As you can see, it’s quite a long time since my last overclocking related post here. Even the one I’m writing now is not about overclocking, nothing of the latest hardware is interesting at all, so I don’t really bother go out and buy something. When nothing interesting is on the market the things I do is: upgrade the daily use rig. I’m not one of those interested in uber dupah performance, I’m alot more focused on reliability, so I never use the latest stuff for my DU rig…better to have 20 % less of performance but well tested and widely used components. Because of what I wrote before, 1 week ago I bought a new monitor, a Dell U2412M. …

Think I never mentioned it but I have a small home server, it was built with a c2d E6600, an Intel G965 mobo and some HDDs. Since 2 weeks ago I was using Ubuntu then I decided it was time to try something better and more challenging than Ubuntu, my choice was CentOS. Why use CentOS ? Because it’s one of the best enterprise class distro with 7 years support and have a good ammount of interesting features like services GUI manager and iptables GUI. I don’t consider myself a Unix pro nor a noob but I’ve to say that the first touch with this distro wasn’t the best. In fact I had lots of trouble trying to install CentOS from USB drive, after had lost 1 hour or so I took a DVD drive, burned the ISO on a DVD and installed from it. When finally I was able to get into the OS the first thing I did was installing XRDP to remote control the machine from one of my other PCs. I also installed Transmission torrent client, added some iptables rules and did some other things. Everything was quite easy except the installation and configuration of Samba server, to be honest I didn’t remember well what I did to make it works on Ubuntu but here on CentOS it gave me some troubles. Google this time wasn’t that helpful, there aren’t much info or guides about Samba on CentOS, so I think I should write here how I made it works. First of all, we have to install Samba, open the terminal, get admin privileges and type: <pre name=“code” class"ruby"> yum install samba …

Today I happen to read somewhere about Intel Rapid Storage and SSD performance. Well, I thought I had already installed it on my notebook but it seems I was wrong, so I did a quick google reserarch and downloaded the software from the Intel site. Someone says this software boosts SSD performance, so I did the usual ATTO benchmark to have a previous / after comparison. …

Yesterday Crucial released a new firmware for the whole M4 SSD lineup, the update over 0009 version was needed because of the so called 5200 hours bug. Basicly, every M4 after a power on time of 5200 hours or so will start to hung every hour, this is because something is messed up with the SMART data. This new firmware resolve this bug. Yesterday’s evening I’ve upgraded at this new version of the firmware the M4-128GB I’ve in my Thinkpad. Crucial doesn’t provide an update tool different from an ISO image to be burned on a CD but I’ve no DVD drive in my laptop. So I dusted of UNetbootin and created a bootable USB drive with the update tool inside. Then normally booted up from USB and followed the how to flash guide Crucial provide on its site. There was no need to set SATA controller in IDE mode, I’ve performed the update while in AHCI mode without any kind of issue. …

After the epic fail experience with Faildozer I dediced to use the latest litres of LN2 to freeze the P4 631 I had laying on the desk for some time. Honestly I didn’t expected to get such high clock. SETUP: CPU: Pentium 4 631 – VCORE 1.95 volt – VTT 1.5 – VPLL 1.6 cooling: Guglio’s CPU pot rev 2.0 MB: Rampage Extreme RAM: Crucial PC3-12800 D9-GTS – 1.9 volt – white slot VGA: nvidia 6200 LE 256 MB PCI-E HDD: seagate 7200.10 160 GB sata PSU: PCP&C 1200 OS: 2k3 server …

Last friday and saturday I had a 2 day LN2 trip with the CVF and my FX-4100 crap CPU. Results were not good due to the crappy CPU but at least I had fun pushing the setup at its limit. I only had time to test max frequency and do some super-pi 32M, then the CPU died. SETUP: CPU: FX-4100 – vcore 2.05 volt, vmch 1.65 volt cooling: Guglio’s CPU pot rev 2.0 MB: Crosshair V Formula – bios 1003 RAM: G.Skill RipjawX 2133C8 – Elpida MNH-E-Hyper – 1.9 volt – red slots VGA: nvidia 6200 LE 256 MB PCI-E HDD: seagate 7200.10 160 GB sata PSU: PCP&C 1200 OS: Win XP sp3 & 2k3 server TW …

I couldn’t resist, I’ve picked up a CVF to replace the crappy MSI 990FX. Today I had the time to do some tests along with a set of G.Skill 2133c8 and an FX-4100. _CPU: FX-4100 (later I will write down the batch) – vcore 1.5 volt, vmch 1.65 volt cooling: single stage on CPU, everything else air cooled MB: Crosshair V Formula – bios 1003 RAM: G.Skill RipjawX 2133C8 – Elpida MNH-E-Hyper – 1.9 volt – red slots VGA: nvidia 6200 LE 256 MB PCI-E HDD: seagate 7200.10 160 GB PSU: PCP&C 1200 _ …

With some hours of delay I’m here writing a post about past year, new year, what I did and what I will do. University in the past year went quite well, I also had the most importart thing: the healt; so really, I’ve nothing to complain about. My usual Christmas trip ended just a bunch of hours ago, now I’m back at home with some new toys to play with. I just love to go away the week across Christmas and Sylvester’s day, this way I don’t have the problem to go buy presents, I’ve not the problem to decide what to do the last night of the year. I just know these days I will be away from home and it makes me feel so relaxed. Doing presents is something I really don’t understand, I’m used to go out and buy whatever I need, probably I’m lucky, but I already have what I want. Starting from that point, whatever present someone will give me will be something I don’t need, just think how much stuff you have in your house that you never use and you have just because someone give it to you; if someone is importart for me he will still be it even if he didn’t gave me a present on my birthday or Christmas. Coming to the present I gave to myself, it is an ASUS Crosshair V Formula; after 3 dead MSI I decided it was time to buy something well know for being good. …