After taking the stats course this semester, I decided it would be nice to have a second one so that I could have one at work and one to use at home. Found a few on Ebay and bid on one. Things were going well until someone came along and ran up the price to $75, but I ended up getting it.
It arrived a couple of days ago, and today I finally made it over to Radio Shack to get some fresh batteries for it. Put them in and turned it on.
Yay, it works!
It’s in great shape and looks practically brand new. Even has the rubber pads still (the pads on mine disappeared long ago). Part of the casing around the battery cover has chipped away, which isn’t unusual for the 28S.
From the serial number (2939A05016), it’s the same vintage as my calculator (1989) made possibly a couple of months after mine was.
I decided to add a second fan to the radiator of the CPU’s liquid cooler (a pre-filled self contained unit that came with the system) to get a push-pull cooling configuration. The air being blown out the case seemed a little on the warm side, so I figured a second fan would help keep things cooler.
The fan is a Scythe S-FLEX 120 mm case fan (which seems to have been just deactivated on Newegg…maybe I bought their last one). The original radiator fan started buzzing so I purchased one to replace it. Now there are two of them blowing air through the radiator. Really nice fan, very quiet, which is why I bought another one.
Getting more air flow through the radiator now, and the exhausted air feels a little bit cooler. Then I thought “I wonder what the motherboard thinks the CPU temperature is”. I had never bothered to monitor any of the motherboard sensors before. After a little bit of searching, I installed lm-sensors.
If the output of sensors is to be believed, then the CPU cores at idle are running around 45-47°C.
Core
Temp (°C)
Core 0
45
Core 1
46
Core 2
47
Core 3
45
CPU temperatures at idle
Seems pretty high to me. I’d have expected something in the 30s.
Starting up the distributed.net client drives up the detected temperature into the high 80s.
Core
Temp (°C)
Core 0
86
Core 1
89
Core 2
83
Core 3
85
CPU temperatures under load
Whoa. Way high, and much higher than I expected.
So now I’m starting wonder: is the motherboard temperature sensor accurate? Is there a problem with the cooling block? Should I take it off and inspect it? Maybe it’s time for another cooler?
The other thing I need to do is check the temperatures reported by the BIOS to see how it compares. I think a little investigation is in order.
Update: BIOS shows pretty much the same temperature (~47°C). Definitely time for some investigating. These temps just seem a little higher than they should be.
Update 2: A little bit of Google’ing shows that idle temps in the 40s aren’t unusual for the i7-930. My temps are still a little on the high end of the range that I’ve been seeing. Maybe a cooler upgrade is in my future soon. The Corsair H70 looks nice.
Update 3: The second fan seems to be helping. Under distributed.net load, the CPU is running in the low 70s now
Core
Temp (°C)
Core 0
73
Core 1
75
Core 2
71
Core 3
72
CPU temperatures under load with a second fan on the radiator
The motherboard in my computer (GigabyteGA-X58A-UD5) has some neat features for updating the BIOS, including being able to update it from a USB drive without having to boot into an OS (Q-Flash).
Q-Flash worked pretty well in the past, but it seems to be limited to BIOS images less than 1MB.
The most recent (beta) BIOS updates for this motherboard have been just over 1.2 MB. Q-Flash no like.
There’s another utility called @BIOS that lets you flash BIOS updates from within Windows, but it only works in Windows.
Made an initial attempt at booting up FreeDOS to use Gigabyte’s DOS based FLASHSPI.EXE utility, but FreeDOS complained about the CD driver not being loaded for some reason. Guess where I put the BIOS image and FLASHSPI for flashing.
So now I’m stuck. Haven’t done much more with FreeDOS yet. Probably could get it working if I banged at it hard enough.
It’s frustrating though that there’s this perfectly good built-in Q-Flash utility for flashing the BIOS, but it’s crippled by a size limitation.
Really? A motherboard that supports 24GB of RAM, USB/SATA ports up the wazoo, a 2.8GHz quad-core CPU and it can’t flash a BIOS larger than 1MB. What is this, the 1980s?
