Category: Hardware

TommyNation Gamer Rig

The Corsair 650D Midi Tower: a TommyNation recommendation

I’ve added a page called TommyNation Gamer Rig. This page will be kept up-to-date with my personal recommended setup for a high quality gaming rig.

It’s not a budget gaming rig, instead I focus on great performance (above average) at a fair price, without going overboard.

The chosen components are not by random selection, but based firstly on my personal experience, secondly on benchmarks and tests that I’ve been reading, as I follow the hardware releases daily.

Check it out and feel free to leave your comments!

Intel SSD 510 Released

Intel SSD 510

An Intel SSD 510 in all its glory

Today, Intel released the SSD 510 MLC drives with an official IOPS rating of up to 20,000 read (4k random) and 8,000* write (4k random) and sequencial file read/write performance of up to 500/315 MB/s. To take full advantage of these SSDs you need full SATA 6 Gb/s (SATA 3.0) support.

The Intel SSD 510 is available in 120 GB and 250 GB versions. Retail units are already available in many outlets online, and expected to start shipping at the time of writing.

You’ll have to shell out around $315 US for the 120 GB unit or $615 US for the bigger 250 GB unit (current price at time of writing at Newegg).

[notice]* Actual write performance is up to 12,000 write operations per second according to early unofficial benchmarks.[/notice]

The retail box includes a desktop installation kit (3,5" converter)

Cougar Point Reloaded for Sandy Bridge

Sandy Bridge 2500k S-1155 Unlocked (box shot)The new Cougar Point chipsets for Sandy Bridge are now in production, fixing the over-voltage error that would inevitabely kill all SATA 3 Gbit/s ports in most P67 and H67 boards, originally released mid January.

Bringing AMD unexpected extra business as a side-effect, the new chips will take a while to reach stores as part of a mainboard sold over the counter, as things such as logistics and production time are accounted for, as well as high demand amongst prioritized system building vendors. Expect to see the new boards in stock sometime in April at the earliest.

As a sidenote, system building vendors have been given permission to use the crippled versions of the P67 and H67 mainboards in systems where the two functioning 6 Gbit/s ports will suffice, e.g. in miniature systems with limited space for expansions.

Corsair AX850 PSU Unboxing

Just got this Power Supply Unit (PSU) from Corsair. It’s very promising in so many ways, and has gotten really good reviews from all over. More techincal details below the video.

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System Crash: Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power

“The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.”

This error can be triggered by many different things, but in general they’re all related to something to do with power management.

I just went through three motherboards, different VGA cards and harddisks, basically changing out everything except for the CPU, only to eventually find that the computer crashes were triggered by Windows 7 trying to manage the power state on my Intel Core i5 750 CPU. As soon as I disabled all C-States, it stopped crashing.

I found out about this workaround from the Technet forum threads “Periodic server core BSOD/Reboot, need help with bugcheck report” and “Iam having Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power crashes“.

The problem with this workaround, is that the new CPUs are supposed to save you energy by enabling the latest operating systems such as Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 to manage them more effeciently. By disabling all of the C-States, you’re basically forcing the CPU to run at full steam. This is most severe if you’ve invested in the latest Xeon processors mainly because of these features, as mentioned somewhere further down in the first forum thread I linked to.

If this is a fault with the new Windows core, I really hope Microsoft comes out with a hotfix soon. It cost me a lot of time and frustration to find the source of – and workaround to – the problem.