How to spend a (geek) weekend.
It’s Friday, and you’re on the road going home… you’re phone rings, that’s a SMS. Is it for a party ? … NO ! It’s just a thousand times better: Fedex telling you your parcel has been delivered !
Half an hour later, you jump out of the car, run to the door, and finally get you hands on that darn package you’ve been expecting for days and days. Time to open it, grab a drink, and run to the computer desk. That box contains everything you need for a perfect geek weekend alone at home: a new cpu and a DDR3 memory kit.
… fast forward … parts are now getting installed, and it’s only 7PM
7:15, moment of truth: will it boot up ?
7:16, breathing restarts, it works !
After a boring hour reinstalling Windows and some drivers, I’m now ready for the real fun: discovering that new platform, and trying to overclock it properly.
9PM, first SuperPI run… score is in the 11s, that’s correct for an aircooled rig, and gives a good start.
11PM, time for a break… get a pizza out of the freezer, stick it in the oven. While waiting, open the windows in the computer room, it’s 0°C outdoor, it would be stupid to miss that nice cold air which could do good on the cpu temperature.
12PM, pizza has disappeared, and it’s time to get serious… run SuperPi as fast as possible as many times as it needs to get a good score.
… fast forward … it’s now 4AM, it’s real cold in the room, and that has been 22 hours since wake-up time. Oh, yes, I forgot the most important: Pi time is now below 10s, and has even been better than my previous personal best. Knowing that former best score was achieved using a cascade cooler which draws 5kW of power, and that the new one just happened with a simple heatsink…
Saturday.
It’s 8:30, and the alarm rings. Time to wake up, good clocks need time, and a weekend only lasts for two days, that means you shouldn’t lose time sleeping too much.
Day was spent doing almost the same thing, but with a new target: getting a 9.5s time. After a long benchmarking run, it finally occurred, as I saw times were not improving a lot with the following runs, I gave up on aircooling systems, and searched for a more powerful cooler.
In the past, I’ve been building a lot of phase-change coolers, but most of them are now either stocked as spare parts in the garage, or need to be repaired. Not speaking of the cascade cooler, which needs a week to make it run for an hour 
Finally, I found one single stage phase change cooler (technically, the same thing as a basic refrigerator) still working… not that good, but working at last. I brought it back into the room, and installed it on the benching rig. After a lot of adjustments, it started to work almost as I expected…
That cooler was not as great as I thought, and needed some re-work, it took a few hours to make it run properly.
The evening was spent trying to get good scores with the cold cpu, and doing some 3DMark tests, so no improvements on the SuperPi time.
Sunday.
You don’t get any record with an usual stock mainboard… except if it’s a Foxconn X48 ! … but as it’s a pre-release one, it still needs some re-work, which were sent from the manufacturer, via a good friend, Shamino. I asked my volt modder, and we changed some things on the board, making it run better.
It’s now time for real benching: we have great hardware, a modded top notch mainboard, and some cold. After a long evening, it finally happened, we were able to break in the 8.xxx s for SuperPi 1M ! That was the main target for the weekend, and we did it.
The sun now sets, and in a few hours, those two short days will end. Find it a loss of time ? Who cares. Weekends are for funny things, and for the geek I am, that’s real fun.
In now two weeks, we’ll be doing that for a whole week. The CeBIT will be all about that kind of things for us, and that was a good start for our preparation.
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