exxos blog - random goings on

[exxos]

I dumped this here as its mostly another moan about Eagle...

Sorry for the poor quality image..

Basically the row of blue tracks at the bottom, are jumping over those vertical red tracks in the middle... But the thing is, those red tracks are actually on a different layer anyway..

If you follow the blue tracks to the right, they end up with a load of buyers going vertically on more red tracks, which are actually on the different layer..

The thing is, those fires are simply not needed and the route can easily go on a single layer without jumping over tracks which it does not need to.

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Part of the problem is that I have two disabled the GND & VCC layers in order to stop eagle from routing on them, but the thing is, it randomly notices tracks routed on those layers

It is like the autorouters decision-making is based on " are there obstacles in the way - yes or no" and if there are obstacles it jumps over them, which is what I am basically seeing. What it should be doing is detecting obstacles, and seeing if the route it is trying to do is on the same way or not, and then make the decision. For example, if there is a clear route from A to B, then it should of course route directly on one layer, not "jump" over obstacles which are on a different layer anyway.

I did two tests yesterday, one of them seem to route absolutely fine. The other test, it actually routed part of the 68K tracks again ( I had already routed them). So it makes no sense how it decides to route some tracks again, and not others. If I route with all layers enabled, it generally start breaking apart the VCC & GND fills and the routing fails anyway.

I have more routing on test , I have loaded Eagle 4 times to route separately. I'm trying to see those some trigger for this or not..

What I did do last night is manually route some tracks which it was struggling with, in the hope that it will prevent the auto routing from going nuts later on.

[exxos]

First one was with the VCC & GND layers turned off. Eagle routed everything manually routed again as below...

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Just waiting for the 4 layer one to route to see how that ends up...

[exxos]

Second test finally finished.. this one looks like it routed fully (well aside from 1 wire which I know about anyway)


BOTTOM LAYER - All solid

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Then the actual 2 routed layers.

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Next I need to do some checking and see if anything double routed etc....

[exxos]

I got one of those funky M2 drives for my PC which doesn't support M2 But its a AHCI drive so windoze7 does find it.. my current SSD benches at about 500MB/s, new one 1200MB/s... BUT the BIOS doesn't see it So I emailed ASROCK and they sent me a beta BIOS which does see it, but I just get a flashing cursor after POST and it doesnt boot

Oddly my PC now seems to be running like twice as fast and the CPU has jumped from 4200MHz to 4400MHz.. bizzare... I could never get it stable at that speed before.

So I put back in my Trident RAM as I was limited to 1600 DDR3.. Now I still had issues, but its like the BIOS doesn't read the XMP profiles correctly as the RAM keeps defaulting to 840.. Though I manually entered the worst case settings, and now running at about 2300

So doing a stress test currently...

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PC is running bloody quick now.. just hope it lasts...

Though my PC has been sluggish for years, and never worked out why.. but since the BIOS update, it runs like twice as fast as it did before... and now the faster RAM is in, its even faster...

[exxos]

Nothing will go any faster now.. seems the Trident RAM even though should be CL9, will only work at CL10 But even so, I cant hit the 2400 speed, I bottle out somehow at 2239.. but still, its a huge jump from 1600..

So my kingston hyperX 1600 is...

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Vs my Trident 2400ish

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I also tried CL11 vs CL10..

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A tiny boost, so not bad I guess

[exxos]

So my PC blue screened with the CPU at 4.4Ghz this morning, why am I not surprised So I put it back to 4.2Ghz and its running fine again.

Now I managed to clock my RAM at the proper speed of 2400Mhz... Don't know if that's stable yet though. The RAM just refuses to run at CL9, so no idea what the problem is there. CL10 seems OK, but I am leaving it at CL11 for now anyway. In theory the RAM is 50% than before with that setup. I can see the PC is a heck of a lot snappier in doing stuff now.

If I can't get my PCIe SSD to boot up, I may give RAID0 a try out. I'm getting 500MB/s on a single one, so 2 RAID0 drives should almost double those results. I tried RAID0 long time ago with 2x 36GB raptor drives, it didn't end well Hopefully tech has improved to be more stable in more recent times.

I'm running a FX8350 8-core CPU, so its about the best I can get for my old board. If I can get the faster RAM stable and get double speed on the C: drive, then maybe the PC will be fine for another 10 years Sadly my ASROCK board seems to be the last MB ever to support onboard floppy

Somewhat reluctant for many reasons to build a new PC, will end up using win10 no doubt Though some of the software I used was registered to my old dual core CPU based board.. There was some really odd hacky program to fake the MB number to my old one, so I could use the software on my "new" PC. Though I bet win10 won't allow such hackery to go on. So when my win7 rig blows up, I will retire and surf the net on a ubuntu rig

[exxos]

2400MHz and windows did not boot. So gone down a notch to 2128MHz. I think 2200 things max out CPU & RAM wise. I may up the FSB a bit more see if I can get back to a stable 2200MHz tomorrow...


Somehow got distracted and routed a bit of the DMA circuit manually. Thinking it may take some strain off the autorouter a bit...

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[IngoQ]

Somewhat reluctant for many reasons to build a new PC, will end up using win10 no doubt

Perfect time to consider switching to Linux For old school windows users I can wholeheartedly recommend Linux Mint. Just runs and looks familiar in many places.

[exxos]

Perfect time to consider switching to Linux For old school windows users I can wholeheartedly recommend Linux Mint. Just runs and looks familiar in many places.

I have used ubuntu, if I was doing simple stuff I would just use that, but everything windows related is all setup and working fine currently. Things may change when/if WIn7 becomes to much of a problem but I probably wouldn't bother setting stuff up again anyway. It doesn't seem long since I moved from XP, and win7 is obsolete now .

In the old days it was a weekly reinstall of win 3.11, 95, 98.. XP was really good and I used that for years, but I couldn't update my hardware , and stuff like chrome refused to work in XP.. So I reluctantly went for win7. So maybe in years to come I may go with win10, but its just annoying to keep reinstalling stuff. I know win10 is supposed to be the "last" OS, but if i'm going to end up messing about with reinstalling, it would kill a lot of the apps I use from years ago anyway, so I might as well go Ubuntu or whatever is best at the time.

Not only that, there probably isn't win10 drivers for my hardware, so win10 would need a new machine.. im just not playing those "games" anymore.

Really I would want to retire by the time I need to actually change from win7. There isn't exactly any leaps and bounds in new hardware anymore, so its not like there is much gain in building a new PC anyway. I may build a new PC one day, but only if win7 has issues.. I could always make my win7 machine a "offline" machine and keep it off the net, and move to Ubuntu for internet related stuff.

So I may be a windows fan, but stuff like 2000,ME,Vista was just a disaster. Microsoft annoyed people with removing the start menu etc (yes I know they put it back) , I just don't like the direction they are moving in. Microsoft just isn't doing "desktop" windows anymore. Will just stick with my desktop until they come back in fashion again

I still don't see how they are making money from win10.. I just think it will become "adware" in the future for "free" versions of windows and they will charge a fortune for a add-free windows.

[IngoQ]

That

I just don't like the direction they are moving in. Microsoft just isn't doing "desktop" windows anymore. Will just stick with my desktop until they come back in fashion again

Yeah, same with me. I used every Windows version there ever was, but since Windows 7 it went down the drain. To me Windows 7 is the last real windows version, everything newer is just crap. What they did with Windows 10 is beyond me, every update crashes millions of systems and they simply don't care.

I still don't see how they are making money from win10..

They don't. Like so many others, they found that there is a lot more money to make by providing online services with a monthly fee. Desktop software is thing of the past for them, Microsoft stated that repeatedly in connection with their Office products. And if everything is in the cloud, you will basically only need a thin client, be it as a dumb terminal or as web client. Until then, Windows 10 main task seems to be to gather marketing data, which is nice speak for spy on people. Which of course they can even do better, if the applications you use are hosted by them as well.

The recent embrace of open source by Microsoft seems to indicate, that they will loose interest in operating systems in the near future. But that is only my guess...

So, time to move on