Selling parts on eBay

One of my main annoyances with people as it relates to the PC is the common lack of simple problem-solving skills. I'm more than happy to help someone most of the time, with the caveat that they themselves have basic research and problem-solving skills. I help those who help themselves.

I sold my 8800GTX on eBay, and the barely literate guy who bought it (judging from his emails) said it didn't work. Keep in mind that I used this card in my own rig for a solid month. And it just suddenly stopped working? Sure, it's not impossible, but it's quite improbable. It's much more probable that the guy simply doesn't know what the hell he's doing. So he's sending the card back to me and I'm going to have to sell it again, hopefully to someone less bone-headed.

This happened once with a motherboard I sold. I had been using my board for quite some time in my own rig, and the guy who bought it said it didn't work. He managed to get an RMA from the company who made it, but I thought it was rather unlikely that the board just stopped working as soon as it reached his doorstep.

The moral is... well, there is no moral. I just wanted to rant.

9800GTX – monster overclocking and an RMA already

I got my 9800GTX last week, and it flies! It's certainly not a big leap from my 8800GTX, but it's a nice bump upward and all my games have been noticeably smoother. Using my usual combination of Rivatuner and the ATI Tool artifact scan, I got the core clock up to a whopping 799mhz and the shader up to 1890mhz using the stock cooler (my water block is still at the Primochill labs).

Here's the weird thing though: the memory clock wouldn't budge. Any increase at all cause ATI Tool to freeze up or crash, and I got display driver errors. Pretty odd considering I've heard of people getting a solid 2500mhz memory clock on this card. But here's what's really weird: despite total stability in ATI Tool, I kept getting crashes in games. I downclocked the card to stock speeds, and still got the crashes. The crashes were display driver errors. So on an educated whim, I downclocked the memory to 100mhz below stock speed. Presto, no more crashes! I was able to increase the core and shader clocks to the previously mentioned speeds with no troubles.

Problem is of course that I didn't pay for a card that won't run at stock speed. So I'm getting an RMA. The card is running just fine for now, so I'll be getting plenty of use out of it over the next week while I wait for EVGA to ship me the new card.

On another note, Primochill gave me a quick update late last week. They think it was the result of PCI Ice, which had been reformulated with an anti-algae, and the Liquid Utopia (also an anti-algae) being used together in such a small loop. I should be hearing back from them Monday or Tuesday.

9800GTX on the way!

I'm still waiting to hear back from Primochill. No word as of yet. I did, however, manage to sell my 8800GTX. It sold for a little less than I was hoping for, but I'm able to grab the 9800GTX for a pretty trivial expense... which is appropriate since it's a pretty trivial upgrade!

So, with all the talk that the 9800GTX is not really a big boost over the 8800GTX, and even performs roughly the same in some situations, why make the upgrade? Well, two reasons. One, because I'm an enthusiast, and I want to overclock it with liquid cooling. The 8800GTX had very little overhead with overclocking, but all reports indicate that the 9800GTX has pretty robust overclocking potential. Add to that the fact that I've yet to see any liquid cooling results, and I think I could get a nice performance boost, though obviously not a huge one.

In situations with anti-aliasing, the 9800GTX has been shown to perform about the same or slower than the 8800GTX, because despite a much faster core, shader and memory clock, the memory bandwidth is reduced from 384-bit to 256-bit. (Incidentally, this is why nVidia didn't simply designate it the "8900GTX" – it's a slightly different core, not just a die shrink.) Now, it's possible to get very close – possibly negligibly close – to the 8800GTX's memory bandwidth simply by overclocking the 9800GTX's memory. But in certain situations it may be that indeed the 9800GTX is slightly slower.

The offset to this is that the vast majority of time, I don't even use anti-aliasing. And I never use more than 4xAA, because as I've demonstrated right in this very blog, anything past 4xAA doesn't add significantly to the visual quality. Many of my favorite games – STALKER, Jericho, Bioshock (DX10), etc. – don't even support anti-aliasing. Crysis is way too intensive for AA and would benefit from the faster clocks, and the most recent game I played, Gears of War, is a graphical beast in its own right and was smoother and more playable without AA enabled.

The second reason I want the 9800GTX is simply because it will likely hold its value better than the 8800GTX over the next year, so when nVidia releases their true next-generation architecture I won't have to chop off as many limbs to upgrade (assuming, of course, that I want and can afford to upgrade when that time comes).

I'm still waiting to hear back from Primochill about the situation with my cooling blocks. They need to hurry up, so I can liquid-cool my new card and overclock the socks off it!

Liquid distopia

So, I figured out why my loop has been running really warm. Here's a clue:





The dye from the Primochill Liquid Utopia had congealed and made itself a nice little home on my water blocks. I cleaned the blocks, dumped most of the Primochill and replaced it will distilled water as a temporary fix until I get some new coolant. My temperatures dropped drastically, in the league of 30° across the board on average.

I've used Primochill products exclusively for some time now, but had some algae problems in the past. Liquid Utopia is a newer product that has an anti-algae in it, and I used it in place of the usual "dye bomb" that you mix with the coolant. I've always really liked Primochill products, but needless to say I was pretty ticked off about this. Best case scenario, I have to replace the tubing and coolant (neither of which is cheap), and the resale value of my water blocks is basically zero since they are stained purple. Worst case, I don't know what kind of long-term damage has been done to my blocks, the pump, or what the inside of my radiator looks like. I may be looking at some major replacements.

I contacted both Primochill and Performance PCs where I bought the stuff, and included the above pictures. The guys at Primochill seemed very concerned, and to their credit the support they've provide thus far has been great. I have sent my GPU block and a piece of tubing to their labs so they can figure out why this happened, which was FedEx'd to them on their tab. Frankly though I will be disappointed if they and/or PPCs do not offer me some kind of compensation for all this. They should be receiving the block tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see how this all pans out, and the result will have a big impact on whether I buy anything from Primochill and PPCs again.

Worthy of Scooby Doo....

I got the new Noctua fans installed, dusted out my radiator and got everything up and running again.

I assumed that this would solve my temperature issues, but... they're still abnormally high. Like, way abnormally high.

Prior to the whole leak/power surge/replacement video card fiasco, my video card would idle at around 45°. I was able to keep it clocked at 648mhz core only because I noticed that if the card stayed below 54° or so, it could stay stable at that clock. During the brief period I used the Swiftech Compact system, the temps crept into the 60s at load and I had to downclock the card.

Right now, I'm running ATI tool on my card, and it's loading at 80°. Eighty fucking degrees. My processor is creeping up on 60°. Obviously these are not dangerous temperatures or anything, but these are clearly way, way WAY higher temperatures than liquid cooling should net you. But here's what's confounding: my system is the same. I'm using the same pump, same radiator, same cooling blocks... same everything that I was when the system was cruising along at drastically cooler temperatures. I'm really quite dumbfounded. I thought perhaps the block was not making enough contact with the video card, so I tried re-sitting the block. No dice. I'm going to try again though, because I don't know what else could cause a 25° rise in load temperatures.

Anyway... I have the new radiator mounts in, and they're fantastic – much classier than the makeshift L-bracket mounting I've used in the past. The Noctua fans are freaking fantastic – I can feel a lot more air moving through the radiator, and they're every bit as quiet as my Silverstone fans. I even took the chance, since my loop was bled, to re-do a little bit of the loop and improve the wiring a bit more. Now if I can just figure out why it's running so @#$^% hot!

EDIT: I re-seated the GPU block and re-applied the thermal grease. It dropped a few degrees. At this point, I'm looking at my radiator. Something ain't right man.

Strangeness

After all the trouble of getting my new gear working recently, I noticed a bothersome trend – my graphics card was idling in the low to mid 50s instead of the mid 40s as it had previously. My CPU was also running hotter.

I was more than a little mystified by this; I used Zalman silver, in a thin layer, on my GPU block... same as I always have. I dusted out my radiator and cleaned my blocks fairly recently, and had been getting awesome temperatures.

Upon closer inspection it appears as though one of the two fans on my radiator is for some reason spinning very slowly. It was hooked up with a 4-pin power connector but not the 3-pin motherboard header (two wires go to the 4-pin, one goes to the 3-pin), so I plugged that in. Didn't work. I can barely feel any air coming through the radiator.

However, I've decided to purchase some of Noctua's new NF-P12 fans, which are 1300rpm fans designed for high static-pressure needs like water cooling. The fans have been ubiquitously acclaimed and although they are a little pricey, I think they'll be worth it.

I also found that Silverstone has started making something long overdue: a hardware mounting system for an internal radiator. I'm going to be replacing my current home-brewed L-bracket mounting system with these. More to come when the parts arrive this week!