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  1. S

    Intel Nuc i5 vs custom SFF build

    I went through a similar decision process. My needs are atypical: I use a Mac mini for general use, and I run various parallel math computations, coded in Haskell. I love building, and have various Mountain Mods cases around that would make good in-law apartments, now housing older overclocked...
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    Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller

    What is the minimum fan voltage that you see, with PWM set to 1%? Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller Sunbeam does advertise that these controllers are designed for 3-pin fans. They don't say whether the control is analog or pulsed. I observed analog voltage control, with 1% PWM...
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    Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller

    If the PWM line can handle a load of "1" and each fan is a load of "0.2" then the system can handle five fans. If the PWM line can handle a load of "1" and each fan is a load of "0.1" then the system can handle ten fans. So if each fan is designed to be a light load, there's room for more...
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    Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller

    The PWM signal is a very weak on-off signal, telling the PWM fan when to turn on and off power to its fan motor. The actual motor power comes in on a different line, which is how e.g. Akasa cables can inject power. It takes some work to turn the switch on and off. Perhaps you understand a...
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    Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller

    PWM is turning the power on and off quickly, in a square wave, these days at an inaudibly high frequency. Play around with which fan you choose to return the rpm signal. The motherboard will tune the PWM pulses to make that fan behave as expected, and the other fans will scale accordingly. They...
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    Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller

    Yes, that's a great cable. Some people wire it themselves, but why bother! It injects power, and the PWM signal splits five ways just fine. Using five identical PWM fans, one will achieve roughly the same rpm in each fan, and PWM control has a much broader range than voltage control. So...
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    Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller

    Not sure why the bump, but I wince now even thinking about this category of accessories. Bottom Line: Do not buy anything in this category unless you know exactly how it is wired, and understand that it is wired as it should be wired. Do not be generous in making assumptions about products you...
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    Core i3 2120K - unlocked dualcore sandy!?

    Are you saying I shouldn't overclock, or I should instead use a 2500K or 2600K in all my builds? I have no idea which. Some of us like to do things with our hands, rather than sit in front of a TV. No one said it's rational, it just is what it is.
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    Core i3 2120K - unlocked dualcore sandy!?

    I have the opposite question: Sandy Bridge opens up overclocking to anyone who can figure out which way to screw in a light bulb. Why do we still see all these forum queries that include "I'm not planning to overclock..." Having a "policy" like this is effectively wearing a sign, "I've made up...
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    Whats up with my Q6600?

    Tomorrow is Rapture day for Q6600 chips. Get a 2600K?
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    Average OC for 2500K?

    Bingo. Back in Q6600 days I used to use Antec P182 cases. I build a wind tunnel (5" tube with push-pull fans) to feed outside air from the front of the case directly to my TRUE cpu cooler, and saw load core temps drop 5 C. I was astonished. Now I build with various MountainMods cases, with 8...
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    i7-2600K idle & load temps? What is everyone getting?

    Noctua NH-D14 cooler with two Cooler Master Blade Master PWM fans swapped in, scaled to run about 50% at full load. Nine Scythe S-Flex SFF21E case fans at 5 volts (12 volts makes at most 1 C difference). At 4.5 GHz I'm seeing 40 C or less above ambient, and the system is nearly silent.
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    P8P67 Pro B3 - USB Issue

    P8P67 PRO (REV 3.1) I have a Rev 3.0 working fine with 16 GB Ripjaws. Awaiting Rev 3.1 to reach suppliers here, for a second build.
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    ILLINOIS MICRO CENTER: Motherboard scams Again!

    Bingo. My first build ever was an LGA 775. Before this, like electricians working live, I'd gotten into the habit of not wearing the stupid fabrics that build static, and working barefoot, but not wearing a static strap. At Fry's I picked up anti-static gloves, along with my "bad axe"...
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    A question to you all experts about stopping a CPU fan.

    My ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard has "Intel Adaptive Thermal Monitor, Enables the overheated CPU to throttle its clock speed to cool down", and "CPU Fan Speed Low Limit [600 RPM], This item appears only when you enable the CPU Q-Fan Control feature and allows you to disable or set the CPU fan...
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    i5 2500K Load Temperatures

    My 2600K is 62 C at load, 4.4 GHz, 1.33 Vcore. This is a very conservative overclock, nearly silent, using a Noctua NH-D cooler and nine case fans at 5 volts. So as everyone says, you're fine. If you want to play around with cooling some more, you can turn better cooling into better...
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    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    Bingo! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I fell for the same description. That's why I was stunned when I saw the actual wiring pattern. Now, if they can forward a signal on a line that already has a signal on it, and we're both convinced that's impossible, then they're starting to meet a...
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    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    Yeah, I'm a mathematician. We make broader analogies than most people are comfortable with hearing. Sometimes it works. Clearly that one wire in (PWM signal) is sharing ground with power in. That's why there are four wires. I was wondering about a termination mechanism analogous to SCSI...
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    QUESTION: How to best use AnandTech Bench to make a CPU Decision

    What keeps us all young is when the world changes enough that we have to rethink our policies from scratch. Overclocking used to be harder. You're not going to fairly assess the 2500K if you don't consider benchmarks for a conservative, manual overclock. Compared to an automatic overclock...
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    Giga Flops, lol

    First, as much as I'm enjoying this (and I'm thrilled to know not every overclocker is a 19 year old gamer), my apologies for helping this thread so far off the rails. Remember, we were once talking about the dots on a performance graph, breaking an easy problem up into a small number of...
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    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    This is of course an empirical question. But USB cables can be 16', I'd be stunned if any of us has a big enough case to worry about PWM fan cable wire length. As for topology, I did wonder if "termination" could play a role in Arctic's thinking. As in the old days, when one terminated SCSI...
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    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    I don't see a smiley. Do you think wire length and network topology is actually an issue, for distributing the PWM signal? The frequency is just above audible, which is a glacial time scale for electronics.
  23. S

    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    I returned all but one fan to http://www.ultimatepccooling.com (highly recommended; great support). There's a more fundamental problem with this Arctic design. By integrating the custom cabling into the fan, they're forcing a particular implementation of the PWM wiring pattern on users. All...
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    Giga Flops, lol

    Make this discussion more tangible. What's a scalable problem that interests you? I don't care how poorly it parallelizes for five minute cases, but for a case that takes an hour, or a day?
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    Giga Flops, lol

    That's one way to look at it. Funny, I've got just such a corner case on my other screen, mapping out a Vcore vs Turbo Ratio minesweeper grid as I overclock my new build. I'm an optimist, and lower bound proofs in computer science are rather rare. If I can't program corner-case efficiency, I...
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    Giga Flops, lol

    Interesting that these graphs analyze interprocessor communication slowdowns as inevitable. Functional languages have the advantage that once a value is created, it is treated as read-only. Every core can have a copy of this value in their cache if they like, with no possibility of the cache...
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    Giga Flops, lol

    I almost sprung for 6 cores this time around, but Sandy Bridge was too amazing to pass on. The 2600K rocks. Next year? Funny thing, Apple's OS X does a better job of scheduling the last core. It would make sense that's something they'd try to get right. I did run a Hackintosh for a while to...
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    Giga Flops, lol

    That graph is wrong. The Core-i7 920 has four physical cores, eight virtual cores. The dots fit exactly what I see, making parallel computations on a Core-i7 2600K. I use the programming language Haskell for parallel programming on various machines. The language itself has a bit of a...
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    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    I had the Sunbeam 6 Fan Controller in my new build for a bit, described in the thread Sunbeam Rheosmart 6 Fan Controller. It works in principal, but kicks on at around 10 volts. I took it back out. The akasa PWM 30-way splitter fan cable draws separate power, getting around your objection to...
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    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    This picture may be easier to follow than my description. I've plugged the RPM 3-pin cable (yellow wire) into the female PWM pass-through connector, and peeled off a sticker to expose the PWM fan circuit on the fan itself. In this configuration, the fan could be used alone as a PWM fan, by...
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    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    http://www.google.com/patents I struck out, although I did recognize a few Cooler Master patents.
  32. S

    Baffled by Arctic Cooling Patented PWM Sharing Technology

    I now have in hand some ARCTIC F PWM fans, with their patented PWM Sharing Technology. I can described exactly how they are wired, and how they are to be used. I do not understand what aspect of this design could be covered by a patent. These fans are advertised as being able to be...
  33. S

    The need for idle transients in stability testing

    Good to know. I remember the days when we'd appropriate Prime95 as a stress test. It didn't take breaks.
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    The need for idle transients in stability testing

    It dawned on me that there's an unchallenged assumption in standard advice for overclock stability testing: We declare an overclock stable if it survives an uninterrupted full load on all cores for 24 hours. My current stress test is a representative parallel computation of the sort I build...
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    Solutions/Opinions : CPU cooler backplace touches chassis

    My standoffs are 6-32 male, 3mm x 0.5mm female. How dumb, they can't stack, or else I'd mail you some. Who dropped the ball on this standard?
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    ThermalTake V4 - bad fan?

    Nice fan circuits include a capacitor, which accumulates and then discharges the extra current needed to start a fan. Not sure if any motherboard fan headers do this. I'd play with the BIOS, the fan isn't getting enough power to start up.
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    Good fan controller?

    I second aigomorla's assessment of fan controllers. The one purpose that a decent electronics circuit can serve here is to drop 12 volts down to a lower value without shedding the entire difference as heat. That takes a well-designed transistor circuit that can handle the amps in question. A...
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    Do "Better" 4-Pin Power Connectors Exist?

    A hot swap 2.5" drive bay for my new build came with a pair of 4-pin to SATA power adapter cables, to split off LED signals for the drives. The 4-pin end was as cheap as they come, and a pin came out while moving the cable to add another component. I wasn't even touching that connector, didn't...
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    When will the core wars stop?

    I'll take all the cores I can get. I build Linux boxes exclusively as compute servers for parallel math computations coded in Haskell. A good read on the issues one faces with parallelism is The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. With more cores, syncing all those caches and memory traffic...
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    ARCTIC F Pro PWM fan only for intake!!??

    Thanks! I changed my order just in time.