- I found the setting that preventing booting and locked me out of the BIOS. Twice. If I chose "AHCI" or "Linux AHCI" instead of "IDE" for the SATA interface -- that which talks to the various storage devices, including the optical drive, hard drive, and SSD -- I got my unbootable lockout. So, having had to open the case and reset a jumper twice to get back to defaults, I know to avoid these! (Theoretically they should work. Theoretically.)
- The memory (RAM) was rated at 1.8-1.9 volts. The motherboard auto-chose 1.9 volts. I decided to manually set it to 1.8 volts, and it still works fine, even under the stress test. The idle power consumption edged down from 30 watts to 29 watts.
- It looks like the CPU temperature reporting isn't fully locked at 42°C, but rather won't report anything less than that. During some of the stress tests I saw brief flickers up to 43°C, leading me to believe that the sensors are alive. This summer, when the room temperatures are 5°-6°C higher than now, the sensors are more likely to wake up during the stress tests.
- I've been slowly experimenting with overclocking -- running the CPU and memory at faster than the rated speeds. The bog-standard default for juno's equipment is 2.93GHz for the CPU, and 800MHz for the RAM. Gradual bumps in speed have been followed by stress testing, so that I know sooner rather than later that it's gone too far. By now, juno is up to 3.16 GHz / 864 MHz. I've left the CPU and RAM "linked" -- overclocking in tandem. If I care to, I can unlink them, so that, for instance, I could continue to bump the CPU speed without taking the memory further than it can go. That juno can accomplish this with the -.10v undervolt of the CPU and the 1.8v setting on the RAM shows how some parts are binned by demand rather than quality. That is, my CPU may be a perfectly good 3.06 GHz or better part, but Intel needed more of the less expensive 2.93 GHz parts to sell, and fixed it as such. In any case, I plan to be conservative, and back off a couple of steps when either 1) the stress test starts to throw errors, or 2) the power consumption starts to climb more than a watt or two.
- I may also experiment in future with the power consumption response to deliberately underclocking the system.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Further Education with juno
Now that I've been working with juno for a few weeks, I have a few updates.
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