Monday, September 01, 2014

I can't believe that I haven't written anything here for over a month (nearing two). It's not that there isn't anything happening at all but most of the stuffs are just related to the army so it's kind of boring in a sense.

Regardless here are the stuffs that happened while this blog was stagnant.

I bought a new CPU cooler, top of the line, premium Noctua NH-D15. As air cooler goes, it's as  good as it gets. You can tell by the sheer size difference between it and my old cooler.

Who said size didn't matter?

Mounting bracket

It's taller than my 760!

With it I never went above 53 degrees celsius under 100% load, which is pretty darn amazing considering that I live in a rather warm environment.

Went to the River Safari for our unit cohesion day. It was boring as hell, and I got bitten by a small monkey; but I guess it's better than spending Friday in camp working. Only took a few photos but it turned out rather decent!

This fish just keeps swimming like this

Either jiajia or kaikai, no idea

First time seeing a polar bear, it's damn huge

no idea what it's eating

Looks like it's praying

Back packing

Dugongs, they look like giant shrimps platter

I'll leave you with some panorama goodness.




Moving on, the title of the post; I just ran 10KM yesterday at the Safra Bay Run. It's the first time I ran a marathon, also the first time that I ran so far. Got a timing of 1 hour 24 mins. Not good by any means but it's good enough to me!

Front | Back

I didn't take any pictures at the event because... I didn't run with my phone and I felt like dying after the run. Kind of wasted but oh well, it can't be helped. The worst part of the run isn't the run itself, but that I've only had 2 hours of sleep due to some admin cockup, followed by my growling stomach throughout the run.

My friends all disappeared within the first 500 metres. Either too far in front, or too far back. It's one of the rare times that I truly felt lost in a sea of people.

To be honest I really didn't felt like running, I initially planned to just walk for the most part, but when there's a few thousand people running with you, it's hard to just say, "I give up." So for better or worse, I did run most of the distance. Which no part is due to my own motivation. I thank you, the pretty ladies who wore skin tight clothes and ass hugging tights.

And the driving force is way more than I anticipated. There was this chick I noticed since the start line, and I chased after her for 3 km before hitting an obstacle. Stairs. Pretty much lost sight of her until the 6 km mark where she suddenly ran past me. I am honestly shocked that I actually passed her, but the rest of the run was just me not wanting to lose to her in the end. HAH!

Every time she passed me I will make sure I put enough distance in between before slowing down. It's kind of stupid racing against a girl who is probably younger than me, but then again I really had nothing to do and no one to talk to. Passing all the people in the last kilometre felt really awesome though.

I wonder when will be the next time I post something, but I guess... wake me up when September ends?

Labels: awesome, desktop, featured, historical, life, lordofgeeks, marathon, river safari, xperia z1

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Friday, January 31, 2014

OLD | Thermaltake Commander MS-I

Last week, I decided to change(upgrade) my desktop case after roughly a year. When I bought it at first, I was simply looking for the best bang for buck case and settled with it. It had the features I needed, it was cheap and it looked decent to say the least. (mini tour of old desktop)

I've always had my eye on the Fractal Design Define R4 and I simply had to get my hands on one of it. Hence I made the trip down to Sim Lim Square last Saturday. One mistake I made was not taking the cab. This case is heavy as fuck I swear, at least it shows that it's well constructed.

It looks quite messy as you can tell

 So I started removing all the internals to prepare transferring to the new case, starting with my precious graphic card.

MSI Nvidia GTX 760 Hawk Edition

4 X 4GB of cheap value RAM

Dust is the bane of all computers

After un-wiring everything from my old case, removing all the components, I was ready to unpack my beast of a case. I love how clean it looks. Clean geometrical lines and a full black coating makes it really sexy.

Fractale Design Define R4

First look at the internals

Box with all the bolts and nuts

Seating in my motherboard

 For the next hour or so I was busy wiring up everything neatly and making sure that nothing goes wrong, referring to the manual diligently and hoping that I won't screw up anything. Much effort later...

Everything is installed! Still a little messy though

Cable management holes to keep everything nice and neat

Wiring up everything at the back and tying them up. (before it's actually done)

No dangling wires

no dangling wires

I made a mistake of not taking glamour shots of the case. This actually has a rather large window pane to showcase the internal components, maybe some other time when I'm making a substantial upgrade. (shouldn't be too long from now*) I recently added a Corsair AF140 Quiet Edition fan to the front panel. Increasing it from 1 to 2x140mm front intake fans.
*planned upgrade to the CPU cooler

I was so excited typing this out that I forgot to mention why I did this and what's so good about this.

This is one of one of the few rare cases that I totally gave in to what I want and there isn't much of a need nor solid reasoning. I suppose I could say that this is my hobby, seeing how much time and effort I've put into it. I want it to run as cool and quiet as possible, thus extending the life of the machine itself.

So, what's so good about this case compared to the other one?
Firstly, it's extremely quiet; to the point where I wouldn't know it's on if not for the LED indicator, and I sit about half a meter from it. I put my ear to it and the only thing I can hear is the air being sucked in and pushed out.
Secondly, awesome cable management. As you have seen from the pictures above, there are holes and space for me to route my cables properly and give unrestricted air flow.
Thirdly, expansion-ability. As it's quite a bit larger than my previous case, there are simply more space to put more substantial upgrades. Like I could water-cool my system should I wish to; it would be hard with my old case.
Last but not least, have you seen how sexy it looks?!

Moving on, I've been hard at work researching like mad; preparing to build a new computer. I'm not kidding, I am preparing to build a storage server, something that can scale out and suit my needs for the next couple of years. My main motivator is my depleting storage that is forcing me to shuffle things around, to make matters worse, I don't have any backups.

I'll be writing up a post pretty soon detailing what I've been doing all of today. Sometimes I wonder myself, what am I trying so hard for...

Oh by the way, happy chinese new year.

Labels: awesome, define r4, desktop, featured, fractal design, lordofgeeks, show off

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Saturday, April 13, 2013

Running Windows 8

It has been a really long time (years maybe) since I've bothered customizing my desktop, because I want it to perform as quickly as it can and didn't want to waste valuable resources beautifying it. However, I noticed that I have a surplus of computing power so I decided to make use of it.

But I still didn't want to tweak the system files for maximum stability, so all I did was change the icons on the taskbar and used Rainmeter for the clock and system monitor (bottom right).

The desktop icons are hidden using Stardock's Fences. Double click to show or hide the icons, which eliminates unnecessary clutter.

Anyway you see that little arrow on the bottom left?

Start menu FTW

Yeah, it's a friggin' start menu on Win8. I'm using a program called StartisBack. And I actually paid for it. I got a bundle so I could give 3 licenses out for free if any of my friends asks. Though I don't usually like to pay for little programs like these, I think it's worth it for the low price and the functionality that it brings.

Alternatively, you could use Classic Shell to emulate the experience but it's just not as clean speaking from my own experience.

I don't know if it's because I'm a power user or anything, but I really can't stand the "Modern UI", especially when I'm actually trying to get some work done.

Example of Win8 default start screen

That UI makes no sense on a desktop environment. If not for the slew of improvements under the hood, I would've stuck with Windows 7. As many have said, Windows 7 is the new Windows XP. It just works, and it works the way you expect it to.

Oh well, I have tweaked my Win8 to work like Win7 as much as possible, and so far everything is awesome. The minimalist approach towards my desktop simply satisfies the my OCD. Speaking of which, I really cannot stand it when people have cluttered desktop or unorganized folders.

I need new hard drives. And on that bombshell it's time to end.

Labels: desktop, geek, random, show off

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Saturday, March 09, 2013

Yeah, the bottom is messy, I can't help it

I realized that I perspire quite a bit when I'm doing things related to my desktop. I don't know why, maybe I'm nervous I'll break something, or I'm just too anxious to get it finished and done. (or maybe I'm tired)

This is why I didn't take a lot of glamour shots. I took some shots, but nothing note-worthy.
First things first, what did I get?

Noctua NF-B9 PWM Fan ($30)


CoolerMaster Blade Master XtraFlo Slim 120 ($18)

Purely for pushing air into the case

Powered PWM 1-4 splitter cable ($12)

Reasons for getting a premium Noctua fan? Because sadly, I'm running a rather small cooler that uses a 92mm fan, there wasn't anything in the shop that is optimized for pressure at that size except this, so... yeah.

I almost forgot to write about this, but I'm using 2 fans for my CPU heatsink (Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO). This is known as a push-pull configuration. So 1 fan is sucking in air, and the other is pushing the air out. Do I really have to go this far? Not particularly, but a lower operating temperature increases the longevity of your electronic components. More about this later.

I had to shift the locations of the fans around due to constraints, but here's how the front fan looks like.


I think and hope that my case is neater than those normal computers. I tried to keep the cables as tidy as I could, for the sake of good airflow. However, as this is counted as a budget case, there wasn't a lot of room for me to do cable routing.

Here's how it looks like at the back.

It was really hard closing the case like this.

A peek inside the case!

After putting everything back together, here's how it looks like from the showcase side.

Taking a closer look...

How are the temperatures like? I ran a program called Prime95 that will stress test your CPU. It does prime number calculations, which will put your CPU at 100% load. (using Core i7 3770)

First run

Idle temperatures: 39°C
Load temperatures: 69°C

I'm getting stable temperatures of 69 degrees celsius. Which is an amazing improvement of over 10°C. I used to get numbers of the low 80s. This has been going great so far, but there was a problem.

The sound. The sound of the fan is distinctively clear. I am not a huge fan of a desktop that makes noise. So I opened up the case once again, added some pads to dampen the sound, added a cable that reduces the fan speed. It became audibly better. I could still hear it, but it's a slight annoyance I'm willing to put up with. Sadly, I do not have a sound meter, but I'm pretty sure it's around 36dBm and above. Definitely going to do something about it in the future.

After tweaking here and there, maybe I somehow managed to get the correct amount of airflow in and out of the case, the numbers looked even better.

Second run

Idle temperatures: 39°C
Load temperatures: 62°C

A 7°C difference is huge. Especially in an air-cooled solution. Considering that the room temperature was around 32°C, the delta for idle temp is only 7°C, and the load temp delta was only 30°C. Not the most amazing cooling I have seen, but it's good enough for me to live with, considering that the delta for load temp was around 50°C before the upgrade.

I am very pleased with the results. With summer fast approaching, and ridiculously warm weather these days, this is just a type of precaution.


p.s. I'm a little anal about the noise. I should definitely get it checked out ASAP.

Labels: cable management, cooler master blade master xtraflo slim, desktop, geek, life, lordofgeeks, noctua nf-b9 pwm, temperatures

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Sunday, December 09, 2012

Honestly, I thought the post will be a lot more interesting than this, but it turns out that I was so eager to build the system that I couldn't be bothered to take the pictures. So..... instead I'll just be rambling on how amazing this is.

Intel Core i7 3770
Intel HD Graphics 4000
ASUS P8B75-V Motherboard
120GB OCZ Vertex 3 (old)
2TB Seagate HDD
8GB of RAM
Cooler Master TX3 CPU Cooler
Thermaltake Commander MS-I Case
520W Modular PSU

Yep, it's just the barebones of a system, good enough to make it work. But with a really really fast CPU in it.


I'm currently running a W7 on VMware with 1.5GB memory assigned to it, which explains the high memory usage. And, I'm not using Windows 8 now because there hasn't been a permanent "hack" for it yet.

Cold boot takes less than 20 seconds. Everything is as snappy as it can be. Though I haven't been utilizing its full potential yet. The whole build took me almost 2hours to assemble. Mostly spent on cable management, trying to make the case neat and tidy, which is kind of pointless since I put it behind a monitor and it can't really be seen anyway.


Read more »

Labels: awesome, computers, desktop, featured, geek, historical, life, lordofgeeks, update

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