PC Upgrade Results and Future Project

Almost two months after I got it up and running, I'm finally ready to talk about how my PC upgrade went. Here's my upgraded PC's specs:

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R
Intel Pentium Dual-Core e2180 @ 3.2 GHz (8x400)
2x1 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1066
EVGA GeForce 8600 GT
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150
Seagate 120 GB PATA (System)
Maxtor 200 GB PATA + Maxtor 500 GB SATA (Storage)
Seagate 120 GB SATA (Cache)
Benq DW1640

The upgrade was fairly smooth... The biggest problem I had was with running my SATA ports in AHCI mode. AHCI mode is required in order to enable special SATA features like hot-plugging and native command queueing, but it caused nothing but problems for me. I'm assuming because two of my hard drives are not native SATA devices and are connected using PATA to SATA adapters, they just would not run at full speed when I had the SATA ports set to AHCI mode. They were stuck using "Multi-word DMA mode 2," which is much slower than Ultra DMA mode 5 or 6, which is what they were supposed to be using. The two native SATA drives were both using Ultra DMA, so they worked well.

I tried lots of different things to fix the problem. Installing Intel's chipset drivers, re-installing Windows Vista, changing the jumpers on the PATA drives... Nothing worked. So, I tried changing the SATA ports back to IDE mode. Like magic, the drives worked at full speed again. So, I guess I learned that PATA drives just don't work well when connected to SATA ports in AHCI mode.

I also ran into some issues with my NEC DVD drive. I had my two DVD drives connected to the PATA port on the motherboard, but the NEC drive refused to work. I tried things like switching the master/slave configuration and even disconnecting the BenQ drive, but it just wouldn't work. Whenever I inserted a disc, the system would freeze for a few seconds and then the NEC drive would disappear from Windows. It was just really weird, so I disconnected the drive. The BenQ drive works perfectly, though.

After I got the hardware problems sorted out, I spent a lot of time playing with the overclock settings in the BIOS. I knew that finding the right settings would take a lot of time, and a lot of blue screens, but I was prepared for it. I installed Windows Vista without activating it just because I knew I could mess up the OS during my testing. I tried a lot of different settings, and I pretty much found the limits of my CPU, RAM, and motherboard combination.

I chose Intel's e2180 CPU for this system because the e21x0 series were known to be great overclockers. The e2180 is a 2GHz CPU, and many people were getting it running at well over 3 GHz. Using the default voltage (1.225v), I could run the CPU at 3 GHz and not fail stress tests. Anything over 3 GHz resulted in Prime95 failing within minutes. So, to push my CPU over 3 GHz and avoid failing the stress tests, I had to increase the voltage. The farthest I pushed the CPU was 3.6 GHz using 1.5v, but it was way too hot, and Prime95 would actually cause the system to crash. So, after trying a lot of different things, I settled on 3.2 GHz using 1.325v. It passed the stress tests and the CPU temperature under load was around 60 C, which is a safe load temperature for the e2180.

Initially, I purchased a Radeon HD 2600 XT to put in this system, but I wasn't satisfied with it. My only requirement for the video card was to do full-rate deinterlacing using VMR9 Renderless in Media Player Classic. I'm fairly certain that it's solely a driver problem, but that Radeon card only did half-rate deinterlacing under VMR9. The ATI card has all kinds of fancy adaptive deinterlacing modes, but they only work in the new Enhanced Video Renderer. I very much prefer VMR9 Renderless over EVR because VMR9 Renderless supports soft subtitles and deinterlacing at the same time. I can use VSFilter to use soft subtitles with EVR, but VSFilter doesn't pass the interlacing flags to the renderer, which means that it won't turn deinterlacing on.

I wasn't willing to wait for ATI to fix that problem, so I just returned the card and picked an NVIDIA card. Before I upgraded the computer, it had a GeForce 7600 GS, and it supported full-rate deinterlacing using VMR9 Renderless. Sure enough, the new GeForce 8600 GT also does full-rate deinterlacing while using VMR9 Renderless.

Once I got everything settled, it was time to test it to make sure it passed my only requirement: to play 1080i AVC files with full-rate deinterlacing. Since I had a bunch of MPEG-2 HD files sitting on the hard drive, I did a quick test to see how many it could play at the same time. The highest I got was four, and that was because the hard drive couldn't keep up. The CPU and video card weren't even breaking a sweat. So, I felt very confident that this machine could play 1080i AVC. I took a 1920x1080i MPEG-2 file and encoded it to MPEG-4 AVC using x264. Playback using CoreAVC was flawless. I noticed that the CPU usage wasn't too, too high, so I tried to play the video using ffdshow. Even with ffdshow's significantly slower AVC decoding, the file played perfectly. So, the machine passed the test with flying colors.

The PC I upgraded is the "family computer," so I don't really have access to it at all times. The computer in my room is an aging iBook G3 900 Mhz, and I'm starting to really feel how slow it is. I can't even play YouTube videos without bogging the system down. I am very impressed by the performance I got out of that budget CPU, so I'm planning on building myself a new PC. I'm thinking something like e2180, G33 based motherboard, GeForce 8400, Micro ATX slim case, and a nice, 20 inch LCD monitor.

The picture for today is the inside of the upgraded PC. I think I did a decent job with cable management this time around. SATA cables helped a lot.