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."

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Re:Useful

[jpc]

reply actually at least you might be able to tell which chip is bad when running memtest. Though my current problem is knowing which one is bad for dual channel chipsets, as I dont know what width they are interleaved on (64 bits?) and how that corresponds to the physical locations.

kind of neat

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

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.

New Optical Tempest issues?

[teqo]

Now, will case modders with transparent cases have to face a new optical tempest problem (beware, PDF link!) [applied-math.org]? (People being able to sniff potentially critical data through analyzing LED blinking, that is...)

Whats the possibility with security here?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

AIDS!

[mrpuffypants]

To quote the lovely Tina Fey:

"Hey! That's great! Lights on my RAM! Oh, hey, scientists: CANCER! AIDS! Let's put the blinkenlights on the RAM on the backburner and try to eradicate cancer and AIDS first!"

It is pretty cool, though...

This hearkens back

[earthforce_1]

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.

colors

[Councilor Hart]

Great. More lights which means nothing to me. I am colour-blind. Worse is that more and more things try to give me information by changing the color of the leds, leaving me standing in the desert of ignorance. So it tells me nothing and I pay for the power usage.

Encouraging emi/rfi?

[v1]

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.

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 /. ran across any studies or sampling done on computer-generated interferance?

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Re:What is the intended use?

[gl4ss]

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.

..Pretty Lights..

[phuturephunk]

Being a visual-spatial person I'd have to say this is a pretty good idea. As far as we've come we pretty much still like to look at the 'pretty lights', yano? Some kind of indicator that what we've built is actually doing something. Helps to bridge the gap between our fascination with machinery and the circutry that we build, which inherantly doesn't inspire the awe of say..an industrial sized crane, because of its lack of moving parts.

People like to 'see' an indicator that what they've built is actually working..Its comforting in a Man-machine sort of way. You could easily see if a bank was out (as someone mentioned before), but then again you'd know that when you tried to boot the machine. ..I think an interesting application of this would be to attach a bank of lights that could vary in intensity depending on power usage to the banks. One could test various in-case heat levels and actually observe the usage levels of electricity inside different parts of the ram as temperature rose. I dunno, I'm grasping here.. ...Pretty lights!!..

Re:Oh my

[msgmonkey]

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.

Re:Blinkenlights!

[macgyvr64]

Pin 39 on the IDE bus is activity. Wire an LED to that.

Re:Pong?

[K8Fan]

You'd need a motherboard with 8 sockets. But I'm sure someone will hack it. Or at least a WinAmp plug-in that will use the RAM LEDs as a spectrum analyzer.

Someone at Argonne Lab once hacked up a Pong for the LEDs on the front of the Connection Machine.

Re:Pong?

[CTho9305]

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 :).

Re:Blinkenlights!

[MrLint]

Well something similar occurred to me with the powermac g5. Build a USb powered LED display and mount it in all the little holes in the front of the case and have it display the the register contents of the cpu in psuedo real time.

Re:Where will this insanity end?

[toddestan]

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.

LED's to indicate bad RAM

[forevermore]

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).

Why people do case mods

[AmiMoJo]

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 [bit-tech.net]. 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.

Joy another thing to bring up prices

[Bruha]

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 :)

Leakage from Optical Emissions Concern (Tempest)

[eriksmithtex]

Call me a little paranoid but this reminds me of the data leakage problems of some communication devices (Modems, DSU's, etc). Have to 'nix the plexiglass case mod now 8->. Here is the article: Information Leakage from Optical Emissions [applied-math.org] or Google HTML here [216.239.37.104]

Re:Why people do case mods

[IM6100]

I did my first 'case mod' back in about 1986 when I built my first 'PC' machine.

I had picked up one of those 63.5 watt IBM-PC power supplies at a swapmeet. I had bought an XT-clone motherboard. I had bought a Leading Edge Model D case (empty). I'd bought an IBM MDA display card and disk controller, and two 360K floppies.

I got it all home and said 'Hmmm'. The motherboard didn't fit into the case. The bracket spacing on the Model D was different from the standard XT layout. The Power supply didn't fit into the case either. It was a standard (real IBM actually) 'XT' type power supply (but pre-XT as it was from an original PC.

I carved away a lot of the bracket frames in the Leading Edge case and used metal standoffs and screws to bolt in the XT-clone motherboard. I completely removed the power supply from it's case and mounted it at the right place in the old Leading Edge case using more metal standoffs and screws. I mounted in the floppy drives, plugged in all 640K of RAM (I'd found it cheap at a surplus store- about $8 each for 256Kx1 chips).

It all worked. I used that machine for years. There weren't any flashing lights. There weren't really any lights at all unless the A: drive or the B: drive was in use.

The infamous Video Hole

[The Monster]

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..

And even then, you couldn't get MSCDEX to load in it, because it took up more than 32K before it went resident (at just over 28K, IIRC). So I wrote a little utility package (2 TSRs and 2 drivers) that let you 'borrow' memory from the color text area at B8000-BFFFF, then recall the 'loan' after the transient part was returned to the OS.

I released that thing as shareware (There's even one site that Google knows about that still has VID_HOLE.ZIP [for their subscribers], which actually works under Win9x for Real Mode drivers) but nobody ever sent me the $5 registration. I wonder if anyone (other than I) ever found a use for the thing?

Re:Just what I need...

[Anonymous Coward]

The other I spotted a mustang all tripped out with yellow kanji.

I wondered if he realized how stupid it was to put japanese writing on an american car. I wondered if he knew what any of those kanji meant. I wondered if the people that make those stickers have a good time selling stickers that say stuff like "dumb ass". I wondered how funny it would look if I just threw some random yellow english words on the side my japanese car. "Speed" "Wisdom" "Honor". Or better yet klingon.