dakospace

Hi there! Again, Overclocking day post. Its has been a while since my last OC day, but I have great news for you:

First, ASUS had released new BIOS versions (for various boards) with improved OC features which refine AMD Core unlocking! Yes, indeed, my AMD Phenom X2 550 processor was recognized as X4 with 4 cores working and unlocked. Pity, Windows always stopped with BSOD no matter what I did. But ASUS did their job well, and in BIOS settings under Unleashed more, you can specify which cores to be unlocked. In my case the faulty core was #3 (starting from zero). So, I was able to boot and load in Windows successfully with 3 working cores: #0, #1 and #2.

Second, I needed a better OC tool to stress the 3 cores. It happened that Orthos is running on 2 cores only, and Prime95 I don’t like since it downloads some data chunks to process, then uploads results. So, a new OC tool was born, and it’s named FFT-z! You can see it in action on the screenshots bellow, next to CPU-z, HWMonitor, FurMark, K10stat and TaskManager applications. FFT-z is not released yet officially, but you can grab a public preview release from here. Expect some new cool features added to it In the next releases.

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Are you already using Windows 7? Well, create a new folder name it “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (without quotes) and hit Enter. Hahaaa Icon changed you see. So open it, to see what’s inside (:

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Imagine your company has hundreds if not thousands of computers. Imagine they are running for at least of a year. How many applications, updates, SP-s were installed meanwhile? How many unused files are left after that? How many temporary files were placed anywhere on those computers? Are your users complaining their computers are getting slow, or that their system drive is full? You want to cleanup! But how?

First of all you download Cleanup Temporary Files (shortly “Cle”) tool. The you setup Logon script for your Active Directory’s users (or OU-s, if you prefer) as this:

REM -- Startup script "user.bat"
REM -- Cleanups the PC temporary and unused files from
REM -- various (hidden) places.
\\SRV-DFS\Files\Audit\cleanup\Cle.exe /custom 32839 /p

then on each user Logon this will happen in the top left corner of the Desktop:

Of course all this could be managed from Cle Configuration application, which brings lots of settings and allows you to cleanup custom specified folders. You can tune up the GUI as well, even you can disable the visuals at all, so Cle would work quietly in the background. Corporate admins could deploy a company-wide Cleanup Policy easily using command-line switches as shows above, and force it to computers using “/s” option.

Noted the magic number parameter after the “/custom”? Well it could be easily obtained from Windows Registry (using regedit.exe) once you have run Cle Configuration. It should be specified as a decimal and not hexadecimal number. Here is its location in the Registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\5GROUP\Cle]
“Selection”=dword:00008047 (32839)

and here is a screenshot of Cle’s Configuration dialog:

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Just loved the HP Compaq LA2405wg 24-inch Widescreen LCD Monitor. Its specs are quite good with 1920×1200 resolution and DVI-D with HDCP support. It also has new DisplayPort interface (just in case I got a Mac notebook). I am looking for a new monitor recently and think this is a good replacement for my current HP 2045w one wich is just 1680×1050 resolution and lacks the HDCP support. With price at 240€ it is a good choice for everyone, I think.

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Announced on Dec 3rd, just a week ago, Google Public DNS service is still in testing/beta phase, so no SLA is available, but I’ve decided to give it a try. Google Public DNS uses Anycast to connect you to the closest DNS server, which in my case happens to be at ~42 msec away. Which is better than OpenDNS one at ~55 msec, but worse than Level 3 DNS 4.2.2.2 at ~36 msec. Right now I am using both Google Public DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as forwarders to see if any change in end-user experience would be noticeble. Will see.

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How To Upgrade Windows 7 RC To RTM? Check out the following article after the jump. Tested, and working just fine minutes ago. Just one side note: when prompted to download setup updates, chose not to do that…

http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-upgrade-windows-7-rc-to-rtm/

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Tired from all those commercial SMS games you receive now and then from your mobile operator?! Happily if you are on Mobiltel AD, just send text “stop 500″ to 17867:

Edit: 500 is the name/code of the specific game. To stop others send their name/code.

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As I said I shall have any news about ATI Radeon HD 4770, I wouldn’t knew I will have to play with two of those. That’s right, I have setup two 4770 in cross-fire mode, but that’s not all of it - as a bonus a brand new AMD Phenom X2 II 550 BE is under the hood, bringing a huge increase of speed and cache compared to AMD 7750 BE (from 2MB to 6 MB L3 cache).
Check out the screenshot above. You can click on image to expand it. All is done on air-cooling. The CPU is OC from 3100 to 3511 MHz (+13.2%) without raising the voltage! And 4770 OC is quite limited by Catalyst Control Center from 750/800 to 800/850 MHz (+6%) which is nothing at all. The real potential of those cards is like 850/1100 MHz. To be continued…

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So is CUDA doing anything? You bet. There’s a 35% drop in output time with GPU acceleration enabled, so CUDA is plainly throwing everything it can at the job. But here’s the interesting part: AMD and Nvidia show essentially the same encode time in CPU-only mode, but Stream yields a 108% performance gain, easily trouncing the CUDA result while averaging 40% less CPU utilization than CUDA (read more).

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