'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

I've finally upgraded to FTTC broadband! I've no idea where the cabinet is but it can't be far given the speed I've got out of it (and I suspect from the modem's stats there's another 5Mb/s of download I could achieve).

My previous ADSL connection was fairly decent as I'm not that far from the exchange - I was on about 11.5Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up (it used to be faster but something glitched out on my line and the exchange decided to target a larger SNR) - but the comparatively slow upload has been annoying for a while. So while doing price comparison for car insurance (protip: if you want to keep your customers, don't add a 20% loyalty penalty!) I also plugged the numbers in for broadband, and for less than what I was paying BT and Sky I could move to plusnet's top package. So I did just that!

Of course as with anything involving phones in this flat nothing was simple and it took 6 weeks to actually switch over! From the updates I got from plusnet either the broadband or the phone order would be rejected by Openreach which meant they had to cancel the whole lot and resubmit it again. It appears that Openreach's system is really confused by the concept of transferring an existing number - one sequence of messages went "transfer this number to plusnet", "you can't have that number, it's in use", "I know, that's why I said transfer". I've ended up with a little collection of "sorry you're leaving" letters from BT all with a different end of service date!

But the order finally went through last week, phone service switched across this morning (taking my ADSL out with it, as expected), and while at work I got a text to say the new broadband had been activated. And I now have shiny fast intertubes!

Fair play to plusnet, they did all the pestering of Openreach without me having to chase them and they've not started billing me until the move actually went through.

What I want to do: use my laptop.

What I actually end up doing: go digging through the settings to find out why I have a new "Meet Now" icon in the tray and how to kill it with fire.

Apparently it's a new Windows 10 group chat feature, and totally not an unexpected at all. Because random new icons can't possibly ever be due to malware...

I like how on one hand techies are continually trying really hard to educate users about phishing, and then on the other hand Microsoft pulls stunts like this. "Yeah, if you see something that you didn't install then it's probably malware. Except when it isn't."

Did you know that a foam dust filter is capable of milling away the leading edges of a PC case fan?



That particular fan was mounted to the top of the case as an inlet (in a vain attempt to have positive internal pressure so the CD drive doesn't become a dust filter), and appears to have sucked the foam filter away from the holder and then merrily chewed away at it. Well, that answers the question of where the buzzing sound in the PC was coming from!



Anyway, after hoovering out some of the dust and putting everything back together (without the filter), I was curious as to how effective the cooling actually is, especially as the the CPU heatsink needs attacking with a can of air. So I set CPU-Z running a stress test and left it for a good while... and the result is the system is remarkably stable for temperatures. It holds the CPU (a Core 2 Quad Q6600, rated at 95W TDP) to <70°C on all cores and the motherboard is reporting 42°C, with spare headroom on both CPU and case fan speeds.

With that proved out I mixed things up a bit by starting a render test in GPU-Z as well. That caused the case fans to ramp up to near-full speed to keep the system temperature at 43°C, with the GPU reporting 64°C and the CPU cores actually slightly lower (thanks to the increased case fan speed).

There is some method behind this investigation: I've got several upgrades planned for Nyx, including a shiny new Ryzen 9 5900X (if I can find one of 'em), and that eats a bit more power than the current CPU. And unlike Craig I don't have a gargantuan computer case that can swallow heatsinks with dual 140mm fans, so I need to pick my cooling system with care.

Today's quiz of "decode-the-marketing-buzzword" is on wifi standards. Your starter for ten: what does "AC1600" actually mean?

I'll give you a hint: it's not 1600Mbps 802.11ac wifi. Because the marketroids have decreed that for dual-band access points the number is the sum of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio speeds. Which means that in some cases, smaller numbers are actually faster.


The point behind all of this is another round of computing upgrades. Having bought a new shiny toy, it occurred to me that the bottleneck in my networking is now my router. It's a fairly decent Netgear DGND3700v2, but is only an N600-class access point which decoded from marketing-speak is "802.11n, 2x2 TX/RX streams, 300Mbps 2.4GHz and 5GHz". I bought that back in 2013 and later in 2014 I added a N600-class PCI-e card for the desktop (and decoded from marketing-speak that means "802.11n, 2x2, 300Mbps 2.4GHz or 5GHz") - at the time that was a decent upgrade from 802.11g, but time marches on and there's much faster kit available. In particular, the laptop has an Intel Wireless-AC 9560 chip ("802.11ac, 2x2, 867Mbps 2.4GHz or 1.73Gbps 5Ghz") so it's worthwhile bringing both desktop and router up to 802.11ac.

Upgrading the desktop is an easy choice: Gigabyte do a 802.11ac PCI-e card which is really an Intel Wireless-AC 9260 M.2 card (basically the same as the 9560 in a different package) and a PCI-e and USB to M.2 E-key adapter to go with it. Being PCI-e I can drop it straight into the eventual replacement for Nyx, and being a M.2 adapter when 802.11ax becomes mainstream I can drop a newer module into it.

This just leaves the router, which is where all the marketing-buzzword hilarity starts. The ideal router would be capable of at least 802.11ac 2x2 1.73Gbps 5GHz, and that's where it gets complicated. There's two ways to reach 1.73Gbps: 2x2 streams in a 160MHz channel, or 4x4 streams in a 80MHz channel. Guess what most do? To make things more fun, some kit advertises 1.3Gbps which looks like a good compromise until you dig further into the specs and realise that's a 3x3 stream solution and so can only do 867Mbps to a 2x2 client. But in theory such a router can split the streams across multiple clients making it not completely pointless.

To make it even more fun I also need ADSL2+ support. I basically have three options here. Option 1: buy a ADSL wifi router. Option 2: buy a non-ADSL wifi router and drop my existing router into bridge mode (option 2a: replace the existing router with a ADSL modem - which simplifies configuration). Option 3: buy a wifi access point and disable the wifi radio on the existing router (which is gigabit-capable).

Option 1 is the simplest one but also the most limiting - ADSL wifi routers have gone out of fashion with the rise of fibre and ISP-supplied routers being "good enough" for most. Option 3 seems to mostly contain range extenders and commercial kit, so option 2 is the most likely path for me to take. I might pickup a standalone modem anyway depending on how well the old router handles being a bridge and what the total cost works out as.

There's a certain amusement in how my networking setup is going full circle, from separate modem/router/wifi to an all-in-one box and back to separate devices...

Anyway, overly-technical ramble aside an AC1200-class ("802.11ac, 2x2 streams, 300Mbps 2.4GHz and 867Mbps 5GHz") or better is probably a starting point, as it looks like true 160MHz-channel kit is hard to find (or at least hard to determine through the marketing buzzwords). Probably another Netgear box, as they've generally proven reliable and I know how to puzzle through the configuration on them.


And once I've decided on what to get, next on the list is the NAS, then a media centre experiment, and finally Nyx is long overdue an overhaul. It has occurred to me that I'm spending a fair bit on computing at the moment, but to put in perspective this is like a decade's worth of major upgrades all happening at once (the router dates to 2013, the NAS to probably 2012, Nyx was first commissioned in 2007, and the original laptop was bought way back in 2005 for university!).

Warning: very techy post ahead! This is mainly as a reminder to myself, because I can never remember how DIMMs should be laid out and the docs never explain it well.


( ASUS P5K-E DDR2 memory channels )

Y'know, there is a wonderful side-effect of all the mass panic over GDPR. Whenever I visit a website only to have a full-screen GDPR consent window pop up, I know that the site's unlikely to actually be useful and so to not bother with it. Especially when there's no obvious "opt-out" button and instead the site presents you with a list of a bajillion different categories and cookies to individually deselect.

This brought to you by searching for recipes and finding that most sites contain more ads than recipe ingredients. So I gave up on trying to find new sites and just stuck with the BBC Food site. Who'd have thought that not stuffing every page with obnoxious ads might actually gain you more users?

So as part of the grand performance test experiment I spotted that my PC wasn't set up as best as it could be. In particular, the RAM I've got is certified with better timings than it's actually running with. The only reason it's not using them I think is down to the particular chipset/BIOS I've got (as well as the JEDEC profiles the SPD chip also contains an EPP profile but that appears to only be understood by nForce chipsets). I'm also not convinced the RAM was properly running in dual-channel mode as CPU-Z listed it as being Dual/Asymmetric.

( Moar performance testing )

One thing I spotted during my performance testing is using USB 3.0 caused one core to be pegged at 100% while accessing the drive. I didn't notice this with USB 2.0 or with eSATA (or when performance testing the internal SATA SSD), so I wonder if the USB 3.0 performance is CPU-limited? Time for more experimentation.

( More experimentation! )

I do have newer drivers to play with for both the USB and the eSATA controllers so those are next on the list to try.

pleaseremove and I ended up discussing CPU performance, partially because he has a new shiny toy and wanted to see how well it performed. Many years ago we benchmarked our systems with CrystalMark 2004 but he's had problems getting that to work so this time round our tool of choice is PerformanceTest 9.

Now by rights, pleaseremove's desktop ought to flatten mine as his is a good 5 or so years more modern, but the question is by how much...

( Nyx, a Core 2 Quad Q6600 with a GeForce GTX 950 )

( pleaseremove's desktop, an i7 3700-K with a GeForce GTX 670 )

Hah. 1619 against 4603 - there's not much contest there, with his system knocking the stuffing out of mine on every benchmark (in particular disk - pleaseremove has a ludicrously fast NVMe SSD because of course he has). While his box couldn't complete the GPU tests, even the ones it did run outperform mine despite me having a much more modern graphics card. Looks like all those years of CPU improvements have actually been worth something.

( pleaseremove's shiny new toy )

The only thing that lets it down is a pokey little embedded GPU, otherwise it still flattens all my systems and gives his desktop a good run for its money...

boggyb: Your laptop outperforms your desktop on disk. How is that even possible?
pleaseremove: The whole thing is utterly ridiculous

( Hemera, a 2GHz Pentium M with an ATi Mobility FireGL T2: )

I really do need to upgrade Hemera one of these days, but that's for another rant on how all modern laptops are terrible except for the ones that you can't actually buy.