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New Mac Pro

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Mac ProIn 2006, work purchased a Mac Pro for me. At the time, and for years after, it was a great machine. Since its purchase, I had upgraded the CPUs, the GPU, and done everything I could to keep it chugging along for as long as possible, partly because of the ever present rumors for the last several years that Apple was just about to release a new Mac Pro. Then, finally, late last year, they finally did, and obviously it was a pretty large change from the previous Mac Pro. So, as my Mac Pro approached 8 years old, my boss ordered me a new Mac Pro, with the price understanding that a fully tricked out iMac every 3 years would amount to about the same cost as this machine. Hopefully that proves to be true. =)

So, after ordering the machine in January, and being promised the machine would ship by the end of February… I finally got the machine early April. =) Specs are pretty damn amazing, considering. 8-Core 3.0ghz Xeon E5, Dual ATI D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM each, 32GB of system RAM, 1TB SSD. Compared to my previous Mac Pro, which after upgrading for years was a 2x 4-core 2.67ghz Xeon, ATI 5770 with 1GB of VRAM, 10GB of System RAM, and 2x 750GB 7200RPM drives. Like I said, not bad given it’s age, but certainly not current. Especially since I couldn’t upgrade past 10.7.5 as the machine only had a 32bit EFI. Lack of VX-T sucked too, for running virtualization.

Anyway, the new machine, is pretty damn kick ass. While it lacks an optical drive (easy enough to fix with an USB3 blu-ray drive I already had), and storage is expensive/not expandable (easy enough to fix with the Drobo 5D I already had), I really can’t see a much better machine if you’re looking for a Mac, and have the money to drop. Read/Write to the SSD is quite literally 950MB/sec. So, damn fast (twice as fast as I’ve seen from any SATA based SSDs). While I’ve been unable to fully test the graphics cards, I can say the game plays both Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 on full quality, with zero dropped frames (60fps). Obviously neither of these are great tests from a performance point of view, but they’re the games that I occasionally play, so they’re what I have. I have no doubt that it would also play most of the Valve games (Portal 2, Team Fortress, CS, etc) at full quality as well.

The machine, really, is pretty amazing. Apple have done a wonderful job of creating a computer that should make almost any professional very happy. If you need expandability, you should be able to just purchase an external PCIe enclosure, connect over Thunderbolt, and have a great setup. I’m pretty sure this machine should last me just as long as my previous Mac Pro, which means it’ll certainly deserve the name “Mac Pro”.

[xrr rating=5/5]

Keithley 196 Repair #2

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KEITHLEY_196I recently acquired another Keithley 196 off eBay that was listed as not powering on, which, could be a lot of things, but hopefully was related to the power supply/rail infrastructure (thinking, most likely the digital logic 5V regulator, primary filter cap, etc).

The unit arrived, and indeed, did not power on at all. No indication that the digital side of things was getting any power at all.

So, opened the unit, and pulled the analog board/enclosure off, and didn’t see anything. So, I pulled the digital board, and wow, the PCB was all brown/burned around the transformer. Sadly, I didn’t take a picture. =( Seemingly, and this is a guess, there was a cold solder joint (either from the factory, or from vibration) on the pin in question, and it heated up over time to the point of burning the pad it was soldered to, which killed that power rail. Tracing out the adjacent pins revealed that the pin in question was related to the 5V digital rail. Viola, we have our issue. Obviously, I’m hoping that the power supply going out didn’t damage any of the digital board.

The biggest issue with the repair was getting the burned pin to take solder. It required a fair amount of sanding with some 400grit paper, then cleaning that up a bit with some 1500grit (didn’t have anything between those two). =P Then, it was just a matter of bodging a wire (in this case, a 20awg stranded wire) between the transformer pin, and the bridge rectifier for the 5V digital rail. Then just tack the wire down with some hot glue (I don’t like wires just flapping about.

Keithley 196 #2 FixI also re-flowed the solder joints for the rest of the transformer pins, as I bet the issue was just poor soldering at the factory… the PCB also flexes a bit in the enclosure, and the transformer weighs a bit (which is why they bolted it to the PCB in the first place). The picture to the left is obviously my repair. I put the unit back together again enough to test (put the digital board back in the enclosure, plugged in the front panel (display, etc)), and powered it up. Bam! Works! So, put the unit back together fully, and tested it out. It’s about 20mV off from my other 196, and my 199. So either they’re both off (which wouldn’t surprise me since I nuked the configuration on the 199 at one point), or this new one is off. One of these days I’ll actually get one of my meters calibrated, but at this point, they’re very accurate, and pretty darn close. Remember, in the 30V range, the 196’s least significant digit is measuring 10uV’s, so 20mV’s is both a lot, and not very much. =)

Job accomplished.

Personal Update — 8 Months

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Sean StairsJust thought I would take a moment away from the normal geek-ness of my site, and do a personal update. About 8 months ago I posted that I had just had a baby son, and yay verily, 8 months later he’s grown up quite a bit (see picture). He has long since gotten his first tooth (Christmas day, 2013), and 3 more. He’s working now on tooth 5. About two weeks ago, he figured out crawling forward (he’d been crawling backward for at least a month prior, and was quite good at it). And shortly after figuring out forward crawling, he started finding all kinds of new things to “pull to stand” on, like the stairs (hence, the picture). =) So, that’s been fun (baby-proofing things he finds that we didn’t even think were likely to be found). =)

The only issue has been, the little guy doesn’t sleep well. At his best, he was sleeping in 2 hour chunks. Lately, this has been hour, at most, chunks. Turns out much of this was due to him having ear infections, which we’ve been fighting, and seem to have under control at this point, but lately he brought home a “wonderful” cold from daycare that both my wife and myself caught, and have been “dying” from the last several days, all the while he’s been crawling around wanting people to play with. ugh. But, we’ll all get better.

In short, parenting is interesting. It’s both exceedingly enjoyable and exceedingly frustrating, and given previous experience, as the little boy gets more able to interact with me/us, that scale will begin to tilt more and more toward the “enjoyable”, as most of the “frustrating” comes from him not being able to communicate in any real way. So, maybe it should be said parenting is all about patience…