What's New Archives - 2003/4

09-24

I don't seem to being doing a very good job of keeping this site current these days.  Although I have some other commitments, I am interested in keeping the Overclocking Wattage Calculator as current as I can.  If I get too far out of date, please drop me an email and I'll try to get the calculator updated.

This has been a year of change for the Fager household.  Our son is now in college at V.M.I. (Virginia Military Institute).  We live about 140 miles North of VMI, and seem to be making many weekend trips down to Lexington, VA. to see our son.  Hopefully when the "first year stuff" is over, I'll have some more time to devote to the site.

I still try to get my email read and answered, so if you have a question on an article, drop me a line and I'll try to get back to you in a (hopefully) reasonable amount of time.

If you're interested in looking at some family photographs, check out Charging up the hill at New Market. This is an index of picture files that I haven't even taken the time to put to a webpage yet!

I hope to have an update on the site soon.

04-27

I received an interesting email from Antoine regarding something that many people have written me about -- the CPU Cooler programs don't seem to work well with Athlons and Durons. He provided me with a link to this article at VCool's site.  Interesting stuff.

Since I haven't run a processor from AMD in a couple of years, I got in touch with my friend Donnie to see if he could put this program through some testing. Not only did he give me some feedback, but he was kind enough to put together a review of the program as it performed on his box.  Donnie gave the program - VCool 2.0 - a thumb's up.  You can read about his experiences here.

Thanks Donnie!

04-16

For "KWSN-Men" in Greece -- The Overclocking Wattage Calculator has been updated with AMD's "Barton" processors.

Enjoy

04-09

A big welcome to the people coming from technet.cz from Pavel Gregor's article. As my languages are limited to English, some Spanish and a bit of German -- and the basics of any traveler worth his while (like: where is the bathroom (WC) and -- of course, the most important words in any language -- "please" and "thank you"), I didn't understand the whole article, but I appreciate the link. -- Thanks to technet.cz!

Jim

04-04

As if I haven't done enough questionable things in my life, I've now taken the plunge into being a possible software pirate (geeze, tell me it's not true!).

Due to numerous requests, I have included the serial number for Waterfall Pro 2.99 in the file located on the Downloads Page.

I apologize to (Tim) the author, but I'm just tired of answering e-mail about how to get this program to install without being able to connect to a non-existant server.

If anyone has a problem with me putting up the serial #, please contact me: jim@benchtest.com

If not, then enjoy the program.

02-09

I've had a chance to update the Overclocking Calculator page with the latest processors from Intel and AMD.  We now have the thermal specs for 150 processors.

Thanks to Jason for the links to the most recent Intel spec sheets.

01-23

I've finally had the time to update the gameport temperature program to work with Motherboard Monitor Version 5.1.9.1 and later releases. This means you can run up to 4 thermistors off of your gameport and send the readings to the latest version of Motherboard Monitor.  You can take a look at the setup info here, and the program (gp_Temp5.04) can be downloaded here.

For those of you who are interested in coding a program to write to the MBM shared memory, I've included the source code for the interface to MBM in Delphi 5 here.  Alex has made the job of writing to MBM much easier and has given us much more flexibility.

While I haven't been doing a lot with hardware lately, I did happen upon a great deal on some used APC rack-mounted Uninterruptible power supplies that needed some batteries. 2200 Watts of backup power on each of these behemoths.  They weigh a ton, but when the neighborhood goes dark, I'll be "showin' a glow" from the computer room, and that's definitely worth the price of those lead-acid cells!

Click on image to enlarge

10-18

OK, so it's been a while.  I apologize, but life happens.

This post is for Gabe who asked me to update the Overclocking Calculator page.

It would seem that his new processor wasn't listed.

He was right, so...

I've added all of the recent Thoroughbred and P4 offerings.

Keep cool!

8-4

Well, you knew that I had to update sooner or later, didn't you?

The promised article on the CKS400 rack-mount server case is up here.   Sorry for the long wait, but, as is true for most all of us, life has been keeping me busier than I had planned on.

For my family and friends on the left coast and the curious among the rest of you, I've posted some family pix.  If you're interested, please take a look.  There are a couple of nice shots from St. John and Provo.

I'm not really sure what the next project will be, but I have been getting quite a few email about my unfinished heat pipe projects.  If I can get motivated, maybe I'll delve back into that.  You guys have certainly given me some good feedback on that project.

Thanks for all of the email.

7-11

Back home from vacation to my computers and a brown spot in the middle of the lawn from the heat.

Life is good!

I'm playin' catch-up with life at the moment, but should have something to put up in the next few.

Here's a shot of the clean (well, kind of) computer room.  I do like this rack.

Click on image to enlarge

6-26

I'm off on a vacation till the 8th of July. Down to the Turks and Caicos Islands. I have my laptop, DVDs, many tutorials and my diving gear. It should be fun.

The "Rack Case" article will have to wait till I get back.

As most of the USA is swelteringly hot now, all I can suggest is to Keep Cool. (If you haven't cleaned the dust from your heat sink and fans in a while, it is probably a good idea to take care of this now.)

6-8

Thanks to my friend Stephen, I have acquired a copy of Waterfall Pro 2.99. It's up for download on the downloads page.

I'm still working on the computer rack and rack case article. It'll be up sometime soon, I hope.

6-6

Happy birthday Mom!

I've added some processor information to the Calculator page where you can figure out your overclocked processor wattage, as well as the degrees C/W of your current heat sink.

6-1

The new rack is up. The new box is installed and I had planned to be working on cleaning the rest of the computer room.

My wife will be happy when that's done ;-).

The first thing I noticed when I fired up the new box was how loud the big Sunon front fan was. The 4U rackmount case came with a total of 3 fans, but that Sunon is something else!

I decided that the cleaning could wait for a bit and that a fan controller project was in order. I have posted that project here.

For the first time in a long while, I have hardware projects finished and not written up. Expect some more articles soon.

5-9

As usual, it's been way too long since I last posted.

I have just looked through all of my Waterfall and Waterfall Pro files and find that I have a good version of Waterfall 123 and one of Waterfall Pro 2.0 but no copies of Waterfall Pro 2.99. => Waterfall 123 is up on the Downloads Page .  If anyone has a copy of Waterfall Pro 2.99, I'd love a copy to put up.

I'm back in the "hardware mode" - though writing software is taking up much of my time.

It's time for me to upgrade the home boxes.  Though the offerings from AMD are enough to get my blood pumpin',  the P4 - 1.6A is the overclockers delight of the moment.  Add to this that I have am running out of floor space in the computer room and that I have become the proud owner of a Chatsworth rack and I smell a new project.  Check back for this one.

Click on image to enlarge

Also on the agenda is a review of a couple of V.92  modems.  My ISP just went V.92 and since Comcast has promised, but not delivered a cable modem to my location for about 3 years and I'm too far out for DSL, I will try for any increase in speed that I can get.

My first attempt at V.92 has been a USR 5610b - which has been less than successful.  We'll see where this goes.  More modems will be tested and hopefully the results will get better.

3-28

Well, benchtest is alive again.

The process of transferring from one server to another would have been pretty easy if I just had that to do.  Unfortunately, in 1998 when I registered my domain, I did so through "the only game in town."  That was Network Solutions.  I decided that along with the hosting move, it would be the perfect opportunity to get away from those folks.  Dealing with them over the last 3+ years has been less than a pleasure.  The "last straw" was trying to change my "email address of record."  The email account was no longer valid.  Well, it took 4 weeks - 3 faxes - 6 email - and 4 calls to make that happen.  I chalked it up to incompetence - which it may have been - but after reading this thread at slashdot, I realized that I wasn't the only one who had been put through this crud.

Anyway, my new domain registrar, OneStop, apparently didn't get one of my email and pointed benchtest to their free hosting site - instead of my new host. The end result was that benchtest was off the web for 2 days.

I'm still fighting a couple of issues, but for the most part, benchtest is back.

Again, thanks for the webspace, Charles.

I hope to add some files to the download section over the next day or so - how about a couple of versions of Waterfall (which I can't seem to find on the net anymore), and I hope to start a new project in the next couple of weeks - I'm waiting on the availibility of this thoroughbred part.....

See you soon.

3-13

Thank you!

Thanks go out to every one who wrote me with a possible way to keep Benchtest.Com alive.

Thanks also go out to [H]ard|OCP for giving me some press. :-)

Due to the volume of mail I received, it will take some time to answer you all, but I'm working on it.

Last, but not least, a huge thank you to Charles.  This gentleman has given me the means to keep this site going.  Too cool!

I'm in the process of getting things in order for the move - and if all goes well, we won't see downtime.

I have to say that the response I received from the great community of computer enthusiasts was more than I expected.

At the risk of wearing out the words "thank you,"

thanks again one and all.

3-8

As some of you may know, I work for RCN (RCN is an East Coast Internet Service Provider / Cable TV / Phone Service Provider).

Well, times for ISP/Cable/TELCO providers are hard.  This means a tightening of the budget.

Unfortunately, it seems that I'm subject to that tightening.

Bummer.

My deepest thanks go out to the guys that made this website possible by allowing me the bandwidth,

However, the "free ride" has come to an end.  I have been asked to cut back my content to 10 megs.

As I'm running about 20 megs of content and about 7 gigs of bandwidth per month at the present time (even with the lack of updates lately), This means I can't provide what I want to provide any more.

The cost of 7 gigs of bandwidth per month is more than I want to spend on what is generally called a "vanity site."

So, unless something changes, I will shut down the site on March 21, 2002.

My thanks go out to all of you who have written me over the course of the projects.  It certainly has been a lot of fun pondering the "what if" with you.

AND -- I would be remiss in my duties as a "cooling site" webmaster if I didn't tell you to --

Keep it cool.

Jim

1-20

Just a quick update.  Yes, I'm still studying - and probably will be for a while.  Between programming and getting three cars through their annual safety inspections (and the assorted work that comes with that) there's been little time for anything else.

As I am getting closer to putting a new system together, I was curious about the cooling I was going to need for the current crop of processors.  My Temp Calculators page seemed to be a bit out of date :(, so I spent a couple of nights updating it.  There are now over 100 processors listed.

 

 

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