Sunday, September 30, 2012

How to fix your discrete GPU temperatures

During summer sessions, computer hardware is getting seriously hot and needs our attention. The most common problem causing artefacts into your screen is due to overheated graphics cards. Either passive (without fan) or active (with fan) cooling, the optimum results stem from the best fit between your GPU processor’s surface and its heatsink. Thus many heatsinks are nickel-plated with a copper base block, or fully copper-plated if you pay some extra money.


Why copper? The answer is simple; it improves heat conduction and offers better cooling efficiency than the other common metals, such as aluminum or nickel. Furthermore, there is a tendency nowadays to use exotic shaped and bulky sized GPU coolers with several heatpipes; they quickly conduct heat from the chip’s surface to protect it from overheating during stressful situations. Personally, I prefer the watercooling solutions in combination with little ramsinks rather than buying a huge cooler limiting my case size and probably harming my tower’s airflow (and maybe its overall ambient temp).

In case you monitor your card’s temperature and notice that it exceeds 85 Celsius (under load –  playing a game or running a stressful 3D application) then you have problem. Before it’s too late, you need to provide a sufficient cooling mechanism to your hardware, in order to operate under normal conditions. But if you think that your cooler is sufficient enough, then please try to replace the thermal paste. All GPUs are coming with low quality pre-applied TIM (thermal interface material), and this is what we are going to replace in the next paragraph.
First things first, you need to remove your card’s plastic body using any clips (look around the corners) or little screws. Here it’s my old NVidia GeForce GTX 465 manufactured by ASUS Technologies.
Okay, now you need to find a way to remove the heatsink. In most cases there are 6-8 screws that hold the heatsink above the GPU processor. Use a screwdriver and remove the heatsink carefully without scratching anything on the PCB.
As soon as you remove the heatsink, you will see your card’s GPU processor, hidden under the very centre of the heatsink. As you can see, ASUS uses here a direct heatpipe cooling system, which means that the heatpipes indirectly transfer the heat through the fins and finally the big surface manages to dissipate the GPU heat successfully through the fan.
Use a soft paper and highest percentage alcohol or Artic Clean in order to clean all the pre-installed TIM. Then, apply the thermal grease (eg AS5 or Ceramique) onto the surface of the GPU processor. After this, your chip should look like this:
Before putting the cooler back on the GPU processor, take this advice and use a hairdresser to heat the copper-plated base of the heatsink. Of course, there isn’t any reference inside the manual that advises you to do that, so act independently. Let’s say that this is my personal step in this procedure so far.
Now place carefully the heatsink in the very center of the GPU processor. Insert the necessary screws through the mounting holes so as to slide the washers onto them. Before moving on, make sure that all screws are both fastened well, although it’s important not to screw them massively tight.
Final step is to place back the plastic body and fasten any clips that holds it on top of the card.
Okay, now you ‘re ready to test your little achievement. Plug your GPU back to your motherboard and start playing a game in order to put your graphics card under stressing situation. Simultaneously, please monitor your GPU temperatures (using lm-sensors) and after a couple of hours of gaming, see the log files. Normally, there will be a delta temp of -5 Celsius than before.

However, if you GPU is still hot then you need to check the fan. Many Linux drivers are not able to operate successfully the cycle fan duty, thus PWM technique fails. The best thing here is to try both available drivers for your GPU model, meaning open-source and proprietary version. In worst case scenario, you need to manually setup thermal thresholds and fix your cycle duty. For example, a rule would be: “if GPU temp exceeds 70C then put its fan at 80% RPM”. Try different combinations and see what works best for you. For example, trying 100% cycle duty is very loud and noise, so do not overestimate, because you will end up with a headache.

Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics

Piwik is a free to download and use open source web analytics tool that gives users full control of their data. It is a great OS alternative to the widely used Google Analytics that is more prone to unwanted data sharing with advertising companies.

Installing

Piwik is PHP MySQL software which you download and install on your own webserver. This way you are given full control of your data, unlike remote-hosted services. The installation is simple and quick to do.
To install Piwik you simply download the latest release, unzip and upload the contents to the desired location on your web server using your FTP client. After the uploading is done you can open your web browser and navigate to the location that you uploaded Piwik. This will display the welcome screen and the installation can now begin.
Piwik will check that the minimum requirements are met and if it finds any problems it will suggest a possible solution.
  
After that you setup the MySQL database, create a super user account and connect the first website that you want to track (you can track many different websites). You are then given a JavaScript Tracking Tag that you must include in every page that you want Piwik to analyse.
You will find a comprehensive and more detailed installation guide inside the downloaded file.

Analytics Data

So what can Piwik show us? Actually is can show almost everything you will ever need!
Piwik Data is divided in 5 main categories. The Dashboard, Visitors, Actions, Referrers and Goals. The following screenshots are not from real data but from Piwik’s on-line demo.
Dashboard
In the Dashboard you can get the main idea of what is going on generally in your website. You get general info about were are your visitors from, how many were they for the set time spectrum, the keywords that brought them to your site, Length of visits, search engines used, referrer websites and a real-time visitor counter that gets updated every 10 seconds!
Visitors
This is maybe the most important tab. Here you can see graphs of the visitors count, their provider, location, what browser and what operating system your visitors are using, what is the resolution of their monitor and what plugins they have installed in their browser.
You can also see visits per local or server time and also check their engagement according to the duration of visits and the depth (pages visited).
Actions
In the actions tab you can view what pages were the most popular and see page views, unique visitors, average duration of visits, bounce rate and exit rate.
Apart from that, you can also check were your visitors went after leaving your website, what links did they click and even how many downloaded content from your website.
Referrers
On the referrers you can check how well you are doing with search traffic and visitors from other websites linking to yours.
Goals
The goals tab is meant to be used for tracking how far or close you are according to the pre-set goals. You can see things like log-ins, number of a featured post readers, new registrations and the revenue of course!

Configuration Options

You can configure the Piwik in many ways to bring it to what serves you the best way. This can be done by adding custom plugins, fully customize your Dashboard and drag and drop widgets you want to display, configure Piwik to send you mail reports, enter custom variables, add and manage multiple accounts, configure Piwik to monitor unlimited number of websites, exclude IPs and so much more…

Try Piwik

Piwik is 100% free software that can worthily replace any commercial solution. It is powerful, comprehensive, informative and easy to use. No matter how pleased you are with what you are currently using, you should give Piwik a try. After all, even if you don’t care about open or closed source ideology stuff, it would be useful to have 2 different monitoring tools and see if they agree.
Piwik Website

SolusOS Eveline 1.2 Review

Desktop Usage
One issue that I have come across with some Linux operating systems in the past is lack of ability of properly managing dual displays out-of-the-box. I can gladly say that SolusOS handled everything with ease and I witnessed no dramas during my test time and on a system with only moderate specifications.
SolusOS sits on a GNOME 2.30.2 desktop environment. Although GNOME 2 is beginning to show signs of its age, it certainly doesn’t show in SolusOS. In fact, SolusOS’s polish is so impressive, GNOME 2 feels shiny and new once more. But no matter how much you dress it up, there’s no changing the fact that there will be no more support or updates for GNOME 2. So what the long term decision will be for its inclusion in SolusOS is unknown to me. But I can see the potential for easily converting the desktop to a MATE base. Which really would be not much effort considering MATE’s heritage goes right back to GNOME 2.
The Menu System
One particular feature that I really enjoyed using in SolusOS was the Main Menu. I don’t know whether it’s a custom version of Mint Menu or something else, but the best way I can describe it is a blend of functionality from Mint Menu and the KDE4 Menu. It’s very functional, responsive and is well designed. It is a pleasure to use and to quickly find what you searching for. Whether it be an application or location on your system.
Package Selection
Software selection was nice. There is a good balance of applications. Most of them bog standard that ship with most GNOME based distributions, but there are some extra goodies thrown in to the mix. PlayOnLinux and WINE add for an extra layer of compatibility. I had time to test out WINE by booting up a quick game of Plant vs. Zombies and it worked a treat. I didn’t really have the time and resources to tinker around with PlayOnLinux. But I did take a quick sneak peek at its GUI and it looks like a very capable package. PlayOnLinux+WINE are a nice addition to have shipped with SolusOS.
Multimedia
There’s a strength and focus on multimedia support with SolusOS. Default packages include VLC Media Player and GNOME MPlayer. And of course there’s also the usual packages you find shipped with almost all GNOME based distribution. Totem and Rhythmbox are both included with the addition of all required codecs. That’s something that always eases the pain for most new users with Linux.
The Missing Piece
When browsing the available and installed applications in SolusOS, I couldn’t help but notice something a little odd. And I have to admit it did bug me a little. Taking the final ISO size into consideration, I expected GIMP to be installed by default. Looking through the menu you’ll find that it’s not. Instead, there is GNU Paint installed. Why GNU Paint has been put in place of where GIMP should be, really, strikes me as not making sense. Unless there is some personal connection with the developers and GNU Paint, I just don’t understand it. Or perhaps it’s just time that I stop expecting GIMP to be installed on every Linux distribution available.
Conclusion
Considering SolusOS comes from a very small development and support team, (in fact, it’s the work of just a few people) there are no signs of this when you use SolusOS. The small development team has done a fantastic job with SolusOS and it’s a real professional Linux distribution that is more than capable of meeting the requirements of even the most demanding Linux user.