler isn't THAT large. 

So, the cooler is loud, and since I had the fan controller, I didn't really care about the noise back then. I have dropped the RPM of the fan to the point that the noise of it gets drowned under the ambient noise. That magic point lies just over 1000RPM. But at 1000RPM, the CPU temps increase by a little over 5C compared to 1700RPM. That’s not a big deal, if it was doing fine at 1700RPM in the first place. It does not!

At 1000RPM, the Prime temps reach 85C within 5 minutes of priming.

Even at 1700RPM, the full load temps (i.e. Prime95 SmallFFT stress test) reach 80C on the hottest core only after 10 minutes.

At 26C room temperature, with just 1.32V and a modest 4.5GHz overclock, this is not correct. On forums I see a lot of people running much cheaper coolers such as the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo and getting much better temps with their SandyBridge CPUs. Even on review sites I see people running much higher volts, such as 1.4375V and getting much less temps that these. Are those accurate? Are they running them on open testbeds with a room temperature of 15C or something? Why have I never been able to get good enough temps with any of the coolers I've had up to now? Am I not mounting the cooler properly? Am I not applying thermal paste correctly? Or is the CPU heat spreader not perfectly flat?

I installed the Zalman with the motherboard already installed inside the case. Installing the cooler was a pain in the ass. It could be that the sink is not properly seated, or the thermal paste is not properly spread out. So that's where I should start. I should take the motherboard out of the case and mount the cooler before putting it back inside. If that doesn't do, I guess I should look for a new cooler.

I know it is exciting to go shopping for a new cooler, but since a new cooler wouldn't give me more performance than what it already gives, I am reluctant to buy a new one. Besides, what can I do with the existing cooler? I cannot sell it. I don't even know how to throw it away.

(Rant) Screw this Nambu line!

Today I came to get the 8:31 train bound for Kawasaki and the retardedly over-secure gate system screws me over once again. If I got aboard that train, I could have reported to work by 9am. Looks like I'm gonna miss it. 

This is what happened. The Nambu line, which this railway line is called, splits the town in two. There is only one entrance to the station, and for people living on one side has to cross the railway line to get there. And we happen to live on that side. There is no overhead bridge to cross the railway line. So we can only cross the line when the gates are open. 

The thing is, when a train comes from Kawasaki (A) direction, even though the crossing is past the station, the gates close and we have to wait for about 2 minutes till the train leaves the station and then actually you can cross the line. It is not that bad when the train comes from the Tachikawa (B) direction because the station is past the crossing. So when the train passes the crossing, the gates open. 

So today, I came to the crossing at around 8:27am. There was a train coming from Kawasaki direction and it hadn't even arrived at the station when I got to the crossing. I don't know where the trigger point is located, but it is pretty fast away from the station. The train arrives at the station few seconds later. Then I had to wait till everyone got off the train and for the train to leave the station. We were all good up to now, because the train I was supposed to take was still far away. But just a split second before the gates opened (because the train bound for Tachikawa left the station), the train bound for Kawasaki reached the gate-close-trigger point. Goddammit! So I missed the train!!!

Haswell dream shattered even before the release? Haswell is a flop?

Yesterday I came across a very disturbing news. A Chinese site had posted benchmark scores of the flagship Intel Core i7 4770K (@stock as well as at @4.5GHz) and the results were pretty bad. They were comparing it with the flagship model from the 3rd generation, namely the Core i7 3770K. They were not just posting the scores. They were also showing the screenshots of CPU-Z, AIDA and other benchmark programs. 

Let's be honest now. Nobody likes those Chinese sites. They are ugly, plus, nobody can read them. Google translate can do a decent job, but still the quality of content in those sites are BAD. Luckily, Xbitlabs recently extracted those results and posted on their website. Check it out by linking on the following link.
Web-Site Publishes Fully-Fledged Intel Core i7-4770K “Haswell” Review 

The following is an extract of the results posted on that site.

That really sucks! The only thing that might sound interesting is the last test, but that is all due to the better iGPU in Haswell. It has nothing to do with the CPU raw power.

But we knew that the performance improvement from the CPU side was not going to be fantastic. Intel was mostly concerned about two things. Improving the power efficiency (for tablets and ultrabooks) and improving the performance of the integrated graphics potion (for non-enthusiast crowd). They seems to have done that alright.

But we expected a bigger than a single digit percentage boost, did we not? In some tests, Haswell is even slower than its predecessor. That's unacceptable. The instructions per clock (or IPC) hasn't improved much, from even SandyBridge. For example, the 4770K@4.5GHz does 1M Super Pi calculations in 8.018s and my 2600K at same clocks does it in 8.344s. Just a mere 4% improvement at the same clocks. That's almost no architectural change IMO. No idea what those Intel engineers were doing for more than a year.

However, what every geek was waiting to see was how well the Haswell CPU overclocked compared to the previous generations. There were leaked overclocking results showing the CPU running at 6GHz with just 1.2V and 7GHz with a whopping 2.56V. It is possible that CPU-Z wasn't reporting the correct amount of Voltage because the Voltage Regulator Modules (VRMs) are moved from the motherboard on to the CPU itself. Anyways, 6GHz @1.2V seems like it can even do that on air, right? IvyBridge could do OK with 1.2V when it comes to the temperature. There is no need to doubt that would not be the case with Haswell because Intel did not change the process node from 22nm. 

But what that Chinese website reports is very troubling. They are saying that their 4770K CPU @4.5GHz could not complete Cinebench test because the internal temperature of the internals rose up too rapidly that their water cooler couldn't keep up with that rate, and ultimately crashing the PC. We don't really know if this is true or if they applied too much voltage to the CPU that it overheated too fast or if the reason for crash was something completely unrelated to it being a Haswell CPU. 4.5GHz seems to low to require a water cooler and that water cooler too being insufficient. Besides, this was a engineering sample. I don't think there would be significant difference between the retail product and this, but we shall see.

The CPUs are coming out in early June so it's only one month to go before we see the real things in action. But so far, things are not looking great for the enthusiast desktop user. If these results are true, I'll probably stick with my trusty Sandybridge CPU. Heck, I might even consider the IvyBridge-E platform to upgrade to. While I'm not happy that I won't be able to waste some of my hard earned cash this time round if Haswell turns out to be crap, I'm glad that this might actually give AMD a fighting chance when the Steamroller comes out later this year. (AFAIK, it's coming out in September so not so far away from now.)

So the new iPhone isn't coming any time soon?

First there were rumors that the new iPhone (iPhone 5S possibly) was going to be introduced at WWDC '13, but seems like the enthusiasm has gone down. Looks like it won't be coming before summer after all. People are now saying that it is coming in Fall. WWDC would be for iOS 7 and maybe Haswell based products (MacBooks and iMacs). So unexciting!!!

Well, if iOS 7 is going to have a hugely revamped UI, that would be fine. I actually like stuff with big learning curves, given that they will eventually become easier to use. But right now, I want more speed out of my phone. I doubt iOS 7 will bring any performance improvements. Apple has never done that. The performance has gone down with every update, according to my experience. My iPhone 4S has gotten very slow. Sometimes when I open Twitter, it takes 10 seconds to load. So is Facebook. It could be due to the slowness of the Internet connection because most of these apps look to sync through the Internet at launch. SoftBank could be the culprit. 

But I think it is not just the Internet connection that is causing these problems. Today on my way to work, the phone literally got stuck in the app switcher pane and the phone didn't respond to anything for more than 30 seconds. The podcast was playing in the background. No idea what happened there. I'm sure people will be quick to blame on the JailBreak, and it possible was the culprit. But I don't give a damn. I need the JailBreak. 

The battery also dies pretty quickly.  But that happens when I try to browse the Internet from my workplace. The signal strength is pretty bad there. Most of the days, I have to charge the phone at work, otherwise I wouldn't have enough battery to get me through the boring commute back home. I'm writing this post during my lunch break and I already had to plug the phone in to charge the battery. One thing that I have noticed is that is I leave home with a full charge, or I managed to charge the battery for 100% the previous night, the rate of battery drainage is lower than if left home with, say, 80% battery. I don't know if the problem is with the battery or with the software. Maybe it could be that Apple hates me for being a Windows user.

I have also deleted almost all the jailbreak tweaks that I was using because I thought it would make things better. I still have to keep the JailBreak because I want to get rid of the camera shutter sound. (In case you didn't know, Japanese iPhones don't lose the shutter sound when the phone is put into manner mode.) The shutter sound comes up even when you take a screenshot. That's irritating.

But yes, we come to an important point in our discussion. If I buy a new iPhone, I won't be able to JailBreak it. Wouldn't that be a deal breaker? Well, speed is my number 1 requirement. More than just the processing speed, I need LTE. I'm so fed up by the slowness of 3G (of SoftBank). I'm not sure how much of a speed I would get when I use the phone at the workplace, because that's where I am most of the day when I'm not at home, but it still felt faster when I checked the speeds of his iPhone 5. 

All in all, time are bad. For one, the Japanese yen is not doing great against the US$. The Intel Haswell products are not performing up to the hype. And now this. Guess I will have to put all my efforts into buying a DSLR. And that's the least interesting item on the list. :(

Updating Windows 8 on office PC

At work, usually there are two PCs for each engineer. One is for development and the other one for documentation. Naturally, the document PC is an old PC that is running Windows XP. But I have an Athlon X2 4400 based PC as my document PC. Couple of weeks ago, I installed Windows 8 on it.

I work inside a lab which doesn’t have internet connectivity. We have, however, a secured connection to our client (I would not disclose who this is) and through this we can even use Windows Update. But they haven’t still updated whatever they are doing to support Windows 8. So, Windows Update doesn’t work with Windows 8.

But nothing is lost. We have common PCs at work that can be used to access the internet. I went to one of them and downloaded the tool called WSUS Offline Update. You don’t have to install that tool. Extract the zip file you download, and just run UpdateGenerator.exe.

This is the main screen of WSUS Offline Update.

I selected Windows 8 from the options and also specified it to create an ISO file. After that it was seamless. It went and fetch all the necessary updates and created an ISO file for me.