In the last post I mentioned that I decided to upgrade the router in my apartment. The one I wanted to buy was the Asus DSL-AC68U router. I looked around hoping for a cheap deal, which sometimes pop up out of the blue. But I was not lucky this time. I had to pay the full price.
I could have ordered one from eBay for $319 with free shipping. But there are few PC shops near my apartment and when I checked their prices, I found out that the shop called MSY was selling it at the exact same price. There was no reason for me to get it late, if I could have it today for the same price, so I decided to buy from MSY.
This was the first time I was going to buy a PC part from a shop, in a long time. In Japan, I did not buy anything at a shop since 2012. The Palit GTX 670 Jetstream card was the last one I bought by visiting a shop.
But most of these PC shops in Australia do not seem to have showrooms. You place the order online and then go pick it up. The shop will prepare the order as soon as you place the order and will inform you when it is ready for pick up. You can pay when you place the order or you can pay at the shop; at least that was how MSY operated.
I also placed an order for three short CAT6e cables.I needed three to connect the NAS. Only one was provided with the Asus router. I had two from the Belong router that I was replacing but they were CAT5 cables. The ones I placed an order for were inexpensive as they were very short. Both the router and the NAS would be kept on the fridge, so I did not need long cables.
I placed the order to MSY Clayton shop and went there after work to pick it up. Everything was done in 5 minutes.
One of the reasons for choosing the Asus T100 tablet when I was switching from the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet which gave me all sorts of trouble was the bundled keyboard dock. It is difficult to use the desktop portion of the Windows 8 operating system without a hardware keyboard. While the keyboard dock of the Asus t100 tablet wasn't perfect, it was adequate for the job was job.
And now it's broken!
How broken is it?
There are two problems.
A large portion of the keys are not registering a keystroke. The reason for this I believe is a water spill. Just like the Logitech g15 keyboard that I had with my desktop PC, water has taken out another keyboard and this keyboard is very important because it is difficult to replace.
The keys with the green dot are currently functioning and the ones with the red dot are not functioning anymore.
The key that is under the Escape key pops off easily. The culprit in this case is my son. He loves to pull keys out of keyboards and he has even done that with the MacBook Air. Luckily the key on the MacBook Air did not break but the key on the Asus T100 tablet wasn't that lucky. This is a very important key because it is the key that is used to convert from input mode Japanese input mode and vice versa (yes, I have the Japanese model, but you can install US version of the OS no problem). But this is not really a big issue because most of the keys are not functioning at all and I cannot use the hardware keyboard at all.
So, someone finally wanted to grab my Asus Maximus VII Gene motherboard and I decided to purchase the Asus Z97i Plus Mini-ITX board. The reason for getting a Mini-ITX motherboard was to make my already small gaming rig even smaller. Well, not just smaller, but lighter too. One might think I am insane, but I have my reasons for doing so which I am not willing to disclose just yet.
Sure, features wise it is sort of a downgrade. The old board had support for dual graphics cards, 4 DIMM slots, a much better audio solution (at least on paper) and better overclocking capabilities (again, on paper). Unfortunately, I am not willing to put a second graphics card or upgrade the memory beyond 16GB. My Core i7 4790K doesn't overclock high enough to warrant a better overclocking motherboard. It only does 4.5GHz without exquisite cooling which would be an easy feat for any Z97 board available. The only thing I would miss would be the audio chip. But I doubt that I would have any issues adjusting myself to the one on the Z97I-Plus board. I will probably feel that it sounds different, but not worse.
On the other hand, the Z97I offers some important features too. In-built Wireless 802.11AC and Bluetooth 4.0 support is one. Better CPU socket placement with respect to the first PCI-E slot is another, although this would only be useful to people who want to install a large CPU cooler. It doesn't apply to me because I'm most probably going to end up with an AIO closed loop water cooling unit.
After writing this post, I headed to Rakuten Auctions website and listed my Asus ROG Maximus VII Gene motherboard. After a few days, I got a message from someone asking me if I had the original receipt with me and whether there was an agent in the country who would handle the warranty related stuff. I had to look up about the latter. There was a Techwind sticker on the box and that confirmed it. Techwind was the official agent for this board who would be handling the RMAs. (It was just like when returned the Corsair SP 2200 speakers due to crackling. You can check out that article here. )
The starting price I set for the board was quite high. JPY 20,000. I did not expect anyone to bid for that amount. I only paid JPY 3,000 more when I bought it. However the current selling price of the board is JPY 26,800 due to devaluation of Japanese Yen. And he eventually placed a bid. Since nobody competed against him for the board, the final bid was same as the starting bid.
The guy paid for the board and I have to send it before 6th of June. In the mean time, it was time for me to look for a replacement. I love searching for new stuff to buy.
The Asus Z97I-Plus was the cheapest, priced at less than JPY 18,000 but it had one issue. The audio chip was the "old" Realtek ALC 892 chip. At least now there were better components such as audio grade caps to complement it, compared to the old Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 board I bought as soon as I arrived in Japan.
The Gigabyte Z97N board was about JPY 2,000 more and it lacked a M.2 port. Although I don't current own a M.2 SSD, I might have to buy one in the future because if everything goes according to plan, I would not have enough space inside the case for lots of drives.
The issue with the MSI board was its price. It was same price as the Impact and in that case the Impact would be the better option for the sheer amount of features it offered.
Today I went to Yodobashi Camera and there I saw the new "cheap" Asus 4K display, the PB287Q. It has been only days since this model has come out and it is good to see that you can already buy it in Japan. The price is decent (you get back 10% of the price as points to use on a future purchase) given the usual high prices when a product is initially launched in Japan.
I didn't get to play much with it, unfortunately. Just saw a movie playing in full screen – that is their demo - and also played a little bit with the desktop. The text wasn't small, so I thought that there was some kind of DPI scaling at play. But I couldn't notice anything out of the ordinary in the DPI settings section of the control panel. I was in a hurry so couldn’t play with it much. So I snapped a quick photo and came home.
Maybe one day I will be able to afford a 4K display. But the thing is, they are pretty expensive at present. It is not just the display itself, but the entire 4K Eco-system - especially if you are a PC gamer. You would need no less than dual Radeon R9 290 grade graphics cards to pump all that pixels while maintaining smooth frame-rates in games. When I bought my 1440p QNIX display, I thought it would be the same but 4K is twice that much pixels, so you get the idea.
But I think 4K displays have a long way to go. Currently the best displays refresh the panel at only 60Hz. But you can get displays up to 144Hz if you are willing to sacrifice the resolution for speed. It will take a long time for us to see a 4K display pulling that kind of a stunt. Remember, 4K means 4 times the number of pixels than a 1080p display. We'd need a massive bandwidth for it to work. Maybe the formulation of a new display connectivity standard.
If you read my previous post, you would have felt that I had kind of decided on what case I was going to get after all. Though it can change at any time, the chances of me going with the Silverstone Sugo SG09 case is pretty high, because of the overwhelming amount of power you can house in that tiny little case. But sure, something like the Cooler Master Elite 130 would be slightly smaller - but only about 15% in terms of the volume. With the Sugo, I can have two graphics cards - which I really don't care about at this time - but you never know , have 32GB RAM and install a beefy CPU cooler of up to 165mm in height. Plus, comparable Micro-ATX boards are slightly cheaper than their Mini-ITX counterparts.
But like I said, it is yet not set in stone. I might change this whole idea all of a sudden. In fact, I would not go along with the downsizing project at all, if I cannot get rid of the Raven RV03 case.
Now, to the fun part. I listed the Maximus VI Hero board on Rakuten Auctions even before managing to sell the case. (Click here to go to the listing.) Why? Because I can buy the motherboard now and have it installed in the Raven RV03 case until I get rid of the case. You must be wondering why I didn't do this in the first place. Well, the Raven RV03 doesn't support Mini-ITX boards and I had been looking for Mini-ITX boards up until now. Understand? It's quite logical.
So, in my road to Mini-ITX series of posts, I'm now going to show my disappoint in Asus and their motherboard choices. Where are the high-end mini-ITX boards?
As the motherboards with the new Z97 chipset are available - even though the chipset itself doesn't provide anything substantial over its predecessor other than future proofing - it doesn't take a rocket engineer to figure out why one would want to go with a motherboard with the new chipset. Well, sometimes it is not so black and white. You might get a great deal on the older models. But as it is the end of the road for Z87 chipset, there is no argument there. Z97 is the way to go.
With the old chipset, Asus had a couple of killer mini-ITX motherboards - the Z87I-PRO and the ROG Maximus VI Impact. The latter was pretty much the best mini-ITX motherboard released to date by any manufacturer. Asus went overboard with the feature-set it offered and it required them to add four daughter boards because the mini-ITX board's dimensions were too restrictive. The two most important daughter boards were the VRM circuit and the sound card. The Z87I-PRO was similar but didn't have the sound card and the "ROG oomph". Still, it was a very good board for the money. In fact, now you can get it for as cheap as JPY 12,000 if you know where to look.
I've been quite silent about the tablet lately. That's because nothing mention worthy happened with it. In fact, I've not been using it much lately. It's slow, even though it has a BayTrail CPU - the latest Atom CPU from Intel. Maybe it is not slow for most people but I'm not most people. And the app experience sucks compared to my iPhone - mostly the browser.
In the last few days, I felt the tablet was running slower than usual. I've been keeping the drivers and firmware up to date. No need to mention that Windows Update is set to install updates automatically. I wonder if these updates have caused issues.
There is a community in Google Plus dedicated to Asus T100 users. I'm a member as well. Yesterday I decided to post about the slowdowns there. I posted it fine but soon after I posted it something unexpected happened. I got a BSOD. It's as if the tablet knew that I was getting to ready to do something about this issue and it didn't like it. There is a ghost in the machine.
When I was deciding on a motherboard for my Haswell rig, one of the things that I looked at was automatic fan controlling capabilities. I has a hardware fan controller bay but it was automatic. And it was a cable hell. Asus boards were on top of that chart with their "mature" Fan Xpert 2 software. So I settled for the Asus Maximus VI Hero motherboard.
Since then I had been using the Fan Xpert 2 software to control the fans of my PC. It currently controls the two CPU fans, 180mm two bottom intakes, 120mm top exhaust and 120mm back intake. (Yes, it's a weird fan setup but that's by Silverstone Raven RV03 case's design).
Anyways, one of the cool feature of this software is that it can completely turn off the case fans when the CPU temps are low enough. (Basically when the CPU is idling.) But it doesn't turn off the CPU fans completely. Must be a safely feature.
I think this feature is causing the dust to pile up inside the case. Basically, when the case fans are not running, the airflow inside the case is governed by the CPU fans and the GPU fans. Since the positive air pressure is not maintained (by making intake fans' CFM > exhaust fans' CFM) this causes air to sneak in from places that you don't want them to sneak in from. Air doesn't just come in alone - it comes with dust. Dust doesn't come in from the holes where intake fans are installed because they are properly filtered. It's the other gaps in the chassis that let the dust in. There is no way to prevent dust from sneaking in through those gaps except for creating a positive air pressure.
So I've changed how the Fan Xpert 2 controls the fan speeds. I don't let the intakes completely come to a halt anymore. I can stop the top exhaust fan completely because it is an exhaust fan.
You can see the fan speed graphs in the following two screenshots. (click on the images for a clearer, larger image)
I should have cleaned the case internals but it is a tedious thing to do. I don't have time nor the motivation. Plus, I don't want to arouse the dust inside the apartment because of the baby. At least now the dust problem will be controlled. I will probably clean up the internals next time I upgrade some component inside the case. But it isn't happening in the foreseeable future.
The reason why I'm even considering a cover for the tablet is because of the glossy/slippery back. I want it made rough because if I keep it on my lap, it can easily slide off and fall. That happened once already. Plus, it also attracts a lot of finger prints. Plus, it would be easier to grip if the back was rough.
The old tablet, the Latitude 10 didn't have this problem. It had a very nice back which made it easier to grip. So I never thought of getting a cover for the back of it. However, because the screen was glossy, I bought an anti-glare screen film for the screen. I bought it from eBay. But I had to remove it after a couple of months because I had to send it back for repairs as the touch screen stopped working.
Anyways, the Dell is old news. Now I have a new tablet and it is awesome except for the aforementioned shinny back and a couple of small things.
Someone on Google Plus recommended me Skinomi for the back of the tablet. When I checked their website, I found that they already had skins for the T100. That is great. But the price is a bit on the high side. $29.95 on their website plus shipping which cannot be cheap. I found it $5 cheaper on eBay with a shipping cost of $10. $35 is kinda too high. Amazon (US) is selling it much cheaper though. Unfortunately, it is not available on Amazon Japan. Sadness.
I should have posted this before talking about the first impressions on my new tablet – the Asus Transformer Book T100 32GB model. But better late than never, right?
The packaging. Simple and elegant. Well, not as simple as an iPad’s packaging, but much better than the products that used to ship couple of years ago.
The tablet is right on top of everything. For a cheap tablet, it was packaged really well.
Like I said in the previous post, I bought the 32GB model of the Asus Transformer Book T100 a couple of days ago. The exact model number of the one I bought is TransBook T100TA-DK32G and I bought it from Sofmap. This post is about the first impressions about it. Actually, since the post is quite long, I'm going to split it into two parts.
Packaging
The packaging of the tablet is way superior to that of the Latitude 10. Both the outside of it and inside of it. When I first held the tablet, I felt it was smaller and sleeker than the Latitude 10 as well. You can see in the following pic, how the T100 compares to my old tablet.
No idea what Dell was thinking! Why would you need such a huge package for a tablet?
Thinner bezels on the Asus making it smaller
The tablet itself is thinner (top) than the Dell (bottom) making it lighter
I couldn't take it anymore. I weren't and ordered the Asus T100 tablet. The 32bit model! I think I can survive with just that much storage.
I ordered it from Sofmap. The tablet cost $449 here but I got 11% points so it only cost about $399. Still a tad expensive than US price. It cannot be helped. I'm planning to sell the Dell on Monday which is a company holiday. Hopefully they will give me a good sum back. Even if they don't, I've had enough with the Dell.
I should get the tablet today in the evening. I actually placed the order yesterday and it has already been shipped. Unfortunately I won't be home when it arrives, so I will have to ask them to deliver it back when I'm home.
Hope it won't disappoint me.
With the points that I received, I can either buy a 64GB MicroSD card or something else. The G602 mouse perhaps? The G710+ keyboard perhaps? Or a new video card? The points should remain intact for 2 years. I don't have to rush it.
Indeed it is, if I was living in the US. In the US, the price of the 32GB model is $349 and 64GB model is $399. If I can make at least $200 from my old tablet, I say that's good enough. I don't want to get the 32GB model though. That would be a downgrade from what I have right now.
The Asus Transformer T100 is ones of the first BayTrail tablets that came out with the launch of Windows 8.1. That $349 price tag includes a hardware keyboard as well. (AFAIK, it lack the addition battery though). Doesn't matter. Even with the Latitude 10, I'm not having problems with the battery life. I am fine having to charge it every night if required. Other than that, the price is the selling point. This price is same as Surface 2 which is ARM based and doesn't come with a keyboard. (You have to pay an additional $120-130 for a hardware keyboard on it.) And this is a convertible tablet, not just a tablet with plugable keyboard. The Surface 2 is not a proper laptop, because it doesn't stay stably on the lap.
Besides, there aren't any other options. Dell has Venue 11 Pro and that's about it. But it is not available for purchase as of today.
If you compare the Asus T100 with the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials, the differences are very noticeable. First, it has a CPU that's more than twice as fast as the one in the Dell. Then the GPU is many times faster. You get the keyboard. You get free Microsoft Office 2013. although it doesn't come preinstalled - a key to install the software is bundled with the package. Nevertheless, you get the best office suite for free. The speakers are very loud - as per reviews. The speakers on the Dell are horrible. It's about 100g lighter as well. The storage is still eMMC, but it would be slightly faster than the one on the Dell. Not sure if the performance difference would be noticeable though. I have always felt that the sluggishness of the Dell was always due to the sluggishness of the storage subsystem, not the CPU. So if that is the case, even a small bump in storage performance would be a godsend. Plus, it comes with Windows 8.1 out of the box. So you don't have to update to Windows 8.1 if you had to do a factory restore.
Only thing you are going to miss is the back facing camera. Who takes photos with a tablet anyways. Ah, and you don't get a full sized USB port on the tablet although one is available on the keyboard so that is not a big deal. I wonder if you can use both of them - the one on the keyboard and the one on the tablet body - at the same time. That would be awesome. I really miss not having multiple USB ports on the Dell.
So, obviously there is no competition between the Dell and the Asus. The Asus wins hands down.
There is one issue though. I don't live in the US. I live in Japan, and in Japan this tablet costs $449 for the 32GB model and $549 for the 64GB model! Ouch!!! That's too much! They want me to pay an extra $150 for the same 64GB tablet?
Sofmap is giving 10% points if we buy it from them, so the price of the tablet drops below $500. But still, I'm not sure that is worth it. I'll wait and see if the prices would drop. Perhaps when more and more shops start selling the tablet, it would become cheaper.
On the other hand, the Surface Pro 2 128GB is going for $870 for some reason. The price in the US is $999. Weird country Japan is!
Everyone on the Internet must already be knowing that I've upgraded to Haswell because I've written a ton of articles. When I was deciding on which motherboard to get, the capabilities of the AISuite software that comes bundled with the Asus motherboard played a big part. JJ of Asus marketing had posted a video showing the auto-overclocking features of the software some time back and I referred it before buying my Maximus VI Hero motherboard. Everything looked nice and functional. The auto-overclocking feature would test the maximum CPU clock speed you can achieve by running a stress test with every step of increase in multiplier. It would even try to overclock depending on the number of cores used. Please watch the video for all the details. It looks fascinating.
1-Click Overclock to 4.8Ghz - 4-Way Optimization on ASUS Z87
But after I bought the motherboard and decided to try it out, it wasn’t available in the AISuite III software that comes for this particular motherboard. It only had 3 predetermined overclocking profiles called CPU Level Up; not the intelligent auto-overclocking feature (OC Tuner) described in the above video. (This page explains the 3 CPU Level Up values).
When I asked around, the answer I got was that the target audience of ROG boards is different and ROG motherboards don’t support it. That’s total BS. I mean, ROG is their high-end motherboard series, but they would put a crippled software and charge more because the audience of the motherboard is more “geeky”? You are paying more to get less? Looks to me their target audience is “idiots”.
I’ve seen many people complain about this in the forums and the comments section of the above YouTube video. I hope Asus will release an updated AISuite/BIOS to bring that functionality to the ROG motherboards. If they don’t, I’m quite disappointed in Asus. It’s not that it is the end of the world. You have to use the BIOS anyways. Those auto-overclocking settings are almost always not stable when stressed out. But at least you get a starting point to build your overclock on top of. I paid for that feature; I want that feature. Besides, Asus doesn’t state anywhere that the ROG boards don’t come with that feature. JJ doesn’t say that in his video.
I was able to run Intel XTU at 4.4GHz for 12Hrs+ and I thought it was stable. How wrong I was! It crashed in Handbrake after encoding videos for many hours. Once after 10hrs! After that I figured that there was something that I must have overlooked. When I asked around, I came to understand that XTU doesn’t use AVX in its stress test. Handbrake does, but still it doesn’t bombard it with AVX instructions like Prime95 does. BTW, Prime 95 27.9 (which is the latest version out with AVX support) crashes easily with the settings that XTU ran for hours and hours without failing.
Then I figured that it could be stable everywhere but AVX. One way to check it was to run Prime95 without AVX. That’s version 26.6. I ran it for hours and it didn’t fail. Now I was sure that it was the AVX instructions that caused the issue. 1.285V just isn’t enough when the components that makes AVX instructions work also become alive inside the CPU. I’m sure I would probably be able to escape by using Adaptive Vcore which automatically increases the Vcore by 0.1V when AVX instructions are heavily used. I tried 1.285V Adaptive, but it still failed in Handbrake. Probably the voltage fluctuation is also not a good thing.
Since then I’ve come to accept that you cannot have everything you want in life and 100MHz isn’t worth that increase in Vcore and temps (and increase in fan speed). So, now I’m going to settle with my 4.3GHz OC and tweak it a little bit to get every bit of power I can get with it. I’ve successfully managed to up the Uncore to 39x at just 1.08V and Memory to 1600MHz @ XMP. I’m also in the process of tweaking the Digi+ power delivery settings (image below) to lower the power consumption and the temps as much as possible without crippling stability. The following screenshot was taken while running Handbrake. Look at the fan RPM – bottom right hand side. It’s completely silent. That’s just great. I won’t be able to achieve that with close to 1.3V. The temps it shows is not very accurate though. Those are not the core temps. Core temps hover between 60C and 70C.
I haven’t done a lot of testing, but after dropping the LLC to level 6, enabling Active Frequency Mode and setting CPU Power Phase Control to optimized, at least it is stable in Intel Burn Test, Handbrake and Crysis 3. If it passes 6hrs of Prime95, I say I’m stable enough.
In a previous post I mentioned that I was able to clock my new Haswell Core i7 4770K chip to 4.3GHz and I was planning to clock it to 4.4GHz. After trying for a week or so, I couldn't get it Prime stable at 4.4GHz below 1.3V Vcore. My CPU is a dog. It doesn't overclock well at all. In fact, it is a well below average chip. That's sad. I lost the silicon lottery.
But it is not the end. There is a few more tweaks I can do. For example, right now the RAM is at 1600MHz with XMP timings (9/9/9/24/2T/1.5V etc.) and cache ratio is at 39x with 1.075V. I think I can tweak the timings a bit and increase the cache ratio to 41x or so. 43x is ideal but will be a long shot I guess. I would definitely have to increase the Un-core voltage to somewhere around 1.2V to get near 4.1GHz. But that doesn't add a lot of power so I should be alright. Maybe I could tweak the voltages a bit. Perhaps lower the CPU input voltage to cut the temps by a degree or two. I could even play with the BCLK as well. Perhaps put it to 105MHz with the multiplier dropped to 41x? That might improve the performance slightly. Something is better than nothing, right?
Anyways, I am really disappointed with my CPU. There are people who have chips than can clock to 4.9GHz with just 1.25V. I have a great motherboard - a motherboard made for overclocking. But me not being able to get higher than 4.3GHz overclock is not the board's fault. It's the CPU alone. I probably can get by with 4.4GHz at something like 1.29V and be stable in real-world work loads. (Heck, I played Crysis 3 campaign from beginning to end with just 1.28V and didn't encounter a single crash). But in my head I know that it is not 100% stable and it might crash when I least expect it to. That is not something I can live with. Hey, it's just 100MHz which is even less than 2.5%.
One thing I should tell is that it was almost always the in-place Large FFT test that crashed when I tested for stability at 4.4GHz. Playing with the voltages other than the Vcore didn't made it more stable. It just needed more Vcore. When I kept on increasing the Vcore, the duration until Prime95 crashed lengthened, which means it was Vcore starved. 1.3V is a lot of volts for Haswell, no thanks to Intel cheaping out under the hood. Bastards!
Funny thing was that I could run 10 passes of Intel Burn Test at very high memory usage at 4.5GHz with just 1.280V Vcore. Intel Burn Test might be an indication of stability, but it is way inferior to Prime95, even though the temps while running Intel Burn Test is much higher than when running Prime95.
Here's are my current settings for 4.3GHz.
Vcore: 1.235V manually set in BIOS (1.248V max recorded in AISuite III)
Un-core multiplier: x39 (AUTO)
Un-core voltage: 1.075V manually set
RAM speed: 1600MHz
RAM timings: 9/9/9/24/2T
RAM voltage: 1.50V
Extreme Tweaking: Disabled
EPU Power Saving Mode: Disabled
Everything else: AUTO
Now, I haven't run adequate stress tests. I will do that after tweaking the un-core and the memory timings a bit.
One of the reasons why I chose an Asus motherboard was because their so called exquisite fan control software. They call it Fan Xpert 2.
I had a nice looking fan controller installed in my case. It was a Scythe Kaze Master Ace, 6-channel fan controller. It had three issues.
No automatic fan controlling depending on the temperature. I like to run the fans at low RPM, but there have been times where the graphics card had been scorched because of this.
The cable mess. Since it is 6-channels, there are 6 cables for temperature sensors, 6 cables for fans and 1 cable for Molex power. As I have a non-modular PSU, there is already a huge cable mess behind the motherboard. I surely didn't want more cables. And these cables are so ugly. Red and white. These issues were not new, but I had to give in because fan speed controlling on my old board was utter crap.
The PWM fans on my Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler had a hard time starting up. Since I am sensitive to noise, I keep the fans running at 1100RPM. Since the fan controller only supports voltage based controlling, that voltage is not enough to start them. Once started, they can work without issues. So when the fans don't spin up, an alarm goes off and it is really irritating. I can disable it, but then I don't know if something happened.
I could buy a new fan controller, or I could buy a motherboard that came with one. Fan Xpert 2 seemed to do just that. All Asus Z87 boards support it actually. The only difference is the number of headers each board have onboard. My Maximus VI Hero board comes with 5. Sadly, the Z87 Pro comes with 6. But I had to get the Hero because of its audio.
Two years and one month ago, I got my SandyBridge CPU (2600K) and motherboard. Yesterday, my motherboard broke. Well, after a long sleep, it came back to life. Still not completely stable, but it is working at least. But I decided that I’m gonna get a new motherboard anyway. It’s a matter of time this board will die imho. I just hope I will be able to sell the motherboard.
I had been sitting on the fence in dilemma, uncertain whether to stick with my SandyBridge 2600K CPU or to upgrade. I first felt Haswell was not worth it. Then the feature-set of the new boards won me over. I even considered the upcoming IvyBridge-E CPUs. But they will be using the two generations old x79 chipset. The prices would be pretty steep (3930K costs JPY57,000 even now), so I decided that route is not for me. That's JPY80,000 or more.
I had been reading the motherboard reviews to decide on a board. Three boards came out on top. The Asus Z87 Pro, Asus ROG Maximus VI Hero and MSI Z87-GD65 Gaming. I felt the software/UEFI support of Gigabyte boards was cheesy and ASRock boards not so good in terms of power delivery circuitry, software and even price - which was their strong point until now.
I moved to a new apartment. It doesn't have Internet so I went to apply for a new connection. You usually get great discounts if you buy a new PC with the new connection. So in my case, I was thinking of replacing my slow UL20A with something that suited 2011.
There were only options really. Either get an Asus UX31 or a MacBook Air 13". Both were available so I tried both of them before deciding which one to go for.
The Asus felt so much snappier and it was much easier to use. I felt right at home with Windows 7. However, the track pad was impossible to use. It was jumpy and this was with the updated driver.
Then I compared it to the track pad of the MacBook Air. It was great but kind of slow. But that could be adjusted. However, when I tried to use the laptop, it was so difficult. I didn't know the keyboard shortcuts. (apparently they are long cuts if you look at the default key combinations.) Anyways, when I tried typing on it, it was so much easier. The mouse pad didn't distract my typing.
