Ready Built Monster Haswell

Sunday afternoon I spotted a local advert on FB Marketplace, luckily before I had started having a pint or two, the seller had a computer, two monitors, a desk, speakers and other peripherals listed for $200 and I shot him a message about just the computer, mainly as I wanted the ATX case and the PSU. It wasn't long before he came back with $100 and that was a good price.

The outside pants went back on, I jumped into the car and went and picked it up. It is very true that they do not make cases like this any more.

On the bench, my bench. It is a magnificent, older Corsair ATX case, which will accomodate most modern motherboards and a 750W EVGA power supply. What came as a surprise though were the contents of the case, because without any interference whatsoever from myself, this was already a very capable computer, even in 2023 and I wonder why people sell them so cheap.

It is older technology, of course, but aside from the case and PSU, there is an MSI Z87 G45 Gaming motherboard with an Intel i5-4670K quad core processor. The GPU is an ASUS Nvidia GTX 660 which I assume to be 2GB, there are 8GB of G-Skill Ripjaws X DDR3, and a Samsung Bluray drive. There have been a few updates though since it was originally built, an EDUP 1300Mbps PCIe wireless card and a 960GB Kingston SSD both of which will come in handy.

Add to all of that, a legal, activated version of Windows 10 Enterprise edition, which will travel with the motherboard if I use it again.

These components are destined to be featured here in future builds, I have blogged this for my digital diary, to remember the Sunday when my drinking patterns were disrupted and the internet made me change my pants and spend another hundred bucks on old tech. 

Hello old, unused, friend

Sunday morning, breakfast was consumed and the coffee is being installed, so I was out at my bench and removed most of the innards from the backup PC I created in April 2021 and installed the Z170 motherboard with the i5-6600K and cooler, an M.2 drive a Gigabyte WiFi card. 

Yesterday we had an afternoon near Victoria and I bought a used Gigabyte GTX 1050TI graphics card and 16GB of ADATA DDR4 RAM, that I will run at 2133 MHz.  These were also installed along with Windows 10 Home edition, which is the digital licence that the UEFI carries on the Z170 board, so more value there with a free operating system that will be supported until June 2025

There it all is, installed in the Rosewill case, top down you can see the Cooler Master Hyper 212, a single stick of DDR4 memory, the Gigabyte GTX 1050TI which impressively does not need an additional power connector as it pulls all it's power from the PCIe slot. In addition, a feature of this card is that it has a 0db feature, it stops the fan when the load is low, so it is quiet. There right at the bottom right of the motherboard is a Western Digital 256GB M.2 NVMe drive, which will suffice for this backup build.

The post mortem on cost, I like this bit.

Case $35, NVMe drive $52, WiFi card $15, Power supply $60 which is all cash spent years ago so that adds up to $162 and I'll add a generous $15 for the fans, so $177 old money there. Then $120 for the motherboard, CPU and cooler, $90 for the GTX and $30 for the DDR4 (which was quite a deal) and that lot adds another $240 for a grand total of $417 which I think, for this level of machine in early 2023 is a very good value.

After installation of software and some testing, this box will go under my bench once again, it has been more "computer therapy" for me, will this build be needed in the future? - who knows, and who cares really and perhaps in another two years I will report that the computer is to be upgraded once more.

The other exciting part of this, is that I now have another set of spare parts that can be built into a case, and I think I have just the case to do that in....

Upgrading the backup PC

If you look back to my posts in April and May 2021, deep in pandemic territory, you will see that I was keeping busy by building a spare PC in case my main threw a wobbler, I said at the time that it would be placed in a home under my bench and I would move on to occupying my time with something else.

So that was then, twenty months ago, and my main PC has been upgraded and logically, the technology "width" between the two machines has widened. That was fine, but as I am always lurking on Facebook marketplace, I came across a very local deal on a motherboard, cpu and cooler combo.

That is one boring photo, but the anti-static bag is hiding an ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard with an Intel i5-6600K processor. The online deal also came with an almost complete Cooler Master Hyper 212 heatsink and fan, and for the record, the motherboard, cpu and cooler, cost me $120 and it was a short drive from the house.

In terms of computer history, the i5-6600K is from the third quarter of 2015, and it is a sixth generation Intel CPU, and they code named that series, Skylake. The ASUS motherboard is based on the Intel Z170 chipset and for this build, I will need DDR4 RAM, I have some, but again, I will go searching for more in the wilds. In general terms, the previous project in the Rosewill case was an Intel i5-4570, 4th generation Haswell CPU on an Intel Z97 chipset motherboard, two generations behind.

As I have discussed, is newer better? - if we look at raw numbers, the Haswell scored an average CPU mark of 5218 with single thread 2036 and this "new" Skylake contender for the crown, scored 6349 with single thread 2341. This indicates that the new one is about 20% quicker, but that is just part of the story as improved generations of Intel processors include other benefits, same cores, same threads, but with increased bus speed, DDR4 memory support and higher bandwidth. 

The Haswell and the Skylake packages include integrated graphics, and that too has assumedly improved between generations, but here is where Intel get convoluted again, the older processor has "Intel HD Graphics 4600" and the new one has "Intel HD Graphics 530" which sounds worse, however, as usual, Intel change their naming rules and the smaller number, oddly, is a lot better. It matters not as with this build, like the previous, I will be using a dedicated GPU which will be betterer.

It was time to dust off that old assembly and update.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60GHz

<geek mode on>

Went and picked up the CPU, a bargain at $40, installed it this morning in another NG9F-QM77 motherboard, something to do on a rainy Sunday morning. Up and running, all ok, same procedure as the other day so nothing to show, except for the size of the heat spreader, chip is same form factor but the heat spreader is a lot bigger :

The "old" Celeron 1020E was 22nm lithography, Ivy Bridge boasting a TDP of 35W and this i7-3720QM, same 22nm, Ivy Bridge, pushes out a little more at 45W and the heat spreader, or contact area on that mirrored plate in the middle there, looks to be about 50% larger.

Simple explanation of lithography is the size of the squares on the "graph paper" of the mask and that the smaller the number, the more densely packed the transistors are on the finished processor. However, the more I talk the more you will realize how little I know.

This Ivy Bridge designation, another of Intel's labyrinth of names, and to muddle it further, Ivy Bridge superceded Sandy Bridge, the latter using the tried and trusted tick-tock on 32nm lithography and the new and wonderful (at the time) Ivy Bridge uses FinFET (3D) Tri-gate transistors and is a die shrink for the previous code name, so it is still a "tick" and not a "tock" and is not a redesign of the architecture.

I read that the tick-tock process still applied and did not end until the 7th generation regardless of FinFET and that's when I lose (more) confidence in the internet, suffice to say Ivy Bridge was fundamentally the same as Sandy Bridge but the transistors were smaller. The NG9F-QM77 motherboards support both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge in the G2 socket, it is logical that the best choice is the youngest, which happen to be more efficient than the older cousin.

The logic that younger processors are better can also be challenged, Intel went through a few generations of marginal, incremental changes, making newer generations better at a few things, but not all the things.

I took a look at what an i7-2720QM Sandy Bridge processor TDP was and the Intel spec sheet still calls out 45W but, the processor runs at 2.20GHz and if I compare passmarks, the Sandy Bridge at 2.20GHz comes in at 4069 (single thread 1376) and the Ivy Bridge at 2.60GHz (for the same TDP) comes in at 5679 (single thread 1870) so thermally, the Ivy Bridge are a lot more efficient. In the first hour or so of operation, I see under load temperatures of about sixty degrees centigrade which, is about ten degrees hotter than the i5-3230M, but not bad at all for a fanless PC.

Excellent stuff, I have learned something today, I had not realised that Ivy Bridge are backwards compatible with the Sandy Bridge (BIOS update may be required) and that they use less power per compute. In addition, Ivy Bridge is the last Intel platform to support Windows XP and the earliest Intel microarchitecture to support Windows 10, 64 bit.

I also learned that the internet talks a lot but does not say much, so I have that in common.

<geek mode off>

Brains, Brains, Brains....

Three new CPU prospects arrived in the post yesterday, all improvements on the Celeron 1020E that are in the batch of industrial computers I bought a little while ago. The overall idea is to always keep a todo list, something to do, to keep me busy, to keep me happy. In relation to other people's hobbies, this is a really cheap one and the three processors you see here cost me seventy dollars, true that is the cost of reasonable flat of beer nowadays, however, I like to think of my alcohol as more of an addiction, not a hobby, the hobby reduces the amount of time I spend thinking about the alcohol.

There are two i5-3320M 2.6GHz processors and an i5-3340M 2.7GHz unit. The designation of processors is quite the thing, breaking it down somewhat, the i5 means that they are all quad core compute units, four processing thingies. I have settled on this level of processor, they do a good job, they are priced well and inversely, are not the "best" thing, which the public desire. The next key thing is the "-3" which indicates a third generation Intel CPU of what, in the computing industry, is from the middle ages as they are up to the twelfth or higher generation today, however, I am shopping for improved brains for the Jetway motherboards, so these be those. 

The next three digits, the "320" and the "340" which are SKU designations, indicating that the higher number was developed later, in this case that makes sense as the first two run at 2.6GHz and the third at 2.7GHz, but fundamentally the same architecture. It is logical that the latter will be marginally faster, but in turn, it will probably run hotter, although all three have the same TDP of 35W. However, that is a convenient, rounded, number so the latter will run a little hotter.   

The last identifier "M" points to the segment of the market, in this case, mobile. This type of processor would have been commonly used in laptops back in the dark ages, in fact the laptop I use as my daily driver has an i5-3xxxM processor, and despite being sooooo old, works very well for what I need. These processors are a decade old, they are Intel Legacy Core, formerly Ivy Bridge, have 22nm lithography and many other descriptions that are really no longer important. 

A method of comparing a raw metric for processors is to search online for the benchmark, or passmark, a simple integer that represents relative performance. a search for "Celeron 1020E passmark" will result in several web sites that report various numbers, computing is always about the numbers...

The original processors, the Celeron 1020E data seems to be thin on the ground, but I discovered passmark numbers of 1394 and 1406 and when I searched for the i5-3340M there was a lot more data and that simple number was an average of 2667. In simple terms it appears that the replacement CPU will be about 90 percent faster.

As with most comparisons, that one number does not tell the entire story, but it is a quick method to form a relative performance judgement. Another metric is the single thread rating, because not all compute tasks are based on multiple threads, however, I'll leave that one for you to worry about. I will add though that the consumers have become rather obsessed with how fast their stuff is, so these numbers are very important for bragging rights, in fact it seems that, with processors and graphics cards, the boasting about the benchmark has become more important than actually doing anything productive on the computer.

There is a prospect of a much faster CPU at the weekend, but it is not in my grubby little hands yet, so I won't say anything more. 

Brain Salad Surgery

 Happy New Year!

The postman delivered the i5-3230M processor and I had something to keep me occupied to take the place of eating and drinking too much.

The old processor is an Intel Celeron 1020E, Ivy Bridge, released in Q1'13 and is quite a capable CPU despite what some would have you think about the Celeron name. I'm swapping the CPU because I can, not because I need to, it is merely a task to keep my numbskulls busy.

First order of business was to remove the motherboard from the case, then remove the aluminum heatsink that transmits heat from the socketed CPU and an embedded chipset processor. This is a tricky little operation as there are five spring loaded nylon pins, that can become brittle with time, they latch through the motherboard and hold the heatsink quite firmly, there is also a thin layer of thermal paste between both the processors and the lower surface of the heatsink.

If you look closely there are also five nylon spacers, one of which I nearly lost in the removal process, the devil is in the details when taking things apart. Usually, when I drop something small off my bench it is magically gone forever, however, I was lucky this time and found the spacer immediately.

The next photo is the Celeron 1020E still in the socket and the new brain patiently waiting by the side.

The Celeron on the left is a two core processor with two threads, the i5-3230M is two core, but has four threads. The new processor on the right is also Ivy Bridge, socket FCPG988 and it is rather interesting, yet boring, to research into all the differences of compatible processors for the G2 socket, Intel's Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, suffice to say, it was a mobile processor socket, 1mm pitch, pin based array, so the processor, when oriented correctly, just drops into the socket.

When I say "just drops into" I mean it is "very carefully placed into" the socket.

Orientation is important, on the lower left corner of the processor there is marked a triangle, and if all the pins are straight, the package finds it's own way. The retaining screw is then rotated a little over a quarter of a turn. The final steps now are to put a dab of thermal paste of the shiny rectangle in the middle there, and on the embedded thingy and reinstall the heatsink.

I should look into what the embedded thingy is.

The motherboard is a Jetway NG9F-QM77 and the custom heatsink makes contact with the CPU and the Intel Mobile QM77 chip, both of which have a thermal cooling requirement, so both have a dab of thermal paste added and the heatsink is reinstalled.

The top of the heatsink will also be slathered with thermal paste and that will make contact with the small ITX case lid. The final step before reinstalling back into the case was booting up the computer to see if everything is ok, the BIOS takes one or three boots usually to work out what the heck has happened, so I usually experience a moment or two of blind panic during that process. 

The BIOS settles itself down, the new processor is reported, the brain surgery is a success. The final step now is to reinstall the motherboard back into the case, apply more thermal paste to the top of the heatsink, install the cover and put all the screws back in if they are still in the same place on the bench and have not been lost in the process.

One last check is to run the operating system and see if everything appears fine. I was running it for several hours yesterday, CPU temperatures hovering around fifty degrees centigrade during high load which isn't bad at all, and the unit is completely silent, that ticks off my two boxes, low temperatures and low noise, or in this case, no noise. It must be ok as I have just completed this entire blog entry on the machine, we are back in business.

Once again, I wish you all a Happy New Year, hopefully this geezer will have more adventures in old tech in the next twelve months, if I do, they will be reported here.