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If you get “Cannot connect to iTunes store” when doing updates but all other store functions seem to work (browsing, purchasing and downloading apps), then try this weird trick that seems to solve the problem for a lot of people. It definitely worked for my 1st generation iPad. Go to Settings -> General -> Date & Time and turn off “Set Automatically”. Then manually set your date a few years in the future. Go back to the iTunes store app and try to do updates. It will tell you that there is a security issue and you should check your date and time. Now go back to settings again and turn the automatic date back on. Return to the store app again and try to install updates. It should work now. Other things to try are:
Hope this helps… Running sceintific distributed computing apps in BOINC is nice, but they slow down the computer too much if you want to play a demanding 3D game. This is expecially true for BOINC GPU computing projects. In fact if you have just one GPU it makes sense to suspend it if you have only one videocard in your system. If you are running a crossfire/SLI setup then there is absolutely no harm in running GPU compute tasks on your second GPU while you work. Apart from extra watts that your computer will convert into heat, you will not see a difference. Do disable computing on main GPU you can use ignore_ati_dev/ignore_cuda_dev/ignore_nvidia_dev BOINC options. There is also exclusive_app app option. It allows you to list processes/games that require full power of your hardware. When such a process is started, BOINC suspends all computing tasks. The problem is that you have to specify every single process/game name here. If you get a new game, you can to edit the cc_config.xml file and restart BOINC. I spent a few hours with Visual Studio I’ve conjured up a simple app that would cause BOINC to suspend computing when any full-screen application is started on the primary monitor. You can download the app here: http://www.everydayinternetstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/FullScreenDetect.zip Here’s how to use it:
Every time a full screen app is started FullScreenDetect.exe will launch FullScreenDetectIsActive.exe. It will keep running as long as the fullscreen app is in the foreground. BOINC will detect presence of this process and pause computational tasks until it exists. The app is written in C# so it requirest .NET Framework 2.0 to run. It shouldn’t be a problem on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Windows XP doesn’t come with .NET pre-installed but in all likelyhood it should have been installed at some point. The app is very lightweight and doesn’t use up measurable amount of system resources. In fact it spends most of its time sleeping. Although technically screensaver is a full screen application, there is an exception for them. If screensaver is running (ex: pretty BOINC screensaver) you are likely away from the PC and certainly wouldn’t mind your GPU being used for scientific purposes. So the night has passed and the glue has cured on the second Radeon HD 7970 and I got about to installing it. As I suspected, it was a very tight fit. I had to install the lower card first and then the other after it. If I ever need to take cards out it will have to be in the reverse order because upper card completely blocks access to PCIE slot lock. Video card with Arctic Cooling 7970 cooler installed is slighly more than 3 slots wide but it still fits. I’m quite happy with the reuslts. Fans speed up just to about 35% when card goes from idle to full load and the difference in noise is impossible to measure. Idle temperatures are at 53°C/49°C (for first and second videocard correspondingly) while noise level is 45dB. At full load the cards warm up to 72°C/52°C and the noise level stays at 45dB. These are nice temperatures given the fact that cards with stock coolers ran hotter and were much noisier. If I manually set fans to 100% power, the noise goes up to 48dB but temeratures drop to 43°C/39°C. I were into overclocking, I could do a lot with a videocard running this cool. Final verdict: Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 VGA cooler rocks in CrossfireX configuration. You have to mind the size though…
I also did an experiment with upgrading Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 with Noctua 80mm fans. Gigabyte card already had the radiators and heatpipes, but fans were noisy. I removed the cover with original 92mm fans and attached 3 Noctua 80mm fans to the videocard with rubber bands. Of course this was never meant to be a permanent solotion. The plan was if the experiment goes well, to have a custom made mounting bracket manufactured. I used 3 way ran splitter with PWM control to power the fans. Unfortunately the splitter had a large motherboard-style connector and no way to plugging it into mini-VGA connector. The only option was to force fans always to run at full speed.
I ran the test in a CrossFire config with other card being HSI 7970 with custom cooler already installed. I disabled the factory 1000Mhz overclock on Gigabyte so that both cards ran at even reference 925Mhz. Idle tests went well with temeratures of 45°C/36°C and noise level of 45 decibels (with fans running at 100% speed). Full load results were bad though. The card quickly heated up to 80°C, while it’s cousin with Accelero Xtreme stayed at 37°C. At that point I aborted the experiment since it seemed that tempteratures would be on par with stock cooler (though without noise at all). It seems that Gigabyte card just doesn’t have enough metal on it in terms of heatpipes (3 vs 8 on Arctic Cooling) and radiators (much less visibly) to remove heat no matter what fans you attach to it. I put the oriignal cooler back and descided to stick with HSI 7970 + Accelero Xtreme and return the Gigabytes. Of course there was also the water cooling option but I descided that given the reduced mobility of the desktop, risk of leaks and additional trouble when moving components inside the case that it is not worth it. As I was typing this post I tried to overclock the cards to 1000Mhz, while keeping the fan at 100%. It seemed to be stable enough when crunching numbers in BOINC for MilkyWay@Home. While running at 63°C/57°C So the thermal glue has cured and I took the modified HIS 7970 with Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 cooler for a test drive. So far I like the results. The video card is completely quiet when idle and under full load and barely noticeable when fan is manually set to 100%. Since I only have one videocard modded, these tests shouldn’t really be compared head-to-head with Crossfire tests from the previous post, but so far results look promising. For these tests having the side panel on or off didn’t seem to have a measurable effect on either temperature or noise. When the video card is idle fan spins at 20%, with noise level 42dB and VGA temerature 42°C. Under full load (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat running on full settings without VSync), fan speeds up to a mere 29%, with no measurable increase in noise and temperature stays at 62°C. Manually setting the fan speed to 100%, raises noise level to 46dB, while dropping the temperature to 36°C on idle and to 52°C under full load. All-in-all I’m inclined to call this a success so far. I’ve started to mod the second videocard and it should cure overnight so tomorrow I’ll be able to run some Crossfire tests. There are some minor downsides to Accelero Xtreme 7970:
Overall these are minor issues (unless you didn’t plan ahead in terms of size) and given vastly improved cooling and reduced noise I would still rate it as great product. Here are some things to keep in mind when installing this VGA Cooler:
That seems to be it. So far so good. I know that it can be scary to mess with $500.00 piece of hardware while voiding the warranty. It was doubly so for me to mess with two such pieces of hardware. But in reality it is not that hard. Just follow the instructions and you’ll be fine. For some reason instuctions are missing from the arctic.ac website right now. English instructions that I used can be downloaded here. Please note, that these can be out of date!!! Contact arctic.ac support! Radeon 7970 is nice in terms of performance but it comes at a price in terms of fan noise. These videocards consume a lot of power (8+6 pin 12V connectors) and emit a lot of heat when under full load. Small fast turning fans are noisy. Reference design calls for one 80mm radial fan like HIS H797F3GM. It can move a lot of air but is extremely noisy. There are also designs with 3 80mm or 92mm fans like Gigabyte GV-R7970C-3GD. It should be noted that Gigabyte model is also factory overclocked to 1000 Mhz (compared to 925 Mhz standard) I had a pair of each cards and tried running them both and I wasn’t happy with either of the cards under sustained load. They ran hot and noisy. Here are some measurements to compare. I measured the noise with iPad app 1 foot away from the desktop. I used S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat to generate 100% crossfire GPU load (2560×1440, everything maxed out and looking at a lot of grass). GPU data was captured by GPU-Z. I only measured data for the 1st GPU. Generally, second GPU in CrossfireX config tends to run 10..15°C cooler than the first so if I could get cooling of the first GPU under control, second should be no problem. I did separate test with and without case side panel installed because mine doesn’t have any means of ventilation. Two fully loaded 7900 generation videocards generate a lot of heat that starts to build up. Most likely I’ll need to come up with some kind of side panel fan.
I considered installing waterblock and the rest of the watercooling system and decided against it. Even though I have enough space in my LIAN-LI case to fit everything inside (even radiators), it would make swapping out parts too much hastle. And then there is always risk of a leak, pump failure, etc. On the air-cooling front, I’m going to try several options: 1) Replacing stock cooler on HIS Radeon HD 7970 with Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970. It gets decent reviews in terms of cooling and noise. The downside is that you have to install it yourself and in doing so you are dstroying the thermal pads from the stock cooler. If you would want to get warranty service, you’ll have to find new ones and reinstall everything which can be tricky. In fact as I’m typing this post, one of my HIS 7970 sits in the next room waiting for non-conductive thermal glue to cure on RAM and VRM heatsinks. Hopefully by tonight it will have cured and if I didn’t destroy anything in the process, I will be able to install main heatsink and run some benchmarks. Mean while I tried connecting the fans to 12V PSU (to run on 100% speed) and was quite happy with the noise level. So provided that the card will not overheat, I may stop with this solution and mod the second videocard in my 7970 crossfire config in the same way. I’m keeping my fingers crossed… 2) Replacing 3 stock 80mm fans on Gigabyte 7970 with Noctua 80mm fans. They should move as much if not more air and are near silent even when running full speed. This is a much less intrusive procedure since all it only takes a couple of screws to remove the fans while leaving the heatsink in place (no radiator gluing required). The down side is that I will need to create a custom bracket to keep them permanantly attached to the videocard. I’ll probably have to design it in SketchUp and have shapeways.com fabricate them for me. If both solutions work, I’m likely to keep Gigabyte cards with Noctua fans. I like Gigabyte cards better because they ramp up fan speed quicker. The way HIS keeps fan at 55% when you can almost boil tea on the videocard is plan wrong. Also Gigabyte comes with factory overclock which is nice. I also like Noctua fans. Every time I build a new PC, first thing I do is replace all fans with Noctua which results in very silent and well cooled PC. So if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to test the first option tonight and post the results. Stay tuned. A couple of nice hacks recently published on astrophotography blog:
In light of the fact that Intel will soon bring TRIM support to RAID0 SSD setups I’ve decided to get rid of over-provisioning as I migrated my OS. As you can see, so far the write performance has not dropped significatly.
 Inter 320 series 600GB RAID0 performance I’ve been using this array for almost a month now and it has been pretty stable. I moved a lot of data though – definitely more than the size of the disks. Windows has been reinstalled a couple of times with full backups of my apps and multimedia being restored (for reasons unrelated to the array). Lets take a look at the performance…. As you can see the performance did drop but not significately. Now bad at all, considering the fact that TRIM is out of the picture completely. At some point of time I started getting an error message “Home PC is unresponsive” when trying to configure backup of one of my machines with Windows Home Server. Backups started failing at that point too. I did a lot of research and found several solutions that I will summarize here. None of them worked for me so I had to do more research and find an extension to existing solution. After examining system logs with event viewer I found following entries:
that lead me to believe that there is a file system error on system reserved partitions. See solution one below: Solution 1: fix file system errors on your disksYou can either run chkdsk /f <disk letter> for all of your disks or right click on a disk, select “Properties”, then select “Tools” and press “Check Now” under the “error-checking” section. Leave the first checkbox on (automatically fix file system errors) and leave the second one off (scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors). Click “Start” and the errors will get fixed. If you are doing this on a system disk that Windows boots from then you will need to reboot for system to check it. This method almost worked for me. The problem was that I had several disks with Windows 7. These have “System Reserved” 100MB partitions at the start of the disk that doesn’t have a drive letter assigned. To check these, you need to temporarily assign them drive letters and then check for errors. You can then delete drive letters. Solution 2: re-install .NETDownload .NET cleanup tool and remove all .NET frameworks from your computer. Reboot. After than download only the latest .NET framework (at this time it is 4.0) and manually install it. Tool can be downloaded here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2006/05/30/611355.aspx Solution 3: Registry fix suggested by HP
Please note that it seems that few computers have this registry key. If you don’t – this solution is not for you. Hope this helps. If you run into similar problem and find other solutions please drop me a comment. |
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It’s beed another month of smooth sailing with my Intel Series 320 SSDs in RAID-0 array. I’ve pumped at least several hundred gigabytes of data though it due to some heavy image processing. Here’s how it looks now: