In my own little world, world…world
Archive for January 2009
Dear diary,
I woke up this morning with the most peculiar craving for human flesh. I can’t quite put my finger on it; I am missing my right hand.
Walking into the kitchen I was greeted by my parents; my father rolling around on the floor and my mother bumping into the table.
*Sigh* Looks like rain, I should find a hat to cover the hole in my head.
Felt left out on sunday. My fellow guild mates had bought Left 4 Dead and sounded like a hoot.
Before I comment on the game, I just want to state how far and how good Steam has come along in the several years it has been about. When I first used it, it so flaky that I had to scrap it and go back to CS1.5 and running Valve games from the start menu instead of through Steam (you know what I mean)
But now it is really stable now I cannot believe it. Another gripe I used to have with it was that all games in the store were listed in dollars, and you could only use credit cards to pay for new games (at the time I didn’t have a credit card).
I was also against buying “the virtual box”; I loved to purchase the game box in store. Feel the box and take pride in the artwork. It is a very different matter nowadays, it is a real pain in the arse to keep track of all those disks. In fact, I find myself favouring services like Steam and Stardock over the physical game since I don’t have to worry about installing the thing or keeping it up to date, that is all done for me.
Anyway, they game.
BEST GAME EVER!
It is so simple, 4 people, kill zombies, achievements, great laugh. Best played drunk I think.
Well I finally finished putting the thing together on saturday. I nabbed the sound card and the DVD drive out of my old machine and fitted them in my new machine. Spent ages routing the cables behind the motherboard tray but eventually it all when in. Looks really tidy too.
One failing I found, which could be attributed to the case really, is that because the power supply is located at the bottem, it is a real stretch for the 4pin power to reach the top of the mother board. Also, the main 24pin power socket is kind of awkwardly placed. If you have a graphics card that is longer than the one I have, it will interfere with the power supply cable. Also the placement for some of the ports made it difficult to route the cables nicely.
I couldn’t be arsed with taking photos of the second part, it was just too much bother for a boring part of the build. i do have some of the result however =D
Installed Vista with no problems. On first impression I would bet that my old machine is faster for desktop actions, I am sure it boots faster. Once in Windows however, its fine.
Got a lovely 5.9 for everything from Vista. And its quite a quiet machine, doesn’t rattle like my old machine. I left all the fans on medium, seems to be the best overall choice.
Blue screened my machine twice though within as many hours, nTune was not happy, so I cannot find out the temps for my graphics card. CPUIDs Hardware Monitor puts the CPU @ 45ish C on idle and 60 C under load. Couple of months time I’ll stick a new cooler on it.
Once all the crap was out of the way I got stuck into installing games. Vegas 2 runs like a dream, only I still die as much… can’t use the stuttering anymore as an excuse ;)
Also stuck Sacred 2 on it as well. Now, this was the game that gave me the nudge to get a new machine as it failed to render graphics on my old machine. However I ran into the same problem again. Thanks to Matt though, he gave me a command line to use (/skipopenal). It seems to be an issue with Sound Blaster sound cards, can’t understand why but that all works now too.
End result, I am a happy chappie.
I could not build it last night, wasn’t “allowed” to clear off the table >.<
Managed to get it cleared off tonight, and started work.
Heres some piccies, I apologise for the quality and lack of more pictures but the anti-shake seems to fail much of the time, so I had to cull alot of them. Sadly this is the cream of the crop.
The CPU heatsink was the most difficult part. I struggled to push the pins into the board and I was scared of breaking it. In the end I took it out of the case, placed the board on top of its anti static bag and resting the lot on a blanket I managed to get the pins through the board. Looking at it closely the board is slightly warped, will have to see what damage I might done once I boot it up.
During one attempt my thumb slipped and I cut it open on one of the heatsink fans. I saved you a picture of the gash (bit excessive :P)
Thats it for the night, I plan to continue tomorrow and will post more pictures.
I have had a few computers in the last couple of years, and each time I have learnt something about the design or the brand.
In particular I want to focus on cases, they seem to be a undervalued component for a PC. Pick the wrong one and you can suffer from subtle air flow problems or rattles.
Heres my 2 pennies worth, its my opinion on good case design.
I was expecting a few more :P Of course my logic could easily be flawed, and I just picked the wrong cases. For a simple entusiast I can’t imagine needed funky features.
It has been 4 years! 4 years since I last bought my computer and it is time for an upgrade. It has only been within the last 6 months that I began to feel the strain of a low speced graphics card (nVidia 7800GTX 256mb) pulling me back when it came to gaming.
Everything else is perfect, but the problem is that the motherboard is too old to support some of the newer features (such as SATA2, PCI-E 16x etc) so as a result I am just going to replace the entire lot. (Except for the soundcard, thats fine)
As always I obsess over the specs, checking all the fine details, reading reviews, pre-plan upgrade paths etc… but since I never really do upgrade or overclock, I just bought what seemed to work.
Heres what I bought:
That should do the job at least for another 2 years. Will hopefully have it up and running sometime tonight :)
The old machine will get cleaned up and given to my darling sister to replace her old slug of a Cellery.