Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

After a week Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 (東京マグニチュード8.0) finished broadcasting in japan I only start watching this anime series, and finish it within 2 days, total 11 episodes. The anime illustrate the city infrastructure and catastrophe after effect in very realistic manner, as the anime production unit BANES claims that this is based on series of simulation supported by experiences of actual earthquake situation in Japan.

Here is the plot: 

The series is set in Tokyo after an earthquake measuring a magnitude 8.0 on the Richter scale shakes the city's foundations and landscape, resulting in the Tokyo Tower, Rainbow Bridge and other noted landmarks falling. Amidst the chaos, siblings Mirai and Yūki, who were visiting a robot exhibition in Odaiba at the beginning of their summer vacation, struggle to reach their parents in their house in Setagaya assisted by a female motorcycle courier named Mari, who is striving to reach her own daughter and mother in Sanjengaya. (From Wikipedia)

This series featuring with pretty realistic graphics detail especially on collapsed building infrastructure, this proven the production unit did plenty of research and simulation on the actual situation. Besides, the sound effect and music presentation did in decent way as it plays at right timing  and right mood accordingly with the smooth paces of story telling. Lastly, this series did great job overall in visual, sound, story telling and the content, this is recommended to everyone who always watch anime or anyone always complaining about his/her life.

OP - 「キミノウタ」 (Your Song)
by Abingdon Boys School

Benchmark: FSB 1600vs1700 Memory Performance

I am curious how much performance would it bring to memory while increasing FSB speed, so I've increase my cpu bus speed to 425 MHz for 100 MHz Rated FSB increment and remain the core speed margin.

CPU clocks configuration showing on CPU-Z

Everest Benchmark

I've use  Everest for the only benchmark for the comparison to the performance result that previous post did. Basically is tested using exactly same test environment but just the cpu clock configurations are 9.0 x 400 and 8.5 x 425.

 

Memory Read 

Memory Write

 

Memory Copy
 

Memory Latency

Conclusion

The benchmark result indicates memory performance does increase by just increasing FSB frequency for the throughput, the memory read performance increase is very minimal, but memory write does the different.  Lastly, the downside of increasing FSB frequency seems will resulted greater of memory latency, and luckily it is very minimal as well as compare to the gain from memory write.

Benchmark: 2x2GB vs 4x2GB 1066Mhz DDR2 RAM

My friend and i first thought of increasing of memory capacity might resulted in lower performance, so i decided to do benchmark comparison on old pair against old pair plus my newly bought pair of Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz DDR2 RAM module which means 2x2GB vs 4x2GB configurations. Four of them are exactly same performance, but the new pair just come with extended heatsink. The OS platform using for benchmark is Windows 7 64-bit RC build 7100 and hardware configurations of my system shown in CPU-Z at below:

System configuration showing in CPU-Z.

I have used Everest v4.60 beta and SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP4 to benchmark and compare the configurations performance differences.

EVEREST Benchmark
The yellow bar is 4x2GB setup and the green bar is 2x2GB setup.

Memory Read Benchmark

Memory Write Benchmark

Memory Copy Benchmark

Memory Latency Benchmark

SiSoftware Sandra Benchmark
The red and orange bars are 4x2GB configuration and the rest 3 are 2x2GB configuration.

Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Memory Latency - Random Access Benchmark

Memory Latency - Linear Access Benchmark

Cache and Memory Benchmark

Conclusion
Memory Read, Write and Copy having slight bandwidth increase instead of dropping, and the latency is having no different. After all, the memory capacity did not dropping the memory performance as we expected.

Overclocking Wolfdale E7300

Overclocking Intel Wolfdale processor isn't a fresh news, since it is very popular cheaper alternative overclocking chip for hitting great Cost to Performance ratio.

Previously i am lightly OC at only 3.2 GHz, but due to recently Gerry has borrow my RAM for his processor OC testing that hitting 4 GHz, so i plan to find a effective daily OC rate.

Figure 1: 3.8 Ghz overclocking.

First stable OC setting, lowered multiplier from 10.0 to 9.5 for 400MHz 3.8Ghz clock with 1600MHz FSB seems like is a good power output but the core voltage has to running at 1.4v - the border of lifespan degradation. It is not preferable for daily usage due to high vcore and core temp range, better avoid for changing of weather.

Figure 2: 3.64 GHz overclocking.

Second stable OC setting for tonight, one step lower of multiplier to 9.0 for slightly increase bus speed to 405MHz, lower core temp and vcore. This setting is nice for not-too-high vcore 1.33 v and the core temp remain under 65°C under full load.

Next will do temperature testing on afternoon time and further bus speed.

うみねこのなく頃に

Umineko no Naku Koro ni (うみねこのなく頃に, literally When Seagulls Cry)[Ref: wikipedia] is a Japanese murder mystery dōjin soft sound novel series produced by 07th Expansion. Umineko is the third title in this "When They Cry" murder misery series. The first and second title are Higurashi no Naku Koro ni(ひぐらしのなく頃に) and Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai(ひぐらしのなく頃に解), and the 4th title is Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru (うみねこのなく頃に散).

I din't play the game series but i did watch the anime of Higurashi series and fortunately now this Umineko is on air. If you never watch the anime or play the game of this series, i would like strongly recommend this to you if you like Mysterious story but it has certain level of violence.

うみねこのなく頃にOP　片翼の鳥

戦場のヴァルキュリア OP II

MARIA - カナシミレンサ

This is Valkyrie Chronicles(戦場のヴァルキュリア) second opening theme song, Kanashimi Rensa(カナシミレンサ) literally means "Chain of sadness". According to progression of the story, the music composed with deep tone to express the growing sadness as oppose to first opening theme song.

MARIA is all female J-Pop band. Wikipedia | Official Website

Zalman Z-Machine GV1000

I went to KL for conference on 16th and 17th July for the company sake. After first day conference i visited Low Yat Plaza (a must-visit place for me everytime went KL) for a VGA cooler since my PowerColor HD4850 having overheating issue under full load. Before spending the money, I have done some research on various make of VGA cooler available in the market, but surprisingly i found the Zalman Z-Machine GV1000 which is in my first buying list. Here we go for today protagonist.

Figure 1: Zalman Z-Machine GV1000 in the box.

The box just included simple description of the product and it ain't informative for compatibility of graphic card, and this is critical, but for sure i knew it support my graphic card since i have did the research.

Figure 2: All the components out of the box.

Preparation of installation, take out every component out of the box.
Basically it contains:

• One (1) VGA Cooler
• Eight (8) RAM Heatsinks
• Four (4) Nipples
• Four (4) Fixing Nuts
• Four (4) Fixing Nuts for SLI/CrossFire
• One (1) PVC Washer Plate
• Eight (8) Rubber Rings
• Four (4) Springs
• One (1) Thermal Grease
• One (1) Fan Controller (FAN MATE 2)
• One (1) Cable for FAN MATE 2
• One (1) Double-Sided Tape (to attach FAN MATE 2)
• One (1) User’s Manual

Figure 3: Closer look of the VGA cooler.

The heatsink has 4 individual heatpipe from the conduction area, whole unit of it was made in pure copper. The cooling fan was transparent with LED illumination for the emphasis of enthusiastic.

Figure 4: My graphic card PowerColor HD4850.

PowerColor cooler wasn't efficiency, it could raise the temperature from 50°C to 80°C just in 20 sec under full load.

Figure 5: The Zalman cooler installed on my HD4850.

After more than hour of installation work, the cooler finally installed on my graphic card. Why it takes so long to get done? Yeah, thanks to the 8 ram module heatsinks, I have to remove it slowly with stationary knife and then wipe off the adhesive remainder of the thermal adhesive tape. Generally the rest of installtion work could be finish within 15 minutes.

Figure 6: The Red LED light of cooling fan in the dark.

Close shot on the running cooling fan red light in the dark. The noise level on 5V quiet mode definitely very quiet as most silent fan do, and the full speed 12V wasn't very loud as expected, the noise level just like normal non ball-bearing fan noise.

Figure 7: The graphic card installed and running.

Overview of my motherboard after the installation. CPU with green orb and graphic card with red orb... The cables still in a mess and the IDE cable was the most troublesome to make tidy up.

Figure 8: GPU-Z showing the GPU info.

The last job get to be done was the performance testing, overclock the GPU clock to 660MHz from 635MHz (normal HD4850 default clock is 625MHz) and slightly increase Memory clock to 1000MHz.

Figure 9: 30 mins testing with ATiTool and GPU-Z monitoring.

Let's see the result of testing, the ATiTool runs 30 minutes, the Zalman cooler was doing great job remain the GPU temp below 60°C and the GPU mem controller temp below 70°C under full load and the room temperature around 27°C. Lastly, the performance of the cooler proofed to be great and the noise level on full speed wasn't loud as expected, it worth for the coins as it bring such stability to the card.