Announcement

All of my blogs will be on hiatus until further noted. That'll be all.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Just some pics of Pandora MK i5. She got a new side panel for Christmas (thank goodness the R4 and Arc Midi use the same side panel so it was easy to find one :3). Also got her led-strips to give her some colour.

New Radeon Software is out!

In case somebody didn't already know. Gonna write about it later when I get some testing done.

ASUS Z97-PRO GAMER + Intel i5-4690K

It's been a while since I've been using Intel processor. Last Intel I had was Pentium 4 (it sucked).

So far I've noticed some major differences when comparing Intel and AMD.

1. Voltages on Intel chips are way more stable than AMD.

2. Overclocking K-series chips is easier and harder (easier because finding max stable OC is pretty simple, harder because there are more factors that affect the OC imo).

3. Intel allows better OC for RAM (I was able to push my 1600MHz-kit to 2133MHz with better timings on Intel than AMD).

Those are some differences. There are more but I'm not going to list them all in this post.

So let's start by taking a look on the mobo.

The motherboard has a slight theme of black and red. Pretty basic ASUS stuff imo.

I kinda like it that ASUS made the board little stealthy looking with darker red and grey.

With brighter red this mobo would totally look like a ROG-motherboard which it pretty much actually is. It has less features than ROG-series motherboards but compared to my old Ranger this

motherboard is pretty much identical (if you don't count the missing features like headphones amp detect and stuff).

The PCI-E 3.0 lanes 2 and 4 run in 8x 8x when using 2 cards (this was one of the key points when I was looking for a new mobo with decent pricing).

It has 4 RAM DIMM-slots (uses DDR3) and 8+2 phase power delivery.

The board has also SATA Express and M.2 slots but at this point I can't say anything about them because I'm lacking the hardware to connect on them.

The placing of lanes, slots and components is pretty standard and shouldn't be a trouble with mid ATX sized cases imo.

Next up Intel i5-4690K.

So after the Haswell was released and it run notoriously hot I was little worried about the Devil's Canyon. My brother has one and he had no problems with it so I thought I might get one as well.

The temps on i5-4690K sure aren't bad. I managed to OC mine to 4.4GHz with 1.25V (beyond that it needs over 1.3V and that's just stupid imo).

After running Aida64 for 2 hours the max temp on all cores was 71C. That's not too bad actually imo.

And when gaming the temps usually stay around or below 60C so Devil's Canyon really has improved somewhat the heat dissipation.

So I managed to OC it to 4.4GHz, Cache to 4.2GHz with 1.25V and my RAM runs in 2133MHz stable. Anything beyond that makes my crash. I didn't get the top tier CPU but it sure isn't bad imo.

So these are some of my thoughts on i5-4690K and Z97-PRO GAMER.

The i5-4690K sure is an awesome processor. If only Intel processors where cheaper (mine cost around 250€). But I'm happy with my purchase and look forward on working with it.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading this post and I'll hope to see you around again.

Coming soon!

Intel i5-4690K + ASUS Z97-PRO GAMER thoughts, coming soon.

Some thoughts

If someone actually reads my blog it'd be nice to have some comments. That way I'd know
that I'm not just writing for nothing but that someone is actually reading my thoughts.

Thanks

Upgrading to Windows 10

Okay so Windows 10 is here and I decided to try upgrade my trusty old 7 to a brand new 10.

Sooooo the Windows was supposed to be able to upgrade straight out of box buuuuut...
It didn't. I didn't want to do the fresh install from flash drive because I wanted to see if it was actually possible to upgrade 7 to 10.

So first few couple of attempts crashed on the error 80240020.

I searched for the web and found few possible solutions.

1: delete the files from folder where Windows downloads the updates. After that open CMD as an adminstrator and type in wuauclt.exe /updatenow.

This didn't work for me so I had to try different method.

2: Installing Windows 10 using the media creation tool. This one actually worked for me.

Download the Media Creation Tool from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install and run it as an adminstrator.

I had to do this few times because first 2 attempts failed because "Windows can't keep the files because the language you're installing Windows is different than the current one" or something like that. This was caused by the different language for unicode in the Area and Language -settings.

I use Japanese as a unicode language because I read wordpad files that are written in Japanese from time to time. After that I changed the language to Finnish because I thought that my Windows 7 originally had Finnish. I didn't remember that my Windows 7 is actually an English version so I had to run the Media Creation Tool for 3rd time. This time the update went how it should have from the start. Windows updated itself to 10 without a problem and booted up.

So far I've yet to face any bugs from updating to 10 without doing fresh install. I'm still little skeptic that this would actually work out because in the past it's been impossible to upgrade Windows to newer one without problems... Time will show if any bugs show up but so far things have been working out well.

I have to say though that Windows 10 looks and behaves better than it's older version.
The interface looks much nicer and more refined. Also the pop up windows like the adminstrator rights pop up smoother. It's not anymore a nuisance when a program asks you a permission to do changes. Also the new Edge browser is pretty nice. In 2 days I've almost completely switched over to it although I'm still using Chrome for Youtube because of the lack of addons in Edge.

This version of Windows is definitely the best so far in my opinion.