Author: aztpg8

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All in One or Tower Cooler. Which is better?

How did we get here?

Some of my first personal computers didn’t even need a cooler. Later, they required a modest heatsink or fan combination, which was more than enough for the heat being produced. Processers weren’t that powerful, graphics were being handled on the motherboard, and ironically, sound was usually handled by a dedicated card. It was a much simpler time.

Several decades later, the processing power in a home PC is more than what took up an entire floor in a major university. That’s not an exaggeration. Your home PC might have been a ‘Supercomputer’ thirty plus years ago. Power draw and heat are also much more than decades past. It’s far less comparatively, but there is a lot of heat generated by modern CPUs. With heat, you need cooling.

There are two main ways to cool modern CPUs. One way using a closed fluid loop and radiator combination. Similar to a car, a pump circulates the fluid and the heat is dissipated through a radiator. Tower coolers use a tall vertical grid to transfer heat up and away from the CPU, while fans move air across the stack. There are many CPU’s you can cool with a smaller fin stack and fan blowing down on the processor, but most high performance chips produce entirely too much heat for that.

Which cooler is better?

The answer is more complicated than just saying ‘go buy this’. The fluid loop system may be the most effective at cooling, but difficult to set up. While it works very well, it is sometimes difficult to put together and maintain, and can prove expensive to buy parts. Failures in the system can cause bigger issues. It can be very expensive if done wrong, and cost money to replace components.

The All in One cooler makes installation easier and often is very affordable. It’s also usually very reliable. Choosing the right sized cooler is not usually difficult, but there are a few things to remember, and a few examples of poor design to be aware of. It’s almost certainly a good idea to stay away from a single fan 120mm design, and the pump should never be at the top of the loop. Most often the pump is in the section making contact with the processor. If air gets trapped in the pump assembly it can burn up the unit, causing other failures.

Tower coolers are usually much easier to maintain and cheaper, but you may not get the same performance. For most CPUs, though, it’s a great solution and doesn’t present the issue of positioning that a loop does. They both come with RGB options, and even digital readouts like temp, etc. Both are solid options, so what’s the question?

So, what gives?

Other than making sure of the positioning of the AIO radiator, either should do the job, right? Yes, but there is a subtle difference no one has mentioned. Where does the hot air go?

Typically, the warm air in a system with an AIO will be forced up through the top. Whether the radiator is at the top, or in the front, there are usually fans pushing air out through the top of the case. After all, heat rises. You can certainly configure the fans to push air somewhere else, but why screw with nature.

Tower coolers push air directly out of the back. Think about it, the tower cooler fans push warm air away from the CPU to the back of the case, right into the exhaust fan. Fans in the top may help, but for the most part most warm air exits from the rear. Why does that matter? Unless you have your PC in an enclosed space, there is more room above your PC than behind it. Much of the time PCs are set up where a wall or even the monitor, etc. is directly behind it. I never considered this until playing Starfield on both of my PCs. It’s a game that really stresses the system.

The both are slightly lower than my desk, and positioned where I can see inside the machine. The backs point toward the desks. I was warm and uncomfortable while playing on the Intel system, but not the AMD rig, and confused why. Confused until I realized the tower cooler was blowing all of the warm air from the CPU right at me. Hmm, I never considered that. The Intel PC doesn’t work as hard, but blows all of that air across my desk. It’s something I didn’t consider.

How do I dix the cooler?

How do I fix it? Do I change to an AIO for that rig? Do I rearrange the desk and PC? Neither is impossible, but either is inconvenvient. I’m definitely not going to stop playing games. It’s easiest to rearrange everything on the desk, so that’s the plan. Not fun, but effective. It’s also cheaper than buying another AIO. There will be a follow up.

It’s not a problem, it’s just inconvenient, but no one talks about it. I can’t be the only one that has run into this issue, though. It’s always a learning process but I hadn’t considered this at all. Now I have to make a video.

Link to the YouTube channel

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Can Arc GPU’s play the new Starfield? Sort of.

How did we get here

The A750, being a new architecture, is bound to have issues, but you would think some things shouldn’t happen. Intel released the Arc GPUs about a year ago and declared that they were concentrating on the most up-to-date processes first. This meant games running DX12 and the new AV1 encoder among other things. They admitted older APIs and processes would take time to ‘fill in’ and to many of us, that was okay.

I saw it as an opportunity to do some testing and make content, so the discovery process worked well for me. Newer titles run well, and as recently discovered, the AV1 encoder is amazing. Older titles running Direct X 11 or 9 had some issues, but that was expected. No one felt they needed to call Intel out on that because they told us what to expect. They reported, and we confirmed. Everything checked out fine.

Intel has released several driver updates over the year to improve running those older titles. Improvements have been seen in older games, especially the more popular ones, and even the upscale Xess is solid. Some games like Borderlands3 still suffer in DX11, though, and straight-up crash in DX12. Others, that have the option of DX11 or Vulkan, are abysmal. World War Z, for example, is horrible in DX11 and cannot access the option to run in Vulkan. Still, for the price, the Arc GPUs are a great buy.

There’s always a but,

There is this time, as well.

Starfield is a game that Bethesda has been working on for several years, and was known about when the ARC GPUs launched. Being a new title, it should be in the new GPU’s wheelhouse. No. The pre-release wouldn’t launch at all. For that matter, as of a week after launch, it wouldn’t start on some systems, including mine.

Try as I might, I can’t think of a good excuse for this. Furthermore, I can’t pin down who should be more at fault. Intel knew about the game and should have been ready for this release, but Bethesda has made comments that even newer hardware won’t be enough to run the game. I get not being able to run it well, but to even start the game?

This was supposed to be one of the most anticipated games to come from Bethesda in a decade and you tell us things like the ARC GPUs don’t even meet minimum specs. The card is a year old and compares to cards that are above your minimum specs. That doesn’t wash. Intel isn’t in the clear here either, though, this game wasn’t a secret, and it wasn’t some sort of indy project. This was a major project and should have been anticipated.

Does it work on Arc or not?

Luckily, Intel continues to work on drivers and we can play this game on our Arc GPUs. It’s not perfect, by any means. There are issues like changing the resolution and keeping a full screen. Or weird blue shading that happens when I change settings but I can play around with it. I shouldn’t have to, but it’s not the end of the world. It does take away from the immersion, though.

The graphics on the game are beautiful and the storyline begins to take shape a few hours into playing. Without some persistence, though, owners of Intel GPUs might not ever reach that point. I could understand if many simply walked away from it, especially for the price point. At this point, it’s an average experience, and if you are used to playing other games in that genre, like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, you may end up passing on it all together. I will tell you, though, that I was happy to get it working on the A750, I just don’t know how much of it I’ll be playing.

Link to the video is here

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The HP Bad Omen – it was supposed to be easy

How did we get here?

The HP Omen needed a new SSD. A new NVMe drive in one of the two M.2 slots should do the trick. The reason was simple, Dustin was selling his computer and wanted to make sure his personal info wasn’t shared. Old drive out, and new drive in. Easy. Not so much. I had prepared for the swap, and it should have been cut and dry, but the Omen PC had other plans.

I installed Windows 10 on a new drive in a PC with very similar parts, but when we turned the new PC on, it boot looped. Okay, get into the BIOS and look for a bootable drive. That was a different problem. On HP computers the spam keys are escape and F10 instead of the Delete key (and occasionally F2), but this didn’t work. I couldn’t get into the BIOS.

We removed the drive to check it, and of course, it worked in the other setup. The original drive also worked in the Omen. Another try with the new drive produced more boot loops, but there was progress. We could get in the BIOS, now. The Crucial P3 Plus was being recognized as a boot drive, but not acting like it. We configured the boot order to see the media creation USB and tried again. The thought being to reinstall windows on the Omen.

Re-installing the OS

I had already taken the precaution of making sure that the SSD was compatible with the OMEN, and I had a back up plan if it didn’t. The media creation tool on the USB was the latest release to keep form a ton of updates when we finished, but we hadn’t gotten to that point.

Windows 10 allowed us to use a local account, and could be set up without needing the new owner’s personal information. The fewer things to worry about the better. The new owner could then update all of the account information, himself. We still had to get the PC to boot in the first place, though.

I was able to start running the media creation tool, but found yet another problem. Windows didn’t see the new drive. In fact, after some trial and error and experimenting, we realized it didn’t see any drive, not even the original. This was just getting weird.

Time to go to the internet. There are several videos for HP Omens and boot issues, but they all say the same thing, change the boot order in the BIOS. Um, we already did that. Maybe this wouldn’t help. I finally found one video from a channel called Lapfix that found the solution. (here). One, out of dozens.

The actual fix

It seems there is an Intel RAID driver required for the new PC to recognize the drive. What? Seriously? An obscure raid driver? It was also necessary to extract it from an exe file. (Obviously you cant use an exe file if you can’t get into Windows.) File was extracted, installed on a different USB, and back to the install. We found the option for using a driver and it actually worked. Finally, things were moving forward again.

Windows was installed along with a handful of updates; there are always updates. The Omen desktop app and the newest NVidia video driver installed easily and we were in business. I was still cautious, though, not taking anything for granted.

A couple of test boots and resets later and this thing was ready to pack up and present to it’s new owner. We installed a second NVMe for games (yes, we had also tried it as a boot), and things were in good shape. I have worked on hundreds of computers and never run into this. Heck, I’ve made stuff work that was never supposed to work together and hadn’t seen this.

Having a small tech channel, gives me an opportunity to see and learn a lot, but this may be one of the stranger things. There should be no reason a single boot drive would need a raid driver. It doesn’t make sense, but it definitely adds to the difficulty of taking care of your PC. It makes it look like these companies purposely keep us from upgrading.

Final thoughts

Prebuilts have parts typically optimized to work with each other, but parts go bad, or sometimes need to be changed. To need a driver like this seems shady at best. It’s entirely possible there is an important reason for it, but I would expect to see it more often, if so. I certainly don’t understand the need on a boot drive.

It’s no secret that companies prevent consumers from repairing their own equipment. Major corporations are guilty and don’t deny it, but this wasn’t a copy protect or proprietary parts. It’s just a driver that seems to be out of place if it’s necessary. To me, it seems shady, but at least now I am aware of it for the next time.

We set things up on Windows 10, but its ready for Windows 11, so by now it should be updated. It’s a shame this was so tricky, because it’s actually a good system. The BIOS isn’t special, but no HP BIOS is special. For that matter, not many integrator’s BIOSes offer many options, but it’s functional. This PC should last the new owner quite a while.

For my part, I will start looking for tricks or extra drivers, especially on prebuilts. I don’t have anything against a prebuilt, but I will stick to building my own. That way, I know the issues are my fault. Sometimes, it’s due to things I shouldn’t do anyway, but that’s a different blog.

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The video can be found here

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Rendering videos with the new editing rig

How did we get here?

Having completed most of the work on CoolBlue, the new editing rig, it came time to start testing. Theoretically it should be better, but that still needed proving. This would primarily be a test of the CPU, because the version of DaVinci Resolve I’m using doesn’t have support using the NVENC encoder used by NVidia. I’ve been using it like this for a couple of years, but there is a wrinkle later.

I devised the rather unscientific procedure of three test runs each on identical projects. I was able to do this because the files are now kept on the server, and available to every computer on my network. It would be three passes with each the AMD Ryzen 7 5800x and the Intel i7 12700KF. I would render a twelve minute video, alternating between the two systems allowing a cooldown between each run.

Both systems are similar with anything handling the media being nearly identical. Both systems are using an intel NVMe drive, with other assets stored on WD Black 7200 RPM. Each saves to a drive on the home network to the server, I recently built. The GPUs aren’t a factor (yet), and the DDR4 memory is 32 GB at 3600 MHz. The only difference is the platform.

The testing

The first run was almost what I expected, except the AMD was twenty seconds faster. I started to question my idea of swapping rigs at this point, but there was more to test. The 5800X clocked in at 4 minutes and 34 seconds, and the Intel rendered took twenty seconds longer. The second run saw them reversed, with the 12700 turning in the faster time. The average of both runs were almost identical, I could go with either system at this point.

That changed with the third run. The AMD rig turned in a time similar to the other runs, but the Intel system rendered the video in three minutes, nineteen seconds. It shaved a full minute off anything the AMD offered. Both of these systems are the previous generation with the same generation of memory, and the same storage solution. It would be a no brainer to use the new build, but there was more.

I mentioned that the version of Resolve I am using doesn’t take advantage of the RTX3060Ti that is in the current editing rig, but it does allow for the AV1 encoder on the Arc A750. The same A750 that is in the new build. Might this be the test I need that convinces me to switch?

AV1 in the new editing rig

One advantage of the Arc graphics cards is the addition of the new AV1 encoding process. An encoder that is also now included on the new 7000 series AMD Graphics cards. After a small misstep, I was able to configure Resolve properly, and I ran the render test, which blistered the previous efforts.

The new run took one minute and fifty two seconds. My fastest run was now cut almost in half! Half! I was convinced. I used to start rendering, then leave the room to go get something to drink or a bio break. Now, I will barely have time to find which image will be my thumbnail for the video. This will save hours over a year’s time. It will pay huge dividends as I move forward.

For good measure and piece of mind, I rendered the support video for this story using the same method and the eleven minute, seven second video, finished in two minutes even. It’s a huge improvement and it makes me excited using this editing rig going forward. It does raise a question of whether I should completely swap PCs or have two systems for two different functions, though, but that’s a question for later.

The video for the testing and results is here.

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New drivers, but the same results

How did we get here?

A few months back I bought Intel’s Arc A750 graphics card to test. The day one drivers, Intel admitted, were lacking support for some older games. Newer games use Direct X12 to interface with Windows, while older ones use DX11 or 9. Some games also use the Vulkan API, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The Arc GPU’s were optimized for DX12 and Vulkan with plans to catch up as they went. If they went.

Newer titles perform very well , and the A750 can be picked up right now for under 250USD. It’s a great deal for the money, and they have updated a wide variety of games. There are, however, some issues. Some games are good for benchmarks because of how they stress components. They may not always be popular, but they have a purpose.

One popular for testing is Borderlands 3. It stresses the graphics card and often makes the best cards run hot. It also runs on DX11 AND DX12, except it doesn’t; not with the Intel drivers. Okay, DX 11 technically works, but DX12 crashes and won’t restart without going into the games config file. I don’t think that is a default setting.

While using DX11, performance is less than stellar. The game measures performance from the mid 70 frames per second to around 100 whether render the resolution is set to 1440P or the more standard 1080P. Generally, 1080P should be between a 10 and 20% improvement over the higher resolution. It’s not, if anything it’s worse, AND its worse with the new driver. Only a few frames and in margin of error, but worse.

Other issues

World War Z is another game with a different problem. Why would I mention a game that has a limited popularity? Because its a dual API game, with a choice between DX11 and Vulkan. Well, it’s supposed to support two protocols, but Vulkan isn’t currently an option. I haven’t looked at the config file yet, but from the menu, it’s a no.

Still, that’s not the real problem. The real problem is the DX11 drivers are all but broken. Any combination of texture and resolution nets you 60fps or less. GPU and CPU usage are both extremely low and memory usage is through the roof. Tears, frame drops and missing textures are all common, making it almost painful to watch. WWZ isn’t that popular, so it probably won’t be fixed for quite a while. it is, a valuable benchmark, however, or was.

They didn’t list either of these as games as improved, but I had hoped.

Will there be better drivers?

Most assuredly. Intel has done a fantastic job of updating every few weeks with a larger one about every quarter. Each time, there is an improvement and we have to remember, they haven’t been producing graphics cards for two decades plus, like the other two have. For a freshman effort, it’s outstanding and priced extremely well.

The card is under 250 USD and compares well to cards that cost at least one and a half times as much. It’s a worthy opponent, and it is a beautiful, sleek looking card that compliments almost any system. The AV1 encoder will be of great use rendering video content, and it is power efficient, as well. The issues with some older titles is an inconvenience for some of us doing benchmarks, but the card performs well in newer titles. It’s actually a solid card.

I was skeptical when it came out, but thought the price was affordable if it turned out to be junk. I’m happy to say, it’s not junk. It’s actually a great card, and a great buy. With the constant improvements to drivers in Arc, I’m excited to see Battlemage when it releases, and I never imagined myself saying that. If the current example holds true, the next gen will also be affordable, putting pressure on NVidia and AMD.

This card will stay in my build and will so be my editing rig. In turn, I will use my other PC for testing, but I think the Arc will make a decent gaming and streaming option, so it gets a try. If it doesn’t cut it, I’ll just swap it out with the RTX 3060Ti I’m using.

The video on this is located here

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