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Memory Activity LEDs
Azert writes "Since a few months almost every popular memory maker includes heatspreaders with their fastest memory modules. Probably Corsair is setting a new fashion with their new line of memory with memory activity LEDs
XMS ProSeries modules feature a row of LED's on the top edge that display real-time memory activity level. Each memory bank has a row of nine dedicated activity LED's that alight as the level of memory activity increases. 512 Mbyte XMS ProSeries modules, with two banks, have a total of 18 activity LED's in green, yellow and red."
At first thought, these seem to be little more than the typical "type-r" enhancements like neon lights in the case, ect. How many users have a transparent case anyway? But this could actually be useful for diagnostics.
Now, will case modders with transparent cases have to face a new optical tempest problem (beware, PDF link!)? (People being able to sniff potentially critical data through analyzing LED blinking, that is...)
I know there was talk a year or so ago about some routers/modems which flashed their LEDs not just on receipt of a packet, but flashed them in accordance with the data contained in the packets, and reading that flashing would enable someone away from the machine without physical access to read the contents of data transferred
Is this the same? Would it be possible to read the contents of what's written to memory as it's written? I'm sure even when a password is encrypted it is, at some stage, moved into RAM as a plaintext piece of information. Could this be read? Are LEDs fast enough to transmit this information?
To the 1950's, 1960's, and early '70s where computers had rows and rows of blinking lights and switches Anywbody remember the PDP 11's? Or the early Altairs?
Now we just need an excuse to add dozens of little toggle switches to the side of the case.
My rights don't need management.
With all the case modding going on, I wonder how much though has been put into the interferance being generated by all the clear cases that are around today? There's a reason computer cases normally come as a solid sheet of metal. It's called a "faraday cage", (sp?) and is used to keep the nasty interferance generated by today's high speed systems inside the case.
/. ran across any studies or sampling done on computer-generated interferance?
Most stock case systems come complete with rows of metal "fingers" along the edges where sheets meet, and where the ports mesh against the back of the case, etc., to keep emi/rfi from leaking out. I'm assuming all of this bother is to keep the case within FCC regulations for generating interferance.
I wonder just how much interferance a typical "clear case" system generates to the surrounding area? Has anyone here at
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Forget LEDs, I want high performance memory in ECC (unbuffered). That way, I can over clock the memory untill bit errors are detected, then back up on the over clocking. It would sure beat the hell out of tweaking untill you BSOD.
Life is not for the lazy.
the latter.
the one that have much cash kind of latter.
besides, what good diagnose can you get from these? if you intend to use a known faulty pair of ultra expensive memory(through somehow mapping the faulty area out of use, iirc there's a patch for linux for this) what's the point in buying ultra expensive showoff memory in the first place? and for knowing if it's faulty i'd think there's a lot of better ways than to look at some activity leds.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Whilst QEMM386 was good you could still get some extra goodness out of emm386.exe. I used to work in a pc repair/upgrade shop, you could sometimes see a customers tears of joy when I used to knock out my "signature" EMM386 line in the config.sys after spending they spent the whole pervious evening trying to get the required 614k to get some game working. The trick was (if I remember correctly) adding /I=B000-B7FFF to 32K more "upper" memory since that memory area was only used for monochrome video cards.. that was nearly 9 years ago, man I cant believe I remember all this crap.
Pin 39 on the IDE bus is activity. Wire an LED to that.
I realize you're joking (I even found your joke funny), but unfortunately, implementing it would require work at the kernel level. Why? Well, when your program writes to, say, 0x00000000, that "virtual address" actually gets mapped to a different physical address. When your hard drive is thrashing and stuff is being paged in and out of RAM constantly, the physical address for a given virtual address could be changing multiple times per second.
:).
Now, a kernel patch for the linux VM system that allowed user programs to manipulate the lights (presumably this could be done by having the kernel just reserve 4k from each physical region monitored by each LED and rapidly hit that little bit of memory upon request) would be pretty cool
My server
I still have an old 286-12 made by a company called Everex that has an orange LED display on the front that tells what head and track the hard disk is on. It also works for the floppy disk drives too. During the POST it goes through messages telling what the computers is doing (DMA OK, FLPY OK, etc). The display came in handy multiple times for troubleshooting, and at the same time still looks cool. Makes it real easy to see when the disk drive needs a defraging too.
It would be neat to get it going on a newer computer, but I don't think it is possible. The display is connected by a ribbon cable to the motherboard. The floppy and hard disk controllers are on a seperate 16 bit expansion card. The display still works if I swap out the conrollers, leading me to believe it's some function of the chipset. There is also the problem with any newer computer the numbers would whiz by way to fast to read though.
Activity lights are nothing. Relatively useless in the grand scheme of things (except they'd make a wonderful addition to a good case mod)... The new Intel Blade Servers (sorry, no link, they're not released until Tuesday - you might try searching for the IBM ones, since they're pretty much the same hardware) have an LED next to each RAM slot that lights up when the stick dies (there's a capacitor on the board that keeps 30-40 seconds worth of electricity, so the LED's will stay lit up when you remove the blades from the chassis).
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
It seems to me that there are two kind of people who go in for case modding. On the one hand, you have your causual modders. They like pre-fab windows. Might add a cold cathode light and some round cables. These represent perhaps the majority.
However, then you have the real "hard core" modders. The kind of people who build their computers in to old radios. The kind of people who want to do some special cooling project, or who want to have a unique case. My personal favorites are the concept cases, and mods that have some practical purpose (like better temperature monitoring for servers etc). They want to be creative. It's not just about pimpage.
This memory seems to be for members for the first catagory.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Seriously case prices have done nothing but go up in the last year or so with many of the vanilla boxes not being stocked anymore. Though I've had my eye on a prefab'd watercooled case for awhile due to the noise levels I still have not seen the prices of it go down where I'd consider it acceptable.
:)
If you consider the case which retails for maybe 100 dollars and a pump that runs 30 dollars and another 30 for hoses and such I still dont see the point of paying 300 for a case for that amount of silence. And there's still the amount of heat that's being output into the house to deal with. I'm considering installing a duct from the office room to a window or through the wall to pipe all the excess heat out of the house.
I'm sure I'd make it back on the 300 dollar case by pumping all that hot air back outside except in the winter when I wouldnt mind it being put into the house