Santouka is overrated

Jo and I went to Santouka at Central last week (before Ben arrived) to get a good bowl of Japanese chashao ramen. I heard lots of good things about the chain and thought why not?

The ambience was great, and service was really good. Was nice of them to give us a big pitcher of water.

I ordered the premium chaoshao set, hoping the taste was up to the standard of the reviews.

To cut a long story short, everything was good, including the ramen but it had no love. The soup, chasao and everything was technically perfect but it lacked something.

We couldn’t feel the chef’s love in the food.

In Singapore, there’s only 1 chaosao ramen I remember. It’s a small shop owned by a very stoic Japanese chef (funny, they seem to be all like that) near the KTV lounge behind OG Orchard. It’s called Osho, it opens at about 11am, has takeaway bento for lunch and opens late till 11pm or more. It seats < 30 people and it’s literally a roadside shop so it’s pretty warm. The chasao is very nicely textured and has a layer of fat surrounding it. Plunged into the soup before it reaches you, the fatty layer is semi-dissolved in the broth, but the chaosao still packs a punch that makes you remember the taste long after. Better yet, the chasao ramen is also cheaper than Santouka’s by quite a bit.

Sorry Santouka, your ramen’s good but it has no spirit.

Why I don’t SLI (or Crossfire)

Firstly, what is SLI?

It’s a technology that scales graphics performance by combining multiple NVIDIA graphics solutions in an SLI-Certified motherboard. This simply means that you can get more performance by putting 2 (or 3) same graphic cards together.

A few reasons why I don’t like SLI:

1. In practise, the performance increase is only 20%-50% at maximum. (Nvidia claims up to 100%. Right)

2. Some really good games don’t support SLI, this means only 1 card is used, wasting the other card.

3. In the early days, there were incompatibilities with games that were supposed to run on SLI.

4. Now, there’s ‘micro stutter’, irritating and probably game-experience breaking.

Anybody keen for watercooled super quiet PC?

I have set up about 5+ systems in the last year and it’s been pretty fun. After this round building 2 Core i7s and a quiet Quad Core, I am designing a new serious watercooled system with a customized case for folks who want a quiet computer without sacrificing power. I am not going to charge any fees for building the system but I need a really good budget for parts (some to be flown/shipped in) and transport fees. I also need about a month or 2 to design, fabricate and get the system up. System suggestion as follows:

Core i7 920
GTX 295 (watercooled version)
12GB RAM
Asus P6T V2
150GB Velociraptor
Corsair 850w
External DVD writer (to keep the case small sized)

If anyone is interested, drop me an email at wesley@memphiswest.com

Thanks!

Some thoughts about the Core i7 and case modding

I have been using the new Core i7 for the last month+. It’s definitely a good processor, the motherboard runs 12GB well and it overclocks well too. A few things that might concern the system builder:

1. This chip runs very hot, almost like the Pentium-fry-an-egg-D. At the moment, the OCed chip shoots up to 64degrees in 31degrees ambient. And this temp is with a high-end 3rd party air cooled heatsink. The current Duo & Quad Cores are running <45degrees.

2. Because of the way the cores are laid out in the chip, the cooler runs best with the fan blowing in a north-south direction. Normal PC cases have the PSU mounted at the top above the processor heatsink. This is not good for the PSU as it increases heat load. New cases have the PSUs mounted at the bottom, so the case is a major consideration for the Core i7.

3. I am using an older PC case (Lian Li PC-G7B) so I decided to flip the PSU upside down with the fan facing up.

flipped PSU upside down, so the fan faces up

4. I had to get the case top plate modded for extra blowholes for the PSU fan and exhaust.

top plate has been modded to expose 3x120mm holes for exhaust and intake

5. The PSU fan is barely visible at the top of the image. The PSU runs cooler and overall the system is also cooler by 1-3degrees because there’s proper holes for the hot air to exit.

6. The whole procedure was slightly troublesome as there are only a few guys doing case modding professionally in Singapore. There is only 1 shop in Sim Lim Square, name of the shop is Uvnium #03-19. Gary (the owner) did a splendid job with the case cutting. I had to buy the M3 screws and nuts myself from a DIY shop.

7. The Lian Li PC-G7B (similar to the PC-7FW @ 218×440x490mm W, H, D) is probably the smallest sized case for the Core i7/ATX with a full length graphic card like the GTX295, any smaller and there will be major issues installing and fitting the parts.

8. The case is extremely light as it’s made of aluminium (<7kg). Combined with the mid/small tower size, it’s very portable for on site workstation setups and shipping overseas if needed. I had a Thermaltake Armor (full tower steel) and I have learned my lesson in weight management.

Out of warranty white Macbook has top plate replaced for free. woot!

The palm rest of the Macbook was cracking last December and I thought it was due to mishandling on my part. Turns out it’s a design defect that Apple finally admitted to. Posted here at The Inquirer and Gizmodo. Here’s the damage.

cracked palm rests

After reading the news, I went to the Apple shop at Wheelock. The repair centre is run by Sapura and I talked to the lady saying that Apple is repairing this for free even if the Macbook was out of warranty. I was put on a phone with Apple Support and talked to tech guy. I used an alpha voice and told him that Apple had admitted to this issue and was repairing this laptop for free. I assured him that the damage was right at where the lid touched the top plate. The guy said he had to talk to the cheif engineer (!!) and after a 10min hold they told me it was FOC. Repair took about 2 days, including a 1 day to wait for the part. It would have taken 3-4 days if I had left it at Wheelock. I took it straight to Toa Payoh North where the service centre was located.

Here’s the new top plate. Looks brand new as it includes a new keyboard (!!). Yay.

new top plate. nice.

GPU acceleration in CS4 Photoshop with XP 64

The graphic acceleration in CS4/XP64 is greyed out and not usable. It turns out that XP64 is not officially supported by Adobe, although it runs 100% perfect.

Adobe has posted a workaround. Here’s the problem:

GPU and OpenGL Features and Limitations in Photoshop CS4

And here’s the solution:

Adobe – Photoshop : For Windows : Adobe Photoshop CS4 GPU optional plug-ins

The download is a registry script that turns a flag on. It’s working so far and it’s pretty amazing. So you can now justify a super gfx card for work and other serious stuff.

Speed of Thought

Speed of thought is roughly between 550 and 750 milliseconds. Any longer than that, there’s a perceived delay.

Since 1994, I have been doing graphic + photography work going through Pentium, AMD machines and Macs. None had approached speed of thought until NOW.

I use blending techniques plus burn+dodge to enhance images and it does get frustrating when the image updates 2-3 secs later when I using a 3% airbrush to delete the layer. It breaks my flow of thought. When I airbrush over an area, I expect to see an instant update, like in real life. No consumer machine had been able to do this real time with 16MP files.

Until now.

The new Core i7/12GB/CS4 machine has finally made it possible to work with images at the speed of thought. Due to the perfect combination of processor speed, memory size and software, I am able to think, apply & respond in real time. Like in real life. Photoshop never touched the scratch disk no matter how many files I had opened up, it didn’t even go near the 10GB RAM limit. This is seriously great.

Update: A friend popped over 24Apr night and took a look at the machine. He’s a Macpro(2008)/16GB/CS4/Velociraptor user. We tried out opening 99x 12MP Tiff (a few were cropped) files on the Core machine coz he mentioned the Mac slowing down after loading several files. The Core loaded all of them at full speed showing 5.10GB/10GB on the RAM usage in the image window. (If the friend doesn’t mind being named, just let me know. :-)

Recently, I also assembled a super quiet PC for Kelvin Koh. It was pretty fun. I spent some time researching and finally ended up with an Antec 183 case. It’s well designed, well built and seriously damped for noise control. Another constraint was power/noise ratio. It had to run Diablo3. The system is pretty amazing, there is very little or no noise beyond 1.5 meters.

Had to choose a card with customized fans.

Efficient 3rd party cpu heatsink with low speed fan

Case that had separate chambers to great heat management.
Chose a small but efficient power supply. Too bad the cables couldn’t be
managed better but they were very short and couldn’t go round back the mobo.

12MP at 3.17sec/file for CaptureOne

Did a benchmarking for the Core i7 920 at 2.66ghz 2 days ago. Clocked in 3.17sec/file for a 12MP image processed to 36MB tiff. Not too bad, that works out to be ~1000+ files/hr. Tried to push the processor to 3.8ghz but 12GB RAM wasn’t stable. Ended up with a solid 3.5ghz. Temp’s running at 60degrees for peak vs 56degrees at 2.66ghz.

CS4 Photoshop has taken up 10GB of 12GB RAM. Benched a 76 (36MB tiff) file load up, they took up~4GB of 10GB alllocated. This is seriously good news, Photoshop won’t need a scratch disk at this rate we are going.

Will see if we can push it to 3.8ghz and stabilize it this week.

BSOD disk.sys 0×00000050 error with WinXP64

I was searching for an answer to a consistent disk.sys BSOD issue that was extremely frustrating. I found the answer after almost 2 days of troubleshooting. I hope this post can help some frustrated folks. My system spec:

Core i7 920
Asus P6T v2 Deluxe
LG & Asus DVD writer SATA
OCZ RAM
Seagate HDD SATA
Windows XP64

Windows and the various software would install fine but after that, the BSOD would randomly trigger. But it would trigger 99% of the time when CS4 Photoshop + Bridge was fired up. Based on Google searches, I started troubleshooting by reinstalling the OS on 2 different HDDs and a memtest86+. HDD produced the same problem and RAM was fine.

On a hunch, I tried detaching the LG DVD writer and the problem disappeared. I reckoned it was the DVD writer and exchanged it for an Asus. The problem still remained. I changed settings on the motherboard on the SATA port. It still BSODed.

I tried one last thing. The DVD-R was in Port2 and HDD in Port4. I switched them around. And the BSOD disappeared, I tested for 2 days and had zero errors. Windows must have expected a boot HDD to be the 1st in SATA sequence and not the DVD writer.

Btw, in case you ask. Why 64bit? Coz I am gettin CS4 Photoshop to utilize 10GB RAM on a 12GB machine.

But why not a Mac? Coz CS4 Photoshop for Mac is 32bit and uses < 4GB RAM on any Mac even though if it’s loaded with 16GB RAM. CaptureOne (4.6.1) also crashes quite a bit on the Mac.

Why not Vista? Coz XP64 is nimble, fast, responsive and acts like XP32.

Why a PC? Coz a Core i7 920/12GBRAM/295GTX goes for less than half the price of a similarly configured Macpro (2009). Granted the Mac has an 2 server type chips (they are essentially the same), the price difference is simply too much to ignore. Furthermore, the 920 can be pushed from 2.66ghz to 3.6/4ghz with enough tweaking.

How to win/lose a customer

Had to write about an interesting set of experiences recently. I spent the last week assembling a new PC for work. It was an adventure and a lesson of sorts.

Mr G
I was introduced to a PC guy who worked at Video Pro. His name is G. Talked to him in Feb about the items I wanted. He told me that he didn’t have a particular video card I wanted but he’ll try.

He calls me back 4 weeks later and tells me there’s stock. I was pleasantly surprised that he called and told him I wasn’t too sure but I’ll have a think and let him know. I walked into his shop and had a chat with him about the parts again.

In the end, I bought the parts from Video Pro, he gave me a small discount and was nice to deal with. But I wanted to get a casing he didn’t have. I wanted a small aluminum case with a side fan.

Fuwell
I saw the case at Fuwell and got served by a nice guy. But they didn’t have stock and wouldn’t sell me the display case.

Cybermind
I saw the same case in Cybermind and ask the guy if I could get a set. He checked and said there wasn’t any stock. I asked if I could get the display case and he was good to go. I did a ‘btw I am using a big graphics card’ and he got a bit worried and asked a blondish hair dude. This guy OPENED UP a brand new box, took out the said graphic card and tried it out for me. Needless to say, I was impressed.

Video Pro
I assembled the PC and got some serious disk.sys BSOD error. I checked the net and thought it was a DVD writer issue. I took out the DVD writer, ran to Video Pro 1st thing this morning and asked the girl for an exchange. She checked the DVD box and found out I was short on a SATA cable. I asked if I could bring the cable down later as I was in a rush. She said no and told me it was a $3 extra charge for the missing cable.

Video Pro could have taken a $3 loss to earn eternal customer loyalty. But they didn’t. Too bad. PC parts are commodity items. Customers aren’t.

Apple
A friend called up 2 days ago to tell me that his ’silence’ button his 3G iPhone broke. He took it down to Singtel and had a no questions asked exchange for a brand new iPhone. Over the phone, I knew that Apple had a new convert and probably a new evangelist.