Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Guide to add zRAM on the Synology DiskStation DS212j
My Synology DiskStation DS212j has gotten slower over the years ever since I bought in 2012. DSM operating system security and software upgrades introduced feature bloat that required more memory and caused memory to page to disk. Wikipedia gives an amazing overview of why paging is bad and why zRAM is amazing for memory constrained PCs.
zram (also called zRAM and, initially, compcache) is a Linux kernel feature that provides a form of virtual memory compression. zram increases performance by avoiding paging to disk and using a compressed block device in RAM instead, inside which paging takes place until it is necessary to use the swap space on a hard disk drive. Since using zram is an alternative way to provide swapping on RAM, zram allows Linux to make a better use of RAM when swapping/paging is required, especially on older computers with less RAM installed.
Pretty cool, huh? The Android community often uses zRAM as a way to bring back older devices back to life and I figured I could do the same with my aging DiskStation that only came with 256MB of RAM compared to the more recent DS216 that comes with twice that at 512MB.
I successfully compiled and added the zRAM module to my DS212j and wanted to share the steps. My DS212j uses the Linux kernel 2.6.32 so this guide should be applicable to any Synology DS that uses the same kernel.
Setting up the DSM 6.1 Tool Chain
Synology has provided excellent documentation on how to compile kernel modules. You should follow their tutorial on how to setup the toolkit to compile the kernel.
You will need to follow the Synology documentation to compile kernel modules here in order to build the LZO kernel module. This is a dependent kernel module for zRAM.
Steps are roughly:
Download the kernel source for the closest branch that is currently deployed on your Synology: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/Synology%20NAS%20GPL%20Source/
Extract the source to /toolkit/build_env/ds.x64-6.1/root/
Enter the tool chain chroot: chroot /toolkit/build_env/ds.x64-6.1 /bin/bash
Build LZO modules because they’re dependencies for zRAM.
Enter Cryptographic API to select LZO compression algorithm as a module. Exit and save.
make prepare
make modules
Copy lzo_compress.ko, lzo_decompress.ko, lzo.ko to your Synology
Compiling the Compcache Kernel Module
I have successfully compiled the Compcache 0.6.2 kernel module and gotten it to work with the stock 2.6.32 kernel. The latest version doesn’t seem to work so we’re going to stick with 0.6.2 where we will follow the Compcache documentation here.
Verify everything worked by checking dmesg for errors
nschimme@NilsDiskStation:~$ dmesg | grep -E "(ramzswap|lzo)" [ 100.500000] alg: No test for lzo (lzo-generic) [ 100.550000] ramzswap: num_devices not specified. Using default: 1 [ 100.550000] ramzswap: /dev/ramzswap0 initialized: disksize_kb=131072 [ 100.560000] ramzswap: Invalid ioctl 21297 [ 101.560000] Adding 131064k swap on /dev/ramzswap0. Priority:5 extents:1 across:131064k SS nschimme@NilsDiskStation:~$
Add above insmod/swapon commands to /etc/rc.local to make the changes permanent
zRAM Results
It’s super effective! I’ve noticed that there was roughly ~100MB of paged memory usually and I’ve managed to get it all to fit within ~30MB of compressed memory space rather than going down to the hard drive. Responsiveness in the DSM OS has greatly improved as a result.
nschimme@NilsDiskStation:~$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 243 79 60 3 104 123 Swap: 2175 94 2081 nschimme@NilsDiskStation:~$ swapon NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO /dev/md1 partition 2G 0B -1 /dev/ramzswap0 partition 128M 94.9M 5 nschimme@NilsDiskStation:~$ sudo rzscontrol /dev/ramzswap0 --stats DiskSize: 131072 kB NumReads: 9890 NumWrites: 26730 FailedReads: 0 FailedWrites: 0 InvalidIO: 0 NotifyFree: 0 ZeroPages: 7231 GoodCompress: 78 % NoCompress: 2 % PagesStored: 19499 PagesUsed: 6640 OrigDataSize: 77996 kB ComprDataSize: 26200 kB MemUsedTotal: 26560 kB nschimme@NilsDiskStation:~$
Gaming with XDMA CrossFire Passthrough on Ubuntu 17.04
I have used Windows as my primary OS ever since I was a teenager because I am a gamer. Ironically, my gaming hobby also introduced me to my programming/Linux hobby (and now career) which are always at odds with one another. I can either game, which has an unfortunate requirement of needing Windows, or hack, which usually requires Linux. This meant I had to constantly dual boot between Windows and Linux or suffer with a virtual machine with poor video performance. Not ideal.
However, a few years ago the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) project enabled near native Windows guest performance by passing through a host video card to a guest. I was extremely interested in trying this out but was deterred by a lack of proof that SLI or CrossFire worked since my other, other hobby is also being a hardware enthusiast.
All that changed when I discovered a post authored by Duelist detailing that he had successfully got his XDMA Radeons to run in CrossFire! I gave it a try it myself and found that documentation was sparse and mostly geared towards Arch Linux. I have a preference for Ubuntu and couldn’t really find anything modern that would help me. All in all, I was successful and am extremely happy with the performance of my box. Hopefully this guide will also help others that have multiple Radeons that they wish to CrossFire!
Note: Large parts of this guide have been pieced together from various tutorials and user posts from around the web. The Puget Systems Ubuntu 14.04 + KVM guide is a great Ubuntu starting point when paired with QEMU-KVM on Arch Linux Guide. If you get stuck the Arch Linux PCI passthrough via OVMF wiki, the Arch Linux forums, or the /r/VFIO wiki are other valuable references.
System Requirements
CPU VT-d support
Motherboard can enable VT-d support
2+ Radeon eGPUs with XDMA CrossFire and UEFI BIOS support
Intel iGPU or a third eGPU
BIOS
Enable VT-d virtualization in your BIOS and enable your integrated GPU.
Ubuntu Setup
Install Ubuntu 16.10 or 17.04 if you want virt-manager because it comes with a more modern libvirt 2.1 than Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
After you have installed Ubuntu you will now have the stock kernel but it won’t be virtualization aware. We will need to enable the VFIO (Virtual Finction I/O) kernel modules to allow us to pass full devices to the guest machine.
sudo gedit /etc/modules
Add the following to the bottom of the file:
# Modules required for VFIO vfio vfio_iommu_type1 vfio_pci kvm kvm_intel
Next we will need to enable Intel IOMMU via the boot loader:
Now we will need to identify the PCI-Bus IDs of the hardware devices that we wish to pass through. In this case I’m passing through my R9 290s and their HDMI audio devices which have PCI-Bus IDs 1002:67b1 and 1002:aac8.
lspci -nn | grep AMD 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Hawaii PRO [Radeon R9 290/390] [1002:67b1] 01:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Hawaii HDMI Audio [Radeon R9 290/290X / 390/390X] [1002:aac8] 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Hawaii PRO [Radeon R9 290/390] [1002:67b1] 02:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Hawaii HDMI Audio [Radeon R9 290/290X / 390/390X] [1002:aac8]
Add this to a special vfio.conf that will be run when the vfio-pci module is started:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/vfio.conf
Add the following to the file replacing you PCI-Bus IDs as needed:
# Ensure that the vfio-pci module gets loaded before any video drivers softdep radeon pre: vfio-pci softdep amdgpu pre: vfio-pci softdep nouveau pre: vfio-pci softdep drm pre: vfio-pci # vfio-pci driver will be loaded onto the following PCI-Bus IDs options vfio-pci ids=1002:67b1,1002:aac8
Blacklist the opensource radeon driver from starting:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
Add the following to the file
# Drivers for devices that are passed to VFIO radeon
Reboot your machine and verify that the video cards have been stubbed out via vfio-pci.
dmesg | grep vfio [ 7.206251] vfio_pci: add [1002:67b1[ffff:ffff]] class 0x000000/00000000 [ 7.250264] vfio_pci: add [1002:aac8[ffff:ffff]] class 0x000000/00000000
QEMU Setup
Next install the Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) and QEMU so that we can run a virtual machine.
sudo apt-get install ovmf qemu-kvm
The OVMF is a project to enable UEFI support for virtual machines. It’s a BIOS that is needed to boot our Windows guest and it needs a variable store partition that we’re going to now create:
Try running the VM using just QEMU after you alter the necessary fields to your machine’s specification. This will be the number of cores/threads, amount of memory, or paths to the installation media. I wouldn’t suggest you change too much otherwise. Also, please note that Windows 10 will BSOD unless qemu emulates a core2duo class processor.
In this example I have also mounted the Windows virtio drivers which you should download beforehand.
If you look at the bold configuration above, the trick to getting CrossFire working is to create a unique PCI-e root port switch per GPU (i.e. ioh3420).
If you were able to run this command then you should have seen a Tiano UEFI boot screen on your Radeons. If so, you succesfully got to the first step in GPU passthrough. Unfortunately this doesn't mean things will work right off away. You will need the QXL emulated video card as a substitute until everything works.
Install Windows on the Guest using QXL Video
I had to set up my guest at this stage because there is a bug that prevents Windows 7 guests from booting QEMU KVMs on libvirt. I installed Windows 7 first (and then upgraded to 8 and then 10) because I don't own a Windows 10 retail copy and can still upgrade to 10 for free with a valid version of Windows 7 or 8. You might want to skip this stage and go on directly on to libvirt section to avoid having to re-activate your OS (it seems libvirt changes something that Windows' activate system doesn't like).
Fully install Windows 10 and get it working before you install the Radeon drivers. It just worked for me after this. If you run into weird GPU issue a reboot will usually fix the problem. Please note that I was also unable to get CrossFire working in Windows 7 so its likely that only Windows 8/10 are supported.
(Optional: 16.10 and above only) libvirt and virt-manager Setup
Now we’re going to get this working with libvirt and virt-manager in order to allow our VM to autostart on boot.
We’re going to roughly follow the Ubuntu KVM guide. Additional information on virt can be found on the Ubuntu KVM Walkthrough.
Next up we’re going to create a file for inclusion as a virt domain.
sudo gedit /etc/libvirt/qemu/windows10.xml
Alter the following XML similar to what you did above for QEMU and paste it in. The necessary bits to load the unique PCI-e root port switches have been added in bold.
sudo service apparmor restart sudo service virtlogd restart
Try to start the Windows 10 guest now using virt-manager
virt-manager
Connect to QEMU/KVM and hit the play button. It's also somewhat convenient to do USB passthrough here.
If you notice things aren’t working keep an eye on dmesg and then edit the Apparmor profile further to give additional access to libvirt.
Benchmark
My machine seems to have a minor 2 frame per second hit over bare metal in benchmarks. If you would like to analyze my benchmark result further take a look here: http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/11182166/fs/8229002
Windows 10 Guest Autostart
If everything was successful you should now be able to autostart your virtual machine on boot with:
virsh autostart windows10
(Optional) Next Steps
Remove crackle from your sound by enabling MSI interrupts for HDMI audio
Improve guest I/O performance by using ZFS
Set up mouse and keyboard sharing with Synergy or evdev.
Pass through USB devices
Replace virtio with virtio-scsi to enable thin client discard
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Intel Smart Response Technology vs Windows 10 Tiered Storage Spaces
I have used Intel’s SRT (Smart Response Technology) as a way to boost the performance of my slow spinner hard drives ever since they introduced the SSD caching technology alongside the Z68 chipset for Sandybridge in 2011. SRT works by caching heavily used data onto the speedy SSD with a fall back to the HDD at the minor cost of requiring a RAID driver on Windows boot.
The technology behind Intel’s SRT is nothing new and has been standard in the industry as a way to boost the performance of database servers. The software has been reimplemented many times in the form of flashcache, ZFS, and bcache. Not wanting to be left out of the server market, Microsoft also implemented tiered storage spaces for Windows Server 2012 by following the same concept but adding their own twist. They introduce a hot/cold tier concept where the SSD is portion is self-balancing and keeps hot data within itself for fast access.
Enthusiast’s who want their games to load fast without shelling out $$$ for a large capacity SSD were stuck with using Intel’s SRT because Microsoft never ported the tiered storage space technology to Windows 10. This was until Windows 10 build 10565 secretly introduced it without any press release.
Microsoft’s tiered storage space technology ought to be more advanced than Intel’s software based caching and should be able to replace it and perform better. My personal goal was to do that and then measure it.
Setting up a Simple Tiered Storage Space on Windows 10
It was nearly impossible to find documentation on how to set up tiered storage spaces on Windows 10. I wanted to create a setup similar to what I had in the SRT where I paired a single HDD with a SSD. In the end I pieced together two guides meant for Windows Server and created some rough instructions that need to be entered into a Powershell:
#Variables
$StoragePoolName = "My Storage Pool"
$TieredSpaceName = "My Tiered Space"
$ResiliencySetting = "Simple"
$SSDTierName = "SSDTier"
$HDDTierName = "HDDTier"
#List all disks that can be pooled and output in table format (format-table) Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $True | ft FriendlyName,OperationalStatus,Size,MediaType
#Store all physical disks that can be pooled into a variable, $PhysicalDisks
$PhysicalDisks = (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $True | Where MediaType -NE UnSpecified)
#Create a new Storage Pool using the disks in variable $PhysicalDisks with a name of My Storage Pool $SubSysName = (Get-StorageSubSystem).FriendlyName New-StoragePool -PhysicalDisks $PhysicalDisks -StorageSubSystemFriendlyName $SubSysName -FriendlyName $StoragePoolName
#View the disks in the Storage Pool just created Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName $StoragePoolName | Get-PhysicalDisk | Select FriendlyName, MediaType
#Create two tiers in the Storage Pool created. One for SSD disks and one for HDD disks $SSDTier = New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName $StoragePoolName -FriendlyName $SSDTierName -MediaType SSD $HDDTier = New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName $StoragePoolName -FriendlyName $HDDTierName -MediaType HDD
#Identify tier sizes within this storage pool
$SSDTierSizes = (Get-StorageTierSupportedSize -FriendlyName $SSDTierName -ResiliencySettingName $ResiliencySetting).TierSizeMax
$HDDTierSizes = (Get-StorageTierSupportedSize -FriendlyName $HDDTierName -ResiliencySettingName $ResiliencySetting).TierSizeMax
#Create a new virtual disk in the pool with a name of TieredSpace using the SSD and HDD tiers
New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName $StoragePoolName -FriendlyName $TieredSpaceName -StorageTiers $SSDTier, $HDDTier -StorageTierSizes $SSDTierSizes, $HDDTierSizes -ResiliencySettingName $ResiliencySetting -AutoWriteCacheSize -AutoNumberOfColumns
#Alternatively try adjusting the sizes manually:
#New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName $StoragePoolName -FriendlyName $TieredSpaceName -StorageTiers @($SSDTier,$HDDTier) -StorageTierSizes @(228GB,1.816TB) -ResiliencySettingName $ResiliencySetting -AutoWriteCacheSize -AutoNumberOfColumns
Benchmarks
The hard drive that I’m using in all these is a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3020ALA632). The solid state drive that I’m using is a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO. My system is powered by a 4690K, ASUS Z87 Pro, and 32GB of RAM.
Let’s start off by just looking at the Hitachi itself by using CrystalDiskMark:
As shown, the Hitachi performs like any other spinning disk drive where any kind of random reads and writes suck.
Let’s take a look at what the numbers look like when we pair the Hitachi with the 850 EVO using a 64GB cache at the maximized acceleration mode with Intel RST.
Performance improved slightly but the cache didn’t kick in because of the nature of how RST works.
Let’s take a look at what Windows 10 tiered storage spaces can do.
Huge improvement there especially with regard to writes! It’s pretty clear that tiered storage spaces offer some benefit over Intel SRT for this kind of work load.
Conclusion
I haven’t had a chance to measure game load times but I’ve been running a tiered storage space system for over a year and haven’t noticed any regression with the game load times. If someone else goes through the trouble of doing this migration please do measure before and after and let me know!
I authored a post on liberating a WNDR4700 router more than two years ago which garnered some interest in the community on developing a proper OpenWRT image. I’m happy to report that it finally happened! The LEDE (Linux Embedded Development Environment) team is fully supporting the apm821xx system-on-chip and are generating nightly firmware images for our use.
Instructions for installing LEDE on your WNDR4700/WNDR4720
Read the following documentation: https://lede-project.org/docs/guide-quick-start/start
Download the LEDE factory image firmware: https://downloads.lede-project.org/snap … actory.img
Flash the LEDE factory image as a firmware upgrade using the router’s web interface.
SSH in to install LuCI:
opkg update && opkg install luci-ssl
Everything should be working but USB and the SD Card reader. In order to get that working then:
Download this binary firmware: uPD72020x-firmware_2_powerpc_464fp.ipk
Reboot and bask in the glory of your upgraded router!
Next up we’re going to install Debian
You will need to either add a USB flash stick or a physical hard drive into your WNDR4700 for this.
Partition your drive to have a 1GB swap with the rest being ext4
Log into the LuCI interface to mount the drives
Head over to System > Mount Points
Add the ext4 partition as a /mnt custom mount point
Add the swap partition and activate it
Next up we need to adjust Local Startup script. Head over to System > Startup and scroll down. Edit your local script to be similar to:
# Put your custom commands here that should be executed once
# the system init finished. By default this file does nothing.
mkdir -p /mnt/dev /mnt/tmp /mnt/openwrt-root /mnt/lib/modules
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount /tmp /mnt/tmp
# Expose OpenWRT root
mount / /mnt/openwrt-root
# Kernel modules need to be available
mount /lib/modules /mnt/lib/modules
# Start Debian
chroot /mnt /myinit
exit 0
We will now install Debian with debootstrap while utilizing the LEDE kernel. Reference this material if you run into trouble.
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -t sysfs none /mnt/sys
mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
mount -t devpts devpts /mnt/dev/pts
LANG=C.UTF-8 chroot /mnt /bin/bash
apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
apt-get install -y locales && dpkg-reconfigure locales
We already configured our rc.local under LEDE to chroot into /mnt/myinit on system reboot. This file will start all the necessary Debian services.
Create this file under /myinit
#!/bin/bash
# Mount
mount -t sysfs none /sys
mount -t proc none /proc
mount -t devpts devpts /dev/pts
sleep 3
# Start Services
/etc/init.d/dbus start
# Disabled Services
#/etc/init.d/ssh start
#/etc/init.d/cron start
#/etc/init.d/unattended-upgrades start
#/etc/init.d/php5-fpm start
#/etc/init.d/mysql start
#/etc/init.d/nginx start
If you reboot everything should now work and Debian should automatically start the services from /myinit too. I have also altered my LEDE environment to use SSH port 2222 and LuCI to use 8080 and 4443 as the ports. This allowed me to install SSH and nginx on Debian and use the standard ports. Good luck!
Modded R9 390X BIOS for the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290/290X
Introduction
I am a PC enthusiast and enjoy putting together computers, modding them, and subsequently writing about it. I am also the tinkering owner of two PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 video cards that I have used now for over a year. This is the story of how I worked to break through the overclocking ceiling that was being limited by the stock BIOS.
I picked the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 cards as my purchase choice because they are amazing workhorses. They are factory overclocked at 1040/1350 MHz core and memory and are competitively priced compared to other manufacturers. They are also differentiated from reference R9 290s cards due to the additional 50 millivolts of voltage that has been added to their core voltage and a heavy cooler which make them great overclockers. I have been able to overclock the pair of cards to 1120/1450 MHz core and memory until one of the cards died and I had to send it in for RMA.
My journey into BIOS modding started here. After a few weeks of waiting I received a PCS+ R9 290 model in the mail that came with Samsung memory. This was somewhat problematic since my other card had Hynix memory but I considered myself lucky because Samsung is well known by the overclocking community to be the best manufacturer of GDDR5 memory. Their memory is able to perform at a tighter set of timings and overclock at a higher frequency compared to what other manufacturers’ products are capable of (and therefore should be superior to my other card with Hynix memory).
I happily plugged the card in and got straight to overclocking where I was horrified to find that I could never push the card past 1150/1375. The Samsung RAM refused to overclock beyond that! There had to be a way to get this card to overclock more and I was dead set to figure out how through research.
Analyzing the PowerColor PCS+ PCB
I knew that I had two PCS+ cards that should overclock similarly given what I knew about Hynix and Samsung RAM. Looking at the physical cards, the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 series seemed to manufactured on the same non-reference PCB. The PCB revision used in the PCS+ R9 290 series is on the card as shown within the red rectangle in the image above. My two R9 290 cards came with the LF R29F V1.0 revision and are therefore pretty much identical.
If the cards have an identical wiring layout that means that the problem was elsewhere. The handicapped Samsung card should perform better or the same given that it had the same PCB. As such, I started looking at other areas and discovered that there was another difference in the BIOS used within the software of each card. I used GPU-Z to view the BIOS and noticed the following versions:
Hynix w/ BIOS version 015.044.000.002.000000
Samsung w/ BIOS version 015.048.000.032.000000
I figured that perhaps my Samsung’s card BIOS had a bug. If I could find an alternative/newer BIOS perhaps that would fix the issue. I visited the Techpulse VGA BIOS Collection and started looking for a replacement BIOS. Unfortunately, none of the BIOSes in the collection supported Samsung memory and a reckless test flash with the wrong memory type quickly resulted in failed BOOT verifying that I had no luck. I flashed back to the original BIOS and begrudgingly left my clocks at stock while I worked on other side projects.
The Hawaii modding scene takes off!
A few months later the R9 390 series was released which gave the overclocking community a new window in comparing the 290 series with the 390 series. The 390 series was a re-brand of the same Hawaii GPU used in the R9 290 series which also used a fundamentally identical BIOS with minor changes (RAM size, clock speed, version, etc). The overclocking community coupled this information with other ground breaking discoveries to start the 290 series to 390 series BIOS modding scene renaissance where they started to provide 390 series BIOSes that were designed for the 290 series.
I played around with these BIOS mods and noticed that they were usually designed for reference PCBs.I did some testing and was upset to find that these BIOSes were not stable on my cards. All BIOSes are designed for a particular PCB and PowerColor’s PCB had diverged away enough from the reference design that I couldn’t use it. I would need to find a BIOS that was for my PCB.
I looked for a PowerColor R9 390 series BIOS, hoping that it shared my PCB, and found a set of the stock PCS+ 390 BIOSes:
390 w/ BIOS version 015.049.000.000.000000
390X w/ BIOS version 015.049.000.004.000000
Now I had to verify now that these PCS+ R9 390 cards used the same PCB. I wasn’t about to go out and buy a card just to verify this so I used a search engine to find a “PowerColor R9 390 PCB” images and discovered that PowerColor had slightly revised their PCBs when moving from the 290 to the 390 series. The 290 PCB revision was LF R29F V1.0 and was now the LF R29FA V1.0 revision in the 390 series.
This sparked some research which revealed that PowerColor had “cheaped down PCB“ and altered the voltage regulation system on the PCB. However, the PCBs still used the same IR 3567 voltage controller so it could be similar enough to work in most regards. If the PCBs were so similar between the 290 and 390 series then perhaps the newer BIOS on the 390 series might include a bug fix for my Samsung card.
I now wanted to mod a PCS+ 390 BIOS to make compatible with my PCS+ 290 cards.
Comparing the 290 and 390 series
The R9 390 series are fundamentally identical to the R9 290 series with the exception of their:
Memory timings (More straps vs Less straps)
Physical memory (8GB vs 4GB)
Clock speed (1010/1500 vs 1040/1350)
Base voltage (900mV vs 993mV)
ASIC Quality (Refined vs Older)
Voltage regulation (Determined by PCB)
Of these changes the only thing that is physically different is the amount of physical memory and ASIC quality. Everything else is dictated in software by the BIOS which means most of these enhancements can be programmed or transferred.
The memory timings improvement was generally accepted as a refinement in the BIOS to support more straps. Straps are essentially a range of MHz where certain memory timings are used to keep the memory stable at that clock speed. Memory timings are also specific to a particular memory manufacturer so I would need to select the right memory timings for Samsung or Hynix.
The physical memory amount is just a function of the density of the RAM chips. There are always exactly 32 GDDR5 RAM chips on a Hawaii GPU. The 290 series simply has half the density compared to the 390 series and as such each chip has 64MB as opposed to 128MB. If I wanted to mod the BIOS I would therefore need to reduce the density.
Clock speed and base voltage are related to the ASIC quality. ASIC quality is a measure of how refined the GPU manufacturing process was and how much leakage the transistors provide. Generally there shouldn’t be too much of a difference but AMD has been tweaking/improving the manufacturing process so there should be less leaking in a R9 390 than an early release R9 290. This improvement in ASIC quality is most likely why the R9 390 series has such a lower base voltage than that of the R9 290 series. I would most likely need to still use the original voltage.
Voltage regulation is determined by the voltage controller and also VRMs on the PCB. This would continue to be one of the huge unknowns in the entire project given that the LF RF29A PCB was altered for the worse. The only way to safely play around with the voltage regulation would be copying sections of BIOSes that manage this into the PCS+ 390 BIOS.
Knowing all of this, I should be able to take a R9 390 series BIOS and adjust the memory timings, density, clock speed, and voltage to match that of a R9 290 series and keep it stable.
Modding the BIOS
Armed with a hex editor, forum documentation, and a ton of other tools of Hawaii BIOS modding I got to work. I used Atomdis, HxD, HD7xxx Series UEFI Patch Tool, and HawaiiReader (all found here) to mod the PCS R9 390 base BIOS with all the changes that I needed to do. I also referenced a set of modded 390X BIOS for 290 series BIOSes that can be found here.
After a lot of trail and error, I found that I only needed to perform the following mods:
4GB memory mod
Enhanced memory timings for each strap and memory type
Replace the PCS+ 390/390X PowerPlay with a reference 390/390X PowerPlay to stabilize voltage regulation
I ended up creating the following BIOS combinations:
Stock with a Performance Boost:
290 BIOS with 390 Memory Controller
290X BIOS with 390 Memory Controller
390X with 290X Temperatures/Overclocking:
390 BIOS with 290 Power Play
390X BIOS with 290X Power Play
390X with Low Voltage/Temperatures/Reduced Overclocking:
390 BIOS with 390 Power Play
390X BIOS with 390X Power Play
Benchmarks
The end result of my BIOS mod is that I am finally able to overclock my Samsung card’s memory beyond 1375 MHz. In fact, I am able to reach 1540 MHz RAM using both my Samsung and Hynix cards thereby managing to eek out an additional 6% of performance according to 3dMark.
I also ended up playing around with a 290/290X BIOS and discovered that simply replacing the memory controller in the BIOS with a 390 memory controller I got a free 3% performance boost.
11/22/2016: I have noticed that the other 390 BIOSes are not stable on my machines. I have decided to just use a 290 BIOS with the 390MC but will leave this post present for anyone who wants to continue to hack.
Flashing to a modded R9 390 BIOS
For those who are adventurous and want to experiment, you can follow these steps:
Verify that you own a LF R29F V1.0 PCB revision PowerColor R9 290/290X with 4GB of memory
Read this thread for more detailed flashing directions
Download my modded BIOSes here
Backup your current BIOS
Uninstall your drivers and delete your Afterburner/Trixx profiles.
Flash your video card
Reinstall the latest drivers
Play some games to test stability
Good luck!
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any damage caused to your device. Always keep a backup of your original BIOS.
The drop in oil prices lead to a cheap Canadian dollar which in turn led to a an amazingly frugal Canadian vacation! We enjoyed our trip and would highly recommend our fellow skiers and snowboarders to check out the Big 3 in Banff.
Mojave National Preserve and Capitol Reef National Park
We recently bought a Subaru Forester and we decided to take it out on a crazy winter road trip to view our national treasures: our National Parks and Preserves!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
A year ago I migrated an old Qt4 project to Qt5. The migration was relatively painless and a huge success with the exception of the QGLWidget powered OpenGL canvas. In Qt5, this widget has been deprecated and currently mangles text rendering on Mac OS X retina displays as shown below:
The only way to fix the mangled text is to migrate to the QOpenGLWidget that was introduced in Qt 5.4.0. Overall, this widget is pretty similar to QGLWidget and Qt has done a decent job describing the differences as well as providing an example of working code.
With that information in hand, I decided to try my luck migrating it over the weekend where I ran into some trouble. Here are some of the more annoying differences that I discovered:
qglColor(), qglColorClear(), bindTexture(), and renderText() are not available.
QPixmaps aren’t supported anymore and you need to substitute QOpenGLTexture.
updateGL() has been renamed to update()
Blending seems to behave differently when utilized with multiple transparent textures.
Some of these things are obvious to fix and others not so much. I was able to easily replace qglColor() and qglColorClear() with by their OpenGL equivalents by looking at the QGLWidget documentation.
bindTexture() does not exist anymore so you now need to preload a QOpenGLTexture and then call texture->bind() wherever you called bindTexture() previously.
Additionally, you will need to load textures in the following manner whereas you could just use QPixmap previously:
QOpenGLTexture *texture = new QOpenGLTexture(QImage(QString(":/pixmaps/terrain%1.png").arg(i)).mirrored());
renderText() was a bit trickier to replace and requires a QPainter to paint text over the OpenGL canvas. I found this solution from jaba on Stackoverflow but discovered a bug (he wasn’t calling painter.end() which resulted in some artifacts). Please also note that the project() method should be what you’re using to project from the OpenGL coordinates to your widget coordinates.
void MapCanvas::renderText(double x, double y, double z, const QString &str, const QFont & font = QFont()) {
// Identify x and y locations to render text within widget
int height = this->height();
GLdouble textPosX = 0, textPosY = 0, textPosZ = 0;
project(x, y, 0f, &textPosX, &textPosY, &textPosZ);
textPosY = height - textPosY; // y is inverted
// Retrieve last OpenGL color to use as a font color
GLdouble glColor[4];
glGetDoublev(GL_CURRENT_COLOR, glColor);
QColor fontColor = QColor(glColor[0], glColor[1], glColor[2], glColor[3]);
// Render text
QPainter painter(this);
painter.setPen(fontColor);
painter.setFont(font);
painter.drawText(textPosX, textPosY, text);
painter.end();
}
Unfortunately, the transparent textures artifact problem was not something that I was able to fix entirely. I achieved a similar look by removing most instances of blending and instead utilized colors with a predefined alpha.
Modded ASUS MG279Q drivers with 60-144 Hz FreeSync range
The ASUS MG279Q was released with much fanfare because it was the first 144 Hz IPS panel that supported FreeSync. If you looked beyond the MG279Q quality control issues (and subsequently won the panel lottery) the only problem with this display was a limited FreeSync range of 35-90 Hz.
A lot of people questioned why buy a 144 Hz IPS monitor if they would be effectively limited gaming to 90 fps (frames per second) but no other solutions existed. Luckily, a German hacker discovered that you could extend the range of FreeSync by modifying the EDID portion of the monitor driver. The total FreeSync range could now be extended beyond 35-90 Hz to 31-110 Hz or 54-144 Hz!
FreeSync excelled at providing smooth gaming at low frame rates so a lot of gamers usually picked the 31-100 Hz option. Gamers were overjoyed with the November release of the Crimson drivers made that old FreeSync range completely obsolete. The Crimson drivers introduced a “low frame rate compensation” feature where frames at a lower frame rate would now be multiplied into the higher range that was supported by the display.
This meant that having a high upper bound was more important than a wider range or a low lower bound. The driver eliminated the lower bound FreeSync limitations by multiplying the frame rate by its highest supported multiplier. For example, beforehand games would run in 35-90 Hz FreeSync in the following manner:
30 fps = 35 Hz
35 fps = 35 Hz
48 fps = 48 Hz
In Crimson, they run with the low frame rate compensation multiplier:
30 fps x 4 multiplier = 120 Hz.
35 fps x 4 multiplier = 140 Hz
48 fps x 3 multiplier = 144 Hz
How do I get this?
I have created a driver pack for anyone that wants to give it a shot by following the steps outlined in Option 1. If you don’t want to use the drivers you can also mod your own driver by following Option 2.
Option 1: Custom Driver Method
This option is now broken in Windows 10. Use Option 2 if you’re using Windows 10.
Step 1: Download the drivers
Download the MG279Q extended FreeSync drivers that I modded.
Step 2: Install the drivers
Skip down in the FreeSync EDID tutorial past the driver creation portion to follow those instructions to deactivate Windows Driver signature checks and install the driver.
I recommend and use the 60-144 Hz drivers because the Crimson drivers have made the other ranges obsolete.
Step 3: Forcing the Range
Set your desktop refresh rate to 144 Hz to unlock a higher default refresh rate by going to Display Settings -> Advanced display settings -> Display adapter properties -> Monitor -> Screen refresh rate. Hit Ok and you will then notice that the monitor will display a warning label that FreeSync is only enabled between 35-90 Hz (don’t worry, this is normal).
Step 4: Verification
Next fire up a benchmark and open the MG279Q on-screen-display settings to view the refresh rate in real time to verify that your FreeSync ranges have been modified. See my Youtube video for an example of what it should look like.
Option 2: CRU Method
If you would rather not install a modified driver and you can use the latest Custom Resolution Utility (CRU) to modify your stock monitor driver to any range that you wish.
Something to remember: the community has discovered that this panel’s lower bound is 31 Hz if you wish to maximize the range. If you want an upper bound of 144Hz the lower bound is 54 Hz.
My display panel tends to work best if I set it with a lower bound of 60 Hz or I’ll get an occasional black screen flicker.
Step 1: Run CRU.exe and click “Edit”
Step 2: Modify the “V rate” ranges and ensure that “Include if slot available” is checked.
Step 3: Click “OK” twice and close CRU.
Step 4: Run restart64.exe or restart.exe depending on if your OS is 32bit.
Step 5: Follow Steps 3 and 4 in the previous option .
Didn’t work? Run reset-all.exe and your monitor timings will reset back to stock.
Troubleshooting
Help, FreeSync didn’t work!
You probably just need to reinstall your drivers. Install Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) and then reinstall your AMD Catalyst drivers and the extended MG279Q monitor driver.
Then verify that your monitor’s refresh rate is set to 144 Hz and ensure FreeSync is enabled in the drivers.
If it still doesn’t work, try going into the Crimson drivers to enable frame rate target control. Go to Gaming -> Global Settings -> Frame Rate Target Control and set it to 144 Hz.
Edit: Post was updated 3/20/2016 to include Crimson driver information.
I am a PC gamer and I love building frugal, quiet enthusiast PCs with a focus on maximizing performance per dollar. This is the tale of how I was at odds with myself and ended up blowing my budget by going all-in on a custom water cooling loop.
Introduction
In 2012 I bought the three HP ZR2440w monitors because I was playing EVE Online and wanted the additional screen real estate. This was a terrible decision because powering that many pixels forces most gamers into buying multiple video cards easily jumping past $500. I somehow managed to persevere and make it work with a single $250 Radeon 6950 in a semi-acceptable manner until 2015 when I started playing Tomb Raider. At this point my PC barely chugged along at sub-30 frames per second and I started to get a serious case of the upgrade itch.
The absolute breaking point for me was the upcoming 2015 release of the Witcher 3 game where I knew that I wanted to play that at 60 frames per second. My 6950 was clearly past its prime so I ended up purchasing two $250 Powercolor PCS+ R9 290s which can handle 4K resolutions and therefore handle the Eyefinity 5760x3600 resolution. After a few weeks of research and a power supply upgrade the two cards finally arrived and amazed me with their performance. They powered through the games; spewing out a constantly high frame rate but at the same time crazy amounts of noise as the fans whining away to deal with the temperatures.
Unlike the cost that I was willing to sacrifice on, the noise that the 290s put out was something I absolutely did not want to compromise on. In the past I had an interest in water cooling due to how it could make a PC more quiet but I was always put off by the price tag. I did know that it was quite effective from my experience of using a $50 Zalman LQ320 water cooling AIO kit built for water cooling a CPU. I had modded it to fit on my Radeon 6950 by performing the “Red Mod” resulting in near complete silence during gaming that I quickly grew accustomed to.
The noise that the two R9 290s were generating was already too loud for my standards and that was in the winter with low ambient temperatures. I knew that any noise that I was experiencing now was only going to get worse come summer. This is when I started seriously investigating how to water cool my PC and discovered a large community of helpful enthusiasts and hobbyists who helped me do my research, build a loop, and therefore write this blog entry.
How to blow your budget water cooling your PC
1) Pick a budget
Your budget is tied to how many components you want to water cool. Take a look at the table below and decide what you need.
The cheapest and easiest solution is always to go with the AIO/CLC coolers and several people have used them together to cool a CPU and multiple video cards via mods (like the “Red Mod”) or products like the NZXT Kraken G10 or Corsair HG10. Some manufacturers even have AIO and CLC coolers that are specifically designed for video cards like the ARCTIC Accelero Hybrid II. If your budget is here then be happy you are able to stay in your budget. (Reading further beyond this point will probably make you bust your budget!)
The next option is buying a Swifttech H220 which strikes a nice balance by being the most flexible AIO/CLC water cooler since it allows itself to be extended to support cooling a video card as well. It is a good halfway point if you’re toying with the idea but aren’t entirely commited yet.
After that, the price and amount of work required in buying and maintaining a build goes up substantially depending on which components you want to water cool but the solutions boil down to two decisions: you essentially have to decide between a kit ($$) and an entirely custom loop ($$$). I decided to go down this route and I’ll share what I learned in the next step below.
2) Expect to blow your budget
I initially picked a budget of $300 and started researching on ways to save money when building a loop. This resulted in me looking at a lot of kits from various manufacturers where I learned that kits have the benefit of having everything provided in a neat package with a lower cost.
However, the problem with using a kit is that you’ll be forced to use only one manufacturer. There isn’t a single manufacturer out there that builds all necessary water cooling components at the highest quality standards. Some companies are better at CPU blocks (EK), others at radiators (Alphacool), and some at fittings (Bitspower). This was this reason that caused me to eventually decided against kits because I wanted quality components at a reasonable price.
That being said, if you’re not concerned with having the best of the best then a kit is still great value for your money. Take a look at these tips if you do manage to identify a kit as your ideal solution within your budget:
Bay reservoirs are loud because they’re close to the front of the case and cause vibrations and noise. If you want a quiet PC you’ll want to avoid these.
The pump in budget kits is usually not powerful enough for an expanded loop. If you want to expand your loop later on you might as well buy a good one (DDC or D5) and forgo the kit in the beginning.
The barbs you get with kits is often questionable in quality so make sure you do a good leak test.
Kits from Raystorm, EK, and Alphacool that are reasonably priced and seemed fine when I was researching them.
3) Research water cooling
At this point I realized that I wasn’t willing to spend $300 on my budget and had to raise it to at least $750 since I wanted to water cool my CPU and two video cards.
I ended up trying to find a good source of material to research and discovered that Reddit and Youtube have a great wealth of information. If you’re interested in water cooling make sure you read everything on /r/watercooling and watch a ton of Youtube videos. I’ve summarized most of what I learned here but I still urge you to read the above material.
Some Basics
All components such as radiators, blocks, and fittings are usually made of some metal. Bronze, copper, and nickel are fine to mix in the same loop. Similarly, acetal is plastic so it is okay to mix with anything. However, NEVER mix aluminum with other metals or you will get immediate corrosion and destroy your components. This is also why you shouldn’t hack up most AIO/CLC kits and extend them because a lot of them have aluminum radiators.
G1/4″ is a standard threading on most water cooling components excluding some pumps. There seem to be a lot of D5 pump tops that remove the standard top and add the G1/4″ top. Also, EK mentioned that only their fittings should be used on their products but my Barrow fittings worked just fine on both their blocks and my Alphacool radiators.
Check here and here for some other basics but I’ll cover the rest in the sections below.
Case ($100 - $300)
The case is where you should start your build. If you already own a case then identify how many radiator mounts you can attach onto it and measure out how much headroom you have for your radiators and fans. Write all this information down because you’ll need it later during the planning phase. Search on /r/watercooling and the internet to see if anyone else has managed to water cool that case before. Examples are extremely useful because they’ll help you visual your loop later on.
I owned a Corsair 650D and found several examples of people who had managed to mod it for water cooling. Unfortunately, what they didn’t have was the need to cool two R9 290s which left me requiring a different case that had the necessary radiator cooling overhead.
I ended up deciding on buying the Enthoo Luxe over the Enthoo Pro for my needs because it could handle thicker radiators and still give me plenty of room to work in. For those who demand the best the Enthoo Primo is probably the best solution on the market right now.
Radiators ($50 - $200 per radiator)
You roughly need 1.5 times 120mm of radiator per component that you want to water cool and have your PC be more quiet than an air cooled solution. If you want whisper quiet PC then people recommend 240mm per component. This meant that for a CPU and two video cards I needed somewhere between 540mm and 720mm of water cooling to make my PC quiet.
Radiators are pretty simple in the sense that you generally want to have as much radiator length in your PC that you can since it increases the total surface area. Radiator thickness is another issue that you can consider but generally slim radiators perform worse than thick radiators.
I ended up choosing some thick Alphacool UT60′s for my purposes (240mm + 420mm = 660mm) since I knew I was going with a low RPM build and they did well on Martin’s review. It should also be mentioned that the EK Coolstream XTX and Hadware Labs SR2 line of radiators were highly recommended by redditors and other reviews.
I would recommend this resource for anyone interested in comparing radiators
Pump and Reservoir (~$80 per pump and ~$100 per reservoir)
Get a DDC or D5 pump and you won’t go wrong. D5 pumps are the best in the industry and one is usually enough for a CPU block and a few video cards. If you start adding more components you might want to consider an additional pump. Some people also run two pumps in serial to help agains the restriction or to prevent catastrophic failure in in case one fails.
Both DDC and D5 pumps are made by a 3rd party company and rebranded to all major water cooling manufacturers so there isn’t much difference between them. A lot of manufacturers sell different “pump tops” which have a different aesthetic appeal or alter the location of the ports.
I ended up getting an EK-D5 Vario XRES 140 because it included the reservoir for a reasonable price. In hindsight, this limited my options for pump and reservoir placement and I wouldn’t have done it again. If I were to do it again I would have bought a separate EK or Phobya reservoir and the cheapest D5 pump I could find at the time.
CPU Blocks ($50 - $100)
EK has a reputation for creating the best blocks in the industry. I was considering the Raystorm previously due to price but it really boiled down to preference. If you prefer other blocks they should work as well but the one thing you should check is to see if they’re compatible with your CPU socket. If they are, then you’ll be fine.
In the end, I picked the EK Supremacy line of CPU blocks due to this glowing review and the fact that I was forced to use EK VGA blocks and I wanted a semi-matching build.
VGA Blocks ($50 - $150 for a block)
Similar to CPU blocks you need to make sure that a VGA block is compatible with your video card. However, unlike CPU blocks you don’t check compatibility via a socket but rather via the PCB version where the “reference PCB” is king.
A reference PCB is a standard PCB that nVidia or AMD initially release a video card with. If you don’t have a reference PCB then you might not get your $100 VGA block to fit correctly and end up damaging your video card.
You also have the option of choosing a full VGA block or a partial block. The full block allows the entire card to be cooled but is extremely tied to the VGA card. If you go with the partial block then you can move the block between most video cards but you’ll end up having to passively cool the other parts of the card with a heatsink and fan.
I was limited to using EK blocks for my video cards because they did not have the reference PCB and I knew I wanted a full VGA block. Luckily, by using the EK Cooling Configurator I was able to find a compatible block in Acetal+Nickel. Another VGA block manufacturer that I considered was Alphacool but they were only compatible with reference PCBs so I couldn’t use them.
Fans
Everyone on the internet says that Noctua fans are the best in the industry and they’re right for the most part. I would love to buy 120mm Noctua’s but didn’t want to use them for two reasons: 1) they’re super expensive and 2) when they reach 140mm their static pressure and therefore effectiveness immediately drops.
This happens because of fan dynamics and the fight between static pressure and CFM (cubic feet per minute). A fan can be optimized in both ways but when it comes to radiators static pressure is what wins. The larger a fan gets the harder it is also to keep its static pressure numbers up and Noctua’s are generally optimizing on CFM.
Luckily, Enthoo makes a great 140mm fan that is reasonably priced which you can see here and here. I ended up buying their 140mm fans for my 420mm radiator and reusing my Corsair SP120s for the 240mm radiator.
Tubing
Tubing is another extremely important decision that everyone has to make. It isn’t recommended for beginners to choose hard tubing so I ended up buying Primochill Advanced LRT soft tubing because it has no plasticizer. Plasticizer is a goey plastic that can leach itself out of tubing and gunk up your components which is extremely difficult to remove. It’s best to purchase quality tubing to avoid this problem.
Tubing also comes in various diameters where there is an outer and inner diameter. If you imagine starting at the tubing from the top down you’ll see the following diagram:
I ended up buying tubing of style 3/8" - ½" (tubes with 10mm (3/8") internal diameter and 13mm (½") outer diameter) because it was one of more popular kinds of tubing and there are a lot of fittings at a reasonable price available for it. The other popular type of tubing is 3/8" - 5/8" tubing which has a larger outer diameter and is therefore less likely to kink in builds.
There are many other types available in addition to these two but they’re rarer and therefore the fittings cost more.
Also, always buy more tubing that you expect to use in case of mistakes or to help you fill your reservoir during the filling stage.
Fittings
Fittings come as either barb fittings or compression fittings. Barb fittings are significantly cheaper but are more of a pain to remove from the build. Compression fittings are recommended and are the modern variation of barb fittings similar to how people prefer to use thumb screws.
The number one thing to remember when buying fittings is that they need to be compatible with your tubing. If you buy tubing of 3/8 ID and ½ OD then you need to buy fittings of the same kind or they won’t fit together.
Most people recommend Barrow fittings (Bitspower OEM) that you can get on aliexpress.com for super cheap. I personally bought them and love them. I would recommend you get a few extra fittings of each type (angle, straight, 45 degree) just in case.
I would also highly recommend that you buy a “T” fitting, extender, and valve fitting to act as a drain port at the lowest part of your loop. I first went without this but have since added it since it makes maintaining a loop worthwhile the extra $30.
Fluid
I decided to go with distilled water from my local super market. Some people prefer colorful nano-fluids but distilled water is safe, non-toxic, and cheap. A lot of manufacturers specifically mention that their products will break with a non-certified biocide and therefore request you buy their fluids. I ended up ignoring this logic and going with distilled since it is highly recommended in the community.
Biocide
If you go with distilled water then you’re going to need a biocide to prevent algae from growing in your loop. There are essentially two solutions on the market with one being a silver kill coil and the other being PT Nuke. I ended up going with PT Nuke since I heard some horror stories about silver kill coils stripping the nickel from EK blocks.
Accessories
There are many little accessories that you should buy as well. Definitely invest in a ATX jump start connector, a good tube cutter, and a funnel that will fit in your tubing for filling your loop.
Other accessories such as flow meters or thermometers for your water temperature aren’t necessary but can add some “fun” factor to your build.
4) Loop planning
At this point you should have a reasonable idea of what is available and what blocks, radiators, and other components that you want. If you have any questions you can write a [Build Help] post in reddit (like mine) to get more information from the community.
That being said, you’re only getting started if you’ve made it to this point. The next major step is to plan out your loop and figure out if everything will fit where you expect. Finding examples of people’s builds in the same case is very useful as it’ll help you visualize your own build.
Sit down and plan out your loop. You don’t need to worry so much about which components feeds to what in what order with the exception of the reservoir and pump. The reservoir always has to feed directly into the pump to keep the pump wet and prevent it from dying.
As your loop runs all the water in the loop will eventually reach the same temperature. It is perfectly fine to therefore have your GPU blocks feed directly into the CPU block before heading to the radiator.
If you’re setting up multiple GPUs you can also consider if you want to set them up in parallel (water flow is cut across all video cards) or in serial (one and then the following). Given that the overall water temperature will mostly be consistent there really isn’t a major reason you should pick one of the other and I ended up choosing serial. Some people pick parallel because it reduces the amount of restriction in your loop.
Eventually you’ll have a mocked up loop diagram like mine above. The loop diagram will help you decide which fittings you need to purchase and give you a rough idea of how much tubing you need. You should have also measured things, found examples of previous work, or asked someone who owns the case to measure things to make sure everything fits. I discovered that many of my parts didn’t fit and had to go back and choose an alternative part such as a new case several times.
Later, you’ll discover that you’ve figured out almost everything and that you’re ready to share your well planned build with the community to double check your work. Create a [Build Ready] post on reddit with your parts, loop plan, and any open questions (like mine) and wait for feedback. Iterate and select different parts as needed.
5) Buy the parts
I purchased most of my components either through TITAN RIG on Amazon, Performance PCs, Aliexpress, or directly from EK and didn’t have any trouble. Pick whichever retailer you want to go through but avoid FrozenCPU since they went out of business.
If you buy through Aliexpress make sure to pick ePacket if you can as its a faster alternative for inexpensive shipping. Also, for those who are concerned about buying directly from EK I found that shipping from Slovenia was fast and the price was cheaper than buying from Performance PCs.
Now it’s just a waiting game for all your parts to get here and until then you should start preparing by doing more research to figure out how to build your loop.
6) Building the Loop
I highly recommend that you watch several Youtube videos before you begin building a loop to become familiar with the process. A picture is thousand words and a video is even better.
I’m purposely keeping this part of the guide short because JayZTwoCents has a particularly good video that explains most of the basics of building, filling, and leak testing a build. Watch that and he’ll be able to answer most of your questions.
I also have some small tips from my own experience of building my loop:
Once you get all the parts strip most of the parts out of your case and start double checking all your measurements. Once you’re satisfied that everything will fit put in the radiators first, followed by the pump and radiator, and then the remaining parts.
Keep the tubing slightly longer than expected as you might want to adjust things later.
Do not over tighten compression fittings and only hand turn them until they feel sturdy.
Tips for filling, leak testing, and draining:
When filling the loop do not overfill the funnel so that air can leave your loop while water fills it.
Do not use too long of a length of tubing if you’re using that to fill your reservoir as it’ll slow down your fill process.
Have lots of paper towels available especially when you’re filling your loop. I ended up having to drain my loop the first time I put it together to fix a problem.
Slowly tilting the machine from side to side will help dislodge bubbles for filling or dislodge water for draining.
Conclusion
I’ve had a water cooled PC now for over a quarter of a year, and I’ve been very pleased with it. I’ve iterated my build heavily and found ways to reduce the pain in having to maintain and service it. It’s a pleasant journey and well worth it if you can afford it.
However, much to my dismay I finally found myself doubling what I had already spent on my PC and completely blowing past my budget. As such, I’ve concluded that water cooling isn’t something people do to save money; it’s something enthusiasts do for fun because we enjoy researching, building, and using PCs.
Good luck and have fun!
I would like to thank the /r/watercooling, Youtube, and overclockers.net community for all the resources and guidance. None of this could be possible without them!
I have been building computers ever since my uncle helped me build my first PC at age 13. The fascination of installing, tuning, and then finally using the machine has been a vice that I have been enjoying ever since. I have now built over a dozen Linux and Windows PCs over the years but the ☼perfect hackintosh☼ has always eluded me.
For those of you who don’t usually mess with the internals of computers, a hackintosh is essentially a standard commodity Windows PC running the OS X which powers MacBooks and iMacs.
Why do people go through such lengths to have OS X? It’s mostly preference, but in my case I’m doing this for my own personal education and curiosity.
Step 1) Purchasing the Right Hardware
I’ve tried building a hackintosh in the past but was always stricken by incompatibility errors that resulted in kernel crashes similar to the dread blue screen of death. The happens because Apple has complete control of the hardware and software stack, and because of that takes a lot of hardware features for granted. If your hardware isn’t exactly compatible, then you need to hack the low-level BIOS software (usually using a DSDT patch) to try to make it compatible with OS X. This is as painful as it sounds so its significantly easier just to buy the right hardware in the first place. Luckily TonyMacX86 as great guides that list out which hardware is best supported but I still needed to buy this hardware and convince myself that the project was worth the cost.
Luckily, I knew of Slickdeals and /r/buildapcsales, which led me to a great deal on a MSI Z97-Gaming 5 motherboard and Intel 4690K Core i5 processor combination that also was highly compatible for hackintoshes per the TonyMacX86 hardware guide. If you’re in the market to buy a PC, I strongly urge you to start subscribing to this subreddit for deals. I have found numerous enabling deals that provoked me to embark projects such as my foray into water cooling (which I’ll write on a post later).
In the end, I purchased the following parts to complete some of spares that I already had from my workstation. The Crucial BX100 SSD was selected because of its excellent price/performance ratio and the history of its bigger brother the MX100. I selected the older Radeon 7950 video card for my build because widely known to be compatible in hackintoshes and still provides plenty of punch for gaming (so much that it was branded as the R9 280 and is still widely sold). I highly recommend gpuShack for your video card purchase since you’ll get a great price and an awesome warranty. Lastly, the TP-Link wireless card was recommended on TonyMac for its native wireless support and having used non-native wireless USB cards I can easily attest that its well worth it.
Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor
MSI Z97-GAMING 5 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Crucial BX100 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
HIS Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card
TP-Link TL-WDN4800 802.11a/b/g/n PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter
Step 2) Configuring the BIOS
You need to setup the BIOS so that it is Mac compatible. To access UEFI Setup, press and hold Delete on a USB Keyboard while the system is booting up.
Perform the following commands:
Settings - Save & Exit - Restore Defaults.
OC Settings - CPU Features - Disable Intel VT-d
OC Settings - CPU Features - Disable CFG lock
Save and exit.
Step 3) Installing the OS
For installing the Mac OS X I first followed the official guide on TonyMacX86 to create the installation USB stick. After having that, I followed the Clover guide to install everything. If you follow the instructions you shouldn’t have too much trouble.
However, in the end I had to apply the following additional fixes. Most of these fixes are distilled from this dated reddit post and forum post to which I owe a lot. Please download the following tools to get started:
MultiBeast - Ethernet
Clover Configurator - fixing sleep and USB 3.0
MaciASL - HDMI audio
Toleda audio_CloverALC (click “View Raw”) - audio
Ethernet
Launch the latest Multibeast (minimum 7.2.0) and install the following:
Optional EFI Installed Bootloader Support
Intel 9 Series Motherboard Support
AtherosE2200Ethernet
Audio
To get HDMI or DisplayPort audio to work you will need to patch your DSDT with MaciASL.
Open MaciASL, go to Preferences -> iASL and change the compiler options to ACPI 5.0. Afterwards, go to Preferences > Sources and add the following URLs:
Compile and save your patched DSDT with the ACPI Machine Language Binary format to /EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/DSDT.aml
You may need to mount your EFI partition with Clover Configuration to be able to do this.
Unzip the Toleda audio_cloverALC script and run it in your terminal. The directions are pretty easy to follow but make sure your EFI partition is mounted.
If this doesn’t work you can also use Multibeast to install the ALC1150 kext but your audio will break with each OS X update.
Power and Sleep
Download GenericUSBXHCI.kext to copy it to your desktop. Run KextBeast to install the USB 3.0 kext.
Open up Clover Configurator and load your config.plist located under EFI/Clover. Once your configuration has been loaded navigate over to the Acpi tab and check mark Generate PStates and Generate CStates
Under Boot check mark xcpm, gux_no_idle, and gux_defer_usb2
Under Devices check mark Inject and Add ClockID
Save your configuration.
Step 4) Backup
Select a backup tool (Super Duper seems to be the current favorite) and make a backup of your hackintosh. Updates often can crash your hackintosh so its a good idea keep a backup always fresh before you try updating the OS.
Congratulations, You should have a functioning hackintosh! Let me know if you had any troubles and I’ll try my best to help :-)
Note: All of the information found here was made possible by the vibrant community of hackers and hobbyists at TonyMacX86, MacBreaker, and /r/Hackintosh. Thank you!
People always said that my mom makes amazing food. I was so spoiled by the fact that I got to eat her cooking every night that I never bothered to learn how to cook any of her dishes. This included phở-- especially phở.
Phở broth takes a whole weekend to make from scratch. Why would any bachelor put himself into that position when he could go to a restaurant and buy it? Unfortunatley, it wasn’t until I moved to the west coast that I realized my mistake. My mom grew up in northern Vietnam which cooks the regional variant of phở called phở bắc which is different from the southern varient of phở that most places here in the Bay Area cook. If you want to have phở bắc (and a nice dose of Schimmelmann nostalgia) you need to cook this type of phở yourself.
Luckily, my mom visisted and I was able to document her dash-of-this, until-it-looks-right steps while she showed me how to cook phở from scratch!
Dry Ingredients:
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
4 star anise
2 cinnamon stalks (2" each)
3 cloves
2" of large ginger root, sliced
2 whole medium onions
1/2 pod of black cardamom seeds
4 tablespoons of salt
Meat and Bones:
5 lbs of beef bones
5 lbs of ox tail
2 lbs of turkey drum sticks
Wet ingredients:
3 tablespoons of fish sauce
small can of chicken broth
2 tablespoons of yellow rock candy
Preparatory Work
Phở broth takes an entire day to make. You will want to start with the broth and let it simmer through the night.
The first thing we want to do is roast the spices to release the oils and flavor:
Place the fennel seeds and cloves into a small pot under low heat. Allow them to roast until gently brown.
Set the medium onions, cinnamon stalks, sliced ginger root, and star anise on a grill over an open flame on the grill until they are charred.
Afterwards, gently rub the char from the ingredients under running water.
Now that we have the spices ready we will clean the bones:
If ox tail or turkey legs are unavailable then substitute them with beef bones. It is preferable to use ox tail and turkey drum sticks as they make the broth sweeter.
Place a large pot filled with water and a good amount of salt and on the stove and allow it to boil.
Once a boil has been achieved, place all the bones and meat into the pot.
Allow the bones to cook for roughly 5 minutes to remove blood and other unsavory flavors to seep out.
Remove the scum from the top of the soup as necessary.
Empty the pot keeping all the bones and meat but discarding the water.
Individually wash the bones under running water removing everything that does not look like meat.
Place the cleaned bones back into the pot.
We can now start to make the phở broth:
Fill the pot with water until the bones are covered and then set it to high heat on the stove.
Add charred onion, ginger, cinnamon, and then 4 tablespoons of salt to the pot.
Place the anise, fennel seeds, clove, and black cardamom in a "phở hòa" (a small teabag like metal canister) and hang it from the side of the pot in the broth.
Watch the pot carefully to ensure it does not boil while removing scum from the top as necessary.
Once it gets close to a boil reduce heat to low and add the rock candy.
Monitor the number of rising plumes of bubbles that reach the surface of the broth. You should be aiming for a total of 3-4 plumes and adjusting the temperature over the next several hours.
Once the number of plumes has stabilized cover and let the pot simmer overnight.
After roughly 12 hours have passed reduce heat and skim the fat from the top of the broth as it tastes horrible. Do not stir the broth as the foul tasting bits have sunk leaving the tasty broth in between the foul bits and the layer of fat above.
Refrigerate the broth to remove the remaining fat as it will congeal and stay at the top. If desired, you can freeze the broth and it will hold.
Save and refrigerate all of the meat and ox tail at the bottom of the pot as a potential topping for your phở while discarding the rest of the contents and bones.
At this point the phở broth is ready and will feed around 20.
Preparing the Toppings
Now we can prepare the toppings for phở:
1 bunch of thai basil
1 bunch of cilantro
6 green onions
1 red onion, sliced
1 tablespoon of sugar
2 tablespoons of vinegar
1/4 cup of water
A partially frozen filet mignon, rib eye, or flank steak
bánh phở (pad thai noodles)
We will first make the soaked red onion in vinegar (hàng ngúm):
Place 1 sliced red onion in a bowl and then pour ¼ a cup of water over it along with 1 tablespoon of sugar and 2 tablespoons of vinegar.
Place this at the table to be added on top of the phở at the leisure of the guest.
Now we will prepare the obligatory green ingredients that all phở should have:
Slice the feet off of the green onions (these will be saved for later) and then dice the tops.
Dice the cilantro and mix it with the diced green onion tops.
Keep this in a bowl near the phở preparation area.
We will now slice the beef:
Partially freeze the meat if you have not as this will allow you to slice it thinner.
Slice the raw meat against the grain as thinly as possible and place it into a bowl.
Keep the raw meat near the phở preparation area as we will need to pour hot broth over it to cook it fully.
Now that we have gotten all of our ingredients prepared we need to get the noodles started so that they are warm and will not soak up all the heat that needs to go towards cooking the meat when we pour the hot broth into our bowl.
Prepare your finished bowl of phở involves:
Boil a small pot of water with a little bit of salt.
Place about a 2” by 1” amount of bánh phở into the broth until it is softened and then immediately place it into the phở bowl.
Top the noodles with a handful of diced cilantro and green onion, some crushed pepper, and however much meat the guest wants.
Now heat up some phở broth:
Reheat some of the refrigerated broth in a small pot along with a couple green onion feet until the broth is nearing a boil.
Immediately pour the hot broth onto the bowl of phở trying to cook all of the meat.
Add any additional toppings such as hàng ngúm, thai basil leaves, red chillis, or fish sauce (nước mắm).
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I worked on a hobby project called MMapper back in graduate school that served as my escape from the daily grind. This project is pretty much responsible for my career as an engineer due to how much fun I had hacking on it. I fondly remember how ecstatic I was combining my love for gaming, playing the role as product manager and engineer, and building something useful for my users/fellow gamers.
Unfortunately, I abandoned my project back when I started my day job and the years have not been kind to it. I had always meant to migrate the source code from Sourceforge to GitHub and also remove some technical debt by upgrading it to the latest version of Qt but something else would always get in the way. I sat down back in September and decided that enough was enough! Little did I know that it would take more than a weekend to finally get it all working...
I figured my first step would be to set up my Qt developer environment again. After 4 long years I downloaded and installed the Qt development libraries and CMake build system once again.I fully expected some version breakage between the major versions of Qt but was surprised to find that CMake refused to even build my project!
CMake went through some pretty radical changes between versions 2.6 and 2.8 when they tried to streamline how they built Qt packages. I wasn't able to find any sort of documentation on how to migrate a CMake build from Qt4 to Qt5 other than this post which only hinted at which direction to go in. After going through a lot of documentation and guess work I have eventually figured out that the old commands that we used to have to manually run (like QT4_WRAP_CPP) have been done away with newer fancier modules that do these things automatically. I eventually got CMake to actually start building the code (if you want to see how I accomplished this take a look at this commit).
I was then greeted with the expected missing function compilation errors that occur between major API versions. I followed the Qt 4.x to Qt5 transition wiki and easily fixed these compile time errors by migrating to the newer APIs. My project finally was able to compile and run!
The next step was packaging which meant I had to work with CMake once again but this time with CPack. I had initially migrated from Qt's qmake system for the sole purpose of automating the creation of installers around MMapper using CPack. This worked great with Qt4 where I was able to create rpms, source tgzs, and both Windows and Mac installers with ease. Now days it's a pretty different story and Qt provides the Qt Installer Framework which probably is much easier to use.
My main difficulty with packaging was including the necessary dynamic libraries that are dependencies of Qt. There has been quite a bit of regression and bloat with time and the number of libraries that are now required to be packaged for Windows are well over 20MBs in size and have quadrupled in count. This lead me to try to resort to alternative solutions where I ended up trying to statically compile my Qt5 libraries for shipment. This took me 4 months because of various bugs that held me up until Qt 5.4 was released. Instead, I eventually just stuck with dynamically linking everything and using the new windeployqt tool that was added in Qt5. Take a look at this commit to see how I used that to eventually figure out which dependencies are required for my project.
Happy hacking!
12/10/2015: A year after this post, I ended up migrating QGLWidget to QOpenGLWidget due to some bugs. Read about that here.
I traveled to Peru over winter break and managed to scratch one of the wonders of the world off of my bucket list!
We utilized Alpaca Expeditions (aka the Green Machine) to organize our 5 day hike of the Inca Trail and had an amazing experience full of awe-inspiring sights and exquisite three course cuisine. It's pretty crazy how much the Chasquis (our porters) can carry given the altitude and then at twice the pace that we were going at.
We also used Tarantula Expeditions to explore Sandoval Lake in the amazon forest near Puerto Maldonado where we saw hundreds of species of plants, insects, birds, and animals including leaf cutter ants and giant river otters. I highly recommend this if you're a fan of animals. I'm still amazed that I saw a bunch of plants and animals that I had only previously seen on PBS.
Some things I should mention to people who want to come to see Machu Picchu:
Don't drink chicha before you start your hike. I'm pretty sure that is how I upset my stomach.
Do the Inca Trail for at least 4 days! The hike was the best part of this trip. I don't think I would have gotten nearly the breadth of knowledge from just doing the train ride and bus tour to the top of Machu Picchu.
Make sure you pick a reputable company to plan your expedition. Don't skimp here! I heard rumors about a lot of people who had to bring snacks because the food sucked. We never had that problem plus we were able to enjoy our trip because we had enough porters so that we didn't have to carry much.
Do spend a few days in Cusco acclimating. The altitude is killer.
Don't bother spending any time in Lima. It's pretty similar to any major city.
Do check out the Amazon forest and Lake Sandoval. It's amazing! (although everything is trying to eat you-- so bring bug spray)
annaxmalina
romaincrisis
janainaart
izzy806
yousharknotpass
origamiaround