Skylake i5-6600 Power Consumption Tests

Another machine with a few different parts but somewhat similar to the previous Skylake power consumption test I did.

System specs: i5-6600, Asus B150M-A, 2x8GB DDR4, 1x240GB Intel 535 SSD, 1xWD Blue 1TB, 1xLiteOn DVD-RW, Antec TPC 550W, Coolermaster Silencio 352. Power measurements were made from the wall (240V AC) with a PowerMate Lite.

Machine State	Consumption (W)	VA	PFC
Off	1.5 W	16.2	0.092
Idle	30 W	45.9	0.65
Prime 95 (Large FFTs, 4 threads)	108 W	115	0.939

The above values are typical. Peak recorded draw was 119.5W. Maximum temperature hit was 80°C. During Prime95 the core frequency fluctuated between 3389 MHz and 3491 MHz.

Not sure why the power usage was so much more than the 6500 system. I guess the combination of faster CPU, different motherboard, extra RAM, fan and SATA drives (even though they were at idle) and warmer "silent" case all contributed to the increase.

Setting up Asus RT-AC68U with Billion 7401VGP-R3

I'd been finding the wireless capability on my Billion 7401VGP-R3 was starting to degrade. Mainly that after a period of being on, it would occasionally start dropping devices and then not let any new ones connect until it was rebooted. Update to latest firmware didn't help.

The modem capabilities of the Billion were good, and I wanted to keep the VOIP capability to run the home phones. So I looked at AC wireless router options, and the Asus RT-AC68U got the nod as a good quality option.

There are a couple of possible ways to set up the AC68U so that it works with another modem/router like the Billion. One way is to turn off DHCP on the Asus and plug an ethernet cable into port 1 (rather than the WAN port) and likewise connect it to the Billion the same way. This allows the internet connection to get through, but takes up one of your ethernet ports.

The way I ended up running it (thanks to the tip from Pete at Whirlpool) was to turn on "Access Point (AP) mode", accessible Advanced Settings -> Administration tab in the router config.

Screenshot selecting Access Point mode

After changing to this setting, it will ask how you want to set up the IP address of the AC68U itself. You can let the DHPC-capable router on the network do it (which in this case I kept as the Billion), but since I'd already "lost" the AC68U once during the setup process by an automatic IP address change, I decided to keep it manually set:

(Incorrect) Manual IP settings for RT-AC68U

So far I haven't had any issues with this setup.

I had one issue, where the AC68U would occasionally drop one of the wireless connections and then seem to reboot. I think it was due to the Billion router allocating the same IP address to another device as the one I'd manually set on the AC68U. This was a bit silly by me, so I updated it to one well outside the Billion's DHCP range. For whatever reason it required a gateway address this time too. So far these settings have proven okay.

Updated settings below:

(Updated) Manual IP settings for RT-AC68U

Here's a colourful diagram of the entire network setup:

The Nightmare that is Windows 8

I recently installed Windows 8 for the first time. Have to say it was an absolute nightmare. It took a long time, had some real eye-opening WTFs, and had a dastardly hardware incompatibility.

The system was an Intel G1620 with an Asus P8B75-M. It had been happily running various flavours of Linux, but I was passing it over to my wife to use, and the demand for Windows had come with it.

Installation Summary

The high(?) lights:

• Only boots with the UEFI option. This is more informational than anything, but the motherboard needed to be set to this option. Newer motherboards may have this as the default now.
• During the installation, it appears to require a Microsoft account just to use the OS. This was a real WTF moment for me (call it the "Facebook effect" perhaps, the insidious attempt by companies to force encourage everyone to create an account with them to do anything, when there is no value added for the user to do so). Fortunately, there is a workaround as Scott Hanselman details here. Basically, you click "Create a New Account", and the option to avoid creating an account appears in that step. Intuitive!
• Something broke during the first install. This was the real "nightmare" part.

Windows 8 is People Broken

The event during install was a hard lock up (almost at the end, of course :/). The hard lock required full power cycle, and afterwards the machine refused to boot (not surprising, since installation didn't complete properly). But it also wouldn't repair afterwards, despite taking as long in the repair as the initial install took. In both cases it brought up the new-look blue screen of death (the "unhappy face" screen) with the error "CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT".

I reinstalled Linux to make sure it wasn't a hardware fault -- everything seem okay. I updated the motherboard BIOS (which reset the SATA devices from AHCI back to IDE, which prevented the UEFI boot until I switched them back).

In frustration, I reinstalled again. This time I unchecked "downloads updates from the internet during installation". This time, Windows 8 installed. So I immediately began to suspect the wireless card, a TP-Link TL-WN851ND, which up until this point had worked flawlessly.

As soon as I activated the wireless, bam! Windows hard-locked again, and refused to boot. Interestingly, Microsoft claim this card is compatible with Windows 8. I beg to differ.

I replaced with a D-Link DWA-548, which worked flawlessly (so, +1 for D-Link).

So I don't know if the problem was purely a Windows 8 driver issue, or if it was the combination of all the bits of hardware I was using. But I would avoid that particular TP-Link wireless card (or cards based on the same chipset) if using Windows 8.

The Interface

The above doesn't even touch on the interface, which is just plain...ugly. It is also the most infuriating interface I've used, and I've used quite a few. It's not just because it's different (the freedom to change desktop environments is one of the interesting things with Linux), but it simply...makes things difficult.

Full screen apps, hot area hovers to do even the simplest of actions...bah. Sure there are extensions to "make things right", but -- really, that's the solution? Some people say Windows 8 is a disaster. I don't know if that's true, but I do know Windows 8 is awful to use, and I'm glad that I don't have to use it myself.

Budget Small(ish) Web Browser Box

I wanted a small box to sit in the corner as basically nothing more than a web browser. Since mITX parts were so difficult to source locally, I went the smallest mATX case I could find.

Here is the parts list:

• CPU: AMD A4-5300 $55
• Mobo: Asus F2A55M-LK-Plus $49
• RAM: 1x4GB 1600 (already had)
• SSD: Plextor M5S 128GB $89
• Case: Coolermaster RC361 $49
• PSU: Corsair VS450 $49
• KB/Mouse: USB combo (already had)

Total: $291 (would have been about $350 if I didn't have RAM/KB/mouse already).

Some happy snaps:

The motherboard, fresh out of the box. Notice how it captures the light...(because of my crappy photography)

The motherboard was fairly low end, but was a good price so I grabbed it. It doesn't have a USB 3 header of SATA 3, but since the build didn't need either, it filled the requirements.

CPU, pins pins pins

Motherboard with RAM, CPU and HSF mounted

Mounting the AMD HSF was straightforward: stick it on the CPU and clip it into place. Easier than Intel's "four pins" mechanism, which takes a little getting used to.

The empty case

The Coolermaster RC361 is about the smallest micro-ATX case I could source locally. It's a "sideways" mini tower, so can stand upright or on its side. For a case that cost less than $50, it's not too bad.

Case with the power supply (tucked away, unusually, in the front of the case)

Mounting the power supply was fairly tricky, and given its unusual location, there's no way to turn the PSU on or off without pulling the front of the case off (which, unlike some cases, came off easily). I don't think access to the PSU switch will prove too much of a problem for my uses. The case also has no place to mount an SSD. Since I didn't have a mounting kit, I just taped it to the bottom of the case. The RC361 does come with a comprehensive set of extra screws and cable ties.

The completed build. SSD isn't visible because it's taped to the bottom of the case

Installed Kubuntu 13.04, it worked really well. The AMD A4-5300 (with proprietary Catalyst drivers installed) will even play some games at a reasonable level (if with low settings).

Asus GTX 650TI on Linux

So after suffering through the (self-inflicted) pain of trying to run an AMD GPU under Linux, I bought an nVidia-based GTX 650ti to try out next.

Asus GTX 650ti

The 650ti doesn't have the best reputation for value (with performance that is similar if not worse than the much cheaper HD7770), but it seemed to go okay in reviews and is realistically already overkill for anything I'm going to use it for.

In box

I narrowed the choices down to an Asus version versus the MSI Power Edition. While I'd heard goods things about the MSI PE cards, in the end it came down to:

• DVI-D ports (compared to DVI-I).
• HDMI ports (compared to mini-HDMI. I have plenty of HDMI cables, but no mini ones).
• Low noise level and temperatures in reviews (though the MSI is similar here anyway).

Ports

Installation

Compared to the troubles I had with the AMD, getting the nVidia card up and running is a breeze. Admittedly, I cheated this time and went straight to the proprietary driver. The open-source driver (nouveau) worked fine straight after installing the card, and I'll probably keep an eye on it (it's apparently made some recent advances in capability). But, I was tired, and just wanted something to work, so I cheated.

Plugged in to motherboard

To see which drivers are installed, you can use:

$ sudo lspci -v

For more (or heaps more) information, you can use -vv or -vvv to the above command. Running with sudo gives you a bit of extra output as well.

Initially you'll see a line something like this in the VGA controller section:

Kernal modules: nouveau, nvidiafb

These are the open-source drivers installed automatically in recent kernels.

To install the proprietary drivers, you can use aptitude to look up the possible targets:

$ aptitude search nvidia

To get going, all you need is to do the following:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig
$ sudo <reboot>

The xconfig command above writes a default file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If all installs correctly, repeating the lspci command above will now output something like:

Kernel modules: nvidia_current, nouveau, nvidiafb

Results

Everything worked without a hitch. Running nvidia-settings lets you set up dual monitors. After rebooting, for the first time the login screen was actually two separate screens, rather than mirrored.

There was no obvious increase in noise levels with the Asus card, which is nice.

It's definitely far from perfect though. There are some noticeable artifacts when watching HD video, for example, and some minor tearing while running the game Dungeon Defenders. But at the moment I'm going to take "everything's working and it was easy to set up" over "pixel perfect display". Maybe if it annoys me enough I'll investigate some more, but I'm happy to run as is for the time being.

Update 15/6/2013:

Some months later, I've still been unable to resolve the tearing issue. It also occurs when scrolling up or down in web pages as well as in games/video, and is frustrating beyond belief that such a trivial action causes screen tearing with vendor-provided drivers.

The issue occurs on multiple computers I've used, all with different hardware and distros, so I can only conclude that nVidia's driver is broken.

Update 3/7/2013:

Forgot to link to it, but I ended up fixing the tearing issue. Unfortunately, I found it only worked with Mint/Cinnamon rather than Xubuntu.