Melting Meltdown

Gosh, it's hot this week. As in really hot.

Yep. Hot. I think I picked the perfect week to take some annual leave, although maybe not the right week to build a new computer ... It's been a bit toasty for doing more than loafing about drinking lots of water.

But still, new bits arrived on Tuesday after a little bit of Cardiff wandering on Monday. Let's actually talk about Cardiff first. I like Cardiff, there's lots to look at including a few curious book caves. The following appeared and escaped with me :
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
CJ Cherryh - Chanor's Venture
Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park
Larry Niven - Tales of Known Space
David Brin - Existence

A few in there that I know should be really good, a few which are speculative. I still need to finish 2312 ... and you know that more will appear during a Book Barn raid in a few weeks.

I also went a little mad acquiring albums with albums from Aurora, Mike Oldfield (x2), Tori Amos, Vangelis, Jade Bird and Lorde appearing. Also sherbets and bonbons. Cardiff is a good place.

Computer ? Here we go. This'll include an honest critique on some of the bits that appeared, because I will immediately replace one and may well replace another as well.

That's the box, a Bitfenix Nova case and is the candidate to maybe be replaced. A box swap is a big job though so inertia may help it survive. Why don't I like it ? It only extracted a light blood sacrifice (a cut about 3mm long, nothing) but it's just too small and doesn't off enough space for fans or for air to escape. We'll come back to that later.

There was also a small distortion in the corner where the power supply fits in, which must have been the result of a fairly major dinting in the factory and should have made it a quality control reject.

That's the inside of a very empty box ... It's just about big enough. The mainboard goes in the top and there's a fan there to extract hot air. The power supply goes in bottom left ....

There we go. Corsair make good power supplies.

(Disclosure note - there is no sponsorship of any kind here !)

That's the motherboard, which everything fits into. It's an Asrock board, following the Asrock board that did pretty well for me in my last machine.

The ports are at the top left, the little square at the top is where the processor goes and the 4x sockets to the top right is where the memory goes. The longer slot in the middle is where a graphics card will go. Everything else plugs in around the edge, including disc drives and the lights on the case.

That's the processor installed under the stock AMD cooler and the 2x sticks of memory are there too. The label saying "Crucial" in the lower right is a 500GB (actually 470GB) M2 SSD hard disc and then there's the back plate laying loose on top of it all.

You get 2x sticks of memory instead of one (cheaper) big one because the machines are capable are using double the bandwidth of just one stick, which makes them faster.

And that's the gubbins in the box. And actually the last proper picture in this series too. The hard discs go over to the right and graphics in the middle. One of the tricks is to manage those power supply cables such that they don't block the airflow and I couldn't really tuck them somewhere out of the way in this box.

This all actually took a hell of a lot more time than the builds usually do ! It was incredibly hot on Tuesday. Literal sweat dripping and other nonsense like that. It should get a bit cooler from tomorrow.

The next thing to do is to connect the leads and switch the power on and ....

Uhoh. No screen. My keyboard is a little awkward so after plugging in its other USB plug (it has two), I reboot and find "Windows did not start up correctly" followed by the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death.

Oh crikey no, that's really bad news.

Zombie PC. Actually not that bad though because the machine was attempting to boot off the most ancient hard disc which was from 2x machines ago, instead of the Windows 10 older SSD. It fired up nicely after switching the boot order around to the correct hard disc.

What was worrying though was the temperature. I'm pretty certain that I have the cooler installed correctly but ....

That's the readout from a hardware monitoring desktop gadget from Addgadgets that I find really useful, getting its data from Core Temp. A steady 53 degrees C on idle is far too hot for comfort, even in these temperatures. You'll see the graphics card below hovering at 35 degrees C. It's not in any danger of melting down, the machine has survived a quick SETI (Milkyway at Home) stress test topping out at 83 degrees C but that sawtooth pattern to the temperature is worrying. It really shouldn't be doing that and I think the machine was derating itself as well during that stress test. What it all means is that you won't get the full performance out of the machine, it's liable to crash when worked hard and you're unlikely to get the 8 years of life out of it that I got with the last build.

(This is why that hardware monitoring gadget is really handy - it lets you spot and diagnose issues like this, including if the horror of horrors happen - a failed fan).

The temperature is hovering between 53 and 66 degrees C at the moment but it was on a nice and steady (as in, a line and not a sawtooth) 73 while playing Motorsport Manager earlier.

So I'll be heading to the shops tomorrow when it's cooler to acquire a new ... cooler. I also need to get a new Windows licence because I've changed too many bits now. I'll still be able to use the other Windows licence in the old machine.

I haven't transferred over the bluray drive yet. I think that might be a dead'un although I need to verify that by finding an opportune evening to watch Rogue One.

How does it perform ? I used the 3d Mark benchmarks on the old machine before switching and on the more stressing Time Spy demo, the numbers went from 3500 wibbles to 4100 wibbles. I think that's graphics card limited. On the cpu test, the numbers went up from 2200 wibblies to a much shinier 7000 wibblies. The new machine has 6 cores up from 4 and can handle 12 threads, up from 4. it's also a little quicker in the GHz.

So - happy with the upgrade, although the heat and the dodgy cooler mean that I haven't gone into heavier gaming yet. I'll definitely replace the cooler and I'll think about replacing the box. The diminutive size of the box means I'm limited on those cooling options and I'm unconvinced that it will get sufficient airflow.

The name ?

If the old one was called Pumpkin after being built at Halloween, this one had to be Meltdown :-D.

Addendum time .... I've figured out the heat issue ... Check out this updated pic from this morning :

That's much more steady, including a steady idle where I turned the Milkyway At Home calcs off to see how quickly the temperature changes would happen. This is much better.

Fix - in the picture in the middle of the post, the Clock is 4199MHz where the mainboard had auto overclocking enabled and turned the wick up on the processor. When the overclocking is disabled and the processor is back to stock 3600MHz performance, the temperatures are just fine. The idle went up to a little bit high 45 degrees C but I'm ok with that considering ambient temperatures.

This is a bit silly and a black mark against Asrock ... The auto overclocking shouldn't be enabled by default, it makes things hot and shortens the life of the machine.