Its on ebay so get it why you can…
Originally uploaded by paulfarrow
After putting a power meter on my home entertainment system realised that my equipment was using a lot of power 350 watts at peak. So thought I would do some investigation into a recent low power mini-itx board from Zotac. I chose this one because it was dual core and it has a pci-express card on it which is good for a cable tuner I am looking at to use in it for when I am in the USA.
Ordered the board from mini-itx.com as they are the only people I could find doing this board. It came and everything looked fine except that the fan isnt fitted and there are no holes for it on the cpu heat sink. After talking with mini-itx they told me to screw it to the heatsink even though it doesnt have any predetermined holes. I also noticed that the manuals that came with it – the quick installation and the main manual werent for this board. Which was a great start.
I had already converted my old system from Vista to Windows 7. I then put the new Atom board into my case and started it up. Immediately I was getting checksum errors and just stalled. I was like oh dear must be memory related so twiddled about a bit with the memory until I found the culprit. From going from 1 board to the other, one stick of my 2Gb DDR2 had decided to die.
Not a real problem as really 2Gb of memory should be ok for what that board needs to do. So once over that everything came up fine. I use this as my media center so mainly playing music and watching tv (SD & HD blu-ray).
Initial reaction was that its great. So lets put it through its paces, watching blu-ray with fast moving action – didnt phase it at all everything was running fine at 17% cpu and wattage was about 270 watts so it was already saving me about 70 watts of power. I then decided to get it to record two tv stations and watch a recorded program at the same time.
It did this as well although cpu was about going from about 50 to 75%. And when navigating through the menu it was a bit sluggish although livable. All in all it is great because it will save me money and the Windows 7 media center is a little better than the old Vista one.
FURTHER UPDATE: having recently bought UP on blu-ray I have noticed something that is important for this board. Some of the later blu-ray’s are recorded in MPEG4 – I have tested UP and The Taking Of Pelham 123, they are both recorded in MPEG4 unlike I Am Legend which is VC1.
MPEG4 is currently running at around 47% cpu usage which is fine on its own but if (like I was at the time of trying to play UP) you are recording tv at the same time its just a bit too much for the little NVIDIA ION board which then runs at 100% and frames and audio drop on the play back of the blu-ray movie. Its a shame because its a great board and just what I want when the machine is on all the time but its a trade off between performance and cost of running the equipment.
Overall I am still impressed even though there are these obvious trade offs.
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There were no other problems, I housed it in an Antec mini tower just fine. Kept the fan on the back which is a little noisy but not too bad, it seems noisy because the motherboard is fanless and the Antec case has a 120 mm fan which together is basically silent and this fan is the only thing in the tower making any noise. Now I put disks a couple of old 250Gb Samsung Spinpoint SATA II drives in it which just happened to be laying around in my office and bought a couple of 1TB Samsung Spintpoint SATA II drives from Ebuyer. Mounted the drives and put them in the Rackmax enclosure. Powered it up and all the lights came on and went off but one of the drives in the Rackmax enclosure had a solid yellow light on which I think signals a problem. I swapped them around and another light came on a different drive !!! wierd so I just put it down to the fact that the enclosure wasnt configured properly yet with the motherboard.
Ok so while I bought the terabyte drives I also bought a 4 port sata raid card from Linitx, it was only a cheapy and just thought its bound to be fine with Linux. Linitx are a very reputable dealer who specialise in small form factor motherboards and embedded systems. So got it slotted into my fanless VIA EK8000 board and plugged the drives up. Powered it up and it just halts on when it is declaring what SATA drives it has on itself. MMM I thought to myself wonder if its all SATA drives or what?! So I unplugged the drives and powered it up and went through no problem. So then I thought perhaps its a size thing so just plugged up one of the 250Gb drives and powered it up. The system booted fine. So tried again with the terabyte drive and low and behold it just halts before it even gets to the Linux boot up. Ok so looked up the model of SATA card I have and it is the Silicon Image Sil3114 PCI SATA Raid Card.
Now some people on the web are saying it is because it cant negotiate the lower 1.5Gbps speed with the SATA II drives and to set your drives to the lower speed. So thought ok that sounds feasible and set about lowering the speed from SATA II to SATA I on my Samsung drives. Now Samsung have a utility that does this for you. Downloaded it off their website and tried it. The ramdrive they have wont load on anything other than a proper Intel processor. It wouldnt load on my VIA C7 board or my Atom board. Therefore I had to break apart my desktop just to be able to flash the drives – it was a real ROYAL pain. Did all that put my desktop back together and still had a problem arrrhghghghghghg. Ok so now I thought it has to be a BIOS problem on the SATA Raid card. Low and behold the BIOS on the card was at 5.0.37 and the latest update was at 5.4 something. Gosh that was like 4 years out of date !!! So now did I have to break open my desktop just to flash the BIOS. No after reading up on the flash utility etc I realised that it can be flashed in windows from the device manager. So opened my Atom machine running Windows 7 (purely because it has an easy access case) and put the card in there. I then downloaded the latest drivers for the card via Windows Update and went into the device manager and right clicked on the device and there is a tab called flash bios. Clicked there browsed to the image and flashed it. Couldnt have been simpler.  I took the binary prefixed with the letter R.
Threw the card back into the VIA board booted with the terabyte drives in it and it came up fine. Just wish I had done that first rather than thinking it was because my drives needed to be downgraded.
And its all running very smoothly now.
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Drove it many times to France and once to Madrid. It was great fun, nearly as great as my GSX-R 750. Wonder where it is now??? Post here if you have seen it.
If your looking for more photos or stories about it try clicking the mini tag in my tag cloud.
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Going to start with a pair of digital freeview tv tuners which I bought back in 2005 and have never used them. So get bidding if you want them…
Rick and Me At El Rickys Mexican Restaurant
Originally uploaded by paulfarrow
Yesterday I got invited around a very good friend of mines – Rick Marden. It was excellent we had fajitas and they were good. Also had to have a photo with the hat !!.
It was such a great send off for my emigration to the USA. It ended up with him giving me a bottle of Pol Roger which was Winston Churchill’s favourite champagne and a special edition scalextric mini cooper from the Italian Job. So kind, thank you.
It was just great and I will miss him and his wife Judy a lot.
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There was a small FEATURE in the plugin that didnt allow it to work when php is hosted on IIS but have worked with the author and have now solved that which is great. Actually great support from them and it works a treat.
So I now have ebay items on the sidebar and you can post directly into the text like this… Check out the tattoo flash from my impending brother in law !!! yahoooo. OK OK I am getting a bit wild for a Monday morning I know any way check this out.
Not sure on the ebay header bit but I guess thats ebay doing that so probably nothing we can do about it.
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Opening the account was fairly easy. And twitter is self explanatory really. I guess the real reason for getting on Twitter is another way of publishing my useless information that I release from time to time via my Wordpress blog. So I downloaded the plugin twittertools and set up the Twitter login details which worked a treat – when I now published a post on my blog it pushed it to my Twitter account paulfarr0w. The problem was that it had the big long url in it so hunted about and realised that actually within twittertools it had 3 other plugins, one being the interface to bit.ly which gives you tiny url’s.
Signed up for an account with bit.ly and posted again and bobs your uncle now I have posts going through twitter as well all from one source my blog.
Oh one last thing the hash’s in the titles tell Twitter to group the posts by those keywords which is pretty nifty.
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Originally uploaded by paulfarrow
Well first blog of the new year and its snowing once again.
My road outside the window has been white for nearly the whole time over Christmas. It just hadn’t cleared. This morning I woke up to find heaps and heaps of snow. The news is saying its the longest cold spell for 30 years. One thing is the UK grounds to a halt when its snowing.
Looks rather beautiful though – don’t you think?
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Originally uploaded by paulfarrow
First snow of the Winter hits us here in Guildford, Surrey. Its not as bad as last year but looks like a substantial amount of snow none the less.
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