Raidmax Exo Special Edition of cheapness

I recently decided that I was going to resurrect my first PC I ever built and get it operational again, serving a second life as a retro Windows XP gaming PC. I still had the CPU, GPU, RAM, motherboard and Creative X-Fi sound card. All I needed was a DVD drive, case and power supply. I took a step forward this week by obtaining a case, namely the Raidmax Exo “Special Edition”

I did not want to break the bank buying an uber expensive case for a 13 year old computer system, but I did need an ATX sized case that had 2 x 5.25” drive bays, something that is becoming a rarity on modern cases as optical drives fade away. Bonus points for a front USB3 port of some kind to transfer files at faster speeds. The Raidmax Exo SE was one of the cheapest cases on Takealot, our local version of Amazon. It ticked all of my requirements boxes, so I bought it. Bizarrely enough, the case includes a built in SD/Micro-SD card reader, which is nice to have, though it is capped at USB2 speeds. The side panel is see through, but it’s not glass. Some kind of plastic or Perspex I think.

When it arrived and I opened the box, I understood why the hell the case was so cheap. It’s made of incredibly thin metal for one thing. One gets the impression that you could probably bend this case in half with your bare hands if you were determined enough. Not great, but I can live with it. However, the promised 2 x 5.25” drive bays is a lie. Technically they are there, but only the top bay is actually usable. The bottom bay is blocked by a metal grille that sits behind most of the front fascia of the case. The (only) 120mm case fan that is preinstalled fits onto this grille. Try as I might, I couldn’t see any way of removing this grille and the section wasn’t something that was designed to bend off or out the way. There’s no paper instruction manual included and the grille looks riveted in place anyway. I think the grill is also there as a supposed mount for up to a 360mm radiator, but I cannot see anyone hooking up water cooling of any sort in a case like this.

Damn. The case was officially not fit for use for my project. I could have returned it, but that would have involved extra effort. Luckily, my dad came up with the ultimate answer – swap the guts of his PC into the case and he’ll make use of it. This would work and let me use his current case, which was actually my original PC case – now the original system would be coming home so to speak.

I proceeded to swap the guts around into the Raidmax case. Nothing too complicated and that I haven’t done hundreds of times before. The full sized ATX motherboard fit as advertised, but space is definitely at a premium inside the case. I took the chance to swap out the enormous Geforce GTX 480 that was in my dad’s PC with a far more modest Geforce GT610, as my dad doesn’t play games and doesn’t need that monster card sucking up oodles of power for nothing. As a result, his PC now runs quieter and more energy efficient than before. I still need to replace the TIM on the heatsink, as I suspect that after many years of use, the stuff is quite dry and not conducting heat the way it should.

I haven’t connected the front 120mm fan yet, as it is powered via a Molex plug – another sign of cheapness and corners cut. This means the fan will run at full speed non stop, making excess noise. I have a couple of 120mm fans that are powered by a 3 pin connector which will connect to the motherboard instead. I just need to get a needle nose pliers from work to help me remove the front façade of the case so I can swap out the fan.

Overall, the system looks nice enough, even though it is extremely budget orientated. You are definitely not getting high end features, but this would work well for an average office or school PC type scenario. Come to think of it though, many systems can be replaced now with NUC mini PC type systems, as those contain all the power an office or school user will generally need. The heyday of the full tower case is long over for casual use to be honest. I wouldn’t ultimately recommend this case unless you were on an extreme budget or need something incredibly basic for a first build. There are much better cases out there that will serve your needs better in the long run. There’s potential in the design and looks of this case, but ultimately too many corners were cut in order to reduce costs and it shows in the build and quality of the final product.

Miracast: so frustratingly close to awesome

Miracast is one of those things that no one really knows of, yet it is incredibly useful to use. In a nutshell, Miracast can be thought of as a form of wireless HDMI. Whether built into a device or plugged in as a dongle, Miracast lets you duplicate your Windows laptop or Android phone’s screen to the recipient device, letting you go BIG screen.

The use cases for Miracast almost seem endless. Do a big screen demo of something on your Android phone without needing to plug in any cables to the device. Project your Windows laptop screen to do live presentations or demonstrations without needing HDMI or VGA cables. When it works, Miracast seems like black magic. Keyword there being when it works…

A few weeks back, I tried to connect a Huawei MateBook D15 to the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter V2 we have plugged into the projector in our school’s hall. No matter what I did, the connection never finished pairing and we had to fall back to projecting the old way. This was annoying, as I’d previously used the dongle and projector just fine with a Dell laptop the year before. Both my Samsung Galaxy S10+ and my partner’s LG G7 connected fine, adding to the frustration…

I brought the Huawei home with me and tried to connect it to my own older V1 Display Adapter. It failed as well. This made me think that a firmware update could help both V1 and V2 adapters, providing there was one. I fired up my old Dell Venue 11 Pro convertible which has Windows 8.1 on it, along with the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter app on it. This basic app lets you set a few settings and also update the firmware. Sure enough, my V1 had an update. After letting the device update, the Huawei laptop connected without fuss.

Going back to the hall, I connected to the V2 adapter and it too had an update. The version number had barely crept up, but I updated anyway. After it was done and rebooted, the Huawei connected as well without issue.

Our library has a HiSense 65” 4K TV that has built in Miracast, but I have been unable to ever connect a laptop to it, yet I’ve managed to connect a number of phones fine. I haven’t been able to find a firmware update for the TV, so I don’t know if that device will ever be able to let laptops connect, which seems like such a waste to me.

One very big issue with Miracast is that it is not supported on Apple devices. Apple instead have their own proprietary protocol called AirPlay that lets you mirror your phone, iPad or laptop to an Apple TV that is in turn plugged into an HDMI port. This does limit Miracast’s usability, as any person with an Apple device will not be able to connect and display their screen.

Although it’s been around for over 8 years now and shipped on hundreds of millions of devices, Miracast still feels like an afterthought in most cases, mainly due to the bugs and quirks of receiving devices. People who see it working often swear it must be black magic, but getting to that point can often be a frustrating exercise of troubleshooting. Nonetheless, as the only open standard that is mostly cross platform, I still believe in it and will promote it to other users who can make use of the functionality.

USB compatibility issues in 2020?!?

USB is such a part and parcel of our daily computing lives that we don’t even think of compatibility issues anymore. With Windows 10 in particular, you don’t need to find drivers for the USB controller on the computer and in most cases if you plug in a device, Windows will go and fetch the driver files for you from Windows Update, provided the manufacturer supplied drivers to Microsoft of course.

However, I have run into an incompatibility issue with my AMD Ryzen based computer – my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV camera absolutely hates the USB 3 (front panel USB 3.0, back panel 3.1 Gen 1 and 2) ports on my ASUS ROG STRIX X-570-F Gaming motherboard, but will happily work on the front panel USB 2 ports – these are actually the only USB 2 ports available for this PC.

When connected via USB 3, the camera shows up and you can see the SD and CF cards in the body, but when you open a folder of images, the camera essentially hangs – File Explorer’s Green Bar of Doom™ crawls ever so slowly onwards but nothing further happens. Trying to import using the Windows 10 Photos app or Lightroom will fail and hang the application until you power off the camera or kill the application.

A bit of internet sleuthing shows I am not the only one who has this issue:

• https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4444602#forum-post-63340467
• https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/EOS/EOS-5D-MarkIV-won-t-connect-to-laptop-via-USB-port/td-p/304290
• https://www.canonrumors.com/forum/threads/help-5div-losing-connection-to-usb-amd-ryzen-cpu.37892/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/as8tez/win10_usb_drivers_fail_canon_5d_mark_4_amd/

For completeness’ sake, here is a picture of my Device Manager with my USB Controllers section expanded:

As per some of the troubleshooting tips in the links above, I plugged my camera into a couple of different systems I had access to. Results were:

1. Intel Core i5 7th gen work computer – no problem.
2. Apple 2014 MacBook Pro with Intel Core i7 4th gen – no problem.
3. Dell Venue Pro 11 tablet with Intel Core i3 4th gen – no problem.
4. Home built Asus ROG desktop with Intel Core i7 1st gen and Renesas USB – no problem.
5. Huawei MateBook D15 with AMD Ryzen 5 3500u – no problem.

The fact that the Huawei MateBook D15 doesn’t have the same problem as my desktop computer is odd, since they are both AMD based systems. It could be due to the difference in chipsets, as my desktop is the X570 chipset and the MateBook is something lower end/mobile focussed.

It’s a bizarre issue and from what I have read at the links above, it also seems to only affect Windows. Users have reported that the issue doesn’t occur under Linux, which indicates that the issue is somewhere in the USB driver code AMD has given Microsoft for their systems, or that Microsoft’s USB drivers for AMD is somewhat buggy rather than it necessarily being a pure hardware issue.

I had the same issue with my previous ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate motherboard and different versions of Windows 10, so the issue is either related to the high end AMD chipsets or some bad USB driver code somewhere that only affects AMD based systems. The fact that the MateBook worked ok makes we wonder if it’s not directly chipset related in the sense that Microsoft’s USB driver needs extra code for any quirks the higher ends chipsets have compared to the lower end/mobile chipsets.

Ultimately, I just bought a small cheap USB 3 card reader to solve the issue. I actually don’t like plugging in USB connectors into camera ports to be honest, as I always worry about wear and tear on those somewhat frail connectors. Replacing a USB connector on a camera motherboard is not cheap! It seems like a bit of mountain/mole hill situation in the end since the card reader is the preferred way to transfer lots of images anyway, but I do get annoyed with incompatibilities like this and my nature is to want to get to the bottom of things and fix it!

At this point it’s probably too much to ever expect some combo of AMD, Canon and Microsoft to fix the issue. Canon have moved on to newer cameras now and AMD probably won’t ever bother spending the time and effort to debug this issue and send in updated code to Microsoft so that the Windows 10 USB drivers can be updated.