Friday, January 14, 2011

Keeping your cool

I started ripping some DVDs. This is something I explored years ago, but the quality of the rips just wasn't there. I tried ripping Shrek and found that color reproduction was poor. Things that appeared as smooth color gradients on the original DVD were dithered when I played the rip. I was driving the TV using a DVI -> HDMI connection from a PC. I abandoned that as unsuccessful.

Now we have a better ripping S/W and the capability to run a DLNA server to deliver the content to a Playstation 3 for viewing on an HD TV. A little experimentation revealed that all of this seems to provide an acceptable reproduction of what I see on the actual DVD. That's important; otherwise I would stick with just playing the DVD. But the media server is a subject for another blog. This is about what transcoding does to a PC.

Since transcoding DVDs is a pretty compute intensive process, I chose the most powerful systems at hand. Those are a couple laptops equpped with Intel Core 2 Duo processors and a desktop with an AMD Athlon. (The athlon is actually pretty ancient, but it's dual core and available.) The first thing I noticed on one of the laptops, a Dell Vostro 1700, was that the CPU temp shot up to 90° C and continued to climb. At 93° I stopped the transcode for fear of doing damage. I asked around (Notebook Review forum) and the general consensus was that this was excessive temperature. Likely causes would be blocked cooling vents and/or poor contact between processor and heat sink.

Next step was to disassemble the Vostro down to the CPU cooler. This is what I found. That's a wad of dust blocking the cooling fins.










The conductive paste on the processor looked like this:














The rapid temperature rise led me to suspect that there was not good contact between the cooler and the CPU. They used plenty of paste during assembly, but it didn't seem to form a thin film. I cleaned that up and reinstalled the CPU cooler with a small drop of Artic Silver.

The result of that was that idle temp dropped from 47° C to 40° C. While ripping and transcoding DVDs (which loads both cores) temperature rose much more slowly and leveled off about 80° C.

The next thing I tried was undervolting the CPU using the instructions here: http://openmindedbrain.info/09/05/2010/undervolting-in-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lts/ and additional information from http://www.linux-phc.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=3&sid=8a3fa068db64ea6ac2096f89eb572450. That brought idle temps down to 34° C. CPU temperature while ripping/transcoding remained at about 80° C.

Transcoding on my T500 also drove temperature up to about 90° C, though it rose more slowly. Emboldened by the success with the Vostro, I took apart the T500. (As an aside, it seemed like there were more parts to remove on the Vostro. In the end, it seemed easier to assemble. Some of the parts on the T500 took a bit of fiddling to get back into place. But... I was happy to find that both Dell and Lenovo provide detailed instructions on their web sites.) I was surprised to find no dust bunnies hiding in the T500. Lenovo seems to have designed air flow that reduces that problem. Neither was I sure that there was a contact issue with the heat sink. Nevertheless, I cleaned it up, applied some Artic Silver and put everything back together. It's been about a week I competed this work. I'm transcoding a DVD right now and CPU temp seems to have leveled off at 72° C. There was a benefit form repasting the CPU.

To summarize, this is what I saw on a Dell Vostro equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @2.20GHz
condition idle temp loaded temp
initial 47° C >93° C
clean and repaste 40° 80° C
undervolt 34° C 80° C

Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 @2.53GHz
condition idle temp loaded temp
initial 47° C 90° C
clean and repaste 35° 72° C
undervolt 33° C 72° C

Testing was done at typical winter indoor temperature here - 68° F (20° C.)

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Spring is here! Part 1.

At least there are some signs. With the holidays behind us, we're getting seed catalogs in the mail. I plan to expand the little patch out back a bit and add some stuff. I'd like to grow some butter nut squash and maybe some more beans. The wax beans were great last summer so I should try some green beans in addition. And I need to separate some rhubarb crowns.

No summer squash next to the house this sumer. It's just too dry. That spot will be reserved for some herbs that tolerate desert conditions better.

Other signs of spring - like warming temps or noticeably longer days - seem pretty far off right now.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

The Importance of Benchmarks, Part 2

Happy New Year!

I tried running my Thinkpad (T500 with Intel 5300 wireless card) using 802.11n and found results extremely variable.  At times it would get terrific throughput. At other times it could not hold a connection. Some research indicated that there is a problem related to Intel firmware with the drivers released with Ubuntu 10.10. It's not clear if the same problem exists with 10.04 which I'm currently running. What I do know is that the techniques (described for 10.10) to force the driver to use G only do not work on my Thinkpad. I have to configure my router as G only in order to get a solid wireless experience.

This makes me wonder if there was actually a problem with my older router. I started having connection problems with it and perhaps that was a result of driver/firmware problems and not a malfunctioning router. I should plug it in and test it out one of these days.

Part 2b

I realized that my new WiFi router (D-Link DGL 4500) supports gigabit Ethernet. So do the adapters in both of my wired PCs. That surprised me because my benchmark tests were all consistent with 100baseT, not 1000baseT. I researched that and found that one system was running at 1000 Mb/s and the other at 100 Mb/s as reported by ethtool. I fiddled a bit trying to get ethtool and mii-tool to change link speed to 1000 Gb/s without success. I tried a different cable and that made the difference. However, the best TCP throughput I found using netperf is about 300-500 Kb/s. I'm not sure what causes that discrepancy. Perhaps cabling is still an issue since I may not not be using Cat 5e. I'll revisit this when I start getting upgraded systems in place. H/W for the symbiotic NAS should be here soon. (And I'm jonesing for an upgrade to the desktop. I've already picked out the H/W. :D I've just discovered that the present system is not actually capable to play a DVD smoothly!)