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Sunday, May 2, 2010

All systems go

2:09 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

Well, my new system is now up and running, and stable to the point that I'm happy to leave it as it is. It's currently overclocked to 3.77 GHz (from the default 2.8 GHz), and while I could go higher it would mean either reducing the memory speed or upping the voltage, and in the interests of keeping power consumption and heat down I don't feel particularly inclined to do the latter. (I believe this is because the memory controller is actually integrated into the CPU on Intel X58 systems.) Not that I've found myself wanting for extra megahertz: it was able to handle a constant 60 frames per second in UNREAL TOURNAMENT III with every graphics option maxed out, even at the default clock speed of 2.8 GHz.

My CPU-Z Validator page:

I was a little taken aback by just how quickly I managed to get the thing up and running. As you probably know from my previous posts, I essentially gutted the entire system retaining the sound card and disc drives but replacing everything else. Despite this, I was able to load my existing installation of Windows and, two minutes later, it had obtained all the drivers it needed and was content to work just fine without reinstalling ANYTHING. Admittedly, I went for the same component brands (Intel CPU, ASUS motherboard, ATI video card), but given that the entire chipset architecture has changed, I was shocked that I didn't have to reinstall Windows. That's never happened to me before. The only real hurdle was squeezing the video card in. The card itself only just fit, and the PCI-E power connectors are on the end of the card rather than on the top, as was the case with my previous card. Because the card was practically touching the case's hard drive column, I had to resort to some unorthodox cable management, threading the PCI-E power cables behind the column and squeezing the connectors through one of the air flow holes.

I did run into a rather unfortunate problem, however, that took me some time to solve. While watching a video on YouTube, I became aware that the sound would click and squeak with some degree of frequency, and on one occasion devolved into such a cacophony of squeals and static that I would probably have blown an eardrum if I hadn't ripped my headphones off immediately. I noticed that the problem became less apparent when I disabled hardware acceleration of Flash (which YouTube uses). A little later, I realised that the same thing would happen infrequently when playing movies in Windows Media Player. The final straw came when I recorded a TV programme via Windows Media Center and discovered that, in the recording itself, the video would glitch and block up every few seconds.

I dowloaded the DPC Latency Checker and discovered that, every time I got an audio or video glitch, it coincided with a major latency spike. I tried everything I could think of. I swapped my audio drivers, I moved both the sound and video cards to different slots. I even removed the sound card altogether and switched to the motherboard's on-board audio device, which had the effect of eliminating the audio glitching but not the latency spikes or the corresponding corruption to off-air recordings in Media Center.

I ultimately came across the solution completely by chance. The problem, it seems, stems from the PowerPlay technology that ATI has built into its current generation of graphics cards and drivers. An admirable idea in theory, PowerPlay automatically lowers the GPU and memory clock speeds when the card isn't being heavily used in an attempt to conserve power. Unfortunately, it turns out that, each time these values are adjusted, a massive latency spike occurs, resulting in the various glitches I described above. ATI doesn't provide an option to disable PowerPlay via its own software, but a handy guide posted on the AV Science Forum shows how to do it fairly easily with minimal text editing. This immediately cleared up all my problems, although personally I'm not over the moon about this solution given that it means running the graphics card at full belt 100% of the time. I suspect the solution is to create two power profiles in the control panel - low and high - and alternate between them depending on my needs. If I end up sticking with on-board audio (doubtful, as I'm particularly fond of the ALchemy software my PCI sound card uses to allow multi-channel audio in legacy games that use EAX or DirectSound3D), then I really only need to disable PowerPlay when it comes to recording TV.

Still, I can't stress enough how happy I am with the system on the whole. It's fast, stable and fairly quiet (it's slightly louder than my previous build, particularly when running graphics-intensive applications, but that was to be expected). See you in the internet pipes!

My system specs as they now stand:

• Case: Antec Sonata III
• Power supply: Antec EarthWatts 750W
• Motherboard: ASUS P6TD Deluxe
• Processor: Intel Core i7 930 2.8GHZ (Socket 1366) overclocked to 3.77 GHz
• Memory: 6 GB OCZ DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Triple Channel (three sticks of 2 GB)
• Video card: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 TOXIC Edition, 1 GB
• Optical drives: (1) Sony BDU-X10S BD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive (SATA); (2) LG GGCH20L BD-ROM/HD DVD-ROM/DVD-RAM drive (SATA)
• Hard drives: (1) Intel X25-M, 80 GB, solid state drive (SATA); (2) Hitachi Deskstar, 400 GB, 7,200 RPM (SATA), (3) Hitcachi Deskstar, 1 TB, 7,200 RPM (SATA)
• Display: 27" Dell Ultrasharp 2709W 1920x1200 widescreen LCD
• Sound card: Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1
• Speakers: Logitech Z-5500 Digital (5.1, THX certified, PCM/Dolby Digital/DTS)
• Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 optical
• Keyboard: Dell Black USB Keyboard
• Printer/Scanner/Photocopier: Samsung SCX-4500W
• Network card: Dual Marvell Yukon 88E8056 Gigabit Ethernet controllers (on-board)
• Network router: Netgear WGR614v6 100 Mbps Ethernet/54 Mbps wireless router
• Digital TV: Freecom DVB USB

3 Comments

 
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