Upgrading BIOS of CROSSHAIR motherboard

Today I finally updated the BIOS. I wanted to to do this since I got the computer but the ASUS site was not opening up the downloads page for CROSSHAIR.

• You may find info about CROSSHAIR ASUS site official
• Another very good site with useful info was pcstat review of CROSSHAIR.

Now after so many day of waiting I have finally got the new BIOS. The idea being that any product or software ships with bugs and they are sorted out as time progresses. I am a software engineer and I know how software's are made. Basically, the makers/manufacturers decide based on the severity of the bugs remaining and the degree of testing done whether to release the software or not. Rest are handled as updates. Also manufacturers cant simulate every possible scenario in which the product will be used.

The latest version of BIOS as of today was 904. 905 was also there as a BETA but I am using the release version. Next I downloaded the ASUS update utility from Asus site to update the bios.

Asus download site for CROSSHAIR

I tried using the EzFlash option from he BIOS itself but the thing wasn't showing my file correctly and was displaying garbage characters. Not to take that risk, I tried it with ASUS update utility. Even after downloading the latest one from the site , the little bugger found even more latest version of itself on asus site and spent a lot of time comfortably downloading it. The latest version now being 7.13.04.

Even though this version of ASUS update does not say its compatibility with Vista. I decided to use it anyway with the reason explained above.

The upgrade progressed nicely without much trouble. I had closed all other programs before I went into this.

It asked for the machine to be restarted. It restarted. I checked the setup to see any visible changes but couldn't find any.

So after the BIOS update, next few things to do for me would be:

• Find the maximum overclocking limit of my machine. 6000+ @ 3Mhz now
• Drill fan holes in the side panel door to fit three big fans. for cooling the motherboard-CPU.

Right now the air gets trapped inside when the door is closed and temperature crosses 60C. Though not very high, I would like to reduce it. The fans I am gonna fit is 120mm Scythe S-Flex 63 CFM. I already have two and I am gonna get some more. Super silent and mighty efficient.

My ThermalRight 120 extreme is helping a lot bit in moving heat away from the processor but it need to go out of cabinet also. Power supply doesn't feel things to be hot enough to speed up its fan. Those Corsair guys put some hot material in 620HX.

Vista not booting "bootmgr compressed" I can compress it but cant read it later

Superb thing happened to me the other day

I have installed Vista on my system drive which was only 10 GB in size, So i am always short on space since beginning. After moving all the optional things like pagefile and index location i am able to fit vista in there.

So for freeing up some space i compressed my system drive . It gave some warning regarding this but i ignored them. Very stupid thing as it turned out.

So after the days work(??) i switched off the computer and went to sleep.

Next the comp refused to boot stating that the bootmgr(a file it uses to boot) is compressed and it does not like the boot files to be touched and advised me to press ALT+CTRL+DEL to restart the comp.

Now everybody and their kids know the ALT+CTRL+DEL restarts the comp, and how is this thing gonna improve the situation is not stated. Carrying out the order takes us back to the same message. Some helpful(recursive) message this.

Now some net searching about this revealed it to be a very generic and unsolved problem. It plagues both XP and Vista it seems. They ask permission for useful things like defrag an scandisk but allow such a destructive operation to be carried out by anyone.

The solution to this as i found out here

http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-bootmgr-missing.html

was :

compact /u c:\bootmgr

compact /u c:\ntldr

from the command prompt thru XP or Vista recovery console by booting from the XP ot vista install disk.

I got to the point of entering the password for windows but failed there since i dont use password for my login and dont remember any password i might have entered while installing.

Then i tried to change the compressed drive parameter from Ubuntu but it does not seem to have any option for that.

How do you undo an operation

Best way to undo any operation is to reverse the steps done. Right.

So i took my hard disk to friends place, Attached it there, ran the above commands for my drive and also by the GUI to be sure about it.

Came back . Started comp and it STARTED.

So much excitement for a very silly thing to do . I mean when you are so short of space that you have to compress entire drive, its best to get a new hard disk.

I really need to get two HDD and get them working in RAID 0 very soon now.

Vista experience index base score of 5.3

:Windows experience index base score: Hmm...

I didn't know about this thingie, nobody seems to be talking about it while discussing Vista. Well, not many are talkin about Vista in the first place so the chances of mention of this thing would be remote.

So. I got the score of 5.3 with subscore as follows

Processor 5.5
Memory(RAM) 5.9
Graphics 5.9
Gaming graphics 5.9
Primary Hard Disk 5.3

This is with the AMD 6000+ Processor running at stock speed of 3000Mhz.

Now i cant do much about the HDD score.(WD 250 GB PATA) so i decided to play around with the processor clock speeds.

With the processor overclocked by 5% 3150Mhz. the processor score stayed at 5.5.
Overclocking by 10% 3300Mhz The processor score moved to 5.6. SS as below

Since the Vista Base score is the least score out of the component scores, i got the Vista base score of 5.3. How to get the HDD score to move up is not known to me right now but i'm sure i'll be able to do that once i get two SATA HDD to run in RAID 0 configuration but thats still a long time to go.

This overclocking was done from the BIOS menu directly without spending much thinking effort on it. Short of time and will. Just wanted to try out the effect.

I'm sure when i get some time to spend on tweaking the clocking values and the cooling subsystem. I'm planning to get a peltier junction to have the best localised cooling for the processor. Then It will be fun to overclock and to extract performance out of processor.

I would love to know the maximum score of components. But since the scoring is capped at 5.9 for some time atleast (Could take a long time for Vista to gain acceptance with XP still being OK and Vista not offering any visible benefits) i'll just have to wait.

Any hackers around to unlock the scoring???

Crysis Demo

I was looking since many days for a way to find the limits of my system. Quake 4 and Doom 3 don't really seems to bring the system to its knees as the saying goes.

So I installed the Crysis Game demo version from this months PC world. It say its a DX10 game and is really kick ass. Lets see I said.

The demo itself is a big one . We used to have full games smaller than this just last year or so . The demo is 1.7 gigs. Somehow I cleared some space for the game and installed it. Currently I am running Vista and the Vista comes up with a question everytime something happens. Dumb OS. Game requires some hotfix to be installed before it can be played. MS came up with a substandard OS and doesn't like people cribbing about it. No wonder people don't want to move from XP which has matured with the old bugs addressed(and new ones added).

After the install i found there was no shortcut installed by it in the start menu. So I went to the installation directory and found it. There were some benchmarks in it so i tried them. Good for us lazy ppl who want to see some action without much input.

The bench mark scenes look extremely good and really nice detailed graphics are there.

The game looks good . Haven't played it yet. Should be fun.

The nice things about the benchmarks is that you can escape into the control panel of the game and change the video/game/audio setting for the game. This helps you come up with proper settings giving playable framerates for your machine.

In the scene where our guy is running around destroying things the details can be realy noticed once you start enableing various video options. AA seems to reduce the frame rate most. With AA turned off I got the scene to move at a animation like speed. With Max AA scene became a slideshow.

download Crysis demo
requirements for the game
Official site

Moving the computer

Today I moved the position of my computer. The table under the computer is the folding type and ther is very little space there. The legs take up all the space(of the Table). I had a hell of the time to work( ;) ) . with the legs getting cramped(mine).

So twas time to realign the orientation of the computer with respect of the table. I mean to change the position in such a way as to make the experience more WOW.

So I changed the computer position to be aligned to longer edge of the table. This was done with the computer still on and the entire operation was done so as to not break the net connection.

Here the decision to buy an UPS was fruitful and thge entire thing was completed properly.

Some day I need to check the backup time from my Microtek 1kVA UPS. The shopkeeper/the manual says that it should be able to suport a single computer for nearly 40-50 minutes but cant really believe that can I? That is similar to believing hte milage figures of the vehicle given in its advertising flyer.