305: Hardly an Off-the-Shelf Knob

Okay. I've put my hands on every one of the new iPhones. Ask me anything. Hey, me too. Oh, okay. I guess you don't need to ask me anything then. I mean, so I went to the AT&T store while I was waiting to pick up food last night. Okay. And. I kind of put my hand so they had the anti-theft things on them to the point that like you couldn't get good hand feel. Oh, OK. Well, so we went to the Chestnut Street Apple Store yesterday. Oh, bougie.

in the midst of yes dude i don't get me started on that apple store have i talked about it before i just don't like chestnut street at all I have an extreme love-hate relationship with the marina in San Francisco. There is some really nice, fun stuff in the marina. I don't like Chestnut Street. The vibes of that area are not to my taste, let's say. Some of my good friends who I went to college with used to like going to a bar out there to watch Tennessee football games and.

Sometimes it was great. Sometimes it just absolutely sucked. So I'm glad we don't go there anymore. I had the worst, probably the worst retail experience of my life at that Apple store on Chestnut Street. For folks who don't know. Um, I don't know what's the, the Marina is kind of like, it's, it's like posh for 26 year olds. Yes. It is the bougiest, poshest part of San Francisco. It's like, well, yeah, it's like high end shopping district though. But, but it's.

But like the high end shopping districts like Pacific Heights or something like that. Like that's where the actual rich people is. This is where the people who think they're really rich but aren't probably like a lot of finance bros in the marina. Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly it. Anyway, anyway, I had way better time at that Apple store yesterday to their credit, but I don't think I've ever been to an Apple store on iPhone launch day. That's the one that I used to go to to pick up stuff when we would.

Before they closed the loophole, because like in the early tested days, you could call your Apple business guy and he would hold shit for you. And then you just go skip the line, go straight, straight in, get your stuff from them. And then they were like, oh, we got to stop this because people are abusing this.

to, you know, not have to wait in the line. But I used to shout out to Mike at the Chestnut Street Apple store 15 years ago because he ripped. He got us like four iPads on lunch day. Thanks, Mike. Line was still way down the block at three o'clock when we got there in the afternoon, but we just, we just went right into browse. So I also saw like the new watches and the new AirPods and stuff, but their anti-theft stuff is minimal enough that I could just hold the phones.

Tiny little disc on the back, but otherwise I kind of got good hand feel on each one. Okay. Where are you at? That air might be too thin. I don't know. I picked it up. I took a picture of my kid. I airdropped the picture of my kid to myself, and then I deleted the picture of my kid from the phone.

And I was like, this is a pretty good size for me. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's a you know, it's a nice, sturdy, large funding screen. Real estate size. It's quite large. Yeah, I didn't buy any phones this year. I've held off to date. So. Yeah. Even the 16E was a substantial upgrade over what I have, let's say. Size-wise? Size-wise, everything about it. I can't believe how light iPhones are now. I've still got an SE3, which is the 6 design. Yeah.

And this thing is pretty small and still heavier than any of those new phones that have way bigger screens in this. Well, so it's it's weird because for a while they got really beefy when they were doing stainless steel frames. and got real heavy like the 10 from the 10 to the 15 i guess or 15 is when they switched to titanium and uh now the titanium one feels pretty heavy and um i i don't know like i

It's it's weird. The fun thing was I went in with my daughter who is now 12 and was she was like, oh, I want to look at iPads, dad. And I was like, OK, you can look at iPads. We're absolutely not buying an iPad at the AT&T store because it's the worst possible place to do that. And she's like, whatever. OK, she's like, wait.

Is this thing really twelve hundred dollars? And I was like, yes, this is really twelve hundred dollars. I thought that they were like four hundred bucks. And I was like, oh, well, I have bad news. They used to be a thousand dollars and now they're twelve hundred because of well, because of elections and people made bad choices.

Someone is gaining perspective on the value of money. Yes, we're learning a lot. But yeah, so I took a couple of pictures with the air because the thing I'm curious about is the zoom and what that dual what those dual lenses are like, because my phone. I think has one dual lens maybe, but I can't even remember because I'm on a 15 Pro. I think they introduced that the next year. I am...

I am curious. I looked at some reviews and I was like, I'm going to wait until I can go to the Apple store and spend some quality time with this thing and then make a decision. They're out there. But like the thing, the place I'm at is my 15, my 15 pro. The trade in on it is going to basically evaporate over the next year. Yeah. Because it'll be 250 bucks next year. Right. 11. Man, that's still pretty substantial to me. I think my SE.

They dropped the trading value on the SE like profoundly in the last few months. I think I would maybe get a hundred bucks for mine now to the point that I would actually probably rather keep it as a backup phone. Yes. At that point. I think mine's $550 now if I do through them. What? The carriers will give me a grand. Oh, my God. What? The carriers want a three-year contract on a phone trade-in, which I'm not going to do. Anyway, phones. I want to talk about the real technology.

The real hot business. What's that? Well, we went to the last flea market of the year last weekend. That's true. We did. Yeah. We trucked down to Saratoga, California. I bought another CRT. I think I opened the season and closed the season by buying CRTs this year. That will happen at the flea market. I'm not allowed to buy any more CRTs.

That was the first message that came back in the group chat, I think, after everybody got to their respective homes from the flea market was, I have been informed this is the last CRT. Like super duper, I am not buying any more CRTs, no matter what a good deal they are. But this one. This is a 1993 model 20 inch Trinitron. It has S video. It's real good, Brad. I'm sighing here because when we first saw it, I immediately thought, man, I should buy that CRT. And then I kind of like held off.

And then you've expressed interest or I thought about it, the more I wish I had bought it. Well, so what's funny is I had the same conversation with Adam who was there with his, with his wife, Adam from PC world, friend of the show. And. he was like as soon as they got in the car as they were leaving his wife was like under no circumstances are you allowed to buy that crt from like if this is a backdoor effort to get another crt into our house that's a hard no from me yeah

And I was like, but okay, so I bought that little RCA, the 10-inch, 13-inch, 12-inch, whatever it is, the baby one, the start of the year. And it turns out, I love it for nostalgia reasons, but it is not a good CRT. I mean, being limited to RFN only is constricting, let's say. And it has the good analog knobs that make the great sound and ka-chunk and all that when you turn them.

One of the knobs, the main one that you use to change the RF channels that you use to dial in the thing, it's a little hinky. Now that just sounds like a knob replacement project in the works. Well, so I looked at that and getting the right switch because it's a two stage. It's got like an inner dial that turns to dial it in. And then it's got the 13 step outer knob.

very familiar with those yeah you have to find a donor tv that's the right tv model to replace it that is hardly an off-the-shelf knob yeah the the fix is the fix if you don't have a donor tv is take the switch all the way apart, clean all the contacts with contact cleaner and then reassemble it. And I'm going to tell you.

I don't think I care that much. Yeah. Well, hey, what if you just bought a newer TV instead? You know, it turns out it has buttons on the front. It has two S video inputs and you can RGB mod it if you want. But I think I'm not going to bother. 20 inches, such a great size because it's still like it's not quite portable, but it's like compact enough and it's got this video and man, I should have bought that TV. It's human manageable. So I.

My my wife, who I love dearly, pointed out that I have a 20 inch sharp in the in the storage unit aging for the last 20 years. Right. That I put probably twenty thousand dollars worth of storage money into at this point. So, you know, if you're looking, let me know. For the Sony or the Sharp? For the Sharp. I'm not selling the Sony. Sony's nice. Well, hey, it's a $20,000 TV. How can I say no? Yeah, exactly. It's a bargain.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hello. We also buried the important thing, which is that you made your first trip to Micro Center after that trip to free market. Yeah, that's right. Micro Center's pretty cool.

Micro Center is nice, huh? Micro Center is not bad. Like the day after I realized like two or three little things that I could have picked up there that would have been nice to have. That is that is the problem with going to Micro Center. Yeah. But but no, we went around. We just kind of walked around the story. I don't think anybody.

Maybe one person bought some stuff, but I think we mostly were just touristing and appreciating the filament wall and looking at 3D printers and TVs and monitors and all that stuff. I became acquainted with Asus's business line of motherboards. Oh, yeah.

which I think I might've seen those before. Like Asus has all kinds of stuff. They've got the pro art ones, which are like kind of creator oriented. They've got the, they've got workstation motherboards that are like serious. That's what I've got in my NAS. But they have these quote unquote business motherboards that have a green PCBs. Really? I missed that. Straight up. So just Google like a Seuss business motherboard. You'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

It just looks like a motherboard from the mid 90s. Like it's just a classic green PCB. The creator ones have Thunderbolt and more USB 3.3 and 3.2 ports usually. They don't have USB 2 ports on the back generally. And usually like an extra Ethernet port, like an extra 10 gig port or something. The business motherboards, the Intel ones I was looking at used a different chipset, which I could not.

puzzle out the nature of it was like a it was instead of a z it was a q kind of probably just means like less memory support and stuff like that you probably can't do uh overclocked memory yeah q q870 is the chipset on this business motherboard It's business time, Brad. Z890, I think, is the high-end AeroLake one. Anyway, parts. Just fun to walk into a giant retail store full of computer parts.

I will tell you my favorite thing about that is how aggressively they help people. And like you actually get knowledgeable people helping you. Like you go up to the BYO computer area, build your own, not bring your own. And they. like we'll walk through you walk through the the cabinets with you pulling out cpus and ram and ssds and motherboards and all that stuff so you make sure that you get stuff that works with everything and like make good decisions and they're like

The last time I was there, I eavesdropped on them to make sure that they were giving good advice. And like, they were taking what people said, hey, I want Intel, they'd give them the alternative and be like, hey, this is the little bit more performant, blah, blah, blah. And then they'd help them make good decisions, which was really cool. Sold out of 9800X3Ds. Yeah. I think every other processor skew on both sides was there except that one.

AMD said last week that they're making those as fast as they can, and they just nonstop sell out. Yeah, I believe it. There were video cards. There were 9070 XTs. There were 5090s. There were 5080s. You could get more or less retail price. In some cases. Well, I guess actually some of the ones that are marked up are the kind of classic overclocked, you know, hey, here's the higher bend version that we factory overclocked and we're going to charge $300 more.

yeah i think the the cheapest 5090 i saw was 2400 bucks which was which was when i looked it up their stated msrp for that particular car okay it's a bigger cooler or whatever i don't know anyway um

What are we going to talk about this week, Brad? What do we got? PCs, actually. The personal computer. I've been somewhat off work this week and have been doing a lot of PC tinkering myself. And I think you've got some stuff also. Yeah, my Linux project is ongoing. I finally put Kashi back on the desktop PC and I've settled into my gnome on the laptop and KDE on the desktop. We talked about the dual boot diaries this week. Sideshow plug.

I think I'm two episodes behind now on that. I think, I think, uh, last time I listened to Adam was about to go to Germany, I think. So we just posted the followup episode to that yesterday. Okay. So I think you're probably four is the current one, I think, and five is next week. Are you Gnome-ing for the gestures on laptop? Is that the distinction there? Because in my limited experience, Gnome is pretty good with touchpad gestures.

yeah so i like the touchpad gestures a lot and um and also the just the default shipping gnome on cash is the full screen one where you gesture up into the into the kind of launcher slash task switcher That's how Fedora, that might just be a GNOME setting. I don't even know if that's a distro specific thing, but at a minimum, I can say Fedora also ships that way. Yeah, it's like you get maximal screen space on the laptop. The only thing I don't like about it is it does a bad job with scaling.

uh out of the box but there's apparently extensions or text edits you can do to get like precise scaling that you want for your for your because the monitor the laptop screen that i use is like 2800 by 1600 or 1400 or something like that it's a weird resolution anyway Your Linux desktop continues. I mean, I'm going to go and tell you it's way easier than I expected it to be. I mean, I think years and years of doing.

like Linux server stuff has paved, has, has made it easier, but it's been fun watching Adam figure this stuff out too. And he's kind of done distro hopping at this point. So anyway, but you, yes, I, yes, I have a new enemy. Yeah. Well, I mean, I told you to put a water cooler in that machine. Air is my new enemy. But one of the one of the things. OK, I've got a couple of little projects I've been tinkering with the last. OK.

week or two that we're here to talk about. One of them pertains to fan acoustics and noise and also the ongoing drama might be a strong word, but some of the ongoing. questions around a lot of the windows based hardware monitoring, uh, utilities, the wind ring zero problem. Yes. The wind ring zero problem that has affected fan control and like a list here of. Let's see, Razer Synapse, Capframe X. Let's see, open hardware monitor. MSI Afterburner. Open RGB. Yeah.

a whole bunch of hw info steel series engine um evga precision x1 although i think the newer versions don't have the problem on that it's it's wild because the thing that happened for folks who don't know is that in a recent Windows update, Microsoft started labeling anything that uses. So let me take a step back. Winring zero is a is a low level driver. It's called Winring zero because it's the lowest level kernel level driver.

uh that you install to get low level access to things like voltages and fan speeds from your from a lot of motherboards and biases it's used by uh a library called libre hardware which is um libre hardware monitor i believe well the monitor monitor is a is a thing that sits on top of that like the dll is used by a bazillion projects open source and closed source to give access to that timing and they all use that same win ring zero driver which microsoft has said

is insecure and is labeling it as a virus and recommending that people quarantine it now it is insecure like even the developer of the driver who wrote it like 15 years ago has since come out and basically said i wish i had not written that and it is and this vulnerability is real and quite bad Yeah. And I think we talked about this. I can't remember. This is the problem with doing two.

podcasts that are kind of adjacent to each other we definitely talked about this on the full nerd i think we talked about it here a few weeks ago i don't think we have because this was new to me okay because when that pop-up hit i was because i i got hit by the defender hey you've got a trojan on your system

Two weeks ago now, it's been a little bit. I immediately flipped out and was like, what is going on here? Because I was installing fan control from Scoop, which is one of the Windows package managers of Note. And like there is some amount of.

relying on the goodwill and vigilance of the community with Scoop or any community-driven package manager that malware doesn't sneak its way into their versions of what they're posting. So my first thought was, oh God, is the Scoop version... like the binary that scoop is distributing a fan control infected what's going on here but then like it did not take long just looking at our discord or github issues or wherever like people were getting hit with this left and right because

Yeah. What happened was Microsoft finally just decided to start enforcing the Windows Defender definition that identified WinRing0 as vulnerable. So I think you could still just click quarantine button and move on with your life if you want it. Right. Like, it's not like they were completely disallowing it, but I don't think that's a good idea. Well, if you hit quarantine, then then control stops working. So I'm sorry. Quarantine is not the right term. Like, so like, like.

Make an exception for it. Yeah, make an exception for it, which is what Microsoft recommended. Yeah. Also, as of this morning, fan control released version 240, which Remo did it, which is uses pod IO.

So this was actually the two 39 was the one that came out a couple of days before we recorded. This was the first version to do that. Uh, that yes, they, I was following the GitHub issues around people flipping out over this one as defender. Um, notification yeah and they were already talking at that time about pawn io as an alternative driver so i installed pawn io on version 237 and it's been working fine for me for the last week and a half

It seems like they'll probably get it where it needs to be. Basically, like here's the here's the note with in the changelog for version 239 of fan control migrated to the pawn IO version of Libra hardware monitor. Win ring zero is no longer shipped with fan control. This will prompt for the installation of the Pawn IO driver. You may use the software without, but you will not get any motherboard sensors. Other sensor sources will still work as usual.

This is a whole new driver implementation. It will contain bugs and require community efforts to iron them out. So like they are making, at least in fan controls case, they are making the transition away pretty promptly from. away from this vulnerable driver, but it sounds like there will maybe potentially be edge cases that would cause issues anyway. I think this is a larger part of Microsoft getting control of the kernel level software.

Yeah, because they need to do. I mean, like, yeah, it's like it's been a long time since the Wild West era of Windows XP and anything goes for anything that anybody wants to write for the OS. Well, but but at the same time, it's like the.

windows defender is a pretty blunt cudgel for lack of a better term like like this is the way they did this and popping up these error messages for a bazillion people for stuff for just to be clear for hardware that ships with your video card or with your mouse or with your, you know, like.

the hwinfo is bundled with motherboards in a lot of cases like asus will install hwinfo if you if you do the full install suite on a lot of motherboards so it's pretty wild that they decided to label these as a trojan without any kind of like supplemental information aside from, hey, there's a knowledge base article here that explains what's going on. That's kind of impenetrable to anybody but nerds.

Yeah, I don't know if Defender is architected in such a way that it can point you to information when it flags something. I guess it is. I don't remember seeing anything like that. It had to read more on mine. Okay. I mean, this needed to be done at some point. I don't know.

Yeah. If this was the best way to go about it. I mean, if anything, to some extent, this may have been somewhat counterproductive to trigger it this way because a lot of people, in fact, a lot of people in the issues on GitHub for fan control were recommending like...

Hey, just make an exception and move on. Like it's just a false positive. Like that was actually, yeah, that's the dangerous narrative there is, Hey, it's just a false positive. Just allow it and move on because it's not actually like, well, a lot of people, a lot of people look at something like this and they're like, Oh no, this is, this can't be an actual threat.

I should just allow this and leave it as is. So for what it's worth, I've been using the pod IO version of fan control for the last week or week and a half at this point. And it's been fine. Um, but I have a relatively simple setup.

Enough people use that software that I'm sure it will probably get hammered into shape relatively quickly. Yeah. But this all actually just prompted my hand because I had been meaning to move off of fan control for a while anyway, because fan control doesn't exist for Linux.

And so it's not like it's not like you could just export your fan control config from Windows and apply it to the Linux version because that doesn't exist. No. So I had the same problem and I solved it by going to the UEFI fan setup and just hitting the quiet preset. Okay, sure. Problem solved. That is absolutely one way to do it. I mean, especially if you're on, if you're on an AIO.

Yeah. And, and whatever fan control or sorry, whatever fan profile on the BIOS or the UEFI you're hitting is somewhat aware of, you know, they're never aware of the liquid temperature. Yeah. Okay. Well, hopefully it's like. tuned well enough to work with an AIO that you won't run into trouble, but also AIOs are very efficient, right? Yeah. So the problem I have is that I don't want the, but what the PC sees is the CPU fans, which are the three fans on the front of the AIO.

spinning up and down with the cpu temperature right i want them to spin up and down with the liquid temperature and it turns out it was confused it was difficult to solve that problem like i i there are very few AIOs, it's something I've been testing for PC World is basically we have a big wall of AIOs and I've been popping them open and plugging them in to see if any of them report the temperature to the BIOS in a meaningful way.

I would love if some of them use the thermistor header on motherboards, because almost all high-end motherboards have a thermistor header, and I would totally run the wire to plug that in if that was an option. But nobody does that. That's weird. That seems like that should have caught up by now. Well, you would think like the, so some of them just don't track that number at all. Like especially cheaper AIOs like, like low end Cooler Master and Corsair AIOs just don't.

Don't track the temperature. Some of them will report it into their Windows software and let you set up fan curves in like Armory Crate or I can't remember what the Corsair tool is called, H something or other. But very few of them will let you do it at a BIOS level. So the solution is... you get the thermistor out of your motherboard and you get a piece of capton tape and some thermal grease and you jam it either on the radiator or near on the metal in the aio area like under the plate

hopefully where you won't crush it when you put the CPU on, but where it's coming in contact with metal and you put the thermal grease on to get good heat transfer between the surface and the thermistor. It's not great. That seems like a pain. It should not be this difficult. This should be an easier problem to solve. Yes. I actually spent a hot minute looking at AIOs and thinking, maybe it's time. Maybe I should just do this.

Get around the issue that I have with my Noctua tower cooler. Then I stumbled upon a forbidden knowledge. So the reason that I use fan control and windows beyond the normal reasons people use it is that I've had this weird issue. I've got a DH-15. I'm sorry, D-15. NH-D-15. It's the granddaddy of Noctawas.

Is this the big tall? Yes. It's like two heat towers with a fan in between another one on the outside. It's the big one. It's the one that Noctua kind of made their name on as being like, hey, this is the best one on the market. This is a $130 AI air cooler. It is significant. Wow. I have a big case. I have a lot of room to put a big cool. Also, I have like the hottest CPU on the market. Yeah, I mean, you are running. Yeah, you are running the goat.

It's a 14900K. It needs the cooling. Trust me. I mean, technically, I think you're not supposed to put air coolers on 14900Ks. Yes, actually, not to run it at full to run it at full tilt. Absolutely. Like I look up the specs. This thing, I think this thing's rated to dissipate 185 watts. Yeah. And that CPU goes up to like 250.

Yeah, but if you don't, that's if you do the overclocking stuff. I mean, that's the out-of-the-box overclocking. 253, I think, is the stock for that. That's right. Anyway, guess who went into their UEFI and Power Limited their $4,900K? Wow. Down 285 watts. You should have gotten a 14700K at that point. Well, it's four extra cores. Okay, fair. Anyway, the whole reason that I was really attached to fan control is that I've had this infuriating...

acoustic issue with this cooler ever since I got it. Yep. And like I said, I was Googling around AIOs thinking maybe I should, I like this cooler. It performs really well, but I cannot abide to this noise. I actually meant to install a guitar tuner app on my phone before we did this and tell you what note my cooler produces.

Okay. Because, because I guess it's, it's, it makes that loud a noise. Well, I mean, I'm, you know, it is extremely noticeable when the fans ramp up on this thing. Like it is the bigger point is if I, again, if I had installed the tuner, I could have told you that it's like an a sharp or whatever.

It is a very consistent, steady tone with a specific pitch that I promise you is like. Just gets into your brain. Probably in the like 450 hertz range or something like that. Like an A or A sharp. I don't know.

And we're going to get into some guitar tuning stuff here in a minute when I finally figured out what was going on here. Noctua, in their infinite competency, because Noctua is one of those companies that goes so far above and beyond. Making adapters for things, publishing more information than you ever thought you needed about their products, on and on. Big giant nerds. Yes, they are like metal and thermal and acoustic nerds like you would not believe. I landed on...

a page entitled fan speed offset beat a frequency theory and how to further optimize acoustics. Oh my God. And so I figured out what's going on here because again, if you look at that cooler, it's two, it's two towers, right? With a fun, I've got a fan on each one.

And it also happens to be pointed right at the exhaust fan out the back of the case. Oh, so it intakes the front and the front side of the case and it's blowing out toward the exhaust fan on the back. Yeah. So these two fans on the coolers are one fan is blowing.

directly into the intake of the next fan like i don't know three inches away from it through the through the fins of a radiator right and then like five or six fans well no but it's the it's specifically the interaction of the air currents that's causing this and then there's the exhaust fan for the overall case

is roughly about the exact same height. Like, I don't know, six inches or less, maybe away from the second fan on the cooler. Have you ever tuned a guitar by ear before? Yeah. My dog has fleas. Are you familiar with the beats? Well, no, I mean, using the two string method. No, I've never done that before. No. So I smacked myself in the forehead when I found this page because I learned 25 years ago, you can tune a guitar by.

playing the same note on two adjacent strings and listening for the beats interaction between oh wow so you just go like two two breaths down on the on the low string so it's uh it's like the fifth fret except for i forget which string it is other than one string it's if you play the if you play the fifth fret on the lower string it'll produce the same note as the open

Oh, wild. And so you play those two strings simultaneously and if they're off a little bit, if they're very close but off a little bit, you'll hear like an oscillating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To the sound? The harmonics, like, they make higher peaks and troughs, right? On the waves. So there are a bunch of, like, what's the term? Like a bunch of waveforms, basically, on this Noctua page, if you really want to see graphed out.

how these different frequencies interact with each other. But again, I slapped myself in the head when I found this because, again, I knew about this phenomenon through guitar tuning and never even considered that it might also apply to computer fans that are adjacent to each other.

You know what else is weird? What's that? It also applies to jet engines, turbo jets and rockets and shit like that. Like I said, air is the enemy. It's all over the place. It's everywhere around us. You can't see it, but it's there. Annoying you subtly. Anyway. This was a huge revelation, and basically, sure enough, I went into the UEFI as I was trying to tweak speeds to get them close to my fan control profile. And all I had to do was offset each one of those three fans by 75 or 100 RPM.

So, okay. And the whole problem went away like magically instantly. And I was like, so happy. I can't even tell you. Does Noctua not do that automatically? Like most of the twin tower coolers ship with two different RPM fans. So in the right at the top of this, I'll put this this beats frequency theory page that they publish in the show notes. But right at the top, it says they're newer models.

The two fans contained in the blah, blah, blah, you know, NFA12G2, blah, blah, blah, are slightly offset in speed in order to avoid such phenomena. With one running about 50 RPM slower and one about 50 RPM faster in the case of the NFA 12, blah, blah, blah. Like they have now accounted for this, but they did not at the time. Part of the problem also is that. I had both fans running into the CPU and CPU opt headers.

Which CPU opt is usually an exact mirror of the CPU. Yes, they actually just use the exact same fan settings. So they were running at exactly the same speed, except that they're never exactly the same speed. If you watch the readout on the fans, you'll always see them kind of.

within 25 RPM of each other up and down subtly. And that's what was, that's what was generating this tone. Like the white noise of a fan to be clear is fine. Like that's expected. It was specifically this tone, this droning pitch sound that was always there. Was it the two fans on the coolers or was it the fans on the coolers and the rear fan? I've never, I never quite figured that out. I just offset all of them.

So I had to move, I had to move the other CPU cooler one to one of the, like the AIO pump header basically on the board. Yes, you can change the speed. To give me independent control of that fan. But yeah, so I basically. Once I had that, I just went in there and again offset each one by like 5% or whatever. And that was enough to basically make them never spin close enough to the same speeds to cause this noise again.

That is absolutely wild. It was, it was, it was a nice moment. Cause like I said, I was thinking about like moving to an AI or something. Cause I just did not know why, what was causing this. So I've never had that happen when you're going like when there's. Usually in my experience, that happens when there's like I used to have a big cooler master cooler, a V8, I think that had a shroud around the tower and it had fans on either side.

and you could make that happen if you if you did exactly the thing you said if the fans were running more or less the same speed you'd get a either you'd get a whistle or a womp womp womp womp which was worse um And you solve that problem by making the intake faster than they're slower than the middle one or something. I can't remember yet to basically make a vacuum.

But I never had them interact outside of that tower cooler. Usually, they have to be pretty close to each other for it to be an impact. Yeah. Yeah, maybe for all I know, it was all three fans interacting with each other because it was extremely loud on mine. And also, as the fans ramped up and down, it would start and stop all the time, which is the thing that really drives you insane. Because if something is super consistent, you just get used to it eventually.

But it's when it comes and goes constantly is when it really stands out. But you haven't solved your Linux problem yet, which is you don't have fan control in Linux. So I did basically what you said, which was I literally dumped the JSON file from my fan control profile and just eyeballed that on my phone while I was in the UEFI trying to recreate the curves.

But I'm on a pretty high end Asus motherboard and even still the fan control in the UEFI is just god awful compared to something like actual fan control. I mean, in Windows, like. You can you can basically get there, but just working with it is such a chore. The thing that's really nice about fan control is that, like like I said, I have a thermistor coming off of the thermistor header on my motherboard that's taped up into the radiator.

And I know that the radiator temperature and the liquid temperature have about a seven degree offset. It varies from like five degrees at the low end where it doesn't matter. to eight degrees on the high end when it when the when the water is really hot and it's running at full bore for a while and

So I just set an offset. I create a fake sensor. That's the sensor for the thermistor plus eight degrees. Okay. And then I build my curves off of that. It lets you do that. It lets you define this as, hey, add eight degrees to this at all times. Just add eight degrees. Yeah. You can you can do things like make a curve that the fan speed is based on that is a 20 percent offset off of another curve. So like.

I know that my back fan needs to work harder. My back exhaust fan needs to work harder if the radiators spin up. So I have a sink fan for the back. That's just. 20% faster. It's the radiator spin speed plus 20%. And that ends up exhausting the heat out of the back of the case so that it doesn't.

heat up the underside of my desk when things are getting hot. The superiority of fan control in Windows as a way to set fan configs is unquestionable. You can't overstate how much better it is than what's in the UEFI.

But like I said, even if it hadn't been for this Wind Ring Zero thing, which isn't even really an issue now, I still needed something cross OS that was going to work. So yeah, the thing I missed the most from fan control when I was trying to make this work in the UEFI is the hysteresis. settings yeah which basically we've talked about this before but it's what lets you take like the history into accounts like you can set more nuance config based on

Like, hey, only start ramping the fans up at this rate if it's been at this above the temperature for X number of seconds or whatever. Right. Well, and yeah, which which which eliminates the constant fan spiking up and down because by default. It's just responding to immediate changes in temperature when you would rather they ramp up kind of gradually. You know, like the temperature will spike for a second and go back down and you don't necessarily need the fans to spike accordingly.

You only want the fans to ramp up when there is prolonged elevated temperature. So the Asus UAFI that I've got does have some very, very basic hysteresis now, but it's literally just a... It's literally just a dropdown per fan that's like, wait X number of seconds between zero and five before ramping the fans. So like that helped a little bit, but it's not.

It's not as good, but it doesn't let you adjust the rate. Right. That's the thing I have. That's the problem is it doesn't actually let you adjust the rate. And it's like I said, it's a fixed between zero and five seconds. You can't go above five. Like it's very limited, but.

Between that and eliminating this tone that was driving me insane, I think I'm pretty happy with where my fans are at now in a way that works cross-platform. Most of the way there. It's funny. So while we're talking about this, I've been... I've been testing some dual CCD weirdness across Linux and Windows this week because when we played, I guess you maybe did we play Helldivers? Were you there when we played Helldivers? Yes.

I had to flip the game mode on in the BIOS on the 9950X3D because I was getting really, really gnarly stuttering if there was anything else running on this computer. And since I run... OBS on this computer to send Vinny the feed when we play games on Monday with Nexlander. I was getting horrible stuttering when OBS was running basically.

So I went and switched off the second CCD and essentially made my 9950X3D and 9800X3D and rebooted and everything was great. I had to go back and turn it back on later and jump through some hoops. I ended up having the same problem with Counter-Strike, actually, which is kind of like I play Counter-Strike sometimes when I just want to mindlessly shoot things and get yelled at slurs at me. Words are hard right now. Sorry.

But it was stuttering as well, which I haven't ever seen. In Windows? In Windows. I installed both Helldivers and Counter-Strike in Linux, and weirdly... No stuttering. No issues. Wait, so does Helldivers work in Linux? Because it's got some kind of branded anti-cheat that pops up when you launch it. I assumed that was low level, but maybe not.

It is, but they actively engaged with the community and built installed the Linux version of it. Oh, that's awesome. So, yeah, like there's a lot of non epic, non. Call of Duty games that do anti-cheat have engaged because they want Steam Deck support. Oh, I didn't even I just thought I just kind of assumed everybody that was doing low level anti-cheat in Windows just had a zero tolerance like fuck Linux. We're not going to bother kind of policy. So encouraging.

the more competitive the game the more likely they are to have that policy because explicitly those they aren't kernel level anti-cheat on linux right so presumably you could run Linux in a virtual machine or some bullshit and then hack memory from outside the VM to do your cheating. Helldivers, like they have anti cheat in so that.

Because the problem in Helldivers one was people would jump into random games, immediately unlock the entire skill tree and tech tree and like destroy people's progressions, which sucks. That's a terrible experience for the people who get. who have done nothing wrong other than play with randos. So that's why they have energy. They talked about it when they launched, but, but they, they immediately like within a, it was one of the first patches post launch. They wanted steam deck support.

Uh, so they, they flipped on the Linux version of their anti cheat, which, which brought it online and it's been like that way ever since. That's cool. And so, and so no stuttering in Linux, huh? no stuttering on linux and so i'm working on figuring like at some point i'll do a video for that for pc world i don't know exactly what the form for that's going to be if people have

examples of things that stutter on windows, but don't start around Linux. I would love to hear about them with the dual CCD chips, especially, um, or like, I don't, I'm having a hard time repeating it actually is the, is the other problem. It's a, it's a little inky. I don't know what's crazier to me, the fact that this is still a problem at all on their second gen of dual CCD processors or the fact that it is not a problem with Linux. I don't know, second, 99 or 79, 59, 50.

Was it dual CCD2? Well, yeah, I guess they did have the same problem there, even without the 3D V cache, right? To a lesser extent. So it seems like it's a Windows problem. It's weird because Linux just generally seems to do better with scheduling stuff.

For example, so I'll often play like a like a big kind of like a crafting game or something like that. That's just kind of like a game that you play and then I'll have a TV show or a football game or basketball game or something on in the background. on another monitor and when on the windows side when things are under heavy load like when you're loading a level or it's doing shader compilation or something like that the video pauses or chunks or drops to lower resolution or just gets kind of

you know, freezy and janky for a second and then recovers. That doesn't happen on Linux, which is wild. I like this has just been a feature of Windows for as long as I can remember. And the fact that like you can have. have that stuff would just work on the other side is quite nice. That's cool. I don't want to get way out over my skis here. This is just kind of a knee jerk guess based on what you're saying, but I wonder if this is maybe kind of the power of a more open.

Yeah. System in action because like the Windows scheduler presumably is, you know, that's entirely closed source and developed at Microsoft versus Intel and AMD are both very heavy Linux kernel contributors and like. Like when I first got this Alder Lake and moved to Linux and the Alder Lake was a brand new chip, I was like looking for Intel.com origin contributors on the Linux kernel mailing list. And you would see patches coming through constantly from Intel engineers.

Adding stuff to the kernel scheduling and the especially the like the heterogeneous core stuff like the performance versus efficiency cores they spent. I think it was like a Linux kernel 5.15 was the first version that had like basic support for the Alder Lake P and E cores, but it was like late into the, they're still adding it. I think they're still tweaking stuff, but it was like late into the Linux 6.x kernel.

you're still making like fairly major changes to that stuff. So like, like here we have a case of the CPU makers, maybe more directly having the ability to help massage the performance of their hardware. I don't, I don't know. That's just a guess. So I know from talking to folks at AMD and Intel that the task scheduler, like the thread scheduler stuff in Windows.

was hard for them to make changes to which is one of the reasons that like we saw bad perf on both intel and amd chips when they launched last year right um i think that we're Some of that stuff has changed. Like right now, I know AMD, when you update chipset drivers, they can write a new thread scheduler into Windows now.

I don't know how low level that can go, and I don't know what the process for that is. But because Microsoft moved really slow on that stuff for a long time, they now have the opportunity to take that. in their own hands it just seems heavy though like i i think it's just i think it's just like looking at the idle memory on my linux machine on the linux boot versus the windows boot it's just

There's just way more crap running on the Windows machine, I think, is the other side of it. Anyway. I would believe that. But yeah, more on that on PC World. I'll talk about it here when I figure out how to test it and how to make a video for it. I need to I need to get back to desktop Linux. It's I mean, I'll tell you, like, I'm really enjoying the cashy stuff. The only thing that doesn't work consistently is Fortnite and Call of Duty. And. Like it.

it runs really well it's i've been surprised at how easy it is well hey segue into our into my other topic yeah what you got i'll probably get back to messing with desktop linux stuff when i finish with this down the hall backup project which i'm Much closer to finishing here with an update on the powering hard drives outside of the case off of a separate power supply thing. I like I'm looking at the picture of this because you posted a picture on our show notes.

And I can see the top of your server case, and I see the PyKVM with an HDMI in and Ethernet in, I think, and a USB out and Ethernet out. yes well there are two there yes either the the second rj45 or ethernet cable is the atx control on the server like it plugs into the atx header on the board so you can send software power on and reset signals that'll effectively press those buttons for you

That's awesome. USB is going to the serial port on the back of the motherboard. Oh my God. Because I've got serial console monitoring. Have I run a screen session? Wild. I made a systemd service on the PyKVM to start a screen session that monitors that serial output on the server.

Because, hey, if the video dies on the server, I've still got text-based insight into what it's doing. That has saved my ass at least a couple times. Are you using onboard video for the server? What do you mean? Oh, yeah, yeah. You don't have a discrete video card. There's no GPU in that, or there's no graphics card in that.

machine okay so then i was gonna say there's four looks like 20 terabyte western digital hard drives in what looks like a like little plastic rack those are cool they're way too expensive for what they are those are actually modular

If the drives weren't hooked up right now, I could grab one and show you. But looking at that stack, I might post this photo in the show notes. I should like blur out the serial numbers on the drive, I guess, first. But yeah, those are made by a company called Sedna, S-E-D-N-A.

And those are modular. So each one of those drives will lift off and like are separate. Like I can pull those that stack apart. These are basically just little rubberized feet that screw into the mounting holes on the drives. And then they've got little like.

pegs underneath each one. Like if you look at the top of the, you can see the little like domed insert. So they're basically made to stack so you could put those feet on each drive and then they will stack as many. And I bought like a dozen of them. If I ever use spinning metal hard drives, I would totally buy some of those. And then there's a power supply that's plugged into the hard drives and the ATX power connector is just a stump.

It's got that stump. CSonic calls it a tester. It's not a tester in the sense that it tests current. It's really just a jump starter. All it does is doing is it's a permanent fixture for what you would normally use paperclips for to jump those two pins. yeah does it have um does it have a resistor on it or is it just a piece of plastic with a jump over the it looks to just be a plastic 24 pin plastic insert with those two pins bridged interesting

But I assume the you need load on the power supply thing was not an issue because I've got these drives plugged in. So those put load on it. Well, so those will put loads. Yeah, those will put loads on the on the on the power supply. They only put loads. I can't remember which voltage the spinning hard drives use, but they'll only put loads on certain rails. But since you're not running electronics on any of this, it's fine. Like the stuff that you're running isn't. So.

There's a lot of fun about this from the old days when old power supplies didn't have didn't have resistors like they didn't have current protection, basically. Sure. So if you left. power supply, an old, like when I say old, I mean like early 2000s, late 90s power supply on with no draw on it, with nothing pulling current on it, it would eventually burn out.

at least one rail and sometimes multiples um most of them have now have internal resistors that will make sure that there's some draw so that they provide uh proper voltages on the right rails for uh even if you're not putting draw on one particular rail or not so like um it shouldn't be a problem with any modern power supply or even like old decent power supplies

Cool. Well, indeed, there has been no problem here. There are two things that I want to get into with this. First, I'll get the housekeeping out of the way first of just generally how this went. Went totally fine. Okay. The tip I got from a couple of people on the Discord last week who also do stuff like this was to turn the external power supply on first. Yeah. To let the external hard drive spin up and then turn the machine on. Mm-hmm. And then...

When you're done, do the inverse, shut the machine down first, and then... And interestingly, in my case, I guess this is like modern SATA spec or whatever. Interestingly, the hard drives that are off the external power supply spun down. when i shut down the machine but before i turned off the external power supply so yeah think about it i mean basically what you're doing if you've ever used these added drives it's the same process right you you typically turn on the external drive first

And then you want the machine to boot up. You can do it the other way on eSATA. On this, if your BIOS is set to allow a hot plug or your card is allowed to set to allow a hot plug, you could plug these in live. I just... It's... Just seems like it's not worth the risk. So on a $400 hard drive or $300 hard drive, you say that. Yeah, here we go. And then I took the risk.

Yeah. And it was totally fine. So I had gone in and set all four of those ports hot plugable. I've got, like I said, I've got, I've got an Asus workstation board in this machine and those boards come with a slim SAS header, which I had never heard of before, but that can be.

It's a single header that can be broken out into different types of drive interfaces. And one of those is you can get a cable that is a single SlimSAS connector to four SATA. Oh. So I actually bought a three-foot SlimSAS to four SATA header cable.

plug it into that slim sass header and that's what's coming out the back of my machine into these four drives anyway okay so you're fine with that adapter but when i said hey why don't you just buy some hard drive power connectors okay splitters multiple things here number one that's not an adapter that's just a cable okay on both ends number two i sent you this photo so you could see why i can't just get splitters i mean you could have

You see how much clearance there is. There's less than an inch of clearance on either side of this machine. And for a transfer that's going to take days. Yeah. I did not want to pull this machine all the way out into the middle of the floor. and have drives hanging out the side of it because the splitters are not very long. I get it. When I had this extra power supply sitting around and was able to do this very tidy situation where the machine is back in the corner where it normally lives.

You just need to daisy chain those splitters. This is days of transfer back and forth. Yeah, I get it. And so I just wanted a nice clean setup where the machine normally lives and doesn't have to run a bunch of longer cables. I was going to say for folks who haven't followed this saga, the whole point of this is.

you're making a dupe of your ZFS file system. Effectively, I need to seed the initial backup to these drives over the fastest possible connection because otherwise I tried this a few months ago and it took like four days. Yeah. over that crappy enclosure that I bought, which that enclosure is perfectly fine on a gigabit network connection. But for like the full initial backup, it's way too slow. It's going to take forever.

And sure enough, I tested this out. I've done some tests with it. And it was like overnight, basically, like less than 24 hours as opposed to like four days. So you could use the extenders. Well, but again, I look. This is working extremely well. The hot plug worked is the thing I was going to say. Basically, after one cycle of that, okay, I need to spin these drives up before I turn the machine on.

I got sick of doing that. Oh, boy. And said, let's just give it a try and see if it works. And so at some point, I just flipped the extra power supply on midstream. All the server was already up and running. Perfectly fine. Spun the drives up. Okay. Had the kernel. Turn a login Linux up. Watched all four drives just enumerate as soon as they spun up and everything worked perfectly fine. And I was off to the races. The thing the thing I will say.

is we were talking about the Seasonic tester. If you have power supplies die a lot, if you do any kind of computer maintenance at all, buying one of those $20, I want to say thermal. kingwin makes a makes one the one that i have it's like 17 and you plug it in it tells you what the rails are get what the rails are getting for whatever you plug in you can plug in sata connector you can plug in uh molex you can plug in an atx 24 pin

is incredibly useful will that show the actual like voltage and current that you're getting out of there it tells you what the minus 12 with the plus 12 like down to the one decimal so like mile if you're getting if like your five volt rail is sagging then it'll tell you that Which is great. That seems very handy. Yeah, like I keep saying tester because that's how the Seasonic manual refers to this thing, but it's really just kind of a jumper. Well, it's a tester in that.

If you plug that thing in and hit the button on the back of the power supply, it should turn on. Yeah, it'll spin up. It'll spin the fan and turn the power supply on to see if it at least works. Anyway, this is all just a prelude to the thing I'm actually excited about here. Yeah. Which is... These are shucked drives. Yeah, that's that's why I have four of them, because sometimes external drives go on extremely deep sales. Shucks dot top.

We've talked about it before. If you want cheap hard drives, go to shucks.top and keep an eye on the sales. You saw that they got Amazon, right? No. So you have to click. Amazon shut down price API access because they don't let you do price tracking. And the last decent price time broke their rules, apparently.

It looks like, is Newegg the same? Okay, I haven't been here in a little while. They don't have prices from Amazon or Newegg anymore. I gotta check both of them now. It's a bummer. Bummer? Well, anyway, it's a pretty killer deal from Best Buy on some 20 terabytes right now.

Yeah. If you're in the market for some hard drives anyway. So these drives are the first drives I've bought that have the 3.3 volt problem. Do you have to do the captain tape? So I had previously done the captain tape. And just to remind people. As best I understand this issue, there is one pin on SATA hard drives that carries a 3.3 volt. Signal's not the right word, but you know what I mean.

It's 3.3 volt 10. That's part of the status spec. I don't think it's really ever been used for anything is as far as I've read, like a manufacturer has really ever used it for anything in particular. Well, it's been used to screw over people who shot hard drives. seems to be the extent of its usefulness. As I think we've said in the past, if you shuck these drives and attach them to a regular computer's power supply and they're getting 3.3 volts on that pin, they will refuse to spin up.

Yeah. And so the canonical, one of the canonical solutions for this is to use captain tape over that one pin to prevent it from getting any current. And then they spin up just fine. You can also cut the 3.3 volt line on your SATA power connector. That's where we're going. There's a bunch of others. There are a bunch of destructive solutions to this as well. You see a lot of people, you can just take a razor blade.

And fold up that pin on the SATA connector on the drive and break it off. I would not do. I absolutely would not do that. But you see pictures all over Reddit of people who are like, yeah, I've been doing it for years. It's fine. I mean, I don't like destructive solutions personally.

i i'm fine like that's gonna prevent that's gonna cause you warranty problems if you ever need to send the drive packs definitely that's although by the time you've shut the drive anyway i mean you're probably already in warranty problem territory there may have sailed although

OK, this is a whole other topic. We'd have to get Kyle Wiens back on the show probably to explore this. I did see some people on Reddit saying that the actual legal precedent, to the extent that legal precedent still matters, is that. They can only deny warranty claims if they can prove that the failure of the product is related to the modification you made. I mean, like that was the gist of it was like the kind of warranty stickers on.

on devices that say warranty void if broken have not held up in court yeah those warranty stickers have never never actually applied they're a deterrent not an actual thing Right. And I always thought those were legally binding, but apparently the standard is that unless you, unless you broke it yourself and they can prove that they are supposedly, supposedly they still have to honor the warranty. Anyway.

I've never loved the idea of breaking the pin off the drive, and I've also never loved the idea of snipping a wire off of the power supply because that's the other option that you just mentioned is you can cut the 3.3 volt line on the SATA cable coming out of the power supply.

I feel like I have modular power supplies mostly these days. And as a result, I have a buttload of three point like your power supply is scary because your three point your your SATA power connectors are a single black cable with like six wires in it.

And it's going to be hard to look at that and know which one is the 3.3 volt one without getting out the multimeter. Okay, so not to cut to the chase here, but here is where Seasonic joins the ranks of Noctua and companies that go above and beyond. Very excited about this whole situation. It's less about partially ruining one SATA cable and more about I don't like the idea of cutting a line that's supposed to carry voltage. Yeah.

So I saw people say like, I snip the line and then put some hot glue on the end. You'll be fine. Like that does not sit well with me. The right way to do that is not to put a hot glue. It's to put a it's to put a shrink wrap. shrink tube on the end. I'm skittish about cutting a wire that's supposed to be carrying voltage and you've got the other end of it coming out of the power supply. Okay, anyway, here's where I got very excited.

Shout out to one random ass Reddit comment, like six posts deep in a sub thread who was like, instead of cutting the line, why don't you just get that Molex tool and deep in the cable in a non-destructive fashion? I was going to say, like, and I was like, oh, man, tell me more. Well, yeah, because like those all it takes to pop the Molex out is a is like something pointy. I use a pair of jewelers tweezers. So I have a YouTube video I will put in the show notes that I got very excited about this.

First of all, I didn't realize that's called like a Molex style pin. I know very little. That's the patent. That's the company that made it. Right. Like the world of like electricity and pinouts and stuff like that is just not my world. I guess I would say I'm more of a software guy if it really came down to it. Are you reaching? Do you have a tool?

i'm i literally well so i sometimes use uh dental probes this is one of the reasons i keep dentist uh dentist tools around is because the pointy one is really good for getting up so the way that connector works is there's a The pin that is the wire that goes into the connects with the other wire on the other end of the connector has a little flange that's kind of like a little bit spring loaded and pops up.

It's like two little wings, basically, right? It's like two little wings or tabs that stick out. Yeah, so you push it past a point, and then the pop comes up, and then you can't pull it back because the metal sprung up to get it in place.

If you get something pointy and push that thing down and pull the wire out at the same time, it just pops out. Yeah. So that's what that tool is for. But the Molex branded tool is like $25 plus shipping. And it's basically just a giant oversized pair of tweezers. It's just like.

It's like a giant set of tweezers with the little needle nose parts like perfectly sized in space to fit into the kind of shroud or housing of a power supply cable. So I this is where I use jewelers tweezers. Jewelers tweezers are the. They're great for taking out splinters and stuff, but they're really, really insanely pointy tweezers that you would use to put half mil sprockets into a watch or something like that. Sure.

they're great for getting there the only problem with them is that eventually you drop them and then the point gets jacked up and you can't fix this you just have to buy a new pair but so let me let me let me do you one better okay because i was googling around for like trying to find that tool to see where to get it from and like you know

You should have just asked me. I couldn't help with this. It was well, so that wouldn't solve my problem. It was less than $25, although that's pretty pricey for a thing this specialized, but it was more the having to wait a day or two because as soon as I keyed into, hey, I can do this, I did not want to wait.

You know how it gets sometimes, right? I'm aware of how you get, yes. Sometimes you've had something that annoys you for long enough and you're like, okay, now I know how to fix this. Now I want to fix this right now and not have to wait two days for delivery.

Because the thing I neglected to mention here is that the Captain tape I have found is like extremely... not a permanent solution oh really oh well yeah you have to replace it every time you disconnect and reconnect the power on the hard drive so that was the revelation was the first time i did it and then pulled the drives out and then started went to go put them back in i was like oh god this tape came off the captain tape is the is

Like it is the least destructive, but it is the biggest pain in the ass of all of these things. Cutting the exact right little strip of tape to put over that one pen made me never, ever, ever want to do that again.

And then when I realized I was going to have to do it every single time I moved those drives around and put them in something else. Yeah. I was like, oh, fuck this. I've got to figure something else out. And that's what started this whole thing. Anyway, I'm going to send you a picture here. Okay. So I sent you a link to a $6 set of precision tweezers. Okay. Well, maybe, maybe I'll do that. You can, I just sent you a picture of the PSU cable that I depend the 3.3 volt line from non-destructively.

Yeah, because C-Sonic posts very explicit, detailed pinout information and cable cross compatibility. That's nice. Matrices for all of their power supplies. That's really good. But I did that with two staples. So I found, I'll put the, I forget, I should pull up the, I should say the name of the YouTube channel because this video was so useful. I don't want to just put the link in the show notes, although I will do that as well.

Not from Concentrate is the name of the YouTube channel. They've got 87,000 subscribers, but they literally showed, like, they actually went through, like, some aftermarket Molex depinning tools and were like, yeah, these work fine, but they're expensive, and some of them work less fine than others.

But what if you could get two staples and do the exact same thing? And then he walks through how to do that. Sure enough, I pulled the stapler out of my desk drawer, pulled two staples off, bent them into L shapes. I don't have a stapler anymore, I don't think. It took about 10 seconds to depin this power supply cable with two staples.

I mean, I'm beautifully. I'm pretty sure I could use this thing that I used to clean the gunk out of my AirPods. Frankly, frankly, but any any like two tiny pieces of like sharp. Thin metal will work, but they need to be pretty specific in size and something you can apply force to. I found the staple method to work extremely well if you have staples on hand.

I highly recommend getting a set of like two or three precision tweezers. I like having one that's straight and is insanely sharp and really pointy and kind of like the kind of thing that if you drop it on your foot, it's going to embed itself in the top of your foot. And then I also like one that has like a 45 degree bend on the end. That's a little bit grippier and a little bit less pointier. Yeah, I might grab some of these.

tweezers that you linked me to just because like i bought one of those iFixit style screwdriver sets a couple years ago that's got the like 800 different screwdriver bits in it and i have extremely been happy to have that thing on hand more times than i can count so like oh yeah

Having some real tools around is nice, but also also the stable method works extremely well. Well, so these I started using these kinds of screwdriver. I mean, I started using these. I've always had these screwdrivers. My grandfather liked to repair watches. And like whenever he would dull a pair of tweezers, he would grind them out. So they'd be pointy again for pulling out tweezers and then hand them off to us. But the but yeah, they're.

Like, look, when you have a pair of really pointy tweezers, it turns out everything looks like a tweezer problem. Also highly recommend the dental picks for this kind of stuff. Like you can, you can jam a dental pick into the end of that. into the end of those Molex connectors to push them out. If the cable is such that you can't pull the cable end to get it to release, you can jam one of those in and push it from the other end.

And then you can get enough slack usually to pull it to pull it loose. Good job on this, Brad. This is a good talk for this. Thank you. I was extremely. So the figuring out the fan beats acoustic problem and then depending this cable all happened within the space of like 36 hours or something.

That fan beats thing would have made me crazy. It drove me insane. Like that's why I used fan control in windows was to control that sound more even than the fans ramping up and down. So like, but it was, it was a strong couple of days of like. figuring out how to fix annoying problems with things I had on hand as opposed to like buying a whole new AIO or ordering some expensive tool or whatever. But now I've got a permanent non-destructively

Modded power supply cable that I can use to just spin these hard drives up without ever having to fuck with captain tape again. Very pleased with the whole situation. Hold on. Let's not get crazy because the captain tape pretty useful. It'll probably come in handy for something else, but hopefully not for this.

Let's see. So I don't have any big projects. The Linux thing has eaten a lot of my time lately. I talked about the thermistor on the radiator to get BIOS temperatures for as close to BIOS temperatures for the liquid as you can get.

If anybody knows of an AIO that gives you actual liquid temperatures in a way that the motherboard can understand, I would love to hear about it. So please let me know. I wonder if that's the kind of thing that like it won't necessarily become standardized, but at least we'll start.

Hopping up in vendor specific implementations over the next few years. Like that seemed that seems so crucial to liquid cooling. That is crazy that nobody has tried to build that in yet. Well, I mean, some of them don't even report it in the apps. Like that's the thing that shocks me. So I have an older Corsair cooler that was on my daughter's machine that's just a 120 AIO that just doesn't report temperatures at all, which is wild.

Of course, it was also like a $65 AIO probably a decade ago. So that explains it probably. But still.

The tacking the thermistor on the side of the radiator and then doing the offset and fan control works pretty well. The other thing I did last week is Willis Lai, who's the producer over at PC World and I. uh did a build in a rack mount case for the pc world stream machine like they have a you know the machine that runs the podcast and the live builds and all the obs mixing in there they're they're an obs house and they have a couple of

I think Blackmagic Decklink cards that are four-port HDMI capture cards for, like, plugging Canon. I mean, we use Canon SLRs for studio cameras over there. Um, and then they also have some other stuff that, uh, like an Elgato capture cards, some other things. And, uh, it was really fun building in the rack mount case. I I'm going to go and tell you, I got a little bit of rack fever. Cause we, that's awesome, man.

They had racks at Micro Center, we should mention, and I also, seeing some racks in person, felt a bit of the fever going. Yeah, like, so... We've had an audio rack for a long time with like the mixer and the compressors and all the power infrastructure and stuff like that for that hardware. But we were having some noise problems and we decided while Adam was in Germany.

to just tear the whole thing down and move all the audio stuff to one side of the producer desk and all of the computer and networking and everything else to the other side of the producer's desk. And and we're putting. We're putting a rack in for all the computer stuff like power supplies and NASA's and all that stuff. And yeah, it like it was at the conclusion of that, after we did all the hard work of rewriting, re pulling all the cables and everything is.

We built in this Silverstone. I think it's an RM46, which is their kind of it is it is a rack mount case for like a rack, a computer that goes into a server data center rack and or also. Like this kind of use where you're where you have like a studio machine. You want to have something in there. To be clear, this was not building a new machine. This was rehoming the guts of the existing. So we're building a new machine just because the the machine that they're on the.

The board, we don't have the TPM 2.0 module to get Windows 11 support on it. It's like a 5950. It's an older AM4 board, though. And that doesn't have a TPM 2.0. It's weird. It's entirely possible we can flip it on, but like we basically we can get a less hot, more core, newer Intel machine. There's a lot of spare hardware in that office. Yeah. Hardware is never a problem there.

And if we're going to go to the effort of moving stuff into a new case, we might as well put new hardware in just so we reset the clock on when that hardware is going to conk out. What's the CPU in the new build? i think we did it i think we used a 285 or 265k i can't remember one of the arrow one of the air lake um processors and uh 32 gigs of RAM. It doesn't need to be a particularly beefy machine. It runs OBS with like four inputs and we run Zoom on a separate device. So yeah, so anyway.

We built in the rack mount machine. The way this rack mount machine is set up is it's like a pizza box. It's a normal, it's an old school 90s looking shape. But on one side, like on the... What would normally be the back is actually the front, because on a rack mount, you want all the cables to be accessible from the side that you have access to, right? The side that the rack goes in. And then the back has room for a 280 AIO.

So we put an Arctic free Arctic cooler. So that's the Arctic liquid freezer. Three is what I was in for the five minutes that I was like, I should get an AIO. That's what I was looking at, because like Gamers Nexus said, that's. That's the one right now. So it's pretty nice. It has, it requires a contact frame, a contact frame, which I don't like. That's exactly what stopped me when I was, I think that's only true on Intel. I believe on AMV it'll use the standard mounting hardware.

Yeah. So I've used that, that exact cooler on an AM five, uh, AM five, Zen five, AM four machine, AM five. I'm completely God. Now I'm like toast in here. No, I'm going to blame AMD for this because they're the difference in numbering between their CPU architecture, their CPU sockets. Yeah, it's AM5. It's like they've been on Zen 3, AM4, AM5.

It's like they've been all over the place on numbering in a way that's hard to keep up with. So I've used an AM5 machine before and it's fine. You just you basically take out the. the you leave the frame that holds the cpu in place but you take out the two side mount holes

And you put these side things. It's a little bit of a hassle, but it's not bad. The contact frame sucks. I don't love that at all. Although that was I thought the contact frame was just for 13th and 14th gen. Is it also for Arrow Lake? So Arrow Lake same like it's different socket, but it's same.

physical connector the same way that am4 and am5 are the same physical connector so they still require you to use that contact yeah there's no no way to screw it in otherwise might be a deal breaker i mean maybe they've got um maybe they've accommodated the like the pressure requirements of the cpu it's still scary as hell yeah because so i've done i've replaced contact frames on two intel builds this 12 600k in my server and then the 14 900k in my desktop

server was fine i've done it on two boards and i never had an issue with it it took me like it took me the better part of like two weeks of tinkering with this desktop machine to get the contact frame stable like it was not fun at all let me tell you when i when i was having the problem with my 13 900k

and i was talking to gordon about it uh he his first thing was he still that stupid contact frame on there and i was like yeah he's like take that off and then call me back and i was like i took it off and still was jacked up but it's just a it's just one more thing to break in a place that you like the benefit At the level of performance I care about is net nil basically. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I just, I mean, I hated the idea of the CPU warping over time, but also.

By the time it's really warped, you're probably going to be upgrading anyway. I don't know if it was actually necessary, but it sounds like the good news, it sounds like that they fixed the problem with their lake generation. So hopefully this will not be a thing going forward. I hope so. Yeah.

But anyway, so yeah, like putting that machine together, putting the 280 AIO in the back exhaust, pushing air through. It's really quiet. It's a really nice little machine. It's funny because it's a server machine, so it has things like intrusion. It has an intrusion sensor. Cool.

So I didn't have to, but I plugged it in the motherboard because it has a port and I was like, oh, we're going to know when somebody opens the case on this bad boy. Right. We did the build live on the PC World channel and there's a couple other things that are kind of cool. It has.

the option of running the power supply in the front so you can just jam the power connector into that side or you can put out the back if you're doing audio stuff so that power cable is away from away from anything that's going to make noise and um

like there was an option to put an external drive cage in there but since we store everything on the nas and it goes across the the fast network to it we didn't we didn't bother and that's um yeah it's fun the the one thing that i learned which was a bummer because we got the the slidable rails for it. And I was like, this is seems a little hinky because like they pull out it's 600 millimeter rails basically. But it's the rails are built for data center depth racks, not.

home or like studio depth racks so i think our rack is like 480 millimeters deep connected front rail to back rail uh where The rails that are that go with this kind of case that let you slide it out and work on it are almost all 600 millimeters. So they expect a deeper thing that's actually physically bolted onto the floor so it won't tip.

anyway so we didn't get to use the slideable rails which is a bummer i've never worked with rack stuff before but i always just assumed it was like super standardized but the more i hear about it the more it sounds like no in fact there are a million different sizing standards and And whether it's square holes or round holes in M4 and M5 or M6 bolts and yeah. Just like everything else in computers, what should be standardized is actually prone to conflicting in a thousand different ways.

Yep. Nothing standard. Yeah. Still, I like when I, when I rebuilt my server on this 12, 600 K a couple of years ago, I, I bought the, I moved to the knock to a tower cooler that is specifically made for four U rack cases. Just anticipating the day that hopefully I will move the guts of that machine into a rack case. Because that's where servers belong. We bought an 18. The rack we bought was, I think, 18 or 24U. I can't remember.

And there's going to be more than enough room for all the stuff that's in there. I could really easily move my entire stack from the garage out there. into a into like a you or 10 you or something like that yeah i mean looking at those those were kind of like knee-high racks at micro center they were i don't remember the use on them they were like 20 or something

Well, so the 18U works out to be about four feet tall, I think, with the wheels on it, with the casters on it. I think that's about the size of the ones that Micro Center are like, I know I would never need a 42U. There's just something cool about having it be taller than you.

Well, so the problem with that, though, is that if you actually do fill that up, then you have your weight load on the floor for your house is a problem. Well, I mean, I guess I guess it depends on what kind of house I end up in. I'm always thinking in terms of my parents' house where the basement floor is just.

cement there you go not an issue no that the cement floor totally fine yeah um and then the last thing is i i did i ended up uh setting up the new crt with s video and i did some uh some tweaks i set up the the On the mister, I set up the super track mode mod script, which is really fun. It just you tell it which course you want it to pull from.

And then it just runs like five or 10 minutes of like the attract mode on a game. And they've kind of filtered out attract like games that have decent attract modes. Oh, that's OK. I should look into that. That sounds fun.

It's pretty good. Like the neat thing about it is if you pick it up and start like playing the game, then it stopped. It pauses the script until it goes idle again until the machine goes idle again for a few minutes. So it's like I have a screensaver with all of my childhood consoles on it. Which I quite like. I should look at it. That sounds extremely cool. I also, Brad, started playing Zelda 2 The Adventure of Link again. Oh boy. Godspeed to you. I'm going to go and tell you.

I did not understand that game as a child. I did not understand how an RPG worked and that they had put RPG elements in there. I also think that somebody told me on Blue Sky.

that the us version didn't actually let you choose where to apply the upgrades as you earned them oh that's not true that's what i thought yeah yeah because you could pick whether you were gonna add health or damage or magic right 100 yeah um but i didn't i i guarantee you i did not understand how that system worked as a kid because i played like dragon warrior but it was presented just differently enough that like my

It didn't make sense to me. The game's better than I expected it to be, and it's great with save states. Yes, that would help tremendously. Zelda 2 rules, but it is brutally hard. So save states are kind of a big deal there. Yeah. Anytime I walk into a room that looks scary, I hit the save state button and just just get ready to cheese the hell out of it. That is the way to be in 2025.

yeah it's pretty good uh but that crt looks gorgeous you you screwed up by not buying it when you did would you pay 50 bucks for it 50 bucks god damn i mean i i did not have room for it in here to be clear i have a i mean i have a nice i have a nice 14 inch CRT in here already. I did not need another one. The nice thing about it is it's stereo. I'm happy to be happy with what I have.

Yeah, so I have stereo now because my old TV was definitely not stereo. Did it have a remote? I didn't see a remote with it. It did not have a remote, but it has buttons on the front, so I don't care. Okay. Yeah, it has all the buttons you need to control everything. So no RGB mod, huh?

I mean, maybe at some point, but like I'm pretty happy with this video looks. Yeah, this video is fantastic. Like I probably also would not bother if I were you with the Trinitron that's from that generation that I have back at my parents' house is composite only. Yeah. And their RGB is perhaps a bit more essential. So I, um, I do have a confession to make. I bought a new, uh, Saturn as you know, I have that Mr. Add-ons.

board with the Saturn analog video out port. And that Saturn connector is so fucking hard to get in the right way.

like notoriously because it looks it's not really keyed at all you have to just line it up and i fucking immediately broke off one of the pins right uh when i was putting it in on the cable or the board the cable the board's female so the board's fine okay the cable the i mean it's like a 12 cable from amazon so i don't really care that much i plugged it in it worked oh so with with the broken pin

Yeah. So it has like, it's like 15 pins or something in there. And some of them apparently are for like, you can do RGB out of there too, if you want. So I guess I lucked out and got one of the ones that's not RGB. It's yeah. Anyway, if it works. Yeah, mistakes are made. I feel like that's the theme of this entire episode is, hey, if it works. I mean, look, maybe that's the theme of computing in 2025. That might be just to be the theme of everything, whatever works.

Yeah, I love it when it works. I love things that work. Working is great. I also bought we didn't talk about the book I bought at the at the at the flea market. Oh, yes. I assume that's some upcoming PC world content. i think i'm going to take it and do some pc world videos yeah it's it's the second edition of assembling and troubleshooting micro computers and the date on the publication page is 1991 which means it predates atx oh

Did I do I remember the term microcomputer? Like connections are being made in my brain right now because I've been thinking about many computers a bit recently. Yeah. Which which are the kind of refrigerator sized era, you know, the PDP 11 and that kind of thing.

Yeah, I used a Wang when I worked in Congress on Capitol Hill. Right. So was the term microcomputer actually in wide usage for the desktop home personal computer for a long time? I'd completely forgotten that. Yeah, because it's the next size down from a mini computer. Right. That's cool. Yeah. So anyway, but it has a bunch of like, here's how to fix your IBM XT and other clones stuff, which is kind of rad. That's neat. Anyway.

On that note, I guess it's going to do it for us this week. That was a smorgasbord of random computer stuff. Hopefully it was enjoyable. Yeah. I looked at fan, the fan thing.

Like the thing that you found out about the Noctua fans is something it's why I didn't like those tower coolers for a long time. Yeah. And like, clearly they woke up to the same issue because like I said, there's, there's a, the second gen version of that D 15 that I have that just came out last year and it addresses this issue. Like I said, cause. Now they are factory tuning the fans to not be too close together in speed to get around that issue, but I am...

I'm very happy I landed on that page from Noctua to solve that issue. I'm very happy that Seasonic had very explicit documentation up for, like, the pinout of my power supply. They also, because I've had, like... four or maybe five Seasonic power supplies between here and working on machines at work. I've just got like a pile of old power supply cables.

And it's very nice that they actually put up a giant chart that says, here are all the cables that are compatible with each power supply. See, I always keep the power supply cables in the bag and then I put a piece of paper and then this is which power supply they go with. So I do that now for the last couple that I've owned.

but I had a bunch of older cables as well. Anyway, it's just, it's nice to very explicitly be able to confirm, yes, this, this cable will work with this power supply and not fry the component, but like just in both cases, like.

And again, this is, this is not sponsored at all. I am purely a customer of these two companies, but like, it's just such a nice heartwarming feeling when they put up the information you need to solve problems and like, don't leave you in the dark with poor or no documentation for things. i was gonna say i buy corsair power supplies usually and i was like for a long time if you bought if you bought inside the same product line the the modular cables were compatible with each other

And then they stopped doing that at some point. And yeah, but at least they have HX only like they have the line on them now that says this is only good with this line. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say the other thing about your fan thing is. It's the argument in favor of using the fans that come with things. I just learned about the difference between static pressure and airflow fans a few months ago.

Um, static pressure fans usually come with AIOs. They're usually more blades and they're, they move less air, but they apply more pressure to push, force the air through the radiators. Yeah. I think on the, I mean, not to make everything knock away, it's just mostly what I buy. So it's what I'm familiar with. I think that's.

Like the split between like the brown and the gray fans, I want to say on their side, like some of them are static pressure and some are airflow. That I don't I don't know about. But but yeah, like. I used on my fractal case, the fractal fans that came with the case with my AIOs because I like the way they looked. And I when I switched to static pressure fans for the same exact thing, I was blown away at the difference in cooling. I was getting on the liquid.

so uh anyway um yeah sometimes like theoretically you should be able to use the splitter on the fans if you buy that same noctua cooler now and it sounds fine because they've offset the speeds on those fans anyway That'll do it for us this month or week rather. Thanks. Thanks everybody for listening. As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is a listener supported show. We wouldn't be here without you all.

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Brad's weird jumpstarted power supply. I should put these pictures in the show notes or maybe just on the discord. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know a good way to host images in the show notes. That probably would break. some podcast clients unless I just put hard links to some hosting service. Yeah. It's like, this is something I would have put on the imager for a long time and then do a link out to that. But yeah.

Anyway, yeah. So for five bucks, you get access to the monthly patron exclusive episode. You get access to the discord. It's a lovely community full of people who are into very much the same things that we talk about here every week. I sure am. And if you subscribe for the executive producer tier, then we give you a shout out every week, including just like we're about to do right now. So thanks to Jason Lee in Felicitas Rips.

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