MSI X79-GD65 (8D) and Intel i7 3820 Nightmare and SOIC BIOS replacement

Posted on November 10, 2012 by thydzik

After many countless hours and out-of-pocked expenses I thought I would share the experience of MSI’s X79-GD65 (8D) motherboard and the Intel i7 3820 CPU.

The MSI X7-GD65 (8D) was purchased from PC Case Gear for $299, the Intel i7 3820 for the same price.

Once it was all hooked up I got the following symptoms on power-up;

No video
CPU phase LED showing constant 3 bars
CPU fan spinning
No digits on the debug LCD
Unable the switch the computer without a hard shutdown on the PSU

After Googling it turns out that old BIOS’ that were shipped with the early boards are not compatible with the late model Intel i7 3820. This is not uncommon, as how can manufactures be expected to design for hardware that isn’t even released yet.

What annoyed me was the lack of options going forward to resolve this situation;

MSI have no means of claiming Warranty Internationally, they cop-out and chime to take it back to the store. What kind of company does that?
The BIOS chips are soldered on to the board, yes, you read that right, this saves them money. It now it isn’t a straight forward procedure to replace the chips, I will show you have you can do it further on.
The firmware updater requires a working CPU, even ASUS realise the need to be able to flash your BIOS with minimal hardware.
MSI recommend to purchase an Intel i7 3930k and then flash the BIOS, if I could afford a $550+ chip in the first place I wouldn’t have purchased the 3820.
Borrow a 3930, the problem is the Sandy Bridge hardware isn’t cost effective; it is rare for people to own these system.

So where did this leave me, with a $300 paper weight, I wasn’t going to give up so soon.

I spotted updated MSI X79-GD65 (8D) BIOS chips on eBay for $20 including shipping so decided to give it ago.

Have a look on YouTube for SOIC (the surface mount chip packaging) desoldering or SOIC removal with a hot-air gun.

I tried the first attempt desoldering, by running a piece of wire under the legs pulling on it once heated to lift it off the pad, unfortunately I removed one of the solder pads.

Fortunately, this board has two BIOS chips.

The second attempted was the hot-air gun approach, this was a lot easier, sprayed with hot air the chip can simply be removed.

The board now booted up which was a relief except only sometimes and I could never work out what was the reason. Searching the forums and there are others with the same problem, a Clear CMOS basically sometimes allows the board to boot.

I ended up getting rid of the board on eBay for $40, yes, I lost money, but I was happy to have it out of my life. And purchased an ASRock Extreme 4.

While I’m ranting, why do MSI place that giant Military Class III sticker on the socket protector, have you ever tried replacing the protector, you are bound to damage some pins in the process.

How do Chinese/Hong Kong sellers make money on eBay with 99c free shipping items?

Posted on October 28, 2012 by thydzik

Over the years I have purchased a large number of items from eBay, many from China and Hong Kong, I also act as a seller on eBay. I started wondering how sellers could make an income from items being sold for 99 cents with free shipping.

After reading forums and researching, I thought it would be useful sharing this information.

I thought I would investigate two products, two that I have bought previously

a generic Nintendo DS stylus, and
a generic iPhone USB data cable

The cost of the product

Everyone one knows that phrase “Made in China’, China’s products are inexpensive do to lower labour costs and mass production of products which get exported all around the globe. But how cheap are these items, to give you an idea head to Alibaba.com, self described as source of “Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters, Importers, Buyers, Wholesalers, Products and Trade Leads”.

A Nintendo DS stylus made from ABS plastic the bulk price can range from around 5 cents per piece to as low as 3 cents for quantities over a thousand purchased.

Similarly, an iPhone USB data cable can range from 10 cents to 30 cents, again depending on quantity purchased.

So the actual product’s cost can vary from 1 percent to 30 percent.

Small padded envelopes can also be purchased in bulk for a few cents.

Postage

Let’s assume items are posted from Hong Kong, Hong Kong Post offers a bulk postage rate of $2.30 (Hong Kong Dollars) for a 20 gram item or $95 (Hong Kong Dollars) for unlimited items to the same destination (Country and City) not exceeding 1 kilogram.

The current (26^th October 2012) exchange rate of 1 United States Dollar is 7.75035 Hong Kong Dollars. So to put the above postage costs into perspective, you can post 1 kilogram of items for $12.24 United States. If you were sending 20 gram packets, it would cost 25 cents each. The envelope to post the item weighs around 8 cents and the actual item from 2 grams to 30 grams.

But why does an international letter from Hong Kong cost less than it costs us to send a domestic letter? There a number of contributing theories,

High degree of automation, have you ever seen a hand written envelope arriving from Hong Kong? Probably not. The seller has already entered all the details online, the postal service just needs to scan the barcode, there is minimal human involvement.
Reciprocating postage agreements, countries have agreements with other countries on the basis of ‘you deliver our mail and we will deliver yours’. Now when was the last time you sent a package to Hong Kong, and now when was the last time you received a package from Hong Kong. There a significantly more received parcels, who pays to deliver these parcels, your local post office, how do they afford to deliver these parcels to your letter box, by increasing the costs to send parcels. Now you know why our postage rates are so much more expensive?
Bulk postage, Hong Kong is an aviation hub, owning the record for world’s busiest airport by cargo traffic. That small envelope you received was probably sharing the same plane with thousands of others destined to your city.

eBay and PayPal Fees

Now we get to the costs for using eBay and PayPal, we know these cost are high for the average sellers, eBay itself have stated they want a return of around 10% on every item sold. How do these particular sellers minimise costs?

PayPal Micropayments

PayPal offers a Micropayments account with a different fee system.

Instead of the normal 2.9% plus 30 cents for each transaction on a Business account, a Micropayments account offers 5% plus 5 cents for each transaction. What this means is that for transactions less than $12, it is more economical to use the Micropayments account.

Assume a 99 cent item, with a normal PayPal business account the fee would be 33 cents, but with the PayPal Micropayments account the fee would only be 10 cents, a 23 cent difference.

Here is an interesting fact, anything sold for less than 30 cents and received with PayPal Business account or 5 cents and received with PayPal Micropayments account and the seller hasn’t already made no profit.

eBay fees

To list an item costs 50 cents, but on that single listing there can be any quantity, for each item sold 7% of the sale price is applicable. Sellers are allowed to make changes to this listing, so the same listing can be used for a number of different items.

To put the eBay cost in perspective, on a 99 cent item it is roughly 7 cents on eBay fees alone.

Final Profit

So now we know all the costs associated with selling the item, what is the profit?

Adding all the selling costs, not including the cost of the actual product, we get 7 cents from eBay, 10 cents from PayPal, 3 cents for the envelope and 25 cents for postage at a total cost of 45 cents. Assuming the product can cost anywhere from 2 to 30 cents, the profit on a 99 cent item can range from 25 to 50 cents, or 25% to 50% net profit. No bad for a single item.

Let’s assume the seller is selling 10,000 items a year. That’s an income of $2,500 to $5,000 per year. Increase the number of items offered, and that is quite a significant income.

Australian Securities Exchange – Shares with highest dividend yields

Posted on October 25, 2012 by thydzik

I was interested in getting a list of Australian shares which pay the highest dividend yields, that is the highest dividend over share price. Google Finance already displays the dividend yield value so it was only a matter of collecting all the data and displaying it in a neat table. While I was collecting the dividend yield data I decided I may as well collect all the other company data.

The ASX provides a listing of Officially Listed Companies, this was imported on 25th October 2012 and will remain static.

The rest of the company data is updated daily.

To find the highest values simply click the column heading to sort the data.

Here is the top 10 of dividend yields;

Company	Code	Yield
BIOTECH CAPITAL LIMITED	BTC	50
CSG LIMITED	CSV	45.9
SERIES 2010-2 REDS TRUST	RDA	44.7
HASTINGS HIGH YIELD FUND	HHY	41.9
RHG LIMITED	RHG	34.9
TROJAN EQUITY LIMITED	TJN	32.9
LEMARNE CORPORATION LIMITED	LMC	31
MULTIPLEX EUROPEAN PROPERTY FUND	MUE	19.2
SEVEN WEST MEDIA LIMITED	SWM	19
APN NEWS & MEDIA LIMITED	APN	18.1

http://thydzik.com/asx/

VBA/VBS check if printer is installed

Posted on October 22, 2012 by thydzik

Here is a quick code snippet to determine if a printer is installed on a Microsoft Windows system;

MsgBox printerExists("Microsoft XPS Document Writer")

Function printerExists(str)
    printerExists = False
    Dim objWMIService
    Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2")

    Dim colPrinters
    Set colPrinters = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * From Win32_Printer")

    Dim objPrinter
    For Each objPrinter In colPrinters
        If objPrinter.Name = str Then
            printerExists = True
            Exit For
        End If
    Next
End Function

To trust or not to trust – the benefits of a discretionary (family) trust – final comparison

Posted on October 6, 2012 by thydzik

I have discussed the benefits of a discretionary trust aka family trust for minimising capital gains tax (CGT). I have also discussed the benefits of a discretionary trust from minimising taxable income. For this last part I am going to compare a discretionary trust against a direct 50-50 split over an average person’s lifespan.

Again similar to the previous examples a 50-50 split is exactly that, two persons owning half a property each, any income is split equally. Also as per previous examples, one person will be earning a secondary external income of $100,000. As before, I have assumed a $1,000 annual fee for trust management.

The following examples try to emulate a real world situation, the purchase of a property, initially purchased under a mortgage with some rent, initially the property will be negative geared. I have assumed all income after tax goes into paying the mortgage, this would never be the case in the real world, so the examples below show the property being paid off much quicker than normal. Finally, once the properties has been paid off savings are accumulated which includes interest. This interest in the same as the mortgage interest, which wouldn’t be the case as it would always be slightly lower.

As previously discussed a 50-50 split is always more beneficial compared to a discretionary trust when the properties are negatively geared, so to make things interesting I have added cases were they begin with a 50-50 split, then once the property is positively geared it changes to a discretionary trust.

The following scenarios are used for the situations;

50-50 – a split of the property when each person owns an even 50%
Trust 2pers – a discretionary trust with 2 beneficiaries
Combo – starting with a 50-50 split and then moving to a trust with 2 beneficiaries once the property is positively geared
Trust 3pers – a discretionary trust with 3 beneficiaries
Combo2 – starting with a 50-50 split and then moving to a trust with 3 beneficiaries once the property is positively geared

Example 1 – mortgage $500,000, rental yield 2.5% and interest 7%

First a 30 year chart of the yearly income after tax

The first abnormality that can be observed on the combo situations is a bump in income at around the 5 year mark, this is the point where the property goes from negatively geared to positively geared, and as I stated above, this is when the combo situations move from a 50-50 split to a trust. But why the bump/ well, because you have changed the title from two persons to a trust, stamp duty is payable, for a $500,000 property roughly $18,000 is payable. Stamp duty is what makes it unappealing to move to and from a trust situation, it is the believed reason key decisions about the trusts need to be made early on, as it is expensive to change your decision later on.

Looking at the cumulative wealth over 30 years, this provides a clearer picture

Straight away, at 30 years the order of scenarios providing the best return in descending order are the second combo, the three person trust, the 50-50 split, the first combo and lastly the two person trust. The difference between the best and worst results is $280,000 which is very significant for a 30 year projection. The difference at around 10 years is only $20,000, since the trusts are playing catch-up from the period of negatively gearing. If you look closely it can be observed the two combo scenarios have a very slight dip around that fifth year corresponding to the stamp duty.

Example 2 – mortgage $1,000,000, rental yield 2.5% and interest 7%

Again, a 30 year chart of the yearly income after tax

A couple of things to notice, first the bump at the 13 year mark signals where the property moved from negative geared to positive geared, a larger mortgage means longer time to pay off. A higher valued property also means more stamp duty for $1,000,000 the stamp duty is around $43,000.

Looking at the cumulative wealth over 30 years

Firstly, the order of scenarios after a 30 year projection has changed, the 50-50 split and combos are in the lead, whilst the two trust scenarios are trailing. The difference between the best and worst results is $250,000 which is very significant for a 30 year projection. We can see the affects of the stamp duty a lot more clearly on the light blue and green lines and the trusts only scenarios never recover from the start.

But what if the cumulative wealth is projected over 50 years

The trust scenarios are back in the lead. Because of the larger time negatively geared and larger stamp duty, the trust scenarios needed more time to ‘catch up’.

Example 3 – mortgage $250,000, rental yield 2.5% and interest 7%

As above, a 30 year chart of the yearly income after tax

As expected, there is a very short period of negative gearing, roughly 3 years. Due to the relatively low value property, the stamp duty is also minor at $7,000.

Looking at the cumulative wealth over 30 years

As expected, due to the short negatively geared period, the trusts are beneficial for the majority of the projection period.

Conclusion

So what does this all mean?

Making the correct decision about trusts can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run. In general if a property is positively geared it would benefit if it is in a trust and if a property is negatively geared it would benefit if owned individually.

The good news is, if planning to hold for the long term it, it can be decided to move to a discretionary trust scenario, as the benefits will eventually out way the costs. When the property is positively geared move it to a trusts, but be prepared to hold it to offset the stamp duty.

ComputerSphere – restoring the original knobs and dials

Posted on September 26, 2012 by thydzik

The two large knobs were the reason the project stalled for so long, I initially planned to use the knobs to control the LCD TV, interfacing the knobs to the digital up/down buttons.

The idea was, since the knobs are rotary, I needed some way to convert the clockwise and anticlockwise directional rotation to two corresponding digital pulses. Searching the internet, I found an incremental quadrature rotary encoder could be used to achieve this.

I initially purchased two inexpensive mechanical quadrature rotary encoders for roughly $3 each and a couple of “and” gates, with information found on the internet I put together a simple quadrature decoder with two LEDs that would light up depending on rotation direction, unfortunately, this didn’t work.

This lead me to thinking that the mechanical bounce was the problem, so I purchased two Grayhill 62P22-H0 optical rotary encoders for $10 each from RS Components, this also didn’t work.

I was then thinking that my “and’ gate setup was causing the problems so I purchased two quadrature clock converter ICs from LSI chip model LS7083, these cost about $30 including shipping to Australia. These chips allow for a rotary encoder with quadrature output to connect directly to the IC, the chip then converts the clockwise and anti-clockwise rotation to up/down pulses. Unfortunately, this still didn’t work.

This was enough for me to drop the project, hence the long leave of absence.

What made me restart the project was I found some rotary switches from company Taiwan Alpha part model 105-SR10030F-PS. What makes these rotary switches so special is they directly output on/off pulses when rotated, they don’t output a quadrature signal, so there is no need to have any hardware that decodes the quadrature signal. This cost me around $50 including shipping. When they arrived I restarted this project.

As it turned out, since I couldn’t use the analogue tuner of the LCD any more (analogue was phased out by digital free to air), I had no more need to convert the volume and channel controls.

So below is a straight forward restoring of the original knobs.

I’ve also starting thinking about what to show on back of the Videosphere, things like power buttons, power connectors and cables. I have an idea to have only USB plugs available. In the square base there will be a slot load DVD-RW drive connected via USB.

PHP code to automatically bid/buy an eBay auction item

Posted on September 26, 2012 by thydzik

The following PHP code will automatically bid on an eBay item.

modify the following variables;

$username = “username”; //the eBay username
$password = “password”; //the eBay password
$item = 300712344201; //the item number
$bid = 0.01; //the bid value in the item’s currency

<?php
	//modify the following

	$username = "username"; //the eBay username
	$password = "password"; //the eBay password

	$item = 300712344201; //the item number
	$bid =  0.01; //the  bid value in the item's currency

	//do not modify below

	//query the sign-in page
	$curl = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL,"http://signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn");
	$ret = curl_exec ($curl);
	curl_close ($curl);

	//sign-in
	$post = "MfcISAPICommand=SignInWelcome&siteid=0&co_partnerId=2&UsingSSL=0&ru=&pp=&pa1=&pa2=&pa3=&i1=-1&pageType=-1&userid={$username}&pass={$password}";

	$curl = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$post);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll");
	$ret = curl_exec ($curl);
	curl_close ($curl);

	if (strpos($ret, "Member id {$username}") === FALSE) {
		echo "Failed signing in.\r\n";
	} else {
		echo "Success signing in.\r\n";
	}

	//place the inital bid
	$url = "http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MakeBid&item={$item}&maxbid={$bid}";

	$curl = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	$ret = curl_exec ($curl);
	curl_close ($curl);

	preg_match_all('/(?:value="([-0-9a-zA-Z]*)" *)?name="stok"(?: *value="([-0-9a-zA-Z]*)")?/', $ret, $regs);
	$stok = $regs[1][0];

	preg_match_all('/(?:value="([-0-9a-zA-Z]*)" *)?name="uiid"(?: *value="([-0-9a-zA-Z]*)")?/', $ret, $regs);
	$uiid = $regs[1][0];

	if (($stok) && ($uiid)) {
		echo "Success placing initial bid.\r\n";
	} else {
		echo "Failed placing initial bid.\r\n";
	}

	//confirm the bid
	$url = "http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=MakeBid&maxbid={$bid}&quant=1&mode=1&stok={$stok}&uiid={$uiid}&co_partnerid=2&user={$username}&fb=0&item={$item}";

	$curl = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	$ret = curl_exec ($curl);
	curl_close ($curl);

	if (strpos($ret, "you're the first bidder") === FALSE) {
		echo "Failed placing final bid.\r\n";
	} else {
		echo "Success placing final bid.\r\n";
	}

	//for testing
	//$fh = fopen("testhtml.html", 'w');
	//fwrite($fh, $ret);
	//fclose($fh);
?>

Replace the hinges and LCD screen on an ASUS F3J laptop

Posted on September 22, 2012 by thydzik

Today I will be walking you through a laptop hinge replacement on an ASUS F3J laptop. As usual I purchased the replacement hinges from eBay for $11 including shipping to Australia. You can only buy a pair of left and right hinges, so you can choose to replace both.

I also purchased a pair of plastic hinge covers from eBay for a relatively expensive $14 including shipping to Australia, I could have probably saved some money and used my existing ones with a bit of glue since the clips had broken.

First a photo of the damaged hinge, you can see the right hinge sheared off completely which is quite dangerous as the associate cables should easily be damaged further. Further, you will notice that there is no plastic hinge cover. The left hinge was fine and still holding the screen in place, but I suspected it may have been weakened by the rotational torque so replaced it as well.

Replacing the hinges are fairly straight forward, first remove two sets of screws on the back of the back of the laptop as per the photo below.

Turn the laptop upside down and remove a screw holding the left hinge in place from the bottom.

Turn the laptop back to its normal position and open the screen to an obtuse angle exposing the plastic hinge covers. Remove these by slightly compressing them and pulling on the back side first.

Once these are removed the hinges are visible. This was already the case for my broken right hinge.

Remove the two screws holding the hinges to the laptop, once removed you should be able to remove the LCD screen from the laptops base completely, be careful though as the data cables would still be connected. You can easily disconnect these cables, this frees the LCD screen a little more except for a single pair of wires which doesn’t seem to look like it was easy to disconnect.

Now with the screen removed from the base, remove the eight rubber screw caps exposing the screws. With a Philips screwdriver remove the eight screws.

With the eight screws remove the surrounding plastic bezel can be removed exposing the LCD screen.

From here remove another set of four screws holding the LCD screen assembly on the plastic backing.

Finally, remove four small screws from either side of the LCD screen.

You should now have the two hinges removed. This is the same procedure if you want to replace the LCD screen. Install the new hinges by following the above instructions in reverse.

To reinstall those rubber screw caps a drop of glue may be required to hold them in place.

Once the hinges are installed, installed the plastic hinge covers and you’re done.

Blog of Travis Hydzik

random snippets and information