ICaramba

Vista and multimonitors - revisited

Miguel Castro — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:02:52 GMT

Regarding the Feb 2007 posting I made (http://geekswithblogs.net/mcastro/archive/2007/02/14/106269.aspx#398291) and the responses I've had, I feel I need to revisit that opinion (even though it was over a year and a half ago).

I run two powerful rigs at home, Superrig runs Vista 64 (8gig RAM) and contains two NVidia 8600GTS cards (640meg each). This rig is powering four monitors effortlessly (and how sweet it is). Son of Superrig runs one NVidia 8800GT card powering two large monitors, also without effort. I was doing this well before Service Pack 1 so I have to say that the multiple monitor situation has been solid.

thanks for feedback

Alert for another phishing site

Miguel Castro — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:30:12 GMT

I received an MSN instant message from a friend today who I know well but only ocassionally chat with. His status showed as offline and for someone I talk to only once in a while, it was weird getting an IM from him with just a link. The link was to john.insaneimagz.com. His first name is John so this at first seemed legit, but then the page came up. It offers picture galleries but asks you to log in with your MSN credentials. Now, we've all seen sites that use "Live Passport" login, and most of us know what the login dialog looks like. This was nothing like that so I immediately did a search for it on the web and found this: http://www.phishtank.com/phish_detail.php?phish_id=491418.

I immediately called my buddy John, only to discover that his IM was comprimised and everyone on his IM list received the same message. Be alert about this one because we don't see too many phishes that come from IM.

Whoever starts these things needs to have their ass removed !

DevExpress Case Study & Interview Video

Miguel Castro — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:20:00 GMT

I while ago I did a case study with DevExpress. My product, CodeBreeze, was developed using the DevExpress DXPerience suite so they did a nice case study with me and here's the link:

http://www.devexpress.com/Home/DeveloperStories/SteelBlueSolutions/index.xml

Also, this year at TechEd I did an interview with Ray Navasarkian, the CEO of Developer Express, where I got talk about my product, CodeBreeze. Here's the link for that:

http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/thinking/archive/2008/06/10/teched-2008-interview-with-miguel-castro.aspx

Popped my TechEd cherry !

Miguel Castro — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:16:24 GMT

Well, TechEd 2008 is over and so is my first speaking slot in this extremely large conference. My talk was "Sexy Extensibility Patterns" and I was properly inaugurized with an 8:30am slot on the second to the last day. However, to my amazement, 296 people showed up to watch my deflowering. The final averages were 8.13 which I'm told me puts me in the "above average" category so I can't complain about this first TechEd speaking experience. As usual, there were a few idiotic comments from people who were oblivious to the point of the talk, but you can't please everyone.

The code for this talk can be found on my web site: www.steelbluesolutions.com

What a pain in the A$$

Miguel Castro — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:22:29 GMT

I'm in the middle of writing an extender provider for something I need and I came across a pain-in-the-ass scenario. Extender providers, like controls, run at design time as well as run time. I needed to debug something in one of my set-accessor methods so I put in something like this:

if ctl.Name = "controlName" then stop

Man, all hell broke lose. VS2008 does not like this one bit - it IMMEDIATELY gives you a window telling you that it found a user break point and needs to close. From this point forward you cannot re-open that project. I tried opening that file in notepad and removing that code since obviously VS was trying to compile it but that did not help. I ended up renaming the file then opening my project. Then I clicked on the "Show all files" button in the property browser, brought up the culprit file, comfirmed the code was fine, right-clicked and selected "include in project". Then I was OK.

I can see why VS doesn't like this, but why the hell can't it give us a recovery option !

CodeBreeze update

Miguel Castro — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 15:53:46 GMT

Well, it's been about 10 weeks since I launched the SteelBlue Site's store-front and the official release of CodeBreeze. Sales have been decent considering I haven't had time to do any marketing. If you're reading this and you're one of my customers, thank you for your business. All the comments I've received from my customers have exceeded any of my expectations on what people would think of the product.

On the 12th of January, I'm sponsoring a code-camp in Philly where I plan to give away a couple of licenses as well as discount coupons to all attendees. CodeBreeze is on release 1.0.0086 currently and contains several enhancements specifically requested by my users. CodeBreeze 1.1 is under final development stages and will include some amazing new features.

For those of you who have not seen it yet, I recorded a DNR-TV show demoing the product in its entirety. The product was in release 1.0.0079 when I recorded the show so there have been several new features put in since then; but the release notes describe all.

CodeBreeze can be obtained at www.steelbluesolutions.com, or you can contact me directly if you are looking for enterprise-level licensing.

Thanks again to all and a happy new year to everyone.

SteelBlue Solutions store-front is up and running !

Miguel Castro — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:07:23 GMT

Since the release of CodeBreeze about 2 months ago, I've made quite a few sales but all through personal contact using a PayPal account. I'm glad to say that's no longer necessary.

You can purchase CodeBreeze at www.steelbluesolutions.com now !

Until November 30th, there is an online coupon (you'll see it in the checkout process) offering a 15% discount off the total purchase. This means above and beyond already existing quantity discounts.

A fully functional trial is available for download and for purchasing you can use all the major credit cards. The PayPal option will be up in a couple of weeks.

Don't forget, you can watch a one-hour full demo on episode 77 of www.dnrtv.com !

Thank you to all my existing users - the response has been beyond anything I ever expected.

The Saga of the Super Rig - part 5

Miguel Castro — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:17:53 GMT

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

The Liquid Loop and Powering it up - yikes

So you saw the surgery I performed on the video cards to attach the cooling blocks. I also talked about the CPU cooling block, the radiator, reservoir, and pump. Each of these has two barbs on it, used for in and out liquid flow. The goal here is to make a closed loop where everything gets part of the flow. Also, do not think that by ordering the loop in a certain way you are providing more cooling in one component than in another. The entire loop maintains the same temperature throughout.

My loop went as follows:

The pump's input (the part that sucks) pulled liquid directly from the reservoir and the output pumped it to one of the radiator's barbs. From there I went out of the radiator (through the other barb of course - remember, everything has two) and into the CPU. I then went out of the CPU and into the first video card, out of that card and into the second, then out of the second card and back into the reservoir. All my equipment has 1/2" barbs so I can use either 1/2" or 7/16" tubing. I went with 7/16" because it's a bit easier to bend and still fits relatively easy into each barb. Some things required more of a twist than others but in any case I sealed it up with some plastic clamps afterward.

Have you noticed I keep using the word "liquid" and not "water"? There's a reason for that. When liquid cooling a rig, you need to use either distilled water or an actual coolant fluid. I went with the later for two reasons. The first is that I wanted something with color; not for show, because this case does not have any window, but so I can actually see something going on. The other reason is that most coolants are actually non-conductive and should there ever be a leak, I felt this was safer. This brings me to testing for leaks.

You don't want to build a rig like this and simply power it up - this thing needs to be tested. First of all of course, you need to fill the reservoir. Before I did this, I had to rig the power supply so I can turn it on without actually turning the machine on. First and foremost of course, this means DO NOT plug any of the power cables to your devices - the most important one being the motherboard. Not plugging it into the other devices is simply because it isn't necessary yet. There are some articles out there on how to cross a couple of pins on your 24-pin connector on the PSU so you can power the PSU up but it's seemed like a pain in the butt. The easy solution will cost you around 30 bucks but worth it because it involves buying a power supply tester, which I feel we should all have anyway. I picked one up online and most of them have receptacles for every single type of connector, letting you test them all. Some have lights that tell you the voltage information; mine has an LED screen. All are about the size of small MP3 player. In fact, I ordered one online then saw one at MicroCenter. Since I'm so damn impatient, I bought it, used it to test my liquid loop then returned it - a few days later, the one I ordered (which was much nicer) came in. Plugging the 24-pin connector into the power supply tester not only tests its voltage, but it also cross-wires it so your power supply can turn on and provide power to the other connectors. I then connected a standard 6-pin connector to the pump and made sure it worked.

The next step was to start filling the reservoir. I picked up this cool syringe that's about as thick as a can of Red-Bull. I used some black coolant that I picked up on the Danger Den web site but later saw that MicroCenter also carries it - the bottle is about 30 bucks. I poured some coolant into a glass so I can easily suck it into the syringe then squeezed it into the reservoir. My reservoir like I stated earlier, mounts in a 5 1/4" bay and I left enough length in the tubing connected to it so i could slide it out through the front about 4 inches. This was enough to unscrew the plastic filling lid on the top-front. I started squeezing coolant into it and repeated the process a couple of times until the reservoir was filled past the barbs. That's when the coolant started flowing down into the tubing. The problem is that of course, gravity is not enough to get the loop filled so it was time to close the reservoir lid and turn on the power. I heard the pump start right away and almost immediately start to suck coolant and pumping it through the loop. As soon as the coolant level came down under the reservoir barbs I turned off the power and added more coolant to the reservoir. I had to repeat this process about 3 or 4 times, effectively using the whole bottle of coolant but I wanted to make sure that the pump can suck coolant properly and I only saw that happening if the coolant level was above the reservoir barbs. I also noticed that if I left the coolant level too low under the top of the barbs, you hear slushing. Filling it up to cover the barbs eliminating the slushing sounds.

The idea is to let the coolant circulate for about 24 hours. This is to ensure that nothing leaks. I actually set some napkins inside the case to capture a liquid and make it more visible. My test was successful and I had no leaks (knocking on wood three times now) !

It was now time to finish connecting the power cables and power this puppy up. I have to tell you, not many thing make me hold my breath in anxiety; but this did. Remember, this was my first venture into liquid cooling and I just wanted to make sure I did things right. I checked and double-checked and triple-checked everything and finally decided I had to take the plunge. I powered it up and...

IT WORKED !!!

My SuperRig powered up and I was able to enter the CMOS configuration. I should tell you that I did have a small problem where the motherboard's internal LED display (it shows you status codes) was showing me an error status code which prevented booting. This happened every so often and was very annoying, but a call to EVGA support taught me that sometimes they leave the CMOS test-jumper in TEST mode, which they did in mine. Moving it over fixed the problem and I've been fine since.

Gripes

So I could not have finished this project without at least one or two gripes. I do have one small problem with the Cosmos 1000 case. It's real nice that both sides of the case come off with literally the flip of a lever in the back - I really love that. It's also nice that both removable sides have sound proofing on them already. The problem is that the space between the foam on the side panel and the motherboard backboard and case framing is not too much. This makes it a bit of a pain in the ass when you slip cabling (especially think cabling like the motherboard power cables) through the bottom slot and back into the case through a side slot. What I ended up doing is just running the 8-pin cable through the back of the case through the bottom slot and back into the front through the top slot (the 8-pin connector on this motherboard is all the way at the top). The 24-pin cable was simply two thick and would have to squeeze between the case framing bar and the panel with the foam on it; this had the effect of repeatedly popping out that side panel. My solution was to run it inside the case but I did tie-wrap it nicely so it was not in the way. As you can see in the picture though, all the other cables like the SATA power cables, the 3-pin connectors, and the 6-pin connectors all come to the back of the case through the bottom. Then those that need to go back in to the case, like the DVD drives, do so through one of the vertical slots; while the others like the SATA cables stay back there. Also notice that the three radiator fans use 3-pin power cables and since they're at the top, I just ran them through that top slot to the back of the case and connected them to a power cable (a couple actually) that ran through the bottom slot to the back of the case.

The other gripe I have is really my own fault. Liquid cooling requires a little maintenance about once a year so I'm told where you need to empty the loop out and clean the cooling blocks. This means removing them from their components and of course cleaning the chips, and reapplying thermal paste again before rebuilding them; it's the price you pay for the life you choose. My gripe is that I designed a completely closed loop so emptying the coolant will probably be done by using the syringe to suck it out of the reservoir. This would of course mean reconnecting the power supply tester so I can run the pump without powering up the machine, running the pump a few seconds so it can move some more coolant into the reservoir and repeating the suck process. If I would have thought about this, I would have put a T-junction with a stopper in the base of the T, in the part of the loop where the pump pushes liquid into the radiator just after it sucked it out of the reservoir. This would have let me open the cap on the T-connector, plug a tube into it and put the other end into a jar or something. Then when I run the pump, it would suck coolant from the loop and push it into the T-connector and into my jar. Of course, ideally the T-Connector should be able to close itself from pushing coolant back into the loop; I am not sure if something like that exists out there - I'll have to research it.

The Monitors

What's the use of having two powerful video cards when you're running Vista, which at this moment does not support SLI? Well, the answer is to run multiple monitors of course. I've been running a triple-head setup for a long time. My last rig was a P4 and used a Matrox Parhelia card that supported three monitors. At that time, I had 3 19" KDS LCD monitors. These only support 1280x1024 resolution which was OK at the time but pretty lame today. I wanted to keep a triple-head setup (at least) and since my second rig (workstation #2) had a Samsung 21T that always looked great, I picked up three more on eBay. These were not refurbished; I bought new ones from a reseller that was getting rid of them and I paid about $250 each. After setting them up on the my primary work area, I decided that it wasn't insane enough so I took one of them and placed it on a wall mount next to the original 21" that was connected to my second rig. That made that machine dual monitor -- nice (in my best Borat imitation), but it left a gaping hole between my other two monitors that would be attached to the SuperRig. I decided that this gap needed to be filled with a nice, brand new, 24" Dell wide-screen monitor capable of running 1920 resolution. The wings were the 21"s which run at 1600 resolution.

Since most of my time on this rig is spent in Visual Studio, I've configured the IDE to take advantage of this. I've taken every tool window I use, including the Solutions Explorer, Toolbox, Server Explorer, Property Browser, Help, and Output Window and docked them all together - with the Output window across the bottom. I've then taken that entire set of docked windows and docked it to the right of the code window and stretched Visual Studio out to take up the center and right monitor, with the center one being all code - it is sweeeet !

Now I was happy !

Conclusion

I'm happy to report that daddy and SuperRig are doing well. The machine is blazing fast and I couldn't be happier - that is, until the 8-cores come out. I have one available monitor port left in one of the cards and heaven forbid it goes unused, so I purchased a 20" widescreen which will go above the center screen. I also have an available PCI-E slot so I may actually pick up a cheaper 8600GTS card to connect two more 20" widescreens as top-wings. Don't say it ! Last time I posted an entry about my old setup, which also has 3 monitors, I got emails from people actually yelling at me with negative comments. Comments like, "why the hell do you want all that" and "you're an idiot, you could have just gotten one big screen" and "why would anyone need that many screens". My answer is simply, "mind your own friggin business - because I want them, and believe me, I use them. And baby, once you play Microsoft Flight Simulator on multiple screens, you're hooked !

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

The Saga of the Super Rig - part 4

Miguel Castro — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:16:56 GMT

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5

The Video Cards

Besides cooling my CPU, I wanted to also cool my two NVidia 8800GTS cards (did I tell you that each has 640meg of RAM). This two I did for not only cooling efficiency for overclocking potential, but also for space savings. Check out these before and after shots of one of my video cards.

The first picture is the card in its original state and second is after I removed the cooling mechanisms and attached the water coolers. This blew me away; the bulk of the card's size is spent in cooling it. So you see, it was time to perform some video card surgery. The GPU coolers are used are the new Stealth from Swiftech and were on backorder everywhere for over three weeks. The cards still take up two slot covers unfortunately, but that's due to the slot plate that's mounted on them. I suspect I may be able to find single-slot plates somewhere. The great thing is that mounting two of them just a couple of slots apart does not give the appearance of over-crowdedness I would have if they had their originally cooling blocks on them - look at those things; they're monsters!

Memory - lots and lots of Memory

The motherboard I used allowed to me put as much as 8 gig of RAM on it, and heaven forbid that I should do any less so yes, I went all out and filled it with four 2gig modules of Corsair XMS2 PC-6400 RAM. Before you give me any hassle over not buying PC-8800 or PC-10000 RAM, check out the price difference. Two 1gig modules of PC-1000 Corsair Dominator RAM would have cost me $600. A two 2gig module pack (4gig) of the PC-6400 RAM cost me $360 and if you check now, it's even cheaper. So I spent a total of around $700 on a total of 8gig of RAM. The Corsair XMS2 still has the same heat spreaders that the Dominator RAM has. And of course, I could not in good conscience leave well enough alone and not attempt some kind of extra cooling on the memory so I bought the Corsair Dominator RAM Cooling Unit which plugs into one of the motherboard's fan plugs. Luckily, one happen to be right next to the memory banks.

Take a look at this picture. You get an excellent shot of how easy this case is to work with. It obviously is designed to hold an extended ATX motherboard so with my standard ATX size, you have lots of room to play. I don't care what you say about smaller being better; once you've had the comfort of working in a case like this, its enormous size does not bother you one bit.

OK, say it, go ahead. Why so much RAM. Because I can! Deal with it. I use VPC quite a bit; in fact I've used a couple of instances of VPC at the same time while also having Visual Studio open. I'm also a fan of a certain game that loves to eat RAM, Microsoft Flight Simulator. That's why 8gig. I've run this rig with 3 VPC images open (XP), each with 2 gig of RAM allocated to them, Visual Studio 2008, and Microsoft Word; all open at the same time -- and all running at full speed. And in my monitor setup, that looks sweet!

Who's got the Power

For my power supply unit, I went with the Maximum PC recommendation after learning that it's also the most kick-pass PSU out there. It's a PC Power Silencer Quad 750 and it's quiet and slick looking. No flashy lights here just a nice single-rail design with all the state-of-the-art cables you can want, even PCI-E power cables for both my video cards. All the write-ups say that this 750 is more than a match for many 1000 watt power supplies on the market. Also, with this case, it sits at the bottom instead of the traditional top-mounted design. Call me weird, but I kind like that design much better. The only deceiving thing is that the cable setup in the Maximum PC rig go from the PSU through a slot at the bottom of the case's side, then back in through a side slot much closer to the motherboards plugs. The problem is that the 24-pin connector on this PSU is not long enough to do what the Maximum PC picture showed. Later I found that those guys had the PSU company make them a power supply with custom-length cables ! As for me, I had to purchase a couple of cable extensions for the 24-pin and 8-pin motherboard connectors (yes, you will be using both of those with the EVGA motherboard).

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5

The Saga of the Super Rig - part 3

Miguel Castro — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:15:49 GMT

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5

Cooling

As I described earlier, when it came to deciding which CPU to use, I chose to go with the 2.66ghz QX6700 with the idea of overclocking it. Overclocking usually requires that you take cooling very seriously so I decided to go with a liquid cooling solution. Since I am a newbie to this technology, I tool the liberty of exercising my God-given right of pestering by liberally bugging my buddy, Richard Campbell quite excessively. But seriously, Richard was tremendously helpful and for that I am extremely grateful. Richard did not recommend any particular equipment or brands to me but instead educated me into exactly how liquid cooling works and more importantly what it does and does not do. Specifically, I am referring to the fact that liquid cooling a rig moves heat quicker than air, as well as more efficiently. The CPU (or other components) is still going to produce the same heat and of course, transfer that heat to the cooling block you apply on top of it. The water (or coolant) is just much better at carrying this heat away.

As far as water cooling components are concerned, I went with the exact same components already proven by the folks at Maximum PC. Yes, call me a copy cat if you want but at least I knew not only that they worked well together but that they fit nicely into my case, since I used the same case they did. Did you catch that last sentence? I said "into" my case; that's right, all the water cooling equipment is actually internal in this case. This is unlike many water cooling rigs where the radiator is mounted externally - usually in the back.

I decided I wanted to liquid-cool the CPU and the two NVidia 8800GTS video cards. One of the things I learned is that the radiator is crucial in taking the heat and blowing it out of the liquid - this really works exactly the same as a radiator system in a car. Since I was cooling some parts that had the potential of getting pretty hot I went with the Swiftech 320 triple-fan radiator. Mounting this thing was where things start to get cool - no pun intended. The Cosmos case comes with two fans at the top of the case, mounted internally and blowing out. The top of the case has grill holes for venting these fans and is covered nicely by a black plastic grill. By removing these fans, I was able to mount the radiator in their place, and was even able to use the same mounting holes used by the fans. Now, remember I said a triple fan radiator earlier? That means that the length of the radiator accommodates up to three 140mm fans to be mounted on it. The Maximum PC rig only used two fans with the excuse that they felt that it wasn't necessary to use all three - here's where I disagreed. I thought that I would take full advantage of having bought such a big radiator so I mounted all three 140mm fans on to mine. in fact, I would have bought just one since the two fans I removed from my case are also 140mm and would have fit perfectly, but oh well, they were only 6 bucks each. The fans are mounted so that they blow through the radiator - this is crucial. All radiator fans should blow through the radiator.

Also shown his the CPU cooling block I used. It's also form Swiftech and it's called the Apogee GTX. It's nicely sized and very easily to install. Basically it has a back plate that goes on the back of the motherboard and of course the cooling block on the front over the CPU. Then, the two just screw together, nice and tight. By the way, as in the case with the video card cooling blocks, don't forget the thermal paste

I've seen radiators mounted where the fans blow through them and then into the machine. I guess this isn't a big deal since you're still blowing the heat out of the liquid, but also wanted to take into consideration the internal temperature of my case as a whole so I decided to mount my radiator/fans where they blow through the radiator and out of the machine.

Now, remember I said that the case had grill holes for venting the two fans that were installed with it. Since I mounted a third fan, I drilled some rather ugly holes into the top of the case where the third fan would be. All this would be covered by a nice looking black plastic cover anyway.

As you can see, the plastic cover looks nice and clean, and the vent slots point back so you don't get any of the warm air blowing directly at you.

I should point out a disadvantage to this configuration, especially in comparison to the Maximum PC build. By mounting my radiator internally in this position, I sacrificed the top 5 1/4 drive bay. This case comes with 5 external bays so losing one may or may not be important to you depending on what devices you want to install later. This sacrifice is also done in the Maximum PC rig. Where mine is different is that I had to sacrifice two bays. The reason for this is that I mounted that third fan where they only mounted two. That means that the overall thickness of the radiator extended all the way to the front of the case. Add to that the space taken by the tubing that comes out of the radiator (at the front) and you see where the need for space came from. To me it really did not matter, I only had plans for three bays; two DVD drives and one reservoir (I'll that about that one in a second).

Some final word about water cooling

So now my radiator was neatly mounted internally and I was ready to continue my adventure. Remember the fan I removed from the bottom of my case and placed in those two drive bays? The space it left available was perfect for my water pump. incidentally this is right from the Maximum PC rig. I used a Danger Den L5 pump and screwed it right two the grill holes the were underneath the fan. By the way, the fan that is now sitting in the drive bays can still suck air from the bottom of the machine (the outside actually). In fact, the Cosmos case comes with two air filters that quickly slide out for cleaning from the front and back of the bottom of the case. My research confirmed what Maximum PC said about this pump; it's one of the most reliable, strong, and QUIET on the market. It also comes with an adjusting screw for controlling its speed - something that definitely affects the noise it generates. I keep mine at just over the 3-setting and everything is just fine. The pump comes with 1/2" barbs so you need to go the 1/2" tubing route, which I was going to anyway. In fact while on this topic, I went with Swiftech 7/16 tubing which is designed to fit into 1/2" barbs but is a bit more flexible than 1/2" tubing. As the article in Maximum PC specifies, it took a hell of a wiggle to get the tubing onto the pump but the clamp I put on it afterward was most likely totally unnecessary.

I've heard several people build water-cooled rigs and don't go with a reservoir. Instead they attach a T-Valve to the liquid loop and fill/empty from there. I've heard mixed opinions on this but I decided to mimic the Maximum PC rig and go with the Swiftech bay-mounted reservoir. It mounted into my last available 5 1/4 external drive bay nicely and provides a certain "oooh" and "aaah" reaction from anyone who comes into my office and sees the front of the case.

I feel I should tell you a couple of other things about liquid cooling. First of all, about the noise: I've heard many people water cool for noise-reduction. Remember my radiator and the three fans? Now granted, these fans are pretty damn quiet; add to that the fact the Cosmos case is extremely quiet and even comes with noise-reducing foam on the side panels and I'm not doing too bad. But don't go into it thinking that you are eliminating all noise from the rig because the only fans you really eliminate are those connected to the CPU and the video cards, if you water cool them too as I did. If you truly want to eliminate ALL noise through water cooling, you would need to remove all case fans right? And if you do that, then how do you blow air through the radiator? Well I'm glad you asked, cause this is where water cooling can become very insane -- but very cool too; oh yeah, and very expensive. What do I mean by insane? Well, talk to Richard anytime and ask him to tell you about his set up. Basically since you still need a radiator, some fans, and a pump, but you don't want the least bit of noise, the only other solution is to offload that equipment elsewhere. I don't mean just an case-externally mounted radiator (heck that would be louder), I mean external in terms of mounting it outside the room and venting out of the house. As far as the pump and reservoir are concerned, yes, them too. Richard has water tubing running in his walls with taps that come out behind each machine. So basically a tube comes out of the wall, runs through the machines internal cooling loop, then back out of the rig and into the wall - and onto the next machine. Pretty cool? Pretty insane? If you knew Richard, you'd understand.

As for me, the primary reason I went with liquid cooling is for the cooling efficiency and the space-savings. The Quad-Core processors are designed to run hotter than what you're probably used to having processors heat up to, but heat is heat and it must be dealt with. To air-cool a quad you would need a pretty decent size cooling block/fan setup, and while they do exist and I have seen builds with these kinds of coolers, no one can deny that they do take up quite a bit of space. Not only that, they make maneuvering inside the case more difficult, even what should be simple tasks like the removable and replacement of memory modules. The cooling block that sits atop my CPU is very small and simply has two hoses going into it. The same can be said about my video cards.

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5

The Saga of the Super Rig - part 2

Miguel Castro — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:13:41 GMT

Click here for part 1, part 3, part 4, part 5

OK, so you probably read the horror story with the online PC builder. I figured by now you want to see the happy ending (don't get any ideas). After my refunds were processed by the PC builder from Hell, I set out to build my own rig from scratch. Coincidentally, my friend Eric Harrison turned me on to an issue of Maximum PC which has just hit the shelves. It described in detail a project that Maximum PC seems to undergo on a yearly basis called, Dream Machine. In this issue, they described their Dream Machine '07 so it seemed to give me a place to start and also a list of components that seemed to work well together. Well, to make a long story short, I built my own version of the Maximum PC Dream Machine '07. I say my own version because some of the components I purchased varied a bit but those decisions weren't made without extensive research and long IM conversations with my friend, Richard Campbell. I started buying components little by little instead of all at once. There was a perfectly logical reason for this and it paid out. The case I wanted - badly - was indeed the one used in the Maximum PC '07; it was the CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000. However, this case was not scheduled to arrive in the states until Sept. 1st. For this reason, I held out in buying the components that were most likely to decrease in price as time went by; these were the CPU, video cards, and RAM. I decided to go with a slightly lesser CPU than the magazine rig did and also than the one I originally ordered from the online builder back in the months of hell.

Originally I spec'd out my rig with the online builder with an Intel QX6800 which was a 2.93 Extreme Quad-Core Processor. At the time I was ready to build my new rig, this processor went for about a grand, but the QX6700 which operated at 2.66ghz went for just over 500 bucks. After researching a bit, I discovered that the QX6800 is simply a factory over-clocked QX6700. The X signifies an unlocked multiplier and the QX6700 had its multiplier set at 10, while the QX6800 had its multiplier set at 11. The speed of the FSB was identical. For this reason, I went with the lesser CPU and had my sights on some serious over-clocking. Because of this I also made the decision to water cool. This had me nervous at first but extensive conversations with Richard made me fee a little better. Oh, who am I kidding? I still was nervous as all hell, but no guts no glory. I went with all same water cooling equipment that Maximum PC did with their rig.

The other differences in our rigs were at the video card, RAM, and hard drive levels. Maximum PC went with the NVidia 8800GTX Ultras while I went with a couple of NVidia 8800GTS cards, each with 640 meg of RAM. I did this primarily for the price difference; using Richard's formula of "shoot for 85% of maximum available speed for 50% of price and avoid 75% stupidity". Another difference with my rig is in the RAM. Maximum PC went with the Corsair Dominator PC1000 and only 2gig, while I went with Corsair XMS2 PC6400 but with 8gig. I preferred the larger amount of RAM for better futurization and at a fraction of the cost. Their RAM is priced at around $600 for 2 gig, while mine was about $370 for 4 gig. The hard drive specs in our two rigs is also a bit differently. They stuck 4 Hitachi 1TB drives into their rig, the first two running in a RAID 0 configuration and other two individually. I went with four drives as well but two of them (the system drives) are Raptor 10K RPM drives running in a RAID 1 configuration (mirroring). My other two drives are Hitachi 1TB drives also running in a RAID 1 configuration. I also went with a couple of lightscribe-capable DVD ROM burners while they went with a Blue-Ray/HD-DVD combo drive that runs over a grand (mine were 40 bucks each). I used the same motherboard that Maximum PC used after researching it a bit and seeing that it really is one of the highest rated motherboards in the 775 socket family - I'm talking about the EVGA n680i A1 Motherboard.

The rest of this article describes the equipment in detail and the building process for your education and entertainment. I will tell you right now in case you're wondering - I loved building it and I'll always totally build my own rigs for now on till the end of time.

Building the SuperRig

The coolest case ever

Since I mentioned earlier that I waited until the case I wanted was available in the states, I'll start there. If you're wondering whether any case is worth putting off the reset of your machines, you have not checked this case out. It's the CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000 and it's awesome. It is a large case, make no mistake about that. But let me tell you, after bleeding from hands just to swap memory, you learn a whole new appreciation for a case that has tons of working room in it. As you can see from the picture on the right, it has real purdy handles on top and bottom. These are not only great for carrying it (it is heavy), but keep it lifted off the floor a couple of inches. The top grill is the fan vents for the three exhaust fans on top. I removed these but more on that later. The case has a beautiful steel finish with a gloss black front door than can be changed to open in either direction. Both sides of the case come off with one lever in the back. I love this thing so much, I bought a second one and gutted my secondary workstation to put into this case. That workstation is currently a P4/AGP rig but it also undergoing a rebuild - albeit a lesser one as it will end up being a dual-core, single video card rig.

The back of this case shows you that the power supply goes at the bottom. This is cooler than you might think. There is no worry about the weight of the power supply and makes for a cleaner case. You'll also note that there is a rear exhaust fan as well. Don't let all these fans scare you. The inside of the case's sides have sound proof foam pre-installed and it makes this thing very quiet. See those two holes at the top? That's right - it's pre-drilled for water cooling, though I didn't use these. Believe it or not, I kept ALL the water cooling equipment inside the case.

See how nice the sides are? Very clean stainless-steel finish - I know, I sound like a friggin commercial. The inside is absolutely awesome. That center piece is a removable wind tunnel for the video card but my configuration called for removing it. The 5 drive bays have this click-in technology where you literally just slip the DVD drive in and click it into place. The bottom right contains the 6 drive bays, of which I used 4. They are removable bays which allow you to secure the drive in place then simply slip each back in. Just to the left of the drive bays is the intake fan. The case has two fan filters underneath that very easily slide out for cleaning. The intake fan is nice and large but in my case it did not stay there. This is where it starts getting cool - no pun intended. I used that area (as pictures will later show) for my water cooling pump. This is the same configuration used by the folks at Maximum PC but they simply eliminated the fan. I used it elsewhere. See, this case is missing an active cooling solution for the hard drives, but not mine.

Hard Drives

As you can see here, I removed the drive bays and I said earlier, I only used 4; the top three and the left most bottom one. Then I used the space left by the two right most bottom drive bays and slipped the fan into it. I even managed to place a screw into it to hold it down. Now, not only did the fan not go to waste, it's actively cooling the drive bay area.

Of course, in order to maintain active air intake and hard drive air cooling, I am limiting myself to four hard drives, but I really don't think I'll be needing more for this rig due to the drives I am using. I chose two separate RAID 1 arrays, giving me the fault tolerance which allows me to sleep good at night. My first array is the boot/application array and consists of two Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM drives, each 148gig in size. These drives really were meant for this purpose, and not data storage since their size is a bit more limited. The RAID 1 mirroring configuration allows any one drive to fail and not cause an interruption. Of course, upon replacement of the faulty drive, a re-mirroring commences automatically. With my system currently configured the way I want (more about that later), I have 50 gig free in this array. If the situation ever arises where I would need more space in my system array but want to maintain the speed of the 10K RPM drives, I can always configure a RAID 0+1 array where a set of two RAID 0 arrays can give me 300 gig of space and mirror each other in a RAID 1 configuration, but of course I would lose the ability to have the fan in the space where the last two drives would go. y second RAID 1 array in my current setup is my data array and consists of two Hitachi 1 TB (yes, that means terabyte) drives. The density of these drives make then very fast, actually coming pretty close to the Raptors. These drives also have a 32meg cache, as opposed to the standard 16meg cache typically found on drives of lesser size.

The drives easily screw into each of their bays and the bays just slip back in. This was a great design on the part of CoolerMaster. It allows you to prep the drives externally but more importantly, the removal and insertion of the drives casings does in no way interfere with any other case components. This is more I can say about many cases where the drives also slip out but sideways, forcing you to remove cards just to install or replace hard drives.

The second picture here is already hinting that I went the liquid route when it came to cooling this rig so I guess I can start talking about the now.

Click here for part 1, part 3, part 4, part 5

The Saga of the Super Rig - part 1

Miguel Castro — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:32:17 GMT

Click here for part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

For those of you who don't know, I've been wanting to build a new development workstation for quite some time now. You would think that it would be an easy task and one that would not take very long to accomplish; but you would be wrong. You see, I don't do anything the easy way. Maybe this is out of sheer ego or maybe it's that I have some real luck issues, but if the fact here is that during this process (at least at the beginning of it) I became very well acquainted with Mr. Murphy -- of Murphy's Law fame. I write this today for a couple of reasons. The first is so that I can spare some of you the headaches involved, and the other to serve as some amount of instruction in PC building. The former will not refer to headaches in the actual act of building my new rig, but more toward what I experienced when I tried to have someone (a certain company) do it for me. I'll tell you the story, but I assure you now that there was light at the end of the rainbow. If you do not wish to learn about my experiences leading up to the actual building of the machine, you can jump to that entry here.

In the Beginning...

This phrase usually starts with "there was darkness". In my case it indeed does, but the light does not come until I gave up on dealing with [PC-Building Company here] and decided to go from scratch all by little lonesome. I'm not out to slander the company I did business with and I'm not going to state their name publicly here but I am going to be factual as to what happenned.

Toward the end of April, I got online at this company's web site and started to spec out a new system. The level of detail in which you can spec a rig was impressive, though I found out later it lacked certain important specifics. The site allowed me to select every specific piece of equipment I wanted; and lack thereof. This included case, motherboard, CPU, drives, video cards, etc. What it did not inform me of was that certain cases were too small for certain chosen equipment. I wish this was the biggest problem to come but sadly it was not. I spec'd out a pretty high-end rig. After all was said and done, I'd have broken the $4,000 barrier. Now came the wait for arrival.

On May 11th, the new rig shipped. After a week in transit, it arrived at my house in great anticipation. This thing had a 2.93ghz quad-core processor, dual NVidia 8600 cards, 4gig of RAM, etc. I went with dual cards because I already had a great monitor set up consisting of three monitors, a 24" wide screen in the center and two 21"s as wings. I also went with 4gig of RAM because I intended to load Vista 64bit on it. Upon opening the case, I noticed that the kind of equipment I had chosen had caused a great over crowdedness in the case. This can be considered my own fault for chosen said case, but I still think that this company's web site should post this kind of information. See, I went with conventional air cooling on this rig and the size of the CPU cooler was about the size of a friggin power supply. It crowded over into the memory area so getting memory modules in and out would not be ease; as I would soon find out. I got the machine hooked up and booted it fine. After getting as far as installing Vista and Visual Studio 2005 I received my first visit from the famed BSOD (blue-screen-of-death for those of you that no habla).

Now here's where the fun begins with the online builder because you see, this blue screen occurred on a reboot after installing some .NET Windows Forms controls. In the interest of a reader possibly having the same stupid reaction to this that the online builder had, I will not specify which control suite it was; but anyone with any knowledge about this knows that it can in no way, shape, or form cause a blue-screen on reboot, especially one before the Windows Vista logo even appears. Control Suites are simply .NET assemblies that exist on your machine and do not interfere with the booting process. In fact I currently have and use all the suites from all the major vendors. After attempting to reboot several times and still getting the BSOD, I broke down and contacted the online builder's tech support department. The phrases "pass the buck" and "cover your ass" received a totally new definition when the techie got on the phone. You see, yours truly was dumb enough to mention the control suite installation and reboot process so of course this was what he immediately blamed for the blue-screen. Now, as smart as some of these guys seem to think they are, their knowledge is very vertical, meaning it is limited to hardware only and does not venture into the software arena whatsoever. This means that my attempts to explain what control suites are, how they work, and what they install went like the resistance to Borg assimilation. The tech asked me to remove all but one of the memory modules (I had 4 1gig modules). This is where the case/equipment combination would prove fatal to the epidermis in my hand. After a maneuver that can only be compared to Mr. Fantastic's limb contortionism, I managed to remove all but the first RAM module. The PC still did not boot so then the tech, oblivious to the bloody condition of my hands, asked me to replace that one module with each of the others - one at a time - and try too boot with each. This was also unsuccessful, though I did gain tremendous dexterity in my now rather useless right hand, a fact that sucked on many levels. In any case, he did conclude that my new wonderful rig was DOA and asked that I ship it back. Now dear reader, in the interest of keeping you looking forward to the rest of this story, I feel I should tell you now that this was the first of three returns.

The company sent me a RMA slip and Fed-Ex ground label so I packed up the rig and sent it back. You should know that this company is in the west coast (Los Angeles County) so the trip there took a week. Remember that I had the machine in my possession for less than 24 hours. After the machine arrived, it took 3 days for the support department to get their hands on it. The guy that took charge of my rig is "stupid support asshole #1" but I'll use SSA1 for short. I talked to SSA1 after he had about 4 days to mess with my rig and he told me that he was waiting for a replacement CPU; that mine had "gone bad". He claimed that it would be about a week, but since I would be on the road for a while consulting and teaching, I figured I could derive my patience from that fact. During this week, I got back on the builder's site and noticed that they were now offering RAM in 2gig modules not only 1. I called them and asked if I would be able to swap mine out while it was in their possession. To my surprise, they said OK and that they would charge me the difference; which turned out to be about 20 bucks anyway. After thinking about it further I called them back and asked if I can purchase two more 2gig modules for a total of 8gig of RAM - I use VPC quite heavily as well as Flight Simulator (another memory hog). They agreed so I was not totally unhappy -- yet. After a few more days, I called back to check the status of my wonderful new system which at this point, simply looked pretty. I was told that SSA1 went on vacation so I was now speaking to SSA2, who told me that my rig was under the desk of SSA1. He said he would take over the situation and actually sounded quite nice and sincere - boy was I naive.

About a week later (by this time, the machine had been in their possession for about two weeks), I receive a package in the mail - the friggin memory ! They couldn't just put it in the machine before they ship it back to me; oh well, such is life. The next day, I got the email that the rig had shipped -- ground ! OK, another week goes by but like I said, I was heavily traveling so I wasn't home too much anyway. My close friends are now starting to wonder where in the name of all that is holy is this patience coming from. I unpack the rig, open it up, install the additional memory, connect it to just one monitor, and power up. And wait. And wait. And curse. And wait. Nothing, not even a boot beep. Now, the motherboard I had chosen is an Asus Striker Extreme which has an LCD display in the back, which now spelled "CPU INIT". I call tech support back and get SSA2 on the phone - yes, him specifically. Thank goodness my hand had healed by now because yes, he had me go through that whole memory bank swap again. This time, even a blue-screen would have been welcomed - I got nothing. No boot beep, no nothing. While on the phone with him, he mentioned he's had problems with this motherboard; a fact that I confirmed by surfing some forums for about five minutes. He recommended I ship the unit back so he can swap out the motherboard with an Intel one that he personally recommended. Time to box it up again. This time, they wanted me to pay for the shipping so now the screaming begins. I guess the fit I through paid off because their shipping department agreed to pay for the return shipping and split the shipping back to me with me 50%. I reluctantly agreed; what else could I do? So now it's another week back to California.

The rig arrived at their site a week later and was in the hands of SSA2 about 3 days after that. He said he needed to order the motherboard and that it would take about a week to get in. He also stated that one of the memory modules was bad and needed to be replaced - remember I had installed the other 4 gig in there before I returned it, so now the rig had 4 2gig modules in it. After about a week, I called SSA2 back to check on the progress. He told me that there was an Intel recall on the motherboard and had installed the EVGA n680i instead - nice of him to let me know ahead of time - no worries, it's a good motherboard and incidentally the one I would be using in the future myself anyway. He also told me that the memory was now on back order and suggested that he sent me the rig with the 4gig in it and later ship me the additional memory when it arrives - I agreed. At this point it's about 6 weeks after the first arrival. So anyway, SSA2 claims he is ready to ship my machine back to me. By this point I have been researching equipment pretty heavily and am starting to regret the rig's configuration for a variety of reasons. The time between his claim of shipping readiness and the actual shipping was about a week - once again, I was on the road so I simply dealt with it. Another week went by and the machine arrived at my house.

Now, for those of you who think this could not get funnier, just wait. I took the case out of the box and already noticed something wrong. Have you ever purchased a light bulb that already sounds like there is something loose in it? Well, here comes my light bulb. One of the memory modules was "floating" around the inside of the case, most probably wreaking havoc during the cross-country flight. I plugged everything and booted it up. Well, let me be more specific; I turned it on. It didn't boot at all; it didn't even give me the boot beep. This could not be happening ! I got back on the phone with SSA2 to express my discontent - this is putting it mildly. He claimed he tested it fully and that something may have been damaged by the rogue, runaway, memory module. He said he needed to put me on hold to grab another customer. Fine I said. Luckily I have a secondary workstation and a laptop with which to work or I would have been in serious trouble. After about 20 minutes I hung up and called back. Now, I should state here that every call I have made to this company (oh ok, I'll tell you their initials - CP) took about 15 to 20 minutes to reach the tech. This time I reached the person I'll call SSA3. When I asked for SSA2, I was told he went to lunch. Yes, you heard right ! The son of a bitch put me on hold and went to lunch ! Some of you are probably really wanting to know who this company is so if you reach out to me personally, I will tell you who it was that I had the misfortune of choosing as the company to build my new Dream Machine. I told SSA3 that I wanted to return the whole thing and get my money back; and it was here where the clusterf$%k potential really reared its ugly head; but not before he actually attempted to get me to go through that little blood-letting memory-swapping troubleshooting technique.

SSA3 informed me that they only had a 30-day return policy and even then with a 15% restocking fee. My dear readers, have you ever heard of a Cuban Temper? Have you heard the rumors, or read the myths? It's only analogous to a combination of Alien-vs-Predator, Hiroshima, and telling the crowd at Woodstock that the rain will cancel the concert. Yes, a 30-day return policy, I repeated back to him; only I haven't had the computer for 30 days -- you guys have ! This went on for about 15 minutes but believe it or not, I actually won this one. I also through a fit about the restock fee but ended up settling at 10%. Yes, this whole fiasco, which ended with no computer, would cost me over 400 bucks. About 20 minutes later, I get a voice mail on the phone which sounded not-so-good in tone. It was from SSA3 and he claimed he needed to speak to me about my machine and that it was important. Oh boy, the things going through my mind now spanned the entire spectrum of human emotion - the dark side of it. I called SSA3 back, which of course took about 20 minutes. He told me that they had decided to waive the restock fee in its entirety. After all this, they actually still assumed I had a sense of humor left ! I also remembered that I had some memory on back order and that it was on a different order number. I explained this to SSA3 and he assured me that it would be refunded as well. About two days later (and several follow-up phone calls), I received an email with the RMA/Refund number and also a shipping label - wow, were they turning over a new leaf? I hadn't even been charged for the 50% shipping I agreed to earlier. I knew this silver lining would be replaced by a dark cloud when I shortly thereafter received another email -- the backordered memory had shipped !

I instantly called SSA3 back and told him that the memory had shipped. He said he would put a stop-in-transit immediately and for me not to worry about it. I also told him I had shipped back the rig. I guess I wasn't too surprised when a few days later the memory arrived at my house. Oh and by the way, it wasn't even the right memory. After calling SSA3 and informing him of this, a fact to which he did not show any surprise, he sent me the RMA and shipping slip so the memory was back on its way to California. The rig took a week to get back, of course, and about another week for the refund to process, but eventually it did, as did the refund for the memory.

This concluded my adventures with CP and also concluded any possibility of ever doing business with them again. I don't know what the cause of all this was but believe it or not, I actually saw it as a blessing. As I stated earlier, I had already begun to research equipment and had regretted several choices on this rig's specifications. So now was my chance to do it right and do it myself. I had the money but more importantly, I now had the knowledge and experience of not only what I wanted, but what I didn't want. I also had some pretty respectful resources to advice me here and there and to them go my eternal gratitude. Among these are

Richard Campbell, Eric Harrison, and Scott Hansleman.

Click here for part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

Great presentation by Sam Gentile

Miguel Castro — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:54:41 GMT

I went to the Northern New Jersey Users Group this Tuesday to see my friend Sam talk about SOA and WCF. The talk was great, the interaction with the audience was great, and the information and code samples were easy to follow. All in all, being a newbie to WCF (though not SOA), I walked away with plenty of new knowledge and that to me is a measure of a successful presentation.

Thanks Sam !

His blog is at http://samgentile.com/blogs/samgentile\

Compiling apps under Vista 64

Miguel Castro — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:01:41 GMT

I just loaded the code for CodeBreeze (which you can learn all about in episode 77 of www.dnrtv.com and obtain at www.steelbluesolutions.com) and I came into a small problem.

CodeBreeze (which you can learn all about in episode 77 of www.dnrtv.com and obtain at www.steelbluesolutions.com) uses a licensing program from Interactive Studios, called QLM (www.interactive-studios.com). The component that it uses from this product is a .NET component but it calls an unmanaged DLL which can only run in 32bit. The problem was that I was compiling CodeBreeze (which you can learn all about in episode 77 of www.dnrtv.com and obtain at www.steelbluesolutions.com) to target .NET 2.0 and "Any CPU". This was causing a nasty error.

The solution was to target "x86". Now it works fine, even in Vista 64 which is what I'm running.

That's fine anyway cause CodeBreeze (which you can learn all about in episode 77 of www.dnrtv.com and obtain at www.steelbluesolutions.com) is not a 64 bit app.

If you develop commercial software, you really want to check out QLM at www.interactive-studios.com. It has registration, activation, custom feature, and a full API at your disposal.

And don't forget to checkout CodeBreeze (which you can learn all about in episode 77 of www.dnrtv.com and obtain at www.steelbluesolutions.com).

Something interesting (and annoying) in VS2008

Miguel Castro — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:13:16 GMT

I started using nested Master Pages in Orcas last week and ran into a small snag. I could not get a break point to fire on the Page_Load in the child Master Page's code-behind class. In fact I noticed that the code wasn't running at all. After 30 minutes of beating my head against the wall, I tried changing the Page_Load method to an override of OnLoad and that worked perfectly. Then it ocurred to me to check the AutoEventWireup value in the Page directive and sure enough it was set to False. This is the first situation I've seen where it does not default to True so if you come across this, jump straight there and you should find the problem.