eVc I2C PWM controller

I recently received an exciting package in the mail, Jon Elmor Sandstrom sent me his latest creation, eVc. eVc is a USB connected I2C controller, capable of interfacing directly with PWM controllers that support I2C. In short this device gives the ability to change a number of PWM settings on the fly. This can help to push insane overclockers and troubleshoot problems with motherboards and graphics cards.

I have taken a closer look at eVc with a Gigabyte 7790 OC card, first with ambient air cooling and then with -40 degree Celsius on my single stage cooler.

The video below goes into detailing explaining how eVc works with a little demonstration of the clocks gained by a combination of extra voltage, load line and subzero cooling.

I am really looking forward to seeing how the future of this device pans out.

James Trevaskis and G.Skill break the memory frequency world record with 4404 MHz

Since the launch of Z87 and Haswell there has been a big focus on memory clocking. We first saw memory frequency taken past the 4000 MHz mark by Gigabyte pre-launch. The record then bounced back and forward between Gigabyte, ASROCK and ASUS over the the last few months.

I decided to give the record a crack with the petite ASUS Maximus 6 Impact board and GSKILL 3000 MHz MFR kit and came up with some good numbers


Setup
ASUS Maximus 6 Impact
GSKILL 3000 MHz TridentX
Intel 4770K CPU
Corsair AX1200
Kingpincooling ram heatspreaders from Ney Pro and custom dominance copper pot
Liquid Nitrogen Cooling

The end result was a validated clock of 4404 MHz, smashing the current world record by over 100 MHz. Normally ram world records are decided by 5-10 MHz so this was a big achievement by the pint sized Impact.

Most overclocking records are respected within the OC community but ignored in the wider tech community, however this record gained widespread attention from the tech world. Here is a link to the ASUS ROG post about the record http://rog.asus.com/258552013/overclocking/4404mhz-ddr3-world-record/

Furthermore I was able to run SuperPI 1M, a very light stability test, past the current world record at around ~4300MHz.

Below are links to some of the Tech media that covered the record.
http://hexus.net/tech/news/ram/58797-gskill-reclaims-worlds-fastest-ddr3-memory-title-44ghz/
http://techgage.com/news/teamaus-youngpro-achieves-crazy-ddr3-4400-overclock-with-g-skill-tridentx-memory/
http://benchmarkreviews.com/3822/g-skill-tridentx-ddr3-overclocked-by-youngpro-to-4400mhz-with-ln2/
http://www.legitreviews.com/g-skill-tridentx-ddr3-memory-reaches-4400mhz-new-world-record_15854

Newegg TV interview for GSKILL at Computex 2013

I just thought I'd throw this Youtube link up. During Computex 2013 this year I spent a week doing liquid nitrogen overclocking demonstrations at the GSKILL booth with Hiwa Piori and Christian Ney. Our goal was to break world records and get the crowd having fun with liquid nitrogen and high end computer components.

Newegg TV dropped by to see what we were doing and ask a few questions about Haswell and overclocking. My (Youngpro) interview starts around 9:15.

AMD ULPS (Ultra Low Power State) disable tool

Anyone that has troubleshooted problems with AMD/ATI graphics card crossfire configurations will probably know about Ultra Low Power State (ULPS). ULPS is a sleep state that lowers the frequencies and voltages of non-primary cards in an attempt to save power. The downside of ULPS is that is can cause performance loss and some crossfire instability.

ULPS is controlled via a registry value named "EnableULPS" located under the "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video" key, it can be disabled by setting the value to 0 or enabled with 1. As there are often multiple EnableULPS values in the registry for different cards and even older graphics cards that were previously in the system, it can be a tedious task to manually make the changes.

This is a simple tool written in the AutoIT scripting language, it searches the HKLM\System key and changes all EnableULPS to either 0/1 as defined by user input.

You can download the binary here (or source if you are interested) from my Github.

GTLcontrol code update v2.0 online

You might have seen the control software I put up for Gigabyte Tweak Launcher (GTL) about a month back. At the competitive end of overclocking the ability to dynamically control the clock speed is priceless, it can be the difference between those last 10 points you need to take the world record. GTLcontrol provides this functionality to any motherboard that supports Gigabyte's GTL.

I have updated the code base to include a full GUI, hotkeys for bclk/multi up/down adjustments and I've also cleaned up the code to increase the performance a little.

The hotkeys F7/F8 are used for multi up/down and F10/F11 are now used for bclk up/down. This allows low end Gigabyte boards to be used just like the uber high end Z77X-UP7.

Also to support the GUI functionality is a new F5 hotkey to "show" the GUI if you have hidden it. I suggest turning the GUI off once you have your settings right, as then GTLcontrol will use less memory and impact your benchmark less. I have done extensive testing with it off and on and found no efficiency loss, but better to be safe than sorry. Please note that if you do turn the GUI off, you need to manually turn it back on by setting "gui=1" in the gtlcontrol.ini file.

Remember when you make any changes to save and then hit reload, this will activate the changes.

Feel free to take this code and do whatever you want with it, please email me any changes as I would like to check them out.

You can download the full version from here or the source code from my github.

Enjoy!

Gigabyte Tweak Launcher hotkey control tool

Overclockers everywhere rejoiced when Gigabyte released their Gigabyte Tweak Launcher (GTL) software that is capable of adjusting the multiplier, voltages and bus speeds. GTL is super lightweight and perfect for competitive overclocking but unfortunately is has one small downfall, it doesn't support hotkeys. Hotkeys can be an essential part of taking that world record, clocking a higher frequency for one part of a test, then lowering the frequency for a heavy CPU based test.

With the help of the lightweight autoit scripting language I have put together a small script capable of passing commands to GTL via hotkeys, my gtlcontrol script works as follows.

How to use GTLCONTROL

1. Download gtlcontrol.exe and gtlcontrol.ini from my github repositories.

2. Make sure Gigabyte Tweak Launcher is installed.

3. Edit gtlcontrol.ini to set your bclk, voltage and multiplier.

4. There are 3 options for each hotkey "multienable", "voltenable" and "bclkenable".

If you want to enable any of the 3 options set the value to 1, setting the value to 0 disables the respective option.

For example, multienable=1 enables the multiplier. multienable=0 disables the multiplier.

NOTE: Every time you edit gtlcontrol.ini you need to exit and reload gtlcontrol.exe.


5. To use the application, first start Gigabyte Tweak Launcher and then open gtlcontrol.exe. GTL must be running in the background for the hotkey functionality to work.

6. Your hotkeys f1 through to f4 will execute the options you set in gtlcontrol.ini.


NOTES:

The options in the [debug] sections are for debugging, you don't need to touch them.

You may want to disable the teamau splash screen, to do this set title=0

If you don't trust binaries, the source is provided in gtlcontrol.au3 (check out my github), it is written in the autoit scripting language.

PC and Tech Authority cover the Team Australia OC Workshops

Check out this article published in the latest PC and Tech Authority and Atomic magazines. It covers a recent overclocking workshop that the Team Australia boys and myself recently ran in Brisbane.

The concept was to introduce PC enthusiasts to extreme overclocking with Liquid Nitrogen. We covered everything from insulation to safe use of liquid nitrogen and how to achieve big benchmark results. We had a large turn out and made some great friends.

Click on the image below to access the article written by John Gillooly.

Nostalgia Overclocking: MSI Wind U100 meets LN2

A few years ago Josh Collins (former technical writer for Atomic Magazine) and I had a stupid idea. Take the overclockable MSI Wind U100 netbook, add LN2 and a tub full of insulating grease and see how it overclocks.

After a failed first attempt that instantly killed the Wind, our replacement arrived and a 2nd attempt was more successful. The Wind didn't overclock extremely well, but we still were able to push to what was at the time, the highest Atom frequency recorded.

After an hour or so of fighting with CPU-Z we were able to achieve a frequency of 2315 MHz, a full 715 MHz over the stock frequency.

Here is a link to the Engadget article
Also a link to our forum post at the time, dated 25/11/2008

Pointless? Sure. Waste of resources? For sure. Fun? 100%. I tried to convince Apple to let me do the same thing to a Macbook, they weren't so keen.

How to replace Apple Macbook Air 2010 3.1 SSD with MX-Katana and performance analysis

I love my Macbook Air 2010 3.1 11" for its portability and size but the stock Toshiba SSD is lack luster in performance and plus I only have the 64GB version. After checking out my available upgrade options I got my hands on the Mach Xtreme MX-KATANA 128GB.

For those not familiar with Mach Xtreme, they are a manufacture focussed on the enthusiast sector and high end. I reviewed their MX Armor 2000 9-9-9-24 2x4GB memory kit in a shoot out for APC earlier in the year and I was suitably impressed.



The Product

Name: MX-KATANA
Model: MXSSD2MKAT-128G
Maximum read performance: 275 MB/s
Maximum write performance: 225 MB/s
Sustained Write: 130 MB/s
IOPS: 25,000

Very impressive specifications for a notebook drive, lets hope my heightened expectations stay true in the performance analysis.

 

  

I was very happy to find the necessary screw drivers included in the package as Apple use a "5-Point Pentalobe" driver, which isn't exactly a screwdriver most people have in their collection.

The Installation

Before you begin, I suggest making a copy of your existing SSD with a tool like carbon copy cloner (CCC). If you use CCC to clone your SSD onto an external USB hard drive, after you have installed your new SSD you can boot from the USB clone and use CCC to clone the data onto your new MX-KATANA SSD.

I have created the below youtube video which details the complete process of removing the back cover, installing the new SSD and replacing the cover.

Here are some more photos of the installation process.

 

Benchmarks

I have decided to use XBench and QuickBench to benchmark the existing Toshiba SSD and the new MX-KATANA, this will allow me to directly compare the two.

I set QuickBench to 5 loops and for Xbench I reran and averaged the results over 3 complete runs.

Performance Analysis


Starting with the QuickBench (QB) average for sequential read, we see the KATANA take a small lead of around 10 MB/s, nothing spectacular but solid. Moving onto QB random write average and again we see a small margin of only 7 MB/s.

I also listed the 1024K random write, this is not an anomaly but a consistent result I see across all of my benchmarks. As the write size is increased the performance leans more in the direction of the KATANA.

Moving onto the XBench results we see a meagre 1% advantage to the KATANA in the disk test score results. In the un-cached write 4K results the stock Toshiba SSD actually takes a lead of around 9 MB/s, but the victory is short lived when the KATANA smashes it in large 256K read operations by 20%.

These results certainly give a clear indication that the KATANA is a great option for those using large cluster sizes, but who is? I don't know many people using anything bigger than around 8-16K, unless it is a dedicated drive for video/audio editing.

That being said if you are working with big files the KATANA will have big benefits for you, but for everyday use you can expect around a 10% performance gain over the stock SSD.

3000MHz with 8GB of ram (4x4GB) just for fun

After the recent Geil competition where I took 16GB of ram to 2720 MHz to win the competition, I decided to have a play with the same GSKILL Trident 2000 MHz 8-9-8-24 kit in a 8GB dual channel configuration.

The result after a couple of hours of tweaking was a cool 3000 MHz!

Setup
2x GSKILL Trident 2000 8-9-8-24 4GB
Gigabyte X58A-UD7 rev 2.0 with GOOC2010 bios
Intel 980X Gulftown CPU
Single Stage @ -50
Western Digital Velicoraptor 600GB SATA3
Windows 7 32bit SP1



Results

CPU-Z validation link

Click on the below photo to expand it.

I am starting to play with my Corsair GTX6 sticks on the same set-up now with hopes of breaking 3400 MHz.

James Trevaskis wins HWBOT 16GB memory clocking challenge with 2720 MHz

Overclocking competition overlords HWBOT recently held a memory overclocking competition in conjunction with manufacture Geil. The competition consisted of 3 rounds including Super PI, lowest memory clock and highest memory clock with 4x 4GB modules.

I decided to enter the 16GB of ram challenge, I have played around with clocking 16GB of memory in the past but not seriously pushing the frequency. I chose the GSKILL Trident 2000 MHz 8-9-8-24 kit as I have tested this kit vigorously in 2x4GB 8GB configurations and easily achieved 2500 MHz.

Starting with the P55 platform and an Intel Lynnfield 870 CPU, I was only able to achieve 2480 MHz with the timings of 9-11-9-27. At this point I thought I was done as P55 is known as the best memory clocking platform.

I quickly moved to X58 and this is where the real magic happened. I relaxed the memory timings to 11-15-15-31, TRFC at 200 and loosened the B2B latency. I started up my single stage cooling, which is an evaporator based cooling solution (like a fridge for your CPU), which set my CPU at -50 degrees Celsius. Instantly I hit 2600 MHz, wow this is great. After playing with some more of the sub timings I was at 2720 MHz before I knew it.

What I had achieved in 6 hours with my P55 setup I was passing within an hour on my X58 system. I put this down to the power of the IMC on Gulftown. Sure P55 has traditionally been great at memory clocking, but this is because uncore isn't a limitation. I believe X58 is probably the stronger platform for clocking any high density memory modules as it is a easier to drive 3 modules in triple channel and the 4th in its own channel than 2 modules over 2 channels as per P55.


My Setup:
4x GSKILL Trident 2000 8-9-8-24 4GB
Gigabyte X58A-UD7 rev 2.0 with GOOC2010 bios
Intel 990X Gulftown CPU
Single Stage @ -50
Western Digital Velicoraptor 600GB SATA3
Windows 7 32bit SP1


Results:

CPU-Z Validation

I made a quick YouTube video of the setup.

Gigabyte A75-UD4P + AMD A8-3850 + G.Skill Flare = DDR3-2700

Okay so its not really DDR3-2700 because its single channel, but its still 1350MHz on and AMD platform,

If you were to say 1350MHz memory clocks 3 months ago on AMD platform people would have laughed at you.. The combination of the Gigabyte A75-UD4P with the AMD A8 3850 (Llano core) cpu and G.Skill Flare memories make it very easy to achieve this frequency though.

I simply dropped the CPU multiplier, raised the voltage to the north bridge to around 1.4v, set vdimm at 1.74v and started to slowly increase the bus frequency. The result? 1350MHz validations... With about 1300MHz stable for 3D benchmarks. I tested the CPU on both air and on my single stage that is able to run the temperature at around -50 degrees Celsius and the results were the same, the cold temperatures didn't help.

CPUZ Validation

Yeah I know the CPUZ validation has a big invalid red cross on it, but this is what is currently happening with high memory clocked Llano setups, so there's nothing I can do to get rid of it!

Bitcoin cryptocurrency: an overclockers best friend

Anyone that has a seperate system dedicated for overclocking has the problem of finding uses for all the quickly obsoleting hardware they have purchased. Further more most competitive overclockers have piles of hardware and it is normally covered in grease and doesn't have many real world uses.

Enter Bitcoin...

What is bitcoin? (this extract is taken from bitcoin.org)

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network.

A modern day gold rush...

The fact bitcoin has no central issuing authority means someone needs to issue the currency, thats where your old hardware comes in, specifically GPUs. Bitcoin is based on cryptography and each block of currency can be generated in a process called "Bitcoin Mining". Basically you load the software onto your system, preferably with some AMD GPU's (5870, 5850, 6970 and 6990 are best) and let the mining software generate Bitcoins. If you want to start mining, it is best to consider mining in a pool. That way you get regular small pay outs and have greater chances of making more bitcoins than going solo. I am part of slush's mining pool http://mining.bitcoin.cz/

An end in sight...

This won't go on forever though, as there are currently about 6 million bitcoins in the wild and the process and the difficulty factor will continue to go up (that means it takes longer to generate each bitcoin) until a figure of around 18 million bitcoins are in the wild. At the moment it takes roughly 45 minutes to generate each bitcoin, but some take as little as 5 minutes while others take up to 2 hours.

Cashing in...

Once you have generated your bitcoins, you can cash them in on sites like Mt Gox (http://www.mtgox.com/) which is very similar to a traditional currency exchange but they trade bitcoins for cash. At the time of writing this article I am making 1.56 bitcoins a day, which at the current exchange rate of $19.4 each, I should make roughly $900 a month. That is for NOW though, shortly the difficulty will take another leap (which it does on a periodic basis) and my profit will go down to about $600 a month. There is also a high possibility of the bitcoin exchange rate taking a dive, and that will also effect profitability.

The Rig..

I am using a rig of old parts I had from past overclocking adventures. My current rig is using a Gigabyte 790FX board, with a AMD 965, 4GB of Patriot memory and 3x Gigabyte EAH5870 and a 1050W psu.

If you don't have the parts it could be costly to get in, but this awesome calculator can help work out if it is worth you building a platform. Remember the difficulty could change in the future and make your income go down considerably.

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/

The Outcome..

Well I am only 2 days into my bitcoin adventures but I am liking what I am seeing. I will write another blog post at the end of the month to let you all know if I think its worth my while, how much it is costing me in electritity and if I am going to add another rig into the equation.

All the information you need to get started is here http://www.bitcoin.org/

What is overclocking? Watch this video with firstzoom.tv and James Trevaskis to find out

Gigabyte X58A-OC OC-Touch interface preview