New PC Build: now UPDATED with overclocking performance

[Tony EI7BMB]

Thanks Scott, that's reassuring about the UDP protocol. I've set the VAC to 512 as you kindly suggested , the UMC control re sets to 512 if I try to select 256 . With the latest version 4.38 UMC control panel there is no longer a drop down box , just a check box for "safe mode" which is unchecked right now. Some other info appears under "Asio Status" on UMC control panel . "Input Latency:728 samples (15.17 ms) " "Output latency :408 samples (8.5ms) "

Edit: Just figured out that the lower limit Buffer size in UMC is dictated by the setting in VMB

[w-u-2-o]

Another update:

Back in December I posted about how I was getting a lot of blue screens and that I had to back off my I7-7700K overclocking from 5GHz to 4.8GHz (both at 1.35V CPU voltage). Obviously my cooling had degraded a bit and CPU temp's were running in the 80's (centigrade) with all of my radio stuff running. That's pretty darn hot, actually.

After a bit of egging on by W4KCN, he finally got me excited about de-lidding my CPU and re-doing all of my thermal interface material. I have to say, it was one of the best things I've ever done. Temp's fell dramatically by 30 degrees C and now the PC happily runs in the 50's with all the radio stuff running, and, more importantly, now runs at 5GHz reliably again. Max. temperature using the Prime 95 stress test is in the high 80's. I don't think it would be reliable up there at 5GHz, but since the PC never runs that hot I'm not worried about it.

I used the following products:

De-lidding tool from RockitCool (borrowed from W4KCN )

Copper replacement heat spreader from RockitCool:



Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut liquid metal thermal interface material between the die and heat spreader.

Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal interface material between the heat spreader and the cooler (replacing MX4). Beware: this stuff is hard to spread. If you use it be sure to warm it up by dipping the tube in some hot water for a few minutes--wish I had done that. My cooler has a copper interface. If I ever re-do it I might go liquid metal next time.

[W1AEX]

That was quite a project Scott! You were really thorough and the 30 degree drop is a nice payback for the effort. Nicely done! Although my cooling projects are not in the same league as your efforts, I have found with my gaming and radio computers that I have to remove my CPU coolers about once every two years and clean out the dust that collects in the big Zalman heat exchangers. Doing that and then removing the old application of arctic silver and re-applying with new stuff usually nets me at least a 15 degree drop so that they idle in the mid 30's with the gaming rig never going much beyond the mid 60's during extended frag fests while the station computer used by the ANAN coasts along comfortably at around 50C while running OpenHPSDR mRX PS, my teamspeak server, my Plex media server, Firefox, Thunderbird, and whatever video/audio editing software I have running in the background. With both of my current computers I have also found it necessary to remove the North Bridge heatsinks because ASUS relies on thermal pads and they seem to shrink up over time and have poor thermal conductivity after a few years. It's definitely worth the effort to gain better cooling and very stable performance.

On the other end of the scale, at the last NearFest I picked up a 2015 ASUS laptop (running Windows 8.1) for 100 bucks that was brand new and still in the box. It uses an INTEL Bay Trail M Quad Core 2930 processor (this is a very lame Celeron) running at 2.16 GHz with 4GB of RAM. It also sports a 500G hard drive (not SSD) and it runs fine for the usual email and web browsing tasks while on trips. Just for fun, I set up the ethernet port for the subnet that my ANAN's static IP is assigned to and connected it to the ANAN's ethernet port. Then I installed OpenHPSDR mRX PS version 3.4.9 and let it run the FFT calculation to generate the wisdom file. That task took just about an hour! When it was done, as expected, it connected fine. What was not expected is that OpenHPSDR mRX PS ran very smoothly at 192 kHz, although the CPU utilization was running in the mid 30's and reaching up to the mid 40's at times. There were no dropouts though and the GUI was very responsive. I did find that running VAC drove the CPU utilization up to the mid 50's so I changed the TX profiles to run through the MIC and LINE inputs. It could transmit and receive fine, but I did not try PS to see how well that worked. At any rate, I was very surprised that the little laptop could handle OpenHPSDR mRX PS as well as it did. I wouldn't recommend a lame setup like this for daily use, but it kind of proves that you don't actually need a fire-breathing computer to do the job!

73,

Rob W1AEX

[Tony EI7BMB]

Nice work Scott . I thought i was doing well just getting the memory to be recognised correctly I get the odd blue screen here under stop code "memory management" , I love that these errors are so non specific (not)

Edit: Uninstalling Microsoft One Drive fixed the stop code memory management issue

[w-u-2-o]

Thanks, Tony! I rolled the dice on memory, too, obtaining some memory from a friend that he said did not work right in his PC. It happily runs at 3200MHz in my PC, though, so I dodged that bullet!

[Tony EI7BMB]

Latest build just completed using X570 Motherboard and AMD 5950 16 Core CPU . Thetis load showing 4% and I can run JTDX at full throttle with good lag times .

pc.jpg (4.5 MiB) Viewed 14449 times

[w-u-2-o]

Jealous! Still holding off on my next build. But it'll be core heavy!

[DL8LAQ]

Jealous! Still holding off on my next build. But it'll be core heavy!

Hi Scott,
I have got a ASRock Z77Extreme6 without TPM, a I7 3770 and might have to ged rid of it soon. What is your recommendation for high end SDR performance?
The graphics card is a GTX1050Ti, so I think a new mobo/cpu/RAM should do it.

[w-u-2-o]

The way Thetis (and PowerSDR mRX) is architected it likes a lot of cores. So I'd recommend at least 8 cores, and 12 or 16 would be better. That automatically puts you into mid-to-high end CPUs.