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

The Nyx replacement build has been in the planning for a long time. It was originally pencilled in for late 2019, and looking at my notes would have likely been a Ryzen 7 3800X build. It got deferred several times, at first because before I upgrade Nyx I want to put together a Kodi system on my Raspberry Pi (because Microsoft killed off Windows Media Center). Then because AMD announced a slightly shinier Zen 2 processor and I wanted to see if the 3800XT was worth it (reviews suggest not really). Then because I had to sort out the NAS replacement (because Firefox killed off TLS 1.0 support). Then because AMD announced even shinier Zen 3 processors and the entire computing world went bonkers over them.

I had all but settled on buying a lowly Ryzen 5 3600X as a stop-gap solution until Zen 3 was stocked again - and while the Ryzen 7's have been available for a while, what I really wanted was a Ryzen 9 5900X and those had only just started to trickle back onto the market at silly prices (£800? No thanks!). So I was gradually finalising the spec and was probably going to buy a 3600X in the next couple of weeks... then pleaseremove messaged me yesterday morning with news of a surprise stock update at an only slightly silly price. One quick order later, and this appeared today (on a Sunday, no less!)...



Now I just need to order the rest of the parts! My challenge is to build a system that outperforms pleaseremove's new monstrosity in at least one PerformanceTest category (and probably only in one - I reckon disk is the only one I've got a chance at given what's in his system!).

pleaseremove: I need commission... That's two 5900x's I have sold scan this morning

Nyx has just crashed in some fashion - both monitors spontaneously dropped into power-save mode, and the music that was playing stopped a few seconds later. The keyboard is no longer responding either (protip: the Num Lock light is software-controlled, so if nothing happens when you press Num Lock then things have gone very wrong). So that looks like a rather major kernel fault and I suspect the graphics card is involved (when I first upgrades to the GTX 950, it had a spate of graphics driver reloads - I thought those had gone away, but evidently not).

Except... Nyx is still present on the network. I can ping it from Hemera. The video output has failed, it's not responding to keyboard input... but I can ping it over a wifi connection. I can see the file shares in Explorer. I can even get as far as opening a remote desktop connection, though it gets stuck on "configuring remote session".

Seriously, WTF is going on here? This is unusual even by my computing standards.

Ah well, since it's running and network-visible time to do some poking around. There's a fair amount of remote administration capability built into Windows - most of the stuff in Administrative Tools can control another computer if you've got a suitable account to log in to. So let's see what I can find out!

First off, let's try Event Viewer. Launch Event Viewer, right-click on the top-level Event View item in the tree, pick Connect to Another Computer, and enter Nyx (the same trick works for Computer Management). Hmm... well the Application log shows that Desktop Window Manager disabled itself (this is the service that does all the Aero effects), and then Windows Error Reporting logged a kernel error. Nothing particularly useful here but it does point towards graphics. System log, on the other hand, starts off with a Display log claiming that nvlddmkm hung and was "successfully" recovered (hah), followed by some error logs from nvlddmkm. Now I happen to know that this is part of the nVidia drivers, so I was right - it was indeed the graphics card and/or driver that failed.

Next... hmm, I wonder if I can get Device Manager working? Well, I need to start the Remote Registry service according to the error message from Device Manager (easy enough), and then from the instructions here I also need a group policy tweak and then to run gpupdate.exe, which I can do remotely with Sysinternals' PsExec tool. And with that I now have remote Device Manager! Sadly it's only a read-only view and so doesn't let me do anything interesting.

Well, my conclusion is that there was a serious graphics card/driver error and the system failed to recover the driver, and some aspect of that completely broke the GUI. I can't get any further remotely so my best option is to trigger a remote shutdown (in the hope of preserving whatever state I had in open programs) and then if that doesn't work use the reset button.

And then head out and enjoy the unexpectedly sunny afternoon because my computers are conspiring against me (Hemera's currently refusing to enable its wifi radio so I've got it on the floor plugged directly into the router). I did at least manage to load the latest geocaches onto the phone first, so I achieved something!

This batch of upgrades happened quite some time ago (as in December last year), but I copied the photos onto the laptop which promptly stopped working. Such is the way of computers here.

( More computer upgrades! )

As with all computer upgrades, you're not doing it right unless there's some spare parts left over (no, not the mouse or keyboard)...

It actually worked! Cooking a graphics card actually fixed it!

Wait, what?

So you may remember that when the graphics card in Nyx failed, I mentioned that it might be repairable? Well, the repair I alluded to is to attempt to fix any failed solder joints... by baking it in an oven at 200°C for 10 minutes. Seriously! There's no end of forum posts and Youtube videos suggesting this as a fix for failed graphics cards, particularly nVidia GeForce cards around the 8800GT mark (the Internets suggest that nVidia skimped on the solder and/or underfill quality for BGA chips, and the thermal stresses from repeated power up/down cycles eventually break one or more solder joints), and most people who claim to have tried this have reported success.

The physics for this checks out as well. Essentially what I'm trying to do is emulate the reflow soldering process used to make the card in the first place, which when you get down to it is basically "bake it in an oven", but with much better temperature control. The aim of reflow soldering is to heat the card up to the point at which the solder melts and flows - much like with a soldering iron, but heating every solder joint in one go - and the temperature needed to melt solder is around 200°C depending on the particular alloy used. Real reflow ovens are ridiculously expensive pieces of kit, but there's many alternatives - SparkFun use a skillet, while Mike's Electric Stuff suggests using a Sainsbury's Basics toaster (removing the pop-up mechanism recommended unless you want a SMT desolderer...). So it's not too far-fetched to imagine doing this with an ordinary oven.

( Here goes nothing... )

Err... oops?

My excuse is I got distracted by planning computer upgrades for Nyx and Aether, and trying to work out which bits to order from which supplier to minimise costs (no one supplier stocks all the parts). And then getting further distracted by working out if a certain upgrade is even possible.


Mainly as a reference for myself, for Nyx (the desktop) the planned upgrade is:

• 3.5" front panel I/O module (4xUSB 2.0, audio, Firewire) to replace the existing top-mounted I/O module which I've always found to be in a somewhat awkward position (it's in the middle at the top, so I can't really put anything on top of the case). Removing the I/O module will let me put a fan there to hopefully increase the air pressure inside the case and stop the CD drives becoming dust-eating air intakes.
• 3.5" front panel memory card reader, as it'd be more useful than the existing external USB reader. Slightly complicated as I'd like one that can handle SmartMedia, and massively complicated by the fact that there are no internal USB ports for it (the new front panel I/O module uses all of them). Or rather, no officially-available ports - the onboard wireless in Nyx occupies a dual USB header, but only uses one USB port and appears to have an unpopulated header to pass through the other one. It should be possible to solder a pin header onto that wireless card and use the other USB port for the card reader...
• Pin header for the aforementioned onboard wireless card. Need to check the spacing carefully - not everything uses a 2.54mm pin spacing. And check which way round to fit it (top or bottom of the card?).
• A couple of 3.5" to 5.25" front panel adapters.
• A pair of 3TB hard disks to replace the existing ones which are a bit too old for my liking. Especially given that one of 'em sometimes struggles to spinup. Hard disks all seem to be much of a muchness these days, so I'm planning on getting whatever the current Seagate Barracuda is as previous incarnations have generally served me well.
• A tube of Artic Silver 5 thermal compound for the graphics card repair.
• And I've just thought that sticking an air filter in the front of the case would help against the dust bunny invasion. Need to check what size I need and work out just how I'll fit the thing. That's one of the few flaws with the Coolermaster Wavemaster case - no air filter on the intake fans. Not sure why they omitted it as the Praetorian had one.

While the processor is woefully outclassed by any half-decent one these days, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is still fast enough that it's not worth me upgrading it. Especially as to do so would require a new motherboard, in turn requiring new memory and quite probably needing PCI-E versions of the TV and SCSI cards.

I might need a new graphics card though if the repair fails. That'd be only the second significant hardware upgrade since building Khaos 7 years ago (the first being the SSD earlier this year)


For Aether (the laptop):

• Intel PRO/2915ABG Mini-PCI wireless card. Yes, I know, the laptop's ancient and this is certainly a non-reusable upgrade (unlike the other one I mentioned yesterday), but for £13 including postage I'm happy to take a punt on it.

Aether could really do with a new battery and an upgrade to Windows 7 but that's a significant cost and at that point I'm probably better off outright replacing it (not to mention that I'm not sure if I can even find the drivers for Windows 7). The current hardware is over 10 years old, and while the Pentium M was incredibly fast for its time (outperforming desktop Pentium 4 processors running at a much faster clock speed), it's just not fast enough for the Javascript monstrosities that are modern websites.

That said it'll be a shame to replace it, as you just can't get laptops with 1600x1200 screens anymore.

Today's fun discovery is the graphics card in Nyx (a rather nice nVidia GeForce 8800GT) may have just failed.

At least, Nyx spontaneously bluescreened (a rarity since the Windows 7 upgrade), and on restart refused to load the driver for the graphics card. Looking in the event log the bluescreen was due to the graphics driver repeatedly failing. Device manger shows "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" for the graphics card, and the consensus online is that this translates as "hardware failure".

The graphical corruption on the BIOS startup screen (rows of blue dots) is something of a hint as well. Last time I saw something like that was with an ATi Rage Pro PCI which objected to being second in the startup order - Nyx only has the one graphics card, so that's unlikely to be an issue this time :)

It'll be quite hard to replace that card. I chose it specifically back when I built Khaos (the predecessor to Nyx) as it was the only decent card on the market with a single-slot cooler, which I needed to be able to use all the PCI slots on the motherboard (itself chosen as I needed 3 PCI slots). Pretty much everything these days has at least a dual-slot cooler on it. Of course, it was only later that I discovered that I'd bought the best possible graphics card (seriously - the 8800GT outperformed just about everything else available, including cards costing an awful lot more). That's true of so much of the build of Nyx - almost everything was bought to fit some odd constraint or other, and most of the parts turned out purely by chance to be very good buys.

Anyway, I'll see if it behaves any better after getting a chance to cool down overnight. There's some suggestion on the internets that this type of failure is thermal-related, and that card has always run a bit hotter than I'd have liked. Certainly whatever thermal gunk nVidia's used on the heatsink looks like it's seen better days.