Thursday April 10, 2008 
James C. Liu's Weblog
Thursday April 10, 2008
A head case over 2 Antec cases
"Too many cases." That's what I thought when I walked into my garage. But I'd like to get more of the right cases.
My latest case obsessions
Last Friday, Fry's had a sale on the new Antec Minuet 350. Regularly, $90, they had them on sale for $70. I already went and checked out the Sunnyvale store. Only the older minuet 300 left. Maybe more coming. But Palo Alto store had two left and I bought them both. This is my new favourite case; this new Minuet 350 now includes a 80+ certified power-supply with active PFC. While efficiency isn't 80+% down below 60 Watts, it's still quite a bit better than lots of cheap power supplies bundled with a case. Plus, because of the efficiency, less waste heat means quieter and cooler PC. It's a low-profile desktop case that only takes low-pro add-on cards, and micro-ATX motherboards, but that's perfect for me, since I've got a lot of microATX and mini-ITX boards.
The sale on the minuet 350 looks like it ended Tuesday, but I would expect it to happen again in the next couple of months and I'm ready to buy a couple more. When I do the calculation on savings over just 1 year for a system I leave on all the time, a good rule is to price it at $2/Watt saved per year. I've put the same board into a cheap case/PSU before and typically have been surprised that the total system eats 75 watts. But in an efficient case/PSU, the total draw is just 50 watts. If I save 25Watts on average, that's $50/yr!. That pays for the difference in just one year over a cheaper case. Makes lots of economic sense to me.
For the folks who want a bigger box to hold full sized/full height option cards, a sale I'd look out for would be the Antel NSK-4480 and NSK-4480B. (Latter one is a black version of the same case). Both are quiet cases and come with an earthwatts 380 PSU, also 80+ certified. And I picked up 2 of these at Fry's in the last few months for just $49.99. Regularly, they're around $89.99, still a great deal, because you'll save money as well and enjoy lower noise.
What to do with the old cases?
I have quite a few cool-n-quiet cases still new-in-box and for a hoarder like me, it's a great feeling. But computer cases are a lot bigger than fishing tackle, so the shelf space they're occupying is very conspicuous and running out. As a volunteer teacher for a Grade 3 - 5 PC building class, I'm actually seriously thinking about giving away the computers at the end of the class. Only, while I do stock a lot of parts, I don't quite have 15 - 20 systems to give away twice a year. But the kids do always ask on the first day if they get to keep the computers. I'm just not sure what a 3rd grader is going to do with a Solaris box. Anyone out there want to help write a bunch of educational software or port EDU software to Solaris? April 10, 2008 10:25 AM PDT Permalink
Wednesday April 09, 2008
Solaris on $50 ECS 945GCT-M Combo Special
An Awesome Combo If It's On Sale
A few months back, I saw a Fry's sale on a Motherboard/CPU combo that listed the ECS 945GCT-M motherboard with Celeron 430 retail processor for $59.99, limit 1 per person. I thought it was an awesome buy and so at lunch time, 2 of my colleagues and I headed out to Fry's and I convinced them to each purchase one and so I had 3 combos sitting in my office. The next week, the same ad appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, but this time the price on the combo was $49.99, so I couldn't help myself and my 2 buddies and I headed over again, and I got another 3 boards. Not only do the motherboards provide Intel ICH7 chipsets with LGA775 sockets and support Core2-Duo processors, the ad on the 2nd week, offered version 3 of the motherboard which have 1333 MHz Front Side Buses.
The Celeron 430 is also a great price/performer. At 35 Watts average TDP, it's got a Conroe-L based core and supports 64-bit processing. Plus at 1.8GHz, it's fairly speedy. The way I guage roughly how fast the system is going to behave is to watch the first bootup after a Solaris install, when the SMF plumbs the first 191 services. And in less time than I can walk over to the frige and grab a cold beverage, the system is at the login prompt.
All Devices Almost Hunky-Dory
We've been running Solaris Nevada on this since build 79 or so. At that time, the onboard Realtek 8101E NIC didn't work properly. And the HD audio codec wasn't recognized. But the onboard Intel 945GZ integrated graphics controller works just fine with Xorg. Plus the SATA and IDE ports work as expected. And the board offers 2 PCI-express x1 lane slots and a single PCI-express x16 slot. Gen1 of course. But what would you expect for $50 - including the CPU!
Recently, I installed Nevada b86 on the system. And behold, the Realtek 8101E NIC is now supported. Surprisingly, it's not supported under the Solaris rtls driver, even though this is a Fast Ethernet (10/100 Mbps) port. Instead, it's supported under the rge driver, which has traditionally supported the Realtek 8169 Gigabit PCI device. Thanks to Miles Xu in Beijing for notifying me about this. This new Realtek 8101E is connected off the PCI-express bus, and register-wise, looking at the BSD source code, it looks much more like the 8169 NIC than the older 8139-series.
At first, I suffered some hardware difficulties with one of these ECS motherboards I had loaned out to some colleagues, and so the NIC would not work properly. But with 5 spares, I was easily able to replace it and try it again. I'm not sure what caused the failure, but secretly, we're using this as test systems for PCI-express HBAs and GigE NICs during development. The thinking is that if it will run on a dirt cheap system, it should have fewer issues running on a premium box.
Adding HD Audio Support to the Solaris audiohd Driver
The only device not yet supported was the audio codec. The Solaris audiohd driver attempts to attach() but fails when it encounters the codec. I decided to see if I could hack support into the driver by simply adding the PCI vendor/devID into the driver. The first step is to identify the codec. The easiest way on Solaris is to simply run:
# dmesg | grep audiohd
You should see some error message such like:
Apr 8 18:02:14 gyoza audiosup: [ID 579887 kern.warning] WARNING: audiohd0: uns upported HD codec vid=0x83847682, sid=0x00000000, rev=0x0010360
This tells us that the codec vendor (0x8384) is SigmaTel, and the DevID=0x7682, according to a web search, seems to indicate this is a type of STAC92XX type of codec.
Source and header files for the Solaris audiohd driver can be found at www.opensolaris.org. You need to download the
After identifying the codec, I edited the
#define AUDIOHD_VID_STAC9200 0x83847690
On my ECS945GCT-M system, have an 0x83847682 device which the web indicated was a type of STAC92xx codec and so I added a new define like:
# define AUDIOHD_VID_STAC9200X 0x83847682
and then editing the
# make; make install
I ended up with an
To update and test the driver, I did the following:
# update_drv audiohd # modload ./amd64/audiohd # devfsadm
After looking inside the /dev/ filesystem and seeing if ./audio and ./audioctl were created:
# ls /dev/au*
I was able to play a few audio clips from /usr/demo/SOUND/sounds/.
When I get a non-working audio driver working, often the the Gnome desktop audio icon is still appear blanked out. The easiest way to cure this is to logout, and then login again without rebooting.
There are plans underway to improve audiohd and maybe integrate that with more popular audio technologies in the future. So hopefully, I won't need to do this every time. But it's not too hard or too big of a hassle since the Solaris source code is out there and easily available. And it was worth the small effort since I now have an excellent value system that plays video and music just fine.
April 09, 2008 05:32 PM PDT Permalink
