Content Moved to My Own Website

A lot of content has been moved to my own website - 

https://alinuxuser.com/

Remaining content will be slowly migrated. This blog will receive no further updates. 

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 280 Review (For LGA 1700)

NOTE for LGA 1700 Owners

Upgrade kits from Amazon are shipping with incorrect number of parts. I had to buy two upgrade kits to get all the parts I needed. The first kit I purchased only had three O-rings, while the second upgrade kit only had three LGA 1700 standoffs. My suggestion, buy two kits and RMA the other once you are done building. Someone at Arctic totally dropped the ball on this when packaging the kits.

Also read the manual very carefully

https://support.arctic.de/lf2-280r6#lf2280installation

And watch this video -


Note - The video shows ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II, but backplate installation, and mounting is the same for ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 280.

Most importantly, use the right mounting standoffs. I made the mistake of getting the standoffs mixed during the build. This was totally my fault. 

I realized there was something wrong with the setup when I rendered a video, and the temperatures were hitting 100c. I would have expected synthetic benchmarks to do this, but not video rendering.

Here is an article on Arctic's website that mentions this fact.

https://support.arctic.de/lf2-lga1700

Hopefully all this will become obsolete soon as companies adopt to the new LGA 1700 standard.

Full Parts List

Here is the full parts list from my latest build. I will discuss more about the parts in a different post.

https://pcpartpicker.com/b/6k4nTW

Installation

Out of the box, the fans are mounted on the side with the tubes, with air pushing on to the radiator. I had to the change the position of the fans, and fit them to the back of the radiator. This was necessary to accommodate the cooler with my case. There was simply not enough clearance because of the GPU.

In addition to this, the size of the case restricted me from installing all three case fans. Therefore, I installed one of the spare case fans into the radiator. Refer to the picture for more information.

 

Performance

In a blended test in Prime95, the temperatures hover around 65 - 75c, and the torture test will hit 100c. This didn't matter with or without the wrong stand offs. Torture test will push all the cores to 100% utilization, and at this point, I expect the temperate to hit the thermal limit.

Real world tasks on the other hand, are far more forgiving. Playing Battlefield 2042 at ultra settings, the CPU temperature is around 65c, and video rendering has never crossed 70c.

Conclusion

I am quite pleased with the cooler. I truly wish Arctic had gotten its act together with the upgrade kits. I am going to rate this 4/5.

DICE Has Something Very Special in Battlefield 2042 Portal

Today, I played the Conquest of the Ages playlist on Battlefield 2042 Portal, and it was amazing to see Noshar Canals and Caspian Border in the new Frostbite engine. The last time I played Battlefield 3 Conquest on Noshar Canals was on 5/12/2013, and Caspian Border was on 5/3/2013. That was 8 years ago. Life was very different back then. Battlefield was very different back then. 

 

Noshar Canals in Battlefield 3

Caspian Border in Battlefield 3

To be able to play these two maps again in Portal mode feels unreal. The feeling of nostalgia when I saw this for the very first time is unreal. Running through the center of the map brings back memories of the countless hours spent on TDM. I learned to play Battlefield on this map. Playing as a support player in TDM was the way to go back then. Without this map, I probably never would have gotten into Battlefield.

DICE has something special on their hands with Portal. I hope they do the right thing, and support this mode for the foreseeable future.

Workaround for Battlefield 2042 (PC) and Nvidia ShadowPlay Video Resolution Issue

When using Nvidia ShadowPlay to record gameplay clips, I often found that the video was getting saved with a resolution of 1280x720, even though ShadowPlay is configured to record at in game resolution, which in my case was 3440x1440 (Ultrawide resolution). 

This is probably because when the game first starts, it opens a window with a smaller resolution, and then scales up to the native resolution. 

The only fix to this that I could find was to stop ShadowPlay recording (Alt + Shift + F10) and then start it at which point, the recordings are in the current native resolution.

This is the recording after stopping and starting ShadowPlay. 

Send HTML Button Selection to a JavaScript Function

Here are snippets of code that will allow you to get the user selected value from an HTML page into a JavaScript function. There might be better ways to do this. This worked well for me.

HTML code:



HTML page:

JavaScript function



JavaScript console output

Bootstrap Glyphicon Not Rendering ("empty box")

If you are not using a CDN link for the bootstrap library, you might find yourself in a situation where using glyphicon on your page might not work, and all you see is an empty box in place.

Glyphicon does not render

One reason for this could be because the paths for the fonts resource is not setup correctly.

If using the CDN link provided on the bootstrap website is not an option, then ensure that the directory looks like this -

Directory structure

Then, include the path to bootstrap.css in the HTML file.

Link to bootstrap.css in the html document

Reload the page in the browser, and that should load the glyphicon.

Setting Up A Simple Website Using Tomcat & Namecheap

In this post, I will share the steps I used to create a very simple website using Tomcat webserver, and Namecheap DNS.

Web server configuration

1. Download the latest tomcat.

• The version in this case is 9.0.6
  https://tomcat.apache.org/download-90.cgi

2. Create the following directory –

D:\MyWebsites

3. Paste the tomcat package directory inside the MyWebsites directory

4. Rename the package to the directory name of the website

This directory will serve the website

5. Download jdk -
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

This step is not necessary depending on how java is installed on the machine. I prefer deploy java in this manner.

6. Deploy jdk in the following directory –
D:\java\jdk64-1.8.0_161

Java directory

7. Create setenv.bat file and place it in the \bin directory. Specify the java home in the file.

setenv.bat

8. Create an index.html file and drop it in the following directory –
D:\MyWebsites\rc03.net\webapps\ROOT

index.html

9. Run the startup.bat in the \bin directory

Running startup.bat will show the environment variables

10. Access localhost:8080 in the browser

localhost

Router Configuration

1. Gather the internal IP address of the machine that is running the tomcat server –

ipconfig

2. Open the router configuration page and find the port forwarding settings. This can be typically accessed at 192.168.0.1

3. Add a new rule for forwarding http traffic to port 8080

Port forwarding

4. Go to http://canyouseeme.org/

5. Type in the port and click on the Check Port button

Port status

Namecheap host record configuration

1. Go to http://whatismyip.com and take note of the external IP address (also known as the WAN IP)

2. Go to Advanced DNS configuration

3. In the host records section, create the following:

• Type: A record; Host: @; Value: <external-ip>; TTL: Automatic
• Type: URL Redirect Record; Host: www; Value: http://<domain>:8080 Masked META (We use this record because www.domain-name.com will be redirected, and “work” in the browser)

Host records

The record for the wildcard exists for creating virtual hosts in Tomcat, which I will cover in a later document.

Problems I encountered

I have a Netgear C6300BD, and the router is running Firmware Version V2.05.18

It turns out that this particular router does not support loopback functionality, therefore when you have port forwarding setup, accessing http://<external-ip>:8080 does not work from within the network.

The best to test if the setup is working is by accessing your website from outside the network, and the most convenient way to do this is through a mobile device with.