Corsair XMS2 6400 800mhz DDR2

If you own a stick or more of this ram you’re in luck, you’ve well spet your money. These babys are very affordable and can be pushed to perform better than some more expensive competitors. However if you don’t pay attention, you might be mission out on the good stuff. My motherboard automatically set the ram at 5-5-5-18, which is not really where you optimally want to be since these sticks handle faster timings. 4-4-4-12 is where I’ve had mine for a long time at 2.1V (default 1.9V), but now I’m trying 4-4-4-10. With my cpu at 3.6ghz and my memory multiplier at 2.0D the system runs pretty nicely. Note that I’m not pushing the mhz higher than the original 800mhz. Give the timings a shot if you haven’t already 😉

New Rig Project (2)

I previously told you that I was going to build a new pc for myself, and I gave a list about the parts. Now I’ve had the rig up and running for about an week, and I’m mostly happy. The e8400 processor is very nice, and in combination with the gigabyte ex38-dq6 motherboard, there shouldn’t be any problems overclocking it. However, the stock heatsink doesn’t do it’s job efficiently enough for my standards (min: 35C, max: 46C, avg: 38C with factory clock), so I’ve ordered a Scythe Ninja Plus. I hope I can fit it in the case 😀

The Zotac Geforce 8800 GT AMP! card is working like a charm. I ran 3DMark and scored just below 13000 with stock settings, and when I’ve got the new heatsink and some overclock, I’ll run it again and post the results.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 Not So Resource Friendly Sometimes

It seems I was a little too hasty in giving Firefox 3 Beta 5 as much credit as I did earlier. Ffb5 does work extremely well, untill it doesn’t. As far as I am able to tell, the browser becomes extremely slow at random times often after keeping the browser open for some time, this is a result of a boost in memory usage and cpu load for no apparent reason. Surprisingly this problem does not occur to everyone, I only found a few reports. Nevertheless, this is a very big issue, that didn’t occur in ffb4. Obviously the browser is in beta stage, so whining is out of question. However, I could have recommended ffb4 to those willing to experience the speed improvement with only a few downsides, but I can’t say the same for ffb5. As the release of Firefox 3 draws nearer, I hope this problem gets fixed as soon as possible. I will still keep using ffb5 🙂 Post comments if you are having a similar problem and also if you know what’s causing it.

New Rig Project

Somewhere around October 2007 my old pc decided to stop working, and I decided to stop working on it, since that wasn’t the first time. I though I could buy a new one soon and maybe then play around with the old one to see what was wrong and set it up as a server. However, this project would take much longer than I anticipated, it’s still not finished. Most of the time was spent on me being lazy, the rest on component providers not being able to provide components. Now I’ve got everything but the CPU.

Case: Antec Sonata III (with 500w psu)
Motherboard: Gigabyte EX38-DQ6
RAM: Corsair XMS2 ddr2 800mhz 1gb X 4 (4 gb total)
Video Card: Zotac GeForce 8800GT 512MB AMP! Edition

CPU (don’t have it yet): Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz Boxed (Wolfdale, 6MB)
I’m getting the HDD + CD burner + CD reader from the old pc.
Hopefully I get it soon, then I can maybe post some benchmarks.

Firefox 3 beta

I use Firefox because in everyday use it is superior to other browsers. It’s more secure, easy to use and personal. However, at the moment it’s not the fastest browser around, yet. Firefox 3 is still in beta stage, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it. Mainly, Firefox 3 fixes problems with memory consumption and leaks. Now the browser starts faster and uses less resources. Ofcourse there will be improvement in HTML and JavaScript performance among many other things. Best JavaScript performance is still in the hands of IE7, but I hope Firefox can narrow the difference. One handy feature that I would like in Firefox is a disable-images-hotkey like Opera has, since if you only need to read something, images are unnecessary. There are all sorts of benchmark tests around for browsers, but I feel that the best way to find the browser with the most performance is by playing around with them 😀 Try the Firefox 3 beta 5 if you already haven’t, and if you have, please comment about your experience with it.
Firefox beta download
Firefox 3 will be released with the codename Gran Paradiso, the date is still unknown.

– EDIT: I’ve encountered a problem with the release, read here