It’s not the actual small form factor system that’s crazy. It’s what I want it to do. What I typically want is to build a high performance gaming system using a micro ATX motherboard, building it into a micro ATX chassis. I’m typically lured in by some cool looking micro ATX case. That happened to me with a couple of Silverstone SUGO models (SG01 and SG03). Most recently, it was the NZXT Vulcan, which I reviewed for Maximum PC. The Vulcan is actually a good looking case with an attractive feature set that makes it sound like a badass, high end case.

As I discovered, the Vulcan is really a normal micro-tower in the skin of a high end, badass case. I don’t want to talk about the Vulcan itself much, though. Go read the review if you want more detail on the Vulcan. I want to talk about the process of building a true micro ATX system.

The idea of building a small, powerful rig that can take on most modern PC games is an attractive idea, and when you see a good looking case like the Vulcan, it’s easy to be seduced.

What you can’t do is build a small form factor system the same way you build a typical mid or full tower PC. For one thing, the order of installation is critical. In some SFF cases, for example, you can’t install the power supply until everything else is in. In addition, the interior of these cases is often very, very cramped, so you’ll need to double-and triple-check that some stray wire or cable hasn’t crept underneath the motherboard. Routing wiring is also important, as its easier for wiring to drop onto a fan, resulting in a horrible sound and possible CPU overheating if it’s the CPU cooling fan.

At any rate, I had an early Gigabyte GA-H57M-UD3 motherboard. Given its layout and use of USB 3.0, I thought it would be an ideal motherboard for building a gaming rig.

Gigabyte's GA-H57M-UD3

The CPU would be a Core i7 870 I had leftover from an old test system, a Seagate 1TB 7200.12 hard drive would handle storage and a Radeon HD 5850 would take care of GPU chores. Installation was the usual painfully slow process (it always is with these tiny systems), but the system booted up just fine. Installing Windows 7 went swimmingly.

Then the stability problems began cropping up. Initially, warm reboots would always hang — I’d have to disconnect power before the system would boot. After installing all the drivers, the system would periodically crash with ugly blue screens. I tried different DDR3 modules and memory settings, but the crashes still occurred.

Even BIOS updates didn’t fix the problems,. What I suspect is that this board is actually an engineering sample, not a retail release, since Gigabyte had shipped it to me within days of its announcement. Note that this board had never been used, and is curiously lacking in markings, though it does have a serial number.

So I thought I’d try another board, an Asus P7H55D-M EVO.

Asus P7H55D-M EVO

I actually had this board working in a another small form factor system that I’d partially disassembled, so I thought it would be pretty simple to rip it out of the other case and slap it into the Vulcan.

By this time, I was in what may be charitably described as a “system building fugue.” You know the drill — you’re so into solving problems with a new build, so into getting it completed, that you start taking shortcut, and start getting careless.

The process of removing the P7H55D-M EVO was less gentle than it should have been. I also encountered several issues when trying to get it into the NZXT case. First, several of the mounting nuts had slipped out, and I didn’t notice them until I’d wiggled the motherboard into the case. So I wiggled the Asus board back out, and reinstalled the nuts.

In my haste, I’d replaced one of the nuts in the wrong hole. Out came the motherboard, then back it went. Oops, a piece of flashing on the ATX I/O plate had been pushed back down, blocking the Ethernet port. Out came the board again, and back in it went.

Somewhere in the process, I’m sure I killed the board. Note that the P7H55D-M EVO had been working perfectly when I removed it from its original case. When I got everything installed, the board wouldn’t POST. Fans would spin up, but no video would appear. I attached an external beeper to the speaker connector, and no beeps could be heard. The memory diagnostic light would stay bright red, no matter what DDR3 modules were installed. The board seemed completely hosed.

Out came the board one more time.

I had one more micro ATX board, an Intel DP55WB. This is by no means a high end board, but it was what I had available.

Intel DP55WB

This time, I realized I had just one more try at this. So I walked away from the whole affair until the following day. When I returned, I exercised extreme care during the installation — something I should have done with the Asus board. I made sure all the cables were cleared out of the way, all the mounting hardware properly installed and that the ATX I/O shield was pristine. The board went in as easily as it could — the interior is still pretty cramped, after all — but in it went.

The system POSTed just fine. Driver installation went smoothly, as did the BIOS update. The system burn-in tests completed without a hiccup.

In the end, what I had was still a pretty powerful system for gaming, but it won’t be particularly overclockable. But then, a small case with restricted airflow precludes any serious overclocking anyway.

There are lessons to be learned. One is to be sure to use actual retail gear, not engineering samples. Most users won’t run into this anyway, but it’s still worth stating. The second lesson is more important: if you find yourself frustrated and tempted to rush the building process, STOP. Walk away. Come back later, after the fever has abated. You should always approach the actual act of building as dispassionately as possible. Celebrate after everything is up and running, and get excited about how you plan on using the system. If you get too wound up during the building process, you’ll likely do something dumb, or overlook something obvious. It’s a lesson I need to re-learn once a year or so. I just wish the price this time wasn’t two motherboards.

We’ve had a Dish Vip622 DVR running for several years now. The 622 is an HD DVR, which can record standard definition and high definition content. The day after Christmas, we were watching a DVD when the audio was almost completely drowned out fan noise. Have you ever heard a PC graphics card when its fan spun up to full speed? That’s similar to what we were hearing.

I paused the Blu-ray player and discovered that the Dish Vip622’s fan was spinning at full speed. Using the Logitech Harmony One to switch to TV mode revealed… nothing. No picture, no audio, nada. The Vip622 had bit the big one.

I didn’t get around to calling Dish Network for several days, but once I did, they scheduled a tech to come in and check it out. The wait, surprisingly, was less than 48 hours. Like most service organizations, Dish doesn’t give a specific time for an appointment. Instead, you’re given a time window. In my case, Iw was too expect the tech between 8AM and 12 noon.

Imagine my surprise when the Dish van rolled up to our house at 8:05AM. When the tech arrived, he listened to my description of the symptoms and immediately went back to his van to get a replacement unit.

Dish apparently no longer carries ViP622’s, so instead the tech swapped in a ViP722k. Interestingly, you lose built-in over-the-air support with the 722k, but do gain another 100GB of hard drive capacity. It took about a half-hour to set it up and verify it was working. While he was setting it up, we talked, mostly about business and new gear. Business has been down somewhat – no real surprise given the recession – and most of his work has been satellite dish relocations as people have moved.

I signed some paperwork, and the tech left. The whole affair had taken less than an hour. After he left, I picked up the Harmony One and fired up the TV.

Nothing.

Actually, there was something: my Onkyo TX-SR875 receiver fired up and the Sony HDTV also powered on. But the Vip722 remained resolutely off.

I grabbed the Dish remote, and tried to turn on the ViP722. Sure enough, it turned on.

I realized that I probably needed to reprogram the Harmony One, which meant downloading the Logitech Harmony software, since I hadn’t programmed the remote since upgrading to Windows 7. Harmony remote are actually programmed via a web app running on a PC or Mac.

The process of programming a Harmony is somewhat cumbersome if you’re a sophisticated user, mainly because Logitech seems to want the whole affair to be idiot-proof. For example, once you start down a path (adding a device, for example), that’s all you can do. Despite this linear mode, you can still click on the tabs at the top of the screen to switch to other modes – you just can’t do anything until you actually press the “done” command.

Also, Logitech’s database of device controls is user-generated. I discovered that the control setup for the ViP722 was severely limited, at least compared to the 622. I actually needed to add a soft button so I could switch to DVR mode to manage or watch recorded shows.

Once the program was uploaded to the remote, I took it upstairs and fired up the TV.

You guessed it: once again, the TV turned on, the A/V receiver fired up, but the DVR stayed off.

It turns out that the 722k has multiple addresses for receiving either IR or UHF signals (the Dish Network remote can operate in either IR or UHF mode, if you have a multiroom setup.) The Harmony apparently sends out its IR signal over a different channel than the 722k’s default setting of IR channel 3. I had to reset the channel to IR channel 1. Dish actually maintains an online copy of the manual. Chapter 10 of the manual describes the process of changing the Dish IR receiver remote address.

Resetting the VIP722k Remote Receiver Address (from the manual)

Once that little chore was done, everything worked as it should.

This took more research than anyone just wanting to watch and record TV should have to perform. It’s as if the complexity of the PC universe is gradually encroaching on the world of consumer electronics. I suppose it’s the price we pay for more flexibility and programmability. But as PC interfaces become easier, the CE world seems to be adopting the worst of the old ways. Let’s hope this all improves over the second decade of the 21st century.

I also built one Intel Atom-based system, using a Travla C156 case. While compact, I could have used any mini-ITX motherboard with that, and the north bridge on the particular motherboard I used had a pretty noisy fan. So when Intel dropped off yet another Atom motherboard kit with me, I wasn’t initially very interested.

But It’s Really Small…

When I finally got around to opening up the box, I realized this kit was just a little different.

All You Need for a Slimline PC

According to Intel, the D945GSEJT, aka “Johnstown”, had a design goal of a 20mm maximum component height. Built around a 1.6GHz Atom N270, the board designers actually hit 20.5mm. It’s a completely fanless design that can fit inside very slim cases.

This motherboard is just 20.5mm tall.

Given the design parameters, the height of the ATX I/O panel was also necessarily limited.

The ATX I/O cluster is half height.

As you can see, the I/O stack is half-height. The real limitation, as we’ll see shortly, are the presence of only three USB ports. I do wish that Intel would give up on VGA for these sorts of systems, and go with DVI and HDMI, though. Power for auxiliary devices is on the motherboard itself, in the form of a four-pin, Molex-style connector. The motherboard also has the DC connector for the external power supply mounted on the motherboard; it’s actually part of the ATX I/O cluster.

These systems were the last pair of systems built to upgrade my Friday Night Follies LAN party systems. Will I be good to go for a few years, or will I be writing a version of this article in a couple of years? That depends, I suppose, on the health of PC gaming a couple of years from now.

But for the present, let’s see what the midrange looks like.

Twin Flavors of Core i7

One interesting artifact of the current http://www.intc.com/priceList.cfm Intel price list is the wholesale pricing for two Core i7 CPUs: the socket 1366 Core i7 920, and the socket 1156 Core i7 860. The 920 weighs in at 2.66GHz, 4.8 gigatransfers per second over its dual QPI links and triple channel DDR3 memory support. The Core i7 860 clocks in at 2.80GHz, but only has a single QPI link, for 2.5 gigatransfers per second, and a dual channel DDR3 memory controller.

Which is faster? It’s hard to say. Both support Hyper-Threading, but the D stepping of the Core i7 920 has become somewhat of a darling among overclockers. However, you can also argue that the Core i7 860 has more Turbo Boost headroom. Turbo Boost is Intel’s auto-overclocking capability, and the 860 offers more Turbo Boost modes than the 920. That’s likely to be a bigger factor than the number of QPI channels. My next Hot Hardware column will touch on the performance comparisons of these two CPU cousins.

The Core i7 920 System

Configurations

While I plan on benchmarking these systems with identical graphics cards, the final builds will be somewhat different, more because of what I have available here in the Basement than because of any intent. Here are the final bill of materials for the two systems:

Let’s consider pricing just for motherboard, CPU and memory for a moment:

Core i7 860 Parts

As you can see, the Bloomfield / X58 system costs more – about $51 more – for just the core components. The key difference is the motherboard pricing: even the micro ATX eVGA board costs about $200, versus the $170 for the mid-level Asus P55 board. However, memory cost per gigabyte is cheaper for the triple channel kit, although the total cost of memory is higher.

Recently, I decided it was time to replace one of the gaming rigs in my office LAN. On most Fridays, my LAN party group gets together for what we affectionately call “Friday Night Follies.” I usually build systems out of older parts for the LAN party systems, which are generally good enough for the games we play.

This time around, though, I wanted to build something a little more current. So I decided to build a compact system based around Gigabyte’s P55-UD4 micro ATX motherboard and a Core i5 750. Part of my rationale was to test long term stability. You can run all the benchmarks in the world, but there’s nothing quite like hammering on a system in a current generation multiplayer game to really test system stability.

Case Imperfect

Gigabyte had sent me a P55M-UDR motherboard, the same micro ATX motherboard I showed off in my recent appearance on Tekzilla. I’d been wanting to build a system around this, as well as push the board a bit. I finally freed up some time, gathered up some component that had been lying around the basement lab, grabbed my electric screwdriver and set to work.

The case, a black NZXT Rogue, was something I’d reviewed at ExtremeTech some time ago. It’s an attractive case that would look comfortable in a Section 8 level. It looks cool, and is a fine case to build a system you plan on just running for awhile. Building a system into it does require a lot of screwdriver work. You need to remove screws to get to the motherboard tray (it’s removable), take out screws to remove the front panel, so you can unscrew the hard drive bay to install the hard drive, which requires more… well, you get the picture.

The NZXT Rogue looks cool, but system building takes a little effort.

The other glitch with this case is that some graphics cards are a tight fit. Actually, it’s long enough to handle long graphics cards. However, the printed circuit board on many high end graphic cards sticks up above the PCI slot plate just a tiny bit. With the Rogue, it means you can’t install the graphics card before sliding the motherboard tray in. What you do is slide the motherboard tray partway in, install the graphics card, then peer into the tiny space between the tray and the case, so you can screw down the graphics card. It’s a minor annoyance, but a little forethought in the design could have prevented this.

Like many compact cases, NZXT got a little creative with the power supply location. The PSU lives above the expansion slots so you need to have all the components installed before installing the PSU. That installation actually works better than you might expect, and NZXT even supplies you with an extension bracket if you use one of the more immense kilowatt PSUs.

Once up and running, the Rogue looks good, keeps the internals reasonably cool and isn’t too noisy. I would have preferred to have fans with 3-pin motherboard connectors (at least as an option.) If you’re not inside the guts of the case, replacing components often, it’s a fine little case.

Other parts consisted of gear I’ve had in the lab forever.

• I’ve had an excellent Antec Signature 650W PSU just sitting on a shelf, which is a tragic waste of a good PSU.
• A 4GB (2 x 2GB) 1600MHz HyperX DDR3 kit from Kingston.
• A Western Digital WD7500 AAYS SATA hard drive (750GB, 7200RPM)
• Lite-On 20x DVD +/- RW optical drive (IDE)
• AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB graphics card.

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I’d built a Windows 7 reference system. That system was built on an Intel DX58SO board using the X58 chipset. So I decided to use it for testing new graphics cards. What happened next was truly weird.

The first thing I was that really long graphics cards are a very tight fit in the CM Scout case I was using. So I transplanted the guts of the system into a Cosmos 1000S that had been sitting in my garage for months. That wasn’t the weird part.

Let’s say, hypothetically, of course, that you have a graphics card that should be really, really fast. So you run your benchmarks and find out it only runs games and other benchmarks no faster than last generation GPUs.

You might just think that it’s just another bit of marketing hype, write it up as crap and be done with it. Or you might think, “that’s really weird.”

So what I did for a day and a half was uninstall and install new drivers, uninstall and install games and benchmarks and even restored backed up partitions that were clean. I still kept getting results that were just plain anomalous.

After all that time, I probably would be forgiven for thinking that I was indeed the victim of marketing hype. After all, I’d done everything I possibly could, right?

But something still didn’t “feel” right.

That Whole “INTP” Thing

Before going further, I should note that, years ago, I took the Myers-Briggs personality assessment test. I don’t put much stock into these sorts of tests, but my company at the time paid for it, so I went ahead with it. Besides, I’ve always liked taking tests.

When the results came back, I wasn’t all that surprised to find I’d fallen into the INTP category. From the Myers-Briggs Foundation web site:

“Seek to develop logical explanations for everything that interests them. Theoretical and abstract, interested more in ideas than in social interaction. Quiet, contained, flexible, and adaptable. Have unusual ability to focus in depth to solve problems in their area of interest. Skeptical, sometimes critical, always analytical.”

That’s almost the definition of a tech geek, after all.

In the previous two articles, I wrote about clean installs of 64-bit Windows 7 onto pretty high end hardware. Not everyone has a Core i7 and 12GB of RAM, however. And more than a few users will want to take the upgrade path (as opposed to a clean install) from 32-bit Windows.

So this time, we’re taking the upgrade path. I upgraded one of the gaming rigs that’s used for the Friday Night Follies LAN parties. This particular system has been running Vista Home Premium for about a year now.

So how did the upgrade go?

As I noted, I wanted to see how a 32-bit Windows 7 upgrade would go on fairly mundane hardware. Let’s take a look at the system specs for this particular system:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 running at 3.16GHz
• Gigabyte GA-33M-DS2R micro-ATX motherboard running the Intel G33 chipset
• 2GB Kingston DDR2 @ 800MHz
• AMD Radeon HD 4870 graphics card w/1GB video memory
• 320GB Western Digital 7200RPM hard drive
• Lite-On 16x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive
• Onboard Audio
• Silverstone SG03 MicroATX small form factor case
• Seasonic 600W PSU

Overall, this is a compact little system that delivers enough CPU and graphics horsepower for most modern games. But it is by no means bleeding edge, with “only” a dual core processor and 2GB of RAM.

Well, it had 2GB of RAM. The first thing I did was upgrade the memory to 4GB. While Windows 7 would run just fine in 2GB, some of the newer games do a little better with more memory. However, all the other parts in the system were left as-is.

So I pop the Windows 7 Home Premium disc into the system, and was told by Setup that “Upgrade is Disabled.” After a moment of head scratching, I realized I’d popped in the 64-bit version. As we all know, if you want to move from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7, it has to be a clean install. After shuffling some discs, I discovered the DVD I’d burned 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

I walked through the setup process for the upgrade. The setup advisor informed me that Windows mail was no longer included with Windows 7, but that Setup would save off my mail settings. That was reassuring, but I didn’t really need it with this particular system, since I’d never actually used Windows mail on it.

Most gearheads travel, for business or just for fun. Prior to starting this blog, the three of the four members of the Case clan spent three weeks in Europe – roughly a week each in Barcelona, Florence and Venice. Being a technophile, I lugged around more tech than I really needed, but I used almost everything I took.

Florence at Night, Looking Across the Arno River. (Nikon D300s, 16-85VR, f4.8, 1/30th, ISO 3200)

Long trips are different than short ones. Given luggage restrictions and the limits of carry-on bags, some hard choices had to be made. My desire not to haul around too much gear in my backpack while hiking around various locales was also a factor.

My choices, of course, weren’t perfect. Let’s take a look at what I hauled with me, and what I might do differently next time.

Traveling for three weeks necessarily meant careful packing. I had one rolling suitcase. Although it was the maximum size to be a carry-on bag, that one became checked baggage. I carried onto the plane a LowePro Fastpack 350, which housed the laptop and dSLR, plus assorted other items. The other carry-on was an old Timberline messenger bag, with lots of small compartments. Food, Nintendo DSi, headphones and other accessories lived in the messenger bag. In a pinch, I could stuff everything into the LowePro, but it would become stone-like, and cram the messenger bag into my checked suitcase.

Here’s the pile of gear.

The Pile of Stuff -- sans Cables and Power Adapters

There's a New Kid in Town

This isn’t about Windows 7 itself. That’s for a later post. It’s about building a reference system to test Windows 7.

I’m working on various Windows 7-related projects. For that, I need a reference system.

What’s a reference system? Glad you asked.

A reference system is something that’s a baseline. Since I’m starting fresh, with a new OS, I wanted to build a system in which I could compare other systems and components. This would necessarily be a high end system, but it wouldn’t be an overclocker’s dream. It is, after all, a reference system. So everything needed to be bog-standard.

Some of the parts for the Windows 7 reference system.

I want to distinguish this from what I call a testbed. I have several here, all running in massive Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 cases. They’re constantly evolving, used to test new motherboard, CPUs, graphics and storage. My intent for the reference system that I just built will be constant going forward, for the next six months at a minimum.

That doesn’t mean it needed to be low performing. I’m working from the thesis that today’s high end is tomorrow’s midrange, which then becomes the low end in a few years. So we’ll start with a fairly high end system. Let’s run down the list of components.

• CPU:  Intel Core i7 975
• Motherboard:  Intel DX58SO
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright Ultra 120
• Graphics:  ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB stock
• Memory:  OCZ DDR3-1333 (@1066MHz) 6GB kit (3 x 2GB modules)
• Power Supply:  Corsair TX850W 850W 80-plus certified
• Hard Drive:  (Primary) Seagate 1TB 7200.12
• Hard Drive:  (Secondary) Western Digital 1TB RE2-GP GreenPower
• Optical Drive:  LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray / HD-DVD / DVD burner combo drive
• Case:  CM Storm Scout (Coolermaster)

So it’s a high end system, but it’s not an extreme high end system. That was the intent. The Scout, by Coolermaster’s CM Storm brand, is a useful mid-tower design. It’s not massive, it’s easy to move around and more important, it’s typical. It’s not huge, like many enthusiasts cases, it’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

For example, you can’t install a really large motherboard, like the Asus Rampage II Extreme. Physically, it would fit, but the back-facing SATA ports would be completely inaccessible. Airflow could be better. But it’s relatively compact and easy to move around. Since this reference build won’t see a lot of frequent hardware changes, the relatively small interior space isn’t a drawback.

Similarly, Intel’s DX58SO is pretty standard fare from Intel. It suffers from having only four memory sockets and unfortunate placement of several of the SATA ports. But it’s reliable, fits easily into standard ATX cases and works.

AMD’s Radeon HD 4890 is not a factory overclocked card, but does support DX10.1. At some point, we’ll have DX11 cards, but since Nvidia doesn’t support DirectX 10.1 features, in went the ATI card. It’s certainly speedy enough in modern games. The hard drives are pretty standard fare. Why a pair of one terabyte drives? The secondary drive is for storing various OS configuration image files. I typically have different image files backed up for gaming benchmarks, content creation testing and so on. And, of course, the LG drive will allow me to check out Blu-ray playback, as well as burn DVDs as needed.

All of these components should give me a pretty good baseline to judge component behavior under Windows 7. Later, I’ll benchmark this baby, but I only just got the Windows 7 RTM installed. I’ll post some results when I get them.

Of course, now that the shipping version of Win7 is up on Microsoft’s Technet, I’m downloading Windows 7 Pro, which is going on my production system. But that’s also a tale for another time.

Let’s take audio speakers as an example. I’ve had a pair of Paradigm Studio 20s rev 3′s as my main left/right pair for years now. They sound terrific — neutral, balanced, airy, clean. I really wanted a center channel speaker to match them, but the then CC-470s cost $700. So I compromised, and instead used a Definitive Technology Procenter 2000s, which cost about half as much. I partially rationalized my decision by telling myself that the area I’d mount the speaker couldn’t handle the much heavier CC-470.

When I found out the CC-470s were being phased out, and the only real match for the Studio 20s would be much pricier, I finally bit the bullet and picked up one of the last remaining CC-470s. The difference was, well, astounding.

A similar thing happened with tripods. I have a lot of professional grade gear:  a Nikon D300, 24-70 f2.8, 70-200 f2.8VR, etc. But when I bought a tripod, the prices of good tripods left me a little breathless, so I bought a midrange Velbon. It was heavy, and after about a year, one of the friction levers that hold the legs in place broke. I stepped up a bit to a midrange Manfrotto that was lighter, but still bulky and heavy. So I used it at home, but never took it anywhere. Finally, I broke down and bought a Gitzo 2540. Now I actually use the tripod more.

I went through similar experiences with tripod ball heads, DVD players, bicycles. In the end, I bought what I really wanted, but went through one or more interim products. That meant the path to getting what I really wanted was more expensive than if I’d just bought the right thing in the first place.

So really, if you’re on the fence, and the higher end graphics card, or better cell phone, or somewhat larger, better HDTV seems just a little too much… go for it. As long as it doesn’t result in bankruptcy or divorce, you (and your family) will be much happier. You’ll pay less money over the long run. And judging from my experience, you’ll keep your gear longer, too.