Evolution

The case has seen some adventures and proven very reliable over the intervening months between my last post and present day.

A LAN party where we had enormous amounts of fun in a newly aquired finished basement. Best Case-Mod Award!! (Photo credit to Wiarton Willy):

Whoot!! I think I said something like "never have I gone so long and so hard" at the time.

In my quest for lower temps and power consumption I wholeheartedly support AMD's Cool and Quiet technology (CnQ). One of the early production bios versions for the MB supported a low end CnQ Vcore of 1.1V. Compared to the stock 1.35 this is great. Unfortunately the lasted official bios versions only utilize a 1.3V CnQ Vc. When OCworkbench, hosts of an active Asrock enthusiast community, released their latest beta bios supporting a CnQ Vc of 1.1V I decided to take the plunge. I'd resisted in the past as the system doesn't have a floppy drive installed (I felt I wasn’t' worth the effort--perhaps I was wrong). Fortunately I now have a USB key in the house post Christmas (whoot! again). Using one of the various methods to make the USB key bootable (XP's bootable floppy from a different system, a copy of the flash utility and bios and HP's Drive Key Boot Utility) and selecting it from the boot menu soon had me upgraded. Unfortunately OCworkbench seems to have selected some options in the bios (some altered defaults and possibly some hidden options) which my system didn't like very much. It wouldn't boot. On further investigation it appeared that it may in fact be attempting something as the keyboard lights would flash as in a normal POST (power on self test) sequence but no video would display. Removing power source and battery from the MB didn't help. Resetting the bios with the CLRCMOS jumper didn't help. Multiple resets didn't help. However pressing F2 to get into the bios did (whoot again!). I then attempted all defaults and forced preference to the AGP card for video initialization. Still only mediocre results (successful video initialization and boot 1/3 of the time). I decided to boot to windows and using the factory supplied windows bios update utility v1.5 to get back to a supported system. No problem and now the system is back to normal.

However I still wanted to take advantage of the fact that this chip likes low voltages. The 1.50 bios uses the CnQ Vc of 1.3 on the low end. I decided to disable CnQ but determine the lowest voltage that the system would run at full speed without sacrificing stability. After attempts at 1.1 (wouldn't even boot windows) 1.2 (pretty flakey right off the bat) it seems that 1.25 is the final answer. I've been running Prime95 to verify stability on both cores and the temp is solid at 63 degrees C compared to 79 degrees C at 1.35V. Pretty impressive gains in power efficiency.

I thought I'd post this article to counterbalance the MANY articles out there describing efforts aimed at maximum performance. I've not had much luck getting this system to overclock by a significant amount and this reduction in energy consumption is much more rewarding to me. This system flies regardless and now has a smaller energy/heat/noise signature to boot. A fantastic HTPC candidate.