Alienware Aurora R2 Saga

Alienware Aurora R2
Alienware Aurora R2

Recently I’ve gone round and round with my Aurora R2 system.

I finally chose to upgrade the system with new Motherboard, processor and memory, but I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

You may remember this system from previous tales on this blog.

As you can see from the image of the system on that page, the system had 8GB of memory that was all working. Somewhere along the way it developed an issue where it would only use 1/2 of the memory.

 

Update: See note at the bottom about performance of Intel Graphics on Haswell.

Update: System is now stable. I moved back to a previous version of the Nvidia GTX drivers for the 560ti.

Continue reading “Alienware Aurora R2 Saga”

GTX 760 Upgrade – Very Nice

ASUS GTX 760
ASUS GTX 760

Did I mention that I upgraded my video card? Woo hoo!! I got a new ASUS GTX 760 and it is hot – or rather cool. This is an upgrade from a GTX 560ti, which I passed along to the Aurora R2 system.

I have noticed that the new drivers are a little glitchy. I’ve had a few driver crashes – black screen followed by a popup indicating that the driver failed and restarted. Oh well. I’m sure that Nvidia is working on fixing those problems.

I’ve not noticed that the video performance is better in Tera. I was using maxed out settings with the GTX 560ti. But with 4 times the Cuda cores things surely are going to be better.

– ww

Creeping Obsolesence of Media PCs

Video Netcast on Tablet

In early 2011, I made a media PC to watch netcasts on my TV. At the time the system was connected to a plasma display and was running at 1440 resolution. Also at the time, it was perfectly able to play the netcasts from the Twit.tv network, as well as other videos.

Currently the jetway atom PC is connected to my new TV which is full HD and it has been upgraded to Linux Mint 14. Also I’ve noticed that it will no longer play live broadcasts or recorded shows from this site. So what has changed? Continue reading “Creeping Obsolesence of Media PCs”

Considering an Upgrade

Intel ci7 3770 box
Intel Core i7

I’m using two of my computers for, among other things, to edit and convert videos for upload to YouTube. Here’s my channel. One of he machines is an Alienware Aurora R2 I obtained used with Core i5-750, circa Q3 ’09. The other is a system I built from scratch, with a Core i7-2600 circa Q1 ’11.

I’m considering upgrading the older Alienware system to an Ivy Bridge 3770 processor. This upgrade of the processor, motherboard and memory will cost about $550. So the question is: How effective will this upgrade be in increasing Video Conversion performance?

A BenchMark

I decided to do some testing to find out whether the two systems that I have are very different in performance before proceeding with the upgrade. When using both systems to edit videos, they perform very well using Corel Video Studio X5 [2600] and X6 [750]. The editing process proceeds with no noticeable delays or lags. Any performance issue has to do with how long it takes to convert the video. Continue reading “Considering an Upgrade”

Tracking SSD Activity

Your SSD
Your SSD

After upgrading my system with a shiny new SSD, the HD light was blinking like a heart beat every second or so, and that concerned me. SSD’s have a limited lifetime, for writes, so it occurred to me that Windows might be burning up my SSD by continually writing to it.

After checking around a little on the web, I found the SysInternals windows utilities on the Microsoft techweb site. At first I tried DiskMon, which showed disk activity,  but didn’t show which files were being accessed. Then I found Process Monitor, which showed which files were being written and  by how much. Continue reading “Tracking SSD Activity”

Battlechair Moving Day

Aurora R2 at Battlechair
Aurora R2 at Battlechair

I decided that if I’m going to get any use from the SSD I had better move it to where I use my computer the most. So I swapped the computers to put the Aurora R2 with the battle chair. I’ll swap them back after I upgrade the Armor 90 system to a 500GB SSD in a couple of months.

The Plan

The plan is to upgrade the Armor 90 system to a 500GB SSD and this will free up 2 650GB 7200 rpm drives that were in a striped array as the system drive. Continue reading “Battlechair Moving Day”

Aerocool Coolpanel III

I finally got around to installing the AeroCool Coolpanel III in the gaming machine. I purchased this back when I got the battle chair machine.

CoolPanel III
CoolPanel III

The coolpanel 3 has a media card reader, 3 channel fan controller/ temperature display, audio ports, USB ports and ESATA port. At this point I’m using the USB media card reader and temperature display. The rest of the functions don’t make sense in my current system. There are no more USB connectors on the MB and there are USB ports on the top and front of the case. The temp display is way cool tho and I really needed that media card reader.

Cheers,

– Windy

SSD Migration Success

Samsung 840 250GB SSD
Samsung 840 250GB SSD

The SSD arrived today!

The first problem was that I neglected to order the package with the 2.5″ > 3.5″ HD bracket. So mounting the drive was an issue. I had taped the Laptop drive during my testing using a cardboard platform, so after not finding any bracket when calling around to places in town, I did the same, and then ordered some brackets from NewEgg. Continue reading “SSD Migration Success”

SSD Migration Nightmare

The Problem

Samsung 840 250GB SSD
Samsung 840 250GB SSD

You may have noticed that prices for SSDs have come down quite a bit in the last year or so. And the sizes are now quite reasonable. A 250GB SSD will set you back about $200 and a 500GB SSD is about $350. So, I’ve decided that it’s time to begin migrating my computers to SSD system drives.

Casper 6.0 is among the tools I’ve had for sometime to migrate disks, so I gave that a try.

The test machine is an Alienware Aurora R2, circa 2008, with 8GB memory and a 1TB HD, running, Win7 x64. Only 180GB of the 1TB HD is used. As a test target before the SSD arrives, the migration target is a 320GB SATA Laptop drive.

Continue reading “SSD Migration Nightmare”