Brief News

Sleepy is running at 4ghz (200x20, HTT On) at 1.32vcore and 1.27 QPI thanks to Corsair's H50. LG 120hz monitor on the way!

Got the Samsung Epic 4G via Sprint. Remote Desktop, ConnectBot, AndFTP and Net Scan are everything you need from Android. Torrent-fu rocks, too.

Reviews to come :0

Sleepy; Updated Information

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1107430

Reseated the HSF and fixed the clocks. 3.6ghz idling at 47c, 55 under load and low 70s full tilt. Stock HSF, still.

Videocard won't go any higher and i need to play with the memory clock more.

My Recommended Software.

General Purpose stuff even you can use.

• Google Chrome
• foobar2000
• VLC Media Player
• DAEMON-Tools Lite
• InfraRecorder
• Pidgin
• WinSCP
• Auslogics Disk Defrag
• CPUID CPU-Z
• Dataram RAMDisk
• Shark007 Codec Pack
• MediaCoder
  

3dmark Vantage

RESULTS. [Click]

Running 3dmark Vantage installed to the ramdisk gave me a CPU score of 49,602 under the 'Performance' preset. Keep in mind, this is a Quadcore i7 running at 3.2ghz, and I just crushed every cpu score except for a handful of hexcore i7s running beyond 4ghz. Good game.

Grumpy, the utility box.

If you have read the hardware specifications, you will have seen that Grumpy would be considered lacking, for most purposes. Having spent much time between operating systems, it became clear very early on that linux has a more natural affinity for networking. Especially in terms of speed and overall performance. The other thing I learned is that typical SOHO routers (Linksys, D-Link, etc.) are generally not optimized to perform Network Address Translation (NAT) on connections over 30mbit. NAT is the technology that allows multiple computers to connect to the internet behind a single IP address. It is somewhat CPU intensive, but is much more noticeable to the power users out there. The biggest improvement over the SOHO routers is the sheer quantity of ram in Grumpy, allotting the machine as much memory required for the thousands of connections per second the machine makes to the internet during our busiest hours.

Grumpy, while old, is obviously much more powerful than any of these common routers. By giving the machine two dedicated network cards, I was able to offload the task of NATing to Grumpy, leaving my home routers only to perform the switching. This machine has been indispensable, ever since. A basic look at my home network topology is below.

The box also serves DNS to the lan whilst blocking ads by running a /etc/hosts file provided by these guys. I wanted to implement Deep Packet Inspection, but the hardware requirements to do that on a relatively saturated highspeed link are well above and beyond the performance capabilities of Grumpy. That aside, Grumpy isn't just old, it's my savior.

Sleepy.

Sleepy is the machine I built as a Christmas gift from my father, for which I am eternally grateful.

The magnificence of this build truly lies with the harddrive arrangement. Using 4 500gb harddrives, each a single 500gb platter provides superior density and ultimately granting wicked read/write speeds. At around 53usd for each hdd, I was able to slaughter the performance of most Solid State Drives in all but Random Access times, at a fraction of the cost.

Being able to run Photoshop maxed AND running a 4gb ramdisk to be used as the scratch area (and for other temporary files) is pretty damn sweet, as well.

Doc's Touchscreen

Some time ago, I performed a relatively simple hardware modification on my Acer Aspire One, the touchscreen. Quick presentation below;

I love the little beast. Later on, I swapped the blue panels for pink to create what is presumably the world's first pink and BLACK Acer Aspire One. The typical pink variant is accented in white.

Finally, I have added a 12 cell battery. This provides ~11 hours of heavy use.