Next Surface Pro might be the one to get

Microsoft announced the Surface Pro 3 few weeks ago and it comes with some nice upgrades. The display has a higher resolution and the tablet body is thinner and lighter than the previous versions.

But is it enough? Not to me. I need it to be thinner and I want those fans out.

Good news is that it might not be that farther down the road. Intel announced the Broadwell Mobile CPUs - aka Core-M - which can run without active cooling. Holy cow!

I currently have the Asus Transformer Book T100 tablet but that's just darn slow for me. Sure it's running the latest BayTrail Atom CPU which is almost twice as faster as the CloverTrail which I also owned about a year ago but sold because I had a lot of issues with it. But it is still not good enough for me. I need a proper Core-I CPU with 4GB RAM and a proper SSD (not the crappy eMMC you find in these Atom based tablets). For that, you have to get the Surface Pro.

Then you might ask why not just buy an iPad Air. It fits the description, right? But I like the flexibility of Windows. You can transfer data using a USB stick. You can connect to the desktop PC that's running Windows without any hard work. To be honest, those are pretty much the only advantages of having a Windows tablet but those are very important to me.

So, next year will probably be my chance to buy a Surface tablet unless Microsoft goes bankrupt or discontinues Surface tablet production. A year is a long time but I will wait for a proper revision before buying a Surface Pro tablet.

[Rant] Z87 boards are going to support Intel Devil's Canyon? Oh yeah!

Despite what Intel made us believe, Z87 chipset seems to support Devil's Canyon. At least on some boards. Couple of days ago, I checked the support page of my motherboard - the Asus ROG Maximus VI Hero - to see if there were any new driver updates available. I went into BIOS page, but didn't really expect to see any new versions out. But to my amazement, there was a new version - 1504 - which had a very interesting description under it.

But there was a little bit of confusion caused by the wording. It said "Devil's Canyon CPU" and not "CPUs". But we know there are at least two CPUs - the Core i5 4690K and the Core i7 4790K. So what is it? Does this bios only support the unlocked Pentium model? But as far as I know, it does not carry the code name "Devil's Canyon". This had been debated on OCN forums, until someone posted the actual CPU support list for the motherboard.

It clearly states that the Core i7 4790K is supported. But I didn't check whether the Core i5 model is supported as well, because I simply have no interest in it.

[Rant] Devil’s Canyon?

If you are a PC enthusiast, you must have definitely heard about Devil’s Canyon. What is it? It is a CPU made by Intel, based on the same Haswell architecture that is aimed at PC enthusiasts.

What’s so special about it, for Intel to give it a special name? Intel says, it is a CPU made for overclocking. They say that the thermal interface material (or TIM) inside Devil’s Canyon is better than the “junk” that is in the current line of Haswell CPUs. So, it should run cooler because the heat will be transferred efficiently from the CPU to CPU cooler. So it should give more overclocking headroom. If you didn’t know, the current Haswell CPUs run so hot when they are overclocked – about 20C hotter than Sandybridge.

Is that all?

I sure hope not. I mean, you could do even better by delidding the CPU. One clue as to that there could be more changes in the CPU is that it requires a whole new chipset. The upcoming Z97 chipset. (The new boards will come out on 14th of May). If Intel only replaced the TIM, then there is no need for a new chipset, right?

It seems the new CPUs have a slightly different power circuitry. Look at the following two images. The one on the left is the Core i7 4770K and the one on the right is the Devil’s Canyon chip.

So, something is different. There are some components missing in the current Haswell chips. That’s good.  I hope that would result in higher overclocks. The improved TIM would give – hopefully – Sandybridge like thermals. I’m not sure if the die and the IHS will be soldered as Sandybridge though. That would be perfect. But that would also add cost.

Today, some more news surfaced the internet saying that these Devil’s Canyon chips would come out as Core i5 4690K and Core i7 4790K. Apart from the above mentioned info, the 4790K seems to be further a speed binned chip. It’s not a measly 100MHz speed bump as the other Haswell Refresh parts, but a whole 500MHz speed bump for base clocks. The first consumer chip from Intel to hit 4GHz base clocks. Woohoo! (clock on the following image to view a larger image)

Well, that’s great news, BUT, no enthusiast cares about stock clocks. For example, my 4.3GHz 4770K still is faster than this chip. This chip needs to be able to hit at least 5GHz to call this is a proper overclocking chip. Man, if you can hit 5GHz without causing a meltdown and wouldn’t cost more than $350, we have a pretty sweet CPU at our hands. Though I’m sure Broadwell will best this CPU eventually.

So what do you guys think? Would Intel be able to win back the enthusiasts’ trust? I sure am going to keep a keen eye on these Devil’s Canyon chips (a.k.a Core i5 4690K and 4790K) and would definitely replace my 4770K (which overclocks like crap and runs so hot) if it is a worthy upgrade.

[Rant] Got a BSOD in months!!!

A few months back, BSODs were a normal thing with my new rig. That was because I was trying to overclock my Haswell Core i7 4770K CPU. I spent a whole month trying to get it to 4.4GHz and finally I gave up and moved on. Now I'm a happily sailing away with a Clock speed of 4.3GHz.

A few days ago I noticed that there was a new BIOS (1002) for the motherboard (Asus Maximus VI Hero) and last night I wanted to try it out. Actually, I skipped the previous one as well. I wasn't going to see if it would overclock better than it used to. I just wanted to update for the sake of updating it.

First of all, I took screenshots of all the BIOS pages because updating would erase all of that. That's a dumb move on Asus's end, right? You can save it to a USB drive as a profile but sometimes when they version the BIOS up, the profiles won't be recognized anymore. Again, quite a dumb thing.

Anyways, just to be safe, I took photos of the bios pages. I could have saved them on to USB drive as screenshots using the shortcut key but that would mean I would have to use the tablet to view all those images. I didn't feel like using the tablet at that time so I just took photos from the phone.

Then it was the time to update the bios. I copied the bios file to the USB flash drive and went into the BIOS. I used the EZ Flash utility inside the BIOS to open the bios file and it took over the rest of it.

After flashing the new bios, it rebooted the PC. Before successfully rebooting, it had to go through 5 POSTs. The PC powers up, the after a couple do seconds it powers down - and this went on for 5 cycles. Man, I hate when that happens. You don't know if something went wrong or not. Anyways, it finally managed to POST and then another screen showed up saying that it is updating iROG... whatever nonsense that means. It took about a minute to complete.

After that it rebooted automatically and I went into the bios straight away and changed the settings back to where they were before. Everything seemed fine so I rebooted to Windows. Except, it didn't work as I expected. It gave me a BSOD just before trying to log into the desktop. Weird, I thought.

[Rant] No Broadwell for desktops?

Intel released the preliminary information about the upcoming Broadwell CPUs at IDF (Intel Developer Forum). They promised that the successor to Haswell is on track for the original schedule – that is in 2014. There were rumors few months ago that Intel had into trouble with the new 14nm process technology and Broadwell will be delayed into 2015. But all assured that there are no such delays.

Broadwell is going to incorporate further power efficiency enhancements from Haswell micro architecture. Performance figures weren’t released at IDC, but power efficiency has been improved by 30%. Haswell’s power efficiency is only at idle states. At full load, the power efficiency was on par with the IvyBridge, if you ignore the iGPU’s performance enhancements. (because if you consider that, then the Haswell has noticeably better power efficiency in games).

Since I lost the silicon lottery with my Haswell Core i7 4770K which can only do 4.3GHz without catching fire, I was hoping to sell it and upgrade to Broadwell as soon as it came out. But few days ago a rumor came up saying that the desktop PCs, at least the DIY PCs, won’t get Broadwell. Broadwell seems to be an embedded CPU; not a socketed CPU. DIY community will not be able to get a CPU and install it in their favorite motherboard. That sucks!

But don’t be discouraged as socketed CPUs are not dead. Skylake will be the next generation aimed at desktops. Well, Haswell-E is coming out next year, with 8-cores on the high-end, but very few people will get their feet wet with that behemoth. However, Intel will still launch new CPUs next year to the mainstream. That will be called Haswell Refresh. Don’t expect miracles. Maybe it will clock better, with better thermals.I’m sure it will get a speed bump as well. Perhaps the Iris Pro graphics on the top end models. Perhaps the disabled features on the K models will be enabled. That sort of “minor” improvements.

I’ll wait for it and see how things go. Probably it will be best to hold off till Skylake is released. The name “Haswell” (refresh or E model) gives me Goosebumps.

[Article] Intel releases IvyBridge-E CPUs. Better late than never?

In English language, there is an idiom called "better late than never", but I'm not sure if you can call it relevant when it comes to the latest CPU release from Intel - the IvyBridge-E. There are few issues with this release which make it very unexciting.

Firstly, the IvyBridge-E is based on the IvyBridge architecture, which is not what the current generation of mainstream CPUs are based on. The current generation is Haswell and Intel's enthusiast CPU is one generation older than it. When Intel released the SandyBridge-E CPUs, the current generation was SandyBridge. Thus, this enthusiast CPU did not fall behind the mainstream CPUs in any test. It at least performed as fast as the top of mainstream CPUs. (Core i7 2600K back them). But now, the top of the line mainstream CPU is the Haswell Core i7 4770K which is faster than the fastest Enthusiast CPU in certain test - tests that don't make use of all 6 cores. That should not be the case.

Secondly, this is not a new platform. This is just a new CPU, which makes use of the previous X79 platform. That platform was already aging at its launch, and after two years, it is completely outdated. You only get two native SATA III ports, no native USB3.0 ports and the chipset is very power hungry. Of course the motherboard manufacturers are putting out refreshed boards, but they have to make use of the 3rd party controllers to at come close to what the current generation mainstream boards are offering feature wise. How hard was it for them to simply release an updated chipset for IB-E? One might be thankful that they don't have to change the motherboard, but the platform is missing a lot of oomph that came with Haswell, that number (of people) will be very low.

Thirdly, the CPUs don't overclock as well as we expected. IvyBridge didn't overclock well as well, but that because the die wasn't soldered to heatspreader. When delidded, they overclocked as well as SandyBridge. But IB-E's die is soldered. So it doesn't face the heat problem. But for some weird reason, it doesn't overclock as well as we expected. It's definitely not a temperature issue. That 22nm tech is giving any advantage over SandyBridge-E CPUs. However, the power consumption is less than the predecessor. Who cares, right? The second you say that you are going to overclock the CPU, you are giving up the privilege to whine about the power consumption.

Fourthly, you are not getting noticeable performance increase from upgrading to IB-E from SB-E. IB-E's advantage is only about 2-5%, which is even less than what Haswell has yielded. But if you are upgrading from a Nehalem 6-core CPU (such as the Core i7 970, 980x or 990x), then the performance increase is worth it, IMO. It's definitely not worth it for SB-E users, especially without any improvement in the platform. Haswell at least gave a new, better platform.

If you want to read an unbiased review, read the PC Perspective's review over here.

IMHO, Intel should have skipped IvyBridge-E and went for Haswell-E straight away. Or, they should have released it at least at the beginning of this year. It looks like Intel doesn't really care. I'm sure their biggest profits (total profits) come from the mainstream CPUs. While these Extreme Edition CPUs are quick lucrative, the number of enthusiasts living in this world is too few.

[Article] Haswell stress testing using Intel Extreme Tuning Utility(XTU)

I'm still trying to find the sweet spot for my Haswell CPU overclock. Prime95 has been failing on my in a weird way. Sometimes it would go for hours without failing. Sometimes even a slight voltage bump would cause it to crash instantly. If I go back to the settings that worked fine earlier, it would crash again.

Last night I decided that it was high time that I moved away from Prime95 and found something new that worked well with Haswell. I have tried AIDA64, but people have been complaining that even after passing it for 12Hrs, it would crash in games. I don't know if that is a good stress test either. Plus, you have to pay for it.

Some guy one Overclock forums recommended that he is using Intel's own stress testing utility called Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (a.k.a Intel XTU). People say that it fully supports the new AVX2 instructions, doesn't make the Vcore go out of control when the CPU is bombarded with AVX instructions and it also shows all the voltages and temps on the same screen (so that you don't have to run a separate monitoring utility (or utilities) as is the case with Prime95. AIDA64 also shows the voltages and temps while stress testing. However, XTU also allows you to overclock the CPU from itself. But I don't really like overclocking using software, especially when AISuite III is installed there and it can clash with other software.

So, I started a stress test in XTU last night and I ran it for 13hrs without a crash or error. However, I'm not confident that not failing XTU alone is a good indication of stability. So I am running a few hours' long H.264 transcode queue in HandBrake. If I can get through it without an error, then I guess I would be stable in everything that I do. I only stress tested the CPU portion. I skipped memory for now. If H.264 fails, I would test Memory as well. Otherwise I don't see why I need to do that because the clocks, timings and voltage is pretty standard for today.

The current overclock settings stands as follows.

• Core multiplier: 44x (sync all cores enabled)
• Vcore: 1.285V manually set in BIOS (should change to Adaptive later)
• Un-core multiplier: x39 (AUTO)
• Un-core voltage: 1.15V (AUTO)
• RAM speed: 1600MHz (XMP)
• RAM timings: 9/9/9/24/2T (XMP)
• RAM voltage: 1.50V (XMP)
• Input Voltage: 1.75V (AUTO)
• Extreme Tweaking: Disabled
• EPU Power Saving Mode: Disabled
• Everything else: AUTO

※This is on hte Asus Maximus VI Hero board with BIOS ver.711.

Here's proof.

Note: 
Time remaining says 10hrs 58min because I set it to 24hr stress test. Deduct that from 24hrs, and you get 13hrs 2min. 

[Article] To de-lid my Haswell 4770K CPU or not?

Haswell runs hot compared to SandyBridge. IvyBridge also ran hot, but Haswell runs even hotter than that because of the existence of FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator). SandyBridge CPUs had the heatspreader soldered to the die thus having good heat transfer from die to the heatspreader. IvyBridge and Haswell both don't have it soldered. Instead, they have a thermal paste in between the die and the heatspreader. Intel is cheaping out.

The thermal paste itself isn't the issue. The biggest issue is that the "large" gap between the die and the heatspreader that requires a thicker than ideal layer of thermal paste. This gab is caused by the thick layer of glue that holds the heatspreader in place.

The only option is to either lower the temps by lowering voltages thus lowering the overclock OR to de-lid the CPU. That means, you pop open the heatspreader, scrub off the glue, clean off the thermal paste, put a better thermal paste and putting back the heatspreader. If properly done, people have been seeing up to 30°C drop in temps after doing this. THAT is massive.

Lower temps help overclock higher, or run your fans at a lower RPM. But it also lowers the power consumption of the CPU. What? How's that possible? It has something to do with these Tri-gate transistors. More voltage obviously increases power consumption. Higher temps also increase power consumption. Well, if you use power saving features - and your should - this will only happen at full load.

I compiled a list of FAQ below and will keep adding more stuff as time goes by.

[Article] Probably IvyBridge-E would be a flop as well

Yesterday Tom's Hardware released some preliminary benchmark results of the upcoming IvyBridge-E CPUs. They only compared others with the highest end SKU, namely, the 4960X. The results were very lackluster once again. (Previously, both the SB to IB and IB to Haswell were lackluster) I felt the benefits of IB-E over SB-E were even less than the benefits of IB over SB.

 

Now, there was one important improvement with IB-E over SB-E. Power consumption. At full load, the power consumption delta was more than 80W. This is at the same clock speeds. With the power consumption being lower than the predecessor and the IHS being soldered to the die, we might see some sweet overclocking numbers though. Too bad Tom's Hardware didn't do  any overclocking tests. That could be the deciding factor.

 

But if we assume that IB-E would clock to the same values as the SB-E, this doesn't look like a big upgrade either. You will definitely see a noticeable improvement with multi-threaded applications by upgrading to a 6-core CPU, but at what cost? The sweet spot, the 4930K, will still cost like $600. That's about 70% more than a 4770K, while giving less than 50% better results even at best case. On average, the 4930K would be like 20% faster. Maybe even less. Like I said, it is the overclocking potential that is going to make a difference.

 

Another noteworthy thing though. Why the heck would anyone buy a 4820K over a 4770K? It will perform about the same (because there isn't a noticeable difference between dual channel and quad channel memory and most people will settle for a maximum of 2 graphics cards; the enthusiasts will go for 6-core CPUs anyway), but 4770K has newer motherboards with 6x native SATA-III and USB3.0 support and a lot of fancy stuff. We all know that there is not going to be a x89 chipset, so the IB-E platform will be 2 years behind current technology. Sucks! Intel should have released IB-E last year.

 

I was planning to get the IB-E and now I'm skeptical. I will wait for the overclocking results - retail overclocking results to be precise. (We all know how Haswell retail CPUs clocks worse than the engineering samples.

 

Why, why, why doesn't Intel want my money? :(

Intel Rapid Storage Technology 12.5 is faster than 11.7

Remember I recently upgraded the firmware on my Samsung 840 series 250GB SSD? Even though the release notes said that I would see some performance improvements with the DXT08B0Q firmware, I didn’t see any. Then I upgraded the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers to see if it yielded in any improvements.

I originally had version 11.7.0.1013 installed. This was what I had when I flashed the firmware. There was a newer version out when I checked it a few days ago. Version 12.5.0.1066 (download from here). I don’t know what happened to version 12 though. Maybe I didn’t check for a new driver in a while. I only got to know that there was a newer driver from OCN forums.

I first uninstalled the old driver and installed the new one, just to be sure. Updating drivers doesn’t go really well most of the times. Ironically, I always update the NVidia drivers, never uninstall the old one and install the new one. I do that because I haven’t had issues doing so in the past. Sorry, I digress.

BTW, I downloaded the floppy driver, not the Windows drivers. The floppy driver comes with… just the RST driver. But the Windows driver comes with their monitoring and management software as well. Since I don’t use Smart Response Technology or RAID in my PC, there is no need to install them. No need to add more junk to the PC. I want to keep it as clean as possible.

Here are the benchmarks, before and after the update. Both were done after I updated the firmware to DXT08B0Q. For the entire specs of the test rig, click here.

Before (11.7.0.1013)

After (12.5.0.1066)

So you see, there is nice speed bump after the driver update. I don’t think that is a noticeable difference. Heck, you cannot feel the difference between two SSDs to the naked eye, without running benchmarks anyways. I just got this SSD because it was the cheapest 250GB one available back in January. not because it is the fastest.

Are you upgrading to Haswell? Improved iGPU will be the killer feature.

Would you upgrade especially if you are already running a 2nd generation or 3rd generation Core i-series CPU? The leaked benchmark scores aren't that great. They maybe for early engineering samples but I don't think the final chip will be much faster than the chips used in the leaked results. Intel won't be making big last minute changes.

I'm running a 2nd generation Core i7 2600K CPU and it's overclocked to 4.5GHz. We don't know how high Haswell CPUs will clock. You would expect an increase in overclock potential because of process shrink but IvyBridge didn't work that way. So you won't know until the full reviews are out. But if these CPUs can hit 5GHz easily, the increase on IPC will carry the performance delta past 30% mark. That's a healthy increase in performance these days.

(Image courtesy of Anandtech) 

One more issue I have with the leaked specs is that the TDP has increased from IvyBridge (84W vs. 77W) contrary to the popular belief. Haswell was supposed to bring significant power savings to the table. Why has the TDP gone up by 7W? I wonder if most of that power is resident in the iGPU. The biggest performance improvements in Haswell will come from the iGPU which doesn't mean much to most enthusiasts. The only thing you might want to do with the iGPU is video transcoding using Intel's QuickSync technology. Even then, the options are pretty limited. The application support for QuickSync sucks at best.

BUT...but...it looks like the drought is going away. You know what Handbrake is, right? Anandtech just reported that Handbrake is about to get QuickSync support. That would be awesome!!! That would be the reason to upgrade to Haswell, especially I'm only using a 2nd generation Core i-series CPU.

(Image courtesy of  wccftech.com)

How to enable TRIM for SSDs in RAID-0 on Intel 6-series (P67, Z68) chipsets

Few months back Intel announced that they were finally bringing TRIM support for SSDs in RAID setups (specifically RAID-0). But that support came with one limitation. Only the 7-series boards were supported. That means Z77, H77 and so on. People with old P67, Z68 boards were left behind. 

Technically, there was no reason why 6-series boards could not support it, but they had the old RAID ROM (firmware) which were not supported. Of course the manufacturers could release BIOS (UEFI) updates with the new RAID ROM, but we all know that would never happen. They want to sell their new boards. Why support the last generation? 

Even though the RAID ROM is bundled with the BIOS (UEFI) files, it is a separate thing. You can hack the BIOS file and modify the RAID ROM potion of it with the new ROM.

Some guy at Overclock.net forums has posted such modified BIOS files for Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI and Asus boards (click on the link to access them).  If you are using SSDs in RAID-0, give it a shot. If your particular board is not listed, you can upload the BIOS file and ask him to modify it. 

Here's the link to the forum thread. LINK

You of course will have to install the correct Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers to get it to work. Everything you need to know is posted in the first post of the above thread.

I don't really have a reason to update to the new RAID ROM because I have given up on RAID-0. But I would just update it for the hell of it - when I get back home. That's me. ;)

Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT) for a data drive – worth it?

Background

This all started when Seagate launched the new MomentusXT 750GB drives. I was wondering if getting two of them to replace my 2TB RAID-0 data drive (2x1TB Samsung F3s)  was worth it. After checking the current prices of the MomentusXT drive, I gave up the idea. Each drive cost 18,000 JPY which is outrageous (for just 750GB per drive). Anyways, the “idea of caching” didn’t leave my mind right there.

Instead of getting all new drives, I could buy the OCZ Synapse Cache drives to get the same effect. OCZ have specifically released an SSD for caching. The cache management is done by their proprietary software.  I could not find it online in Japan, but the Newegg prices are pretty steep as well. $150 for 64GB, which is about $2.4/GB. You can get 120GB SSDs almost for that price these days. For example, the OCZ Agility 3 120GB is ~$152 (JPY 11,980) these days.