Belkin N150

I finally found a wireless router. I was actually looking for a wireless access point only, but it seems the stores only stock the wireless router / ADSL modem types.

I read some reviews on the Belkin and the general feeling was that it isn't a very good device. I was sceptical but it was cheap and it was the only one that was close to what I needed, the other combos where over the top industrial things at an over the top price.

I installed it and it works very well. Here in my area the ADSL lines are very noisy and the Belkin manages to sync @ 4096 mbps, so that is very good.

My Apple iPad is also quite happy with the router, which was the main reason I replaced my old wireless router. The iPad didn't work at all with the old wireless.

So the Belkin N150 is a very nice cheap wireless router / modem, just don't expect industrial performance from it, but for home use it is very good.

Nintendo 3DS

So the new Nintendo 3DS is out in South Africa and I had a peek at the photos and marketing material. I still need to see it in action but I am tempted to get one.

The marketing material says it can play DS games and the original GameBoy and GameBoy Color games. I am guessing it can play GameBoy Advance games too. I would probably need to rebuy them online but it should be cheap.

The 3DS games look brilliant though, so that already will make it worth the money. I should probably first finish all my PSP games before buying a new hand held console, but it is very tempting.

Official 3DS page.

PC Upgrade 2010, Part 2

I eventually got all my parts and upgraded the PC. It was not without its own set of drama. The first problem I encountered was with my memory. I bought 4 x 2Gb OCZ Gold DDR3 1333MHz memory. After I installed Windows, I could only use 4Gb, the other 4Gb was 'reserved'. Three hours later I found a post on the OCZ forum suggesting that my BIOS detected my DRAM settings wrong and they were right. I manually had to set my DRAM settings in the BIOS, but at least that worked.

i7 Stock Cooler

I then decided to run memtest86+ just in case, and the horror! I had errors in test number 8 in memtest86+. I took out all my DIMMS and reinserted them again, ran memtest86+ and no errors, and just to be sure I ran 5 passes of the tests and another 2 passes the next day.

Cooler Master H212+

My next challenge was heat. The i7 870 with its stock cooler was not good enough. The i7 under load went up to 90C which is not good. Idle temp was at 35C, not bad, but not good either. I wanted to replace the stock cooler with the Cooler Master Hyper 212+ but no one had immediate stock so I had to take whatever was on stock at the first computer shop that had any CPU coolers.

Zalman S9700

This turned out to be a Zalman S9700 LED, which is a massive heat sink and heavy, 790g heavy, so mounting that vertically in my case seems a bit excessive. The good news though is my CPU idle at 22C and with average use it goes up to 35C. I still need to stress test the new cooler.

I will also run some benchmarks. The current feeling is that this machine is very very fast. Running a VM and developing on the host at the same time is no problem at all.

PC Upgrade 2010

My current development PC at home is getting close to 3 years old now. I decided it was time to do an upgrade.

I browsed and read lots and lots of blog posts and articles around the different CPUs available and eventually settled on the Intel i7 870.

I like the new Turbo Boost functionality on the i7, but the i7 870 was priced well. I also prefer dual channel instead of triple channel so the 870 seemed to be a good fit.

Dual channel also means my motherboard was cheaper than the triple channel versions.

I am not into over clocking at all, so I settled for a motherboard that does what I need and nothing more. I did investigate its performance on some of the well known benchmarking websites.

The MSi board performed on par with all the other expensive boards, the only thing about the MSi board is that over clocking is not its claim to fame, which is fine with me.

The RAM in my new machine will be OCZ DDR 3 1333MHz, a full 8Gb. I bought the OCZ RAM because it was on special at Take2.co.za.

The RAM also looks nice.

I also decided to make an investment in the new SSD hard drives. This SSD was expensive compared to what I could get if I bought a normal hard drive, but according to all the benchmark tests the difference in speed will be huge.

Only problem is I will only have 60Gb space, so I will need to micro manage my hard drive usage again like back in the 90's.

Hard drives are so big and cheap lately, that I almost never delete files any more.

My PC components should arrive on Monday, so Monday night will be PC building night.

The Samsung 24" LED LCD (BX2450)

I just saw this amazing Samsung at Take2.co.za, and I am impressed. More than impressed, I want it.

The monitor is really very easy on the eyes. It has the standard HD resolution that everyone has standardized on, but it has no DVI port.

My current graphics card, the NVidia 8800GT does not have HDMI out ports.

I did find a conversion dongle at Amazon. So I can use this with my existing graphics card.