Rawr!!!

[Review] Noctua NF-P14 FLX

December 21st, 2010 by

fan-logo

Product: NF-P14
Manufacturer: Noctua
Price: ~$20 USD
Product Link: http://noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=33&lng=en
Manual: http://noctua.at/pdf/infosheets/noctua_nf_p14_flx_datasheet_en.pdf

Summary:

So you’re a performance hog, and would love to have water cooling, but can’t bring yourself to the hassle. Everyone knows that water cooling is the best of both worlds when it comes to performance & silent’ness. And on the other side there are in-efficient fans, that are loud, push dust all over the place, and nick you in your fingertips when you’re tinkering. Noctua fans are an entirely different experience than the norm (minus the nicking your fingertips bit [that's just your own fault for tinkering]) The NF-P14 FLX is an amazing blend of craftsmanship & performance that I would dare to say is one of the finest fans you can buy. Noctua specializes in mainly fans & heat sinks which speaks loudly on the quality of their product due to a niche market. They have a small range of products, and make them very well. In contrast with water cooling, I’ve always gone the straight and narrow route of air cooling, and love the money I save, and the performance I can get out of a good set of fans, in a proper configuration

Specs:

  • Size: 140x140x25 mm
  • Bearing: SSO-Bearing
  • Blade Geometry: NF-P14 Blade Design with VCN
  • Rotational Speed (+/- 10%): 1200 RPM
  • Rotational Speed with L.N.A. (+/- 10%): 900 RPM
  • Rotational Speed with U.L.N.A. (+/- 10%): 750 RPM
  • Airflow: 110.3 m³/h
  • Airflow with L.N.A.: 83.7 m³/h
  • Airflow with U.L.N.A.: 71.2 m³/h
  • Acoustical Noise: 19.6 dB(A)
  • Acoustical Noise with L.N.A.: 13.2 dB(A)
  • Acoustical Noise with U.L.N.A.: 10.1 dB(A)
  • Static Pressure: 1.29 mm H2O
  • Static Pressure with L.N.A.: 0.77 mm H2O
  • Static Pressure with U.L.N.A.: 0.53 mm H2O
  • Input Power: 1.2 W
  • Input Current: 0.1 A
  • Voltage Range: 12 V
  • MTBF > 150.000 h
  • Warranty: 6 years

Includes:

  • Ultra-Low-Noise Adaptor (U.L.N.A.)
  • Low-Noise Adaptor (L.N.A.)
  • Adaptors for 140mm mounting
  • 4 Vibration Compensators
  • 3:4-Pin Adaptor
  • 4 Fan Screws

Design:
Lets start with one of the most obscure, yet most important parts of this fan; the cabling, and how awesome it is. This first element shows the immense amount of detail that is put into one of this art pieces. First we see the common set of three wires (ground, hot, and speed), then; a splendid item that is rarely seen on fans. A device that prevents the cable from ripping out of the motor… I might be going a little overboard on just a little piece of plastic, but I’ve played with a lot of fans from a lot of different manufactures & for multiple applications, and little things like these make all the difference in a fan that lasts for a lifetime. Even if the fan is never moved from its installed location, proper routing in the case of the fan allows you to easily tuck wires every which way and tidy things up. To finish up the package the main of the wire is covered in expandable loom & capped at either end with heat shrink tubing.

cabletie-heatshrink

The cable is about 15″ long, and is capped off with a standard 3 pin molex connector.

cable

cable-end

One thing that is easily overlooked about the fan is even though it’s a 140mm fan, you can mount it in a 120mm slot. The fan blade is 140mm standard, yet the outer mountpoints are 120mm sized. In fact I was a little dumbfounded when I went to mount the fan into a 140mm hole & couldn’t because it was too small. I realize now that I need a mounting kit, that was not included in the review sample that I received:

The branding on Noctua fans are unmistakable. From the color, logo, and sexy curves, everything is suave, and harnesses the Noctua look. The outer body of the fan is an eggshell color, and seems very strong for how light the entire fan is. The fan blade construction is fantastic, and the nine blade fan cuts through the air like a hot knife through butter. It might be hard to spot in the picture, but the notches are staggered. This isn’t just for looks, but has an acoustic benefit to make the fan more quiet, and easier to blend into ambient noise. I would definitely read through Noctua’s guide on fan blade design, it’s quite exquisite: http://noctua.at/main.php?show=nf_p14_blade_design&lng=en

front

One sub-thought is how the motor is constructed. Most of the time you just have to guess that there is a decent motor assembly, and hope for the best. Well Noctua gives a little outline of the “Metal Reinforced SSO-Bearing Shell & Magnet” claim on the front of the fan. The shaft is reinforced on the center inside & outside of the shaft. There are also reinforcements on the outside of the shell where the magnets go for the coil. It’s a brilliant idea when most motors use an all plastic design, and all it takes is a little misalignment to totally screw up your fan.

The back of the fan complements the front, and to be honest isn’t anything special & what I would expect from the back of a fan :)

fan-blades

Performance:

This fan screams pure awesome, in a quiet whisper. The funny thing is that even though this fan is almost dead silent, there are two more ways to make it even quieter per your application. The L.N.A && U.L.N.A (Low Noise Adapter & Ultra Low Noise Adapter respectively) which underclock your fan. The stock RPM of the fan is 1200 RPM, and you can clock it down to 900 RPM with L.N.A & 750 RPM with U.L.N.A. The only complaint that I have to Noctua is how they deal with RPM step downs. I dislike that to step down the RPM you have to add in a separate little coupler that adds a resistor. It would be ideal to have a switch on the fan that just had a variable resistor in the casing that would allow you to modify the speed on the fly. This really isn’t that big of a deal considering the Antec fans that have this feature (3 pole switch for high, medium, and low), and it’s nice, but useless for some applications. Plus I’m the kinda tinkerer that want’s to have the switch mounted somewhere flush & accessible ;)

The actual airflow that comes out of this fan feels surprisingly low, yet it pushes a lot of air. According to Noctua about 110.3 meters^3/h. I wish I had some way to test this, but racked my brain, and couldn’t think of a way to measure the airflow correctly. All I know is that with the fan mounted in an Antec Sonata II it decreases the internal temperature of the case about 4 degrees celsius as opposed to the case without an exit fan.

Summary:
This fan absolutely rocks. I’ve used Noctua fans in many of my projects & PC builds, and have always been happy with the money I spent for them. Mind you Noctua fans aren’t cheap, but you get what you pay for. When you buy a cheapo fan from China-R-US & end up noticing that it’s fried or making funny noises 6 months later, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. The Noctua fans perform great, and last forever (even with a thick coating of dust ;) The extra goodies like loomed wire, and reinforced motors end up being worth it when you go to build a new computer, and decide that your Noctua fans are still in perfect working condition. Just move them to your next build, and save money. I’ve had a paid of 120mm/80mm Noctua fans I’ve had for about three years or more, and I keep moving them between builds when I put one PC out of commission & build out a new PC.

[Review] PC-Engines alix6e1

November 7th, 2010 by

set_logo

Product: alix6e1
Manufacturer: PC Engines
Price: $85.00 USD
Product Link: http://www.pcengines.ch/alix6e1.htm
Manual: http://www.pcengines.ch/pdf/alix2.pdf

Summary:

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m very picky when it comes to hardware. I will normally research a new mainboard for quite some time, until I find just the right one. Then it comes, and I’m let down by some chipset issue, socket placement issue, or other nitpicks. These little issues end up swaying my “perfect” board into something sub-par by the time I go to use it in my projects. I think that too many manufacturers today try to please everyone & end up adding too much flac to their boards, until the hardcore enthuiasts are stuck with a bunch of crap that they don’t want/need. (Onboard video, extra pci-express slots, hdmi, onboard wifi???)

I’ve had the pleasure of using Alix boards in a few of my projects so far, and haven’t had the slightest regret to spending a little extra money to get something that is perfect. Pascal (main dude [and I think only dude] at PC engines) is a genius. He holds his place in a niche market, and does an amazing job at designing these boards. Just taking a visual look at the board you can see that everything is very well thought out. I dislike boards with large chunks of PCB that are left virtually untouched; due to poor overall design. The alix6e1 is no exception to all of the Alix boards in that they are very concentrated, and the components are splendidly placed. What makes the alix6e1 spectacular is that in the same form-factor of PC Engines other boards, so much is placed to fit in the board. You get a Wan/Lan port (2x 10/100), miniPCI card, miniPCI Express card, usb, cf card slot, 500 Mhz cpu, ram, and all the extra bits to make it work. This along with a great BIOS built from the ground up, makes this board difficult to pass up, especially since they are only $85.00 USD at the moment.

Specs:

  • CPU: 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800
  • DRAM: 256 MB DDR DRAM
  • Storage: CompactFlash socket
  • Power: DC jack or passive POE, min. 7V to max. 20V
  • Three front panel LEDs, pushbutton
  • Expansion: 1 miniPCI slot, 1 miniPCI Express slot (USB only), LPC bus
  • Connectivity: 2 Ethernet channels (Via VT6105M 10/100)
  • I/O: DB9 serial port, dual USB port
  • Board size: 6 x 6″ (152.4 x 152.4 mm)
  • Firmware: tinyBIOS

Hardware:

  • Case (case1c1blku):

    • case_front-tilt

    The case is absolutely splendid. Mind you it has a few “features” that some people might find unfavorable for their situation, yet everything is just perfect for me… I’d like to start with the most awesome part of this case; it’s utmost care to simplicity. I have dealt with a LOT of router cases in my time here on earth, and all of them seem to be overcomplicated (mostly plastic) pieces of crap. The case1c1blku is a no-hinge clam-shell design.

    case_open

    It’s takes 4 screws to mount the board, and another 4 to close the case up tight. The mounting anchor points are integrated in the case (soldered in), and seem very sturdy. I would have no regrets to throwing this router around in my bag as a mobile router due to the case ruggedness.

    case_mount

    The punch-outs on the back for the i/o ports are cleanly punched, and there are no barbs left behind (prolly laser cut).

    case_back

    To assemble:

    0) Add CF card now, unless you don’t plan on using one

    1) Remove the com port anchor screws

    2) Tilt board into case with i/o ports in their holes

    3) Bend the front a little till the board snugly fits in place

    4) Screw down & enjoy

    One of the “features” that some people might dislike is the non-removable CF card. I see this as a security feature, just in case you don’t want someone live-tampering with your device (if in a secure environment). Another “feature” of this is that the CF card doesn’t have the ability to move around (it’s stuck next to the front of the case). So if you’re especially rough with your alix6e1 you don’t have to worry about the card falling out.

    case_cf-card

  • Layout:

    • The overall use of space on this board is astounding. The CPU is butts up next to the memory, which allows for shorter traces. The Ethernet controllers are squished underneath the dead space for the miniPCI card. Even more space is saved with the heavy use of SMC’s (surface mounted components). Even the tolerances between components seem extreme (ceramic resistors next to clock chip (to the right of sim card slot)). It’s hard to find mistakes on this board, since everything is so well though out. The only pressing issue that I could find was a missing centimeter between the miniPCI & miniPCI Express card. If the miniPCI Express card was pushed to the left a little bit, or re-positioned; a normal sized pci card would fit more easily. I’ve been informed that this is planned for the next generation of this board, so at least it’s been noted and will be fixed.

    layout_top

    The bottom is just as pretty as the top. Many resistors, and a few smc’s are on the bottom, which makes me happy. It shows that a 2 layer design was implemented well. And based on how everything is neatly jammed into the board, the bottom compliments the top very well. It’s great to see a nice fat ground strip flowing throughout the core of the board (not a lot of backwards tracing to find a ground). And one last thing that I almost forgot to mention is a wonderful silkscreen that coincides with schematics on the site. If you are the tinkering type, and something happens to go horribly wrong; the ability to dive in, and find the problem yourself is simplified with technical documentation. The fact that Pascal releases his schematics is fantastic, and allows you to work on your hardware long after your warranty is up.

    layout_bottom

    The back of the board (the side with all the goodies) is fairly well thought out. I love that there are 2 usb ports, but a lot of dongles aren’t compatible with stacking that close. It would be great if there were two single usb ports (such as on either side of the wan port) But far enough so that if you have wide usb dongles it won’t interfere. I have a large collection of usb flash drives, and a bunch of them cut it close to interfering with the Ethernet port in the current configuration. Another awesome thing to have would be and integrated PSU (or an optional module). Where all you plugin is a short 2 prong cable. That would be a dream :)

    layout_ports

  • Input/Output:

    • Lets start with the basics: 10/100 Ethernet, Serial Port, miniPCI & miniPCI Express & sim card slot. Two Ethernet ports are more than enough for a 10/100 router. One WAN (who has 100Mb internet anyway ;) && one LAN (going to hook it up to a Gb switch anyway). The great thing about the 10/100 ports is that each has it’s own Via VT6105M chips. Instead of using a cludge multiplex hack, the time and effort was put in the use two individual chips. I’m glad that there is an external serial port (I don’t know how you could get away without having one), and it’s spaced far enough from the other i/o ports that makes it easy to plug in a larger serial adapter and still have room for an Ethernet jack. The biggest mistake of some boards is that serial jacks are put to close to other component jacks which disables you plugging in chunky cables. The miniPCI slot bummed me out. It’s just a little too close (about .5mm) to the miniPCI Express card slot which disables you from using full size miniPCI cards. You can still use full size miniPCI cards, but they will bow a little bit from hitting the top of the miniPCI Express connector. I tried to get a good picture, but couldn’t get a good angle, sorry. I never like to bend boards, or force anything, but it is a very minor bend. In the long run if you ran a full sized miniPCI card; you wouldn’t have any issues, it’s just not perfect. The miniPCI Express slot is a minor letdown; in that it only supports usb miniPCI Express cards. (kinda hit/miss if your card is usb or native minipci express). You would have to look very closely at the documentation of the card you are planning to purchase to make sure that it’s a usb card & not native. And most of the time there isn’t sufficient documentation :( I didn’t have a sim card to test the sim card slot with (since I use verizon (cdma)), but I can’t see it being hard to recognize/setup.

    Lets finish off I/O with usb, power, cf card, and optional ports… I kinda wish that the usb were oriented a little differently to accommodate more usb options. In the current configuration you are allowed two thin usb devices. It would be nice if the usb ports were oriented differently to allow more variation with usb dongles. The cf card slot is perfectly placed & it’s horribly placed (depending how you look at things) For one it’s secure. To access the card you have to open the case, pull up the mainboard & only then can you remove/replace the cf card. On the other hand if your a hacker that wants to constantly change/hack & break your router OS & swap out cf cards; you’ll have no luck with the current configuration. The one last dream of this board would be to have the included optional components well not optional. The internal mini-ide port would be killer for a little extra storage, and internal usb would be spectacular for a nice little flash drive that doesn’t stick out the back of the device. I know they are optional for a reason, but I wish the reason was NULL & they were included ;)

  • Power Consumption:

    • I’m using a 12V 1A PSU brick & am consuming on average 6watts. I could probably optimize OpenWRT to save a half or maybe even a full watt, but for now I’m fine with 6 watts.

  • Benchmarks:

    • I’ve been working on true benchmarks for a while now, and am going to outline everything in another post with OpenWRT due to so much entanglement with the OS. The quick benchmark is what you would expect from a 10/100 Ethernet connection (not any faster or slower) && the processor is quick & performs VERY well for the application. Everything is robust, yet power efficient & cool. No fans are needed whatsoever even with full load; since the CPU & accompanying chips are cool to touch & don’t overheat.

Software:

  • BIOS:

    • The BIOS is streamlined, and non-cluttered. It’s a perfect fit to the overall design of the board. It was built from the ground up for the alix board series. A quick attachment via usb serial converter && a `screen /dev/cu.usbserial 38400` (default baud rate) gave me the goods I was looking for.

    A little run down on what’s shown on bootup:

    1) BIOS version (this is the newest for the board)

    2) Base Memory

    3) Extended Memory (aka. usable memory)

    *) All the rest is initiated by hitting the letter ‘s’ on your keyboard (to startup the config menu)

    - The menu allows you to change the baud rate (beware that some baud rates aren’t supported by grub/custom router OS’s)

    - CF card mode modification

    - MFGPT workaround (timer hack)

    - late PCI init (fix for lousy pci cards)

    - enable/disable serial console

    - PXE (pixie boot is so 1337)

    - xmodem (upload binary [usually used to flash bios])

    – More information can be found in the manual (http://www.pcengines.ch/pdf/alix2.pdf)

    <br />
PC Engines ALIX.2 v0.99h<br />
640 KB Base Memory<br />
261120 KB Extended Memory</p>
<p>01F0 Master 848A SAMSUNG CF/ATA<br />
Phys C/H/S 4065/16/63 Log C/H/S 1016/64/63</p>
<p>BIOS setup:</p>
<p>(9) 9600 baud (2) 19200 baud *3* 38400 baud (5) 57600 baud (1) 115200 baud<br />
*C* CHS mode (L) LBA mode (W) HDD wait (V) HDD slave (U) UDMA enable<br />
(M) MFGPT workaround<br />
(P) late PCI init<br />
*R* Serial console enable<br />
(E) PXE boot enable<br />
(X) Xmodem upload<br />
(Q) Quit<br />
  • Choice of Router OS:

    • I choose OpenWrt for now. I’ve been using dd-wrt on my wrt-350n for the longest time, and would like a change of scenery. Especially since there are a few really stupid quirks to dd-wrt that bug me. (Like why the hell isn’t IPv6 support compiled in :( ) The installation went flawlessly. I just `dd if=openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext2.img of =/dev/disk3` (something like that on my mac), and started up the board, and bingo, everything was ready to go. The BIOS had no issues with my CF card, and OpenWrt has amazing support for the alix boards (x86 version of OpenWrt). I’ve been running it for a while, and it’s been chugging along with no issues. I plan to have an OpenWrt tutorial in the future, so I won’t go into much detail about OpenWrt, but expect more in the future.

Summary:

Other than a couple little quirks (usb only miniPCI Express ; miniPCI -> miniPCI Express gap & cf card spacing) this board is fantastic. It draws very little power, is powerful, and runs cool & quiet (well silent). The case is a simple clamshell that is easy to assemble, and feels very sturdy. The BIOS rocks with a perfect amount of features. The overall potential for this board is amazing (diy mifi device); I’m sad that I won’t be taking full advantage of the mini-pci express slot; since I use my Droid Incredible for a mobile hotspot. I guess the one and only big letdown for me is limited support for mini pci-express slot. Since it only allows usb cards (a couple gobi devices, novatel, and some others) you are forced to purchase a mini-pci card for wireless. It would be wonderful to be able to choose between mini-pci && mini pci-express in the future since mini pci-express cards are more widely available & cheaper. I would & do recommend this board to any diy hobbyist that want’s a great board, for cheap, with plenty of features to chew on.

NoFailNAS teaser

October 27th, 2010 by

IMAG0327

This is one of a few WIPP’s I have (Work in Progress Projects) It’s supposed to be a replacement to my previous NAS, and is mostly complete. I’m just missing the case… :( Anywho I have a whole write up in progress also, that will document what I got (hardware, software, experience). This is just a mini-teaser with some raw hardware goodness

Unbrick WRT350N

February 24th, 2010 by

Wow, so last night I tried to flash an unsupported ddwrt image on my WRT350N & I bricked it :( . I would have been golden, except for some reason boot-wait wasn’t working. I spent about 30 minutes looking what new router I should purchase, when I thought, ah there are no good routers out that will accept DD-WRT; I’ll just unbrick my current router…

Well to start I had to figure out how to open the darn thing. I ended up ripping off the top & bottom plastic where some nice torx security screws greeted me… Well a few came out with some nice twists of my torx driver. Yet a couple actually had the center pin proper height. Easy way to get around this, is to find a small phillips screwdriver. I was able to easily unscrew them with a phillips.
Security Torx

After removing the screws I was now able to access the board; most importantly the serial header:

091

From Left to Right (Yellow = 3.3V; White = Tx; Red = Rx; Black = GND)

I used my handy dandy CA-42 Serial to USB adapter:

CA-42

It also has colored wires, and I should have matched them up, but I kinda just plugged some alligator clips in & plugged them into the right wires for the CA-42. The CA-42 layout is like this (Black = GND ; White = Rx ; Green = Tx ; Red = +V)

CA-42 > Router

After connecting everything up, you should be able to see “output” & be able to hit Ctrl-C to be dropped into CFE>


nvram set boot_wait=on

nvram commit

reboot

Now prepare to copy the image over. I had three windows open. A window with the serial output, a window pinging 192.168.1.1, and a window to execute my push command. I would also recommend that you set (IP Address = 192.168.1.10 ; Subnet = 255.255.255.0; Gateway = 192.168.1.1) Once you receive a ping after rebooting run the following command:


echo -e "nmode binarynrexmt 1ntimeout 60ntracenput dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic.binn" | tftp 192.168.1.1

where ‘dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic.bin’ is the image you would like to flash (it took me about 6 different images until this one worked [ this is the web flash image on the wrt350n page])
After running the following you should get something that looks like this:

If everything went as planned, then you should end up with a working router :) Yay!

Success

Success_Final

There are plenty of resources on the internets. I found this wonderful link: http://dg.cascade.dyndns.org/wrt350n.html which perfectly outlines EVERYTHING I needed to do. It was very helpful in this process.

In-N-Out NAS update

October 14th, 2009 by

So I’m ditching the Via board that I purchased for the In-N-Out NAS, and opting for a nice 64 bit board (Intel DG41RQ). This sucks since I have to dump another couple hundred into the new board/cpu/ram/psu. Eh… Anywho this is kinda cool, cause now I have an extra board that I think I’ll use to mod a few speakers I have into a media center for when I go out to the desert. Well I’m going to go buy the new hardware, and hopefully whip the working system up within the next couple days.