MSI GTX 970 Gaming cards in SLI in a MICRO-ATX case

I should confess: I didn't buy a second GTX 970. But as of writing this article, I have two GTX 970 Gaming cards in possession. The second card is a replacement for the first card. I actually went ahead with RMAing the first one as it exhibited some coil whining. Although it is not as heavy as some of the other reports as I've already mentioned in a previous post, I did not want it to develop to a utter irritation. So I decided to play safe.

So, I informed Amazon that I am going ahead with the replacement. They sent me a second card and asked me to ship the old one back to them before a deadline which is quite far away. Being the opportunist that I am, I thought of making full use of this. 

A little bit of background for the late-comers

When I shrunk my old ATX PC to MICRO-ATX and not MINI-ITX, I wanted to keep my options of going for a Multi-GPU setup open. When NVIDIA launched the GTX 900 series cards with minuscule power draw compared to what it was replacing as well as the competition, that became almost a reality...well, at least a feasible option. When I assessed the way I should go about upgrading the graphics subsystem in the future, SLI appeared economically leaps and bounds ahead of going with a single GPU high-end card. So, SLI is happening people; just the budget needs to be passed.

GTX 970 cards and coil whining

There are many reports of coil whine with GTX 970 cards than ever before. These coils are in the power delivery and regulation circuitry. When the components are pushed hard, they start to vibrate to a level it is audible, especially if they are not high grade components. But it is weird that this is happening with cards as power efficient as GTX 970s, because there are many cards that draw more than 100W more power but without claims of coil whine.

When I bought my MSI GTX 970 Gaming graphics card, I hoped that it would be free of coil whine too. This is because it is using a custom PCB with very high quality components. Alas, there is coil whine. It is not very distracting or pronounced, however it is there...again, not all the time but at very random occasions; not even when it is under very high load either.

I tried capturing it on audio but it was extremely difficult to capture anything useful because of the noise from the other fans inside the case. However I found a video posted by someone on YouTube demonstrating coil whine on his Asus Strix card but that was way extreme compared to my case. I don't hear that level of coil whine. One might even call mine as having no coil whine at all. But I still hear it and it is a extremely distracting when it is there. Plus, I didn't pay for it in the first place. In fact, I paid more not to have it. Plus, there are people claiming that the little hum that their cards originally put out eventually became an irritation as they decided to stick even when the card was loaded properly. 

Tried out Strawberry Kitkat for the first time

This is not the typical tech related post that you would see on my blog.

Almost every day, I have a snack at work during the afternoon. It is usually a some sort of bun or a packet of potato chips. Today I wanted to try out something new.

I went to the Familymart near the office - which is a convenient store here in Japan - in search for that special snack. There are two Familymarts near the office and I went to the newer one that was put up no more than a couple of weeks ago. There I saw Strawberry flavoured Kitkat and I wanted to see how they tasted. I love chocolates, but I avoid eating them at work because they are bad for teeth. But today I wanted to make an exception.

Jail-broke my iPhone 5S running iOS 8.1 using Pangu

 

It's been only a couple of months since iOS 8 has been released to the public and we already have a fully functional jail-break! At first, there were a lot of steps that needed to get it to work but Pangu, the tool that's used to jail-break, has been getting updated frequently and now it is as simply as clicking a button. That meant my wait was over; it was time for me to try it out on my iPhone 5S.

 

Note: At the time of jail-breaking my phone, the version of Pangu out for the public was 1.1 but as of this moment, the tool has been updated to version 1.2.1. You should get the most recent version which would have most bugs ironed out.

 

I followed the steps mentioned in this YouTube tutorial posted by EverythingApplePro and it came out fine.

 

Video courtesy EverythingApplePro