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Tag: build

Bookmarks for building a PC

Published by Silveira on 2017-01-03

logicalincrements.com Good as a starting point to find what kind of PC you want to build.

reddit.com/r/buildapcsales Aggregates best and latests deals on pc parts. You can also filter it, e.g.: latest SSD deals. This was probably the site that I most used for research, the comments sections were also very useful. Use the META filter for coupons and special deals.

pcpartpicker.com Use it to store your combination of parts and find possible incompatibilities between them. Given a piece, it also shows the prices from multiple stores and even the price history. These prices are sometimes out-of-sync or don’t take coupons in consideration, so sometimes you can get better deals.

camelcamelcamel.com Create e-mail alarms when a product reaches a desired price on Amazon.com. I have been using this site for everything related to Amazon.com with success for years.

iftt.com Create advanced notifications such “if there is a new post on /r/buildapcsales about SSD send me an email”.  For that you can use an IF “New post from search” THEN “Send me an email” recipe with search as “subreddit:buildapcsales SSD”. You can replace SSD for anything you want.

Lepa AquaChanger 240mm and Cooler Master HAF 912

Published by Silveira on 2016-12-22

Can you fit a fit a Lepa AquaChanger 240mm AIO Liquid Cooler in a Cooler Master HAF RC-912? Yes, but the fans will need to be mounted outside.

If you have a HAF 912 pc case and bought a Lepa AquaChanger 240mm AIO (All-in-One) water cooler with a 240mm radiator and they don’t fit, there is a way. You can fit them together but the radiator fans will not fit inside the case. The HAF 912 manual recommends you to put 240mm radiators outside the case, on the top of it and route the tubes in the back. There are two holes there designed for this. Unfortunately, this is not an option for the Lepa AquaChanger 240mm because it’s a AIO (which means you can’t remove any joint) and it’s tubes are too short for any customization.

The easier course of action is to put the 240mm radiator inside, facing the top, with the two fans outside of the case, in the top, pulling air from the radiator. You have to use the same screws to both hold the fans and the radiator, I had to try a few times until get it right. I also had to route the power supply to inside, for one of the fans I removed the top plastic cap of the case to pass the wires through there. I could keep the rear fan (pulling air from the case) in the same place, but using only one of the four screws as the other as misaligned now.


The disadvantage of this setup is that the fans are exposed and someone can accidentally break them by touching or dropping something on them. I added two 120mm grills later to mitigate this. Also, the fans are not in direct contact with the radiators so it’s not the most efficient setup.


In the other hand, I got both the case and the water cooler for a really good price and I didn’t want to replace any of them. I’m getting great CPU temperatures.

Another option would be drill a hole on the top of the case, get fans and radiator outside, and route the tubes using the hole. It could work but it would require a hole big enough to pass the pump through it.

Update: I was building another pc and ended up moving this water cooler to a different case which supports a 240mm radiator nicely (DIYPC Gamestorm-BK).

Parallel Build Benchmark

Published by Silveira on 2008-11-14

You can optimizing your building times using a parallel build process.

The GNU Make supports it using the parameter –jobs=N (or -j=N), where N is the maximum number of jobs that can be realized at the same time, usually compilation jobs. By default, Make will perform just a job per time. Using -j without arguments imposes no limits on job number. There’s also the load approach using –load-average.

Here’s a benchmark I did showing four different complete builds of the Inkscape project, from one to four jobs at the same time. I used a Intel (Yonah FSB667 Mhz/2MbL2) Dual Core with 2 Gb of Ram with a common Ubuntu 8.10 and default build parameters and no additional optimizations.

chartinkscape_parallel_build.ods

Just compiling with make –jobs=2 instead of just make, almost doubles the speed of the build. As I’m using a dual core processor and the heavy compilations dominate the build process, the best result was with 2 jobs.

I had no trouble with those builds but it’s known that you can have problems such implicit dependencies among targets or memory exhaustion. There’s a good article, Optimizing Build Times Using Parallel “make”, on this subject. On the Make manual, there’s also a section on parallel excetution.

So, next time you try a make, try using make –jobs=2 and see the results. 🙂