This game runs perfectly stable, as do the vast majority of games I play. Very few games will hard lock my machine after red spots appear scattered around – games like Assassin’s Creed and Medal of Honor: Airborne. Oddly, since I bought this new Samsung SyncMaster T220 monitor last week (22″ @ 1680×1050) neither of these games have crashed, even though I’m rendering so many more pixels than I did with my previous monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 915N @ 1280×1024). Doesn’t make much sense to me. Maybe the drivers have been improved since I played these games last.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Heat sink hot chocolate

The physical disk test took so long on my first drive that I tried cancelling, assuming it was going to fail, but luckily hitting the cancel button simply greyed it out until the test concluded successfully and reported its findings. Here’s a screenshot of my first disk’s speed analysis:

As is depicted in the graph, my hard drive (the red dot) is right on par with similar drives in terms of access (seek) time, but is extremely slow in sustained file transfers. For comparison, and to eliminate the possibility that the problem existed on my motherboard or elsewhere, I tested my second drive as well:

The red dot is missing from this graph for some reason but the numeric values in the legend show that while the access time on the working drive is similar (slower, actually) than the first drive, the Drive Index indicating the read speed is nearly 12 times faster! That’s a no-no.

While I’m almost positive the problem is with the drive itself, I’ve noticed some strange behaviour from my PC in general. It seems that applications that read from this drive will sometimes cause my computer to freeze up for a fraction of a second and my sound card will make a strange buzz or beep or will elongate whatever sound was coming out of it before the freeze. I also noticed the sound card making a buzzing noise while trying to copy a large file from that drive. Perhaps this is a power attenuation issue?

I’m kind of stumped here and a little concerned. This hard drive is only about 2 months old so it’s falls well within Seagate’s 3-year warranty, but what if the broken hard drive is a symptom and not the sole cause of my troubles? I’m really lucky not to have lost any data yet and I’m backing up my precious music collection this very moment, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll make it all the way through. This is my system disk too so if it goes kaput I’ll have to reinstall Windows. I’m also concerned that I’ll have to run some kind of rigorous diagnostic software that will stress my hard drive and possibly break it entirely.

Ideally I’d like to advance RMA a replacement, copy my old drive to the new one, and then mail back the broken one. I’ll report back on Seagate customer service. PC Village assures me they’re a very professional and especially punctual company. Wish me luck!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Smart but a little slow

Rice pudding, tapioca, and cake icing.

Split pea soup with table cream and honey.

Wash it down with a glass of peach cocktail mixed with lychee juice.

That’s how smooth my new computer runs.  Here’s the specs:

• Intel Core Duo 6750 (2.66GHz, 2x2MB L2 cache)
• ASUS P5KC (Crossfire, supports up to 45nm CPUs and DDR2 or DDR3, fanless, Intel AGTL FSB)
• XFX GeForce 8800GT Alpha Dog XXX 512MB (factory overclocked, 1 slot width)
• 2 x 1GB OCZ DDR2 800MHZ (5-5-5-15, sexy heat sinks)
• 2 x Seagate 500GB HDD (SATA2, 16Mb cache, both running standalone)
• Antec EarthWatts 500w PSU (120mm fan, silent)
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2
• Antec Sonata III 500 Quiet Super Mini Tower (sound dampening case)

Initially I was just in the market for that 8800GT but figured I’d do my wife a favour (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) by snagging a few more parts so that she could build a new PC with my leftovers. They’re decent leftovers too, as outlined in a previous post.  It’s interesting to look at that post too, since I’ve apparently spent about $400 less on pretty much the same parts about 18 months later.

The 8800GT is pretty scarce these days so I nabbed the CPU, mobo, RAM, and case last week from PC Village. Thanks to my partitioning scheme I only needed to back up a few things, so I copied My Documents to another drive as well as some backups using FEBE and Mozbackup for my browser and Thunderbird email archives respectively. Lickety split. Took me 10 minutes. I later learned that I’d forgotten to back up Miranda IM, which is frustrating because it has a zillion preferences and plugins, but I’d smartly retained an older backup which got me right back on my feet with no configuration or even installation required.

I opened up my old Antec Sonata 1 box and yanked out all the goodies to be transplanted, and laid out my new parts on the floor. I installed the RAM and CPU into the new mobo (that Core Duo comes with a huge, easy to install heat sink) before screwing it into the case. Gotta love Antec – the gold riser screws come preinstalled in the case and ready to go! I connected the various wires from the case to the motherboard, which was easier than ever thanks to the great manual (a big surprise for a motherboard – they’re usually quadrilingual yet indiscernible in any language) and clear markings on the PCB. In went my old 7950GT and I plugged it in, making sure not to replicate a previous mistake of forgetting the GPU and 12v power cables.  My new Sonata III was a similar form factor as the original Sonata so it was a trivial matter of removing my old drives and sliding them right in to the new case without having to adjust the rails I’d screwed on previously.

I closed it up, held my breath, and powered on. Magic. Until now I’d never done a successful build on my first try. Very satisfying.

My very first impression – silence. The CPU fan is very quiet, as are the 120mm case and PSU fans. The GPU fan spins up to full speed at POST but quited down to idle speeds shortly thereafter, leaving little more than an zen garden of breezy silence.

My second impression – AMI BIOS! I hadn’t seen that logo in quite some time. I flipped through all the settings and verified my hardware was installed and detecting. Everything was kosher. Interestingly, the Intel CPU doesn’t seem to run at 100% in the BIOS, as did the AMD Athlon X2, which ran about 12 degrees hotter according to the hardware monitor, and the Core Duo’s quiet fan corroborated this. I liked all the flexibility in the BIOS but stuck with fairly safe settings (I’m not an overclocker) and pressed onward.

Windows installed rather quickly. Surprisingly, fewer onboard devices detected with this mobo than with my previous ASUS M2N-Deluxe so I started up with no network connectivity. Sorry, Windows Genuine Advantage, you’ll have to wait a while. I easily installed all the onboard hardware with the driver CD, all in one go thanks to “ASUS InstAll”. I rebooted a few times and installed the newest drivers from ASUS’ ridiculously slow and problematic website. I also successfully updated the BIOS with ASUSUpdate.

I restored my backups and copied over my documents and it was almost as if I’d never formatted. FEBE FTW, seriously. Most impressively, I downloaded and installed Steam over top of its old directory and it immediately detected all the games I had installed before the format, and they all worked immediately! I didn’t notice much of a performance improvement, though.

In fact, things didn’t seem mega speedy in general. Not much faster than before, except for the pristine Windows install. However, hovering the mouse over the control panel for the first time populated the icons very, very quickly.

My favourite CPU benchmark

I happily puttered along over the weekend. My video card was over a week late. I called to check in a few times and this Monday PC Village said the model I wanted, an EVGA, still hadn’t arrived but they had others in stock including my second choice, XFX. I couldn’t wait. I bought it the next day.

It’s a really attractive video card. Long and heavy with a single slot heat sink. I deleted my old drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro in safe mode, powered down, and opened up my case. It took me a while to unsnag the old one from the PCI-E slot (not sure what it was snagged on) but it finally came out and the new one installed as easily as the old.  I booted up and excitedly selected the 8xxx series drivers from NVidia’s well organized web site. The install went off without a hitch.

The moment of truth.

Holy freaking crap.  I can’t challenge this video card.

I threw everything I had at it. Call of Duty 2 and 4. Guild Wars.  Half Life 2: Episode Two. Team Fortress 2 (with 16x AA and AF!!!). All child’s play. 60 frames throughout. Butter. I couldn’t believe my eyes. These games ran so well, at their highest settings, that it actually detracted from them. This video card is a behemoth. It needed a real workout. Crysis.

I tried the Crysis demo with my last machine and it was depressing. I put all the settings on medium and got about 5 frames per second.  Low settings did little better. Not so anymore. I allowed Crysis to autodetect (which usually produces ridiculous suggested settings) and it suggested running everything at high – the highest you can set the game without “upgrading” to Windows Vista. I was incredulous. Okay, Crysis, if you insist.

I got about 20 frames per second, which, for this game, is bonkers. It’s insanely gorgeous and the vastness of the world, the scope of all the realtime action and physics, ought to be enough to humble any dream machine. There’s no computer in the world today that can run Crysis at full detail, I’ve heard from many sources. I can’t even imagine how this thing must look on the “very high” settings.  I don’t find Crytek’s games very engaging, though, so I may not care to find out.

My computer is damn fast. The graphics blow my mind. I can play games with 30 processes chugging away in the background. All in all I spent less than $900. Why anyone would ever play console games is absolutely beyond me.

In all honesty, when I see such a powerful computer, and I know it’s mine, I feel, in a way, reborn. It’s a religious experience for me. What a sweet hobby.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Buttered prune puree

Rather than leaving this tenuous situation unchecked I decided to buy a new hard drive and start a fresh new install on that. I bought a 500GB 7200RPM Seagate SATA2 HDD with 16MB of cache. I installed it with no issues. It’s not blazingly fast so it took a couple of hours to shuffle my files around after installing the OS, but I’ve come up with a lovely organized partitioning scheme spanning both my physical drives. Coupled with my 300MB disk I’ve got 800MB of storage at my disposal now! Yay for overkill!!

I asked PC Village for advice and they said that Seagate and Western Digital had the best drives out there, but Seagate offered a 5-year warranty whereas WD only offered 3. 2 years of warranty was worth the additional $4. The drive was $119.99 before tax and they even threw in a SATA cable. Great store.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

I’m 500 billion keystrokes smarter

Just how much has this silicon Jezebel spoiled me?

Isn’t it just fitting that I’m playing a game on Steam immediately following the recent break-in fiasco and subsequent denial thereof by Valve? Dreadful fear of my identity being pilfered aside, I’m having loads of fun playing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines by the now defunct Troika Games. Now that I get the chance to replay after a few much needed patches it’s easier to see what a well-crafted and open-ended RPG it is. Despite it being the first licensed Source Engine game the eerily lifelike character design and motion-captured animations, plus the carefully crafted architecture combined with a sunglasses-at-night take on modern Los Angeles do a great job of obscuring the age of the framework.

It’s the game’s enormous yet sharp textures that left me wanting more. I was getting just about 60 frames solid at my monitor’s max resolution with the “setting cranked” (the only option in video preferences is a toggle for bump mapping) so before even watching the entire opening sequence I quit, forced 4x antialiasing at the driver level using the NVidia Control Panel, and started it back up. The result was quite pleasing.

And yet, it wasn’t good enough! Frame rates were still excellent at 4xAA so I decided to traverse the final frontier – 8xS antialiasing with 16x anisotropic filtering!! You’re positively melting as you read these words, I know.

Here’s an illustration of the difference between “vanilla” 4x antialiasing (left) and 8xS antialiasing with 16x anisotropic filtering (right). I recommend opening these screenshots in separate tabs or windows so that you can compare them fullscreen, switching from one to the other. The difference is quite dramatic:

           Â

It’s interesting to note that the screenshot at the left is a half-megabyte smaller than the one on the right, so one can imagine how much more work it must be to render in real time!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Eight is enough

Analysis isn’t entirely necessary before I can start mixing, but if I don’t do it in advance it will analyze on song load which puts more strain on the CPU (increasing the chance of skipping) and it progresses much more slowly since playing an MP3 is a surprisingly system-intensive function. Plus, it’s nice to have analyzed MP3s because this provides a peak graph (which visually shows the song waveform) and automagically detects the beats per minute (about 95% accuracy).

So I’ve instructed Traktor to run a batch analysis on my entire DJ collection, weighing in at a hefty 30-odd gigs. It might take all day.

Large batch multimedia processing is a job best performed by Intel processors, while AMD chips are usually the best for gaming. I do a lot more gaming than multimedia so I still stand by my choice to buy an Athlon 64 X2, but today I’ll pay the price while my system speed is degraded during this long processing job.

Or will it?

I admit I’ve seen little or no improvement in speed with my new CPU – most of the HUGE improvements I enjoy are thanks to my tear-jerkingly incredible 7900GT. Today, however, is a happy exception, as illustrated below:

As you can see in the upper two graphs, dual core has saved the day! My audio analysis job is isolated in the second core, maxed out at 100% load, while the first core stays cool as a cucumber. This means that I can enjoy nearly full speed computing while the second core is dedicated to the monumental task of processing 30 gigs of audio peaks. What a treat!

A recent ad for Dell or some other crappy manufacturer markets dual core CPUs as something that allows you to watch a movie, rip a CD, browse the web, and edit documents all at the same time (like a menstrual pad advert for nerds). This is true, I suppose, but don’t run out to buy a dual core CPU due to this hogwash. I am a power user through and through and today is the first time in about a month that I’ve really taken advantage of it. Dual core is probably a moderately future-proof technology – it will run games and apps pretty well for the next year or two – but if you’re looking to upgrade I think it would be wise to wait until later this year when quad cores come out. No doubt Dell will recommend being schizophrenic, double jointed, and ambidextrous in order to get the most out of one of those babies.
Can’t wait to start making loud banging noises once again! Let’s see what the neighbours think!

And if you’d like to enjoy some free origianl electronic music songs and mixes check out my web site and DJ blog.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Two heads are better than one!

I am very proud to say that I now have the fastest computer I’ve ever seen!! Cheeses n’ rice, it’s blazing fast!

I took out and reinstalled my motherboard with a few extra stand-off screws just to keep it nice and snug in the case, and I plugged in all the leads from the case. I had a little scare with the CPU fan input because the wire had 3 plugs but there were 4 pins on the motherboard, but the white plastic support fit the 3-hole wire just fine. The power coupler fit great and gave just enough extra slack that I could comfortably wrap the main power cable around the others which helped keep them all out of the way of airflow. The cables look really well shielded but I hope this method doesn’t result in noisey attenuation.

I installed the back USB plate and connected the one on the front of my case as well as the firewire port. The box says the motherboard supports 10 USB ports but I don’t know where the last 2 are. There are 4 on the back of the motherboard, 2 on the expansion back plate, and 2 on the front of my case. I used up all the USB plugs as far as I could see. Oh well. I only have 3 USB devices so I wont’ nitpick. Plus I have 2 firewire ports which is 2 more than I’ll ever use.

The video card went in easily enough, though I’m not crazy about the little rubber doodad that replcaces the plastic snap on AGP boards to keep the card in place. I suppose that’s overkill anyway. I plugged *2* molex HDD power leads into the custom condenser cable and slid that into the card. Easy as pie.

I couldn’t find any back plates for the case so I just stuck my 2 spare sound cards in again and later disabled them in the OS. I don’t like using PCI slots for no reason so I’ll yank ‘em when I find those back plates.

So before closing ‘er up I put ‘er into position and plugged in the keyboard, mouse, monitor (plus DVI to VGA adaptor), and sound into the onboard sound card and turned it on. The symphony of smooth rolling, quiet spinning raw power filled my ears, followed by a single BEEP that reassured me I’d done the most important stuff right! Huzzah!! All the fans were spinning

I immediately checked out the BIOS to check out the CPU temperature and was relieved to find it manageable – around 45 celcius which is average in the BIOS since the CPU and fan run at 100% there. My CPU detected just fine, RAM timings looked right, all my drives showed up, and I needed very little customization before declaring the job a success!

However, I noticed that the power and HDD lights on the front of my case weren’t coming on. I had installed the backwards… odd since the labels on the plugs were facing the same way as all the others. So I turned it off, made a couple of adjustments, closed it up, and plugged it all in for the real test! The lights worked!

Just for fun I tried booting my old copy of XP. Instant blue screen. Oh well. I’d made ample backups for just such an occasion. I was surprised to find my old installation working fine when I upgraded from Athlon XP to Athlon 64, but I guess 64 to X2 is just too much of a leap.

Windows installed in about 20 minutes despite its overstated estimate. Of course since most of my hardware was onboard it wasn’t able to detect sound, network, USB2.0, and other stuff, so I guess that must have sped things up a tad. I rebooted, made a user account, and was ready to rock!

Oh yeah, and I didn’t need any special driver disks to get Windows setup to find my SATA HDD this time! I needed to burn a custom image with nLite on my socket 754 mobo, but PC Village assured me this was the fault of the mobo, not the OS, and it looks like they were right! One fewer headache is always nice.

I booted into Windows and everything looked fine until I tried my old DVDRW drive. No worky. I’d put in a disk, it would spin up, and the whole machine would freeze. Very odd since the CDRW was working just fine – I’d installed Windows off of it. I tried a few reboots before and after installing the Nforce chipset drivers but no joy. I opened up the machine and unplugged the CDRW from power and IDE and the DVDRW worked fine. Maybe it’s my 380w power supply struggling, or maybe Asus doesn’t really take IDE seriously anymore. Regardless, I can live with one optical drive. That leaves one spare for when I rebuild my 64!

Drivers drivers drivers, reboot reboot reboot. Very boring but I made a resolution long ago to take Windows seriously when it says it needs to reboot, so I do so at my earliest opportunity. All the onboard devices including network worked just fine, and so did my video card. So far everything was going relatively smoothly!

Windows informed me I had 30 days to activate so I clicked the icon, clicked a Next or two, and clicked finished. Phew! I’d expected the worst after my previous ordeal!

Windows Update announced about 50 updates so I downloaded and installed those while putting on Firefox and Gaim. Gaim has a really clunky and annoying interface and it took me a really long time to get it back the way it ought to be.

I had used the Firefox Extension Backup Extension to archive my bookmarks, extensions, history, cookies, and passwords before formatting. FEBE is an extension itself so Firefox must be running in order to use it, but it complained that I couldn’t restore preferences to the current profile so I had to do some research on how to do so. It involved a commandline command which was really annoying. However, I made a profile and logged in, ran FEBE, changed back to the default profile and deleted the spare one, and presto!! Firefox was 99% as I had left it! It even remembered previously clicked links! The only inconsistency is that it forgot which extensions I’d disabled so I just deleted those two.

Windows Update completed and I rebooted. Boot took slightly longer but the updates caused no problems. But then I was presented the message I’d been dreading – “Your hardware has changed significantly since you last installed Windows XP. You have 3 days to activate your software.” Didn’t I just do that?!?!

And of course it didn’t work. And now I only have a cell phone and no land line. Cheapskate that I am, I installed Skype and guessed my password after many, many tries. I plugged in the fancy microphone that came with the motherboard and a message popped up onscreen asking what I’d just plugged into the grey plug (NEAT!!!). I chose “microphone” from the list and it informed me that I’d chosen the wrong plug, then showed an animation smoothly illustrating the relative position of the pink plug I should have used! Super cool! I fixed it up, made some volume adjustments, and Skype worked like a charm! I sat the well designed microphone atop my LCD monitor and called Microsoft.

Thank goodness, dialing numbers on the keypad worked in lieu of slowly dictating the 48-digit installation key. Just like my last ordeal, this key was refused and I was connected to an Indian MS rep (she spoke much better and was more chipper than the last woman I spoke with). She asked for the first 2 groups of numbers, asked if this was my first time installing the software, and asked why I was reinstalling. Highly annoying. She dictated another 48-digit code which worked fine and thanked me for calling. Yeah, I’ll speak with you again next year babe.

And that was about the end of my woes! I ran 3DMark06 and was blown away!!! I could never imagine such graphics as anything other than a slideshow but I was getting between 10 and 24 FPS on this computer humbling app! The detail was so crisp and the effects were very dramatic. My CPU scored 1780 which is about double my previous CPU score, and the GPU scored 1920 which is nearly 10 times my old video score!!

I installed a bunch of games and each one looked more amazing than the last. FEAR is quie detailed and the quick frame rate makes it easy enough to play without relying solely on bullet time. Quake 4 is a brainless and idiotic game but it shore does look purdy. Half Life 2: Episode One with AA and HDR is exceptionally quick and very very sharp. Every game ran at 100% full detail with AT LEAST 4x antialiasting at 1280×1024 and gave me an average of 35 FPS!! It’s absolutely breathtaking

I haven’t done any real desktop computing yet so I’m not convinced of the benefits of dual core yet, but the desktop is certainly very snappy and responsive. Icons and windows draw instantly and dragging windows is very smooth. My SATA drive is already feeling dated as it’s clearly the worst bottleneck so maybe I’ll need to do something about that some time in the future. 2 x 10k RPM Raptor RAID 0? Or, since drives are so damn cheap, maybe I should set up a RAID 5 array! Though if I ever add SLI that’ll need a very beefy power supply.

This is the best extravagance I’ve ever indulged in. I’m so happy with this system! Now I’ll have to struggle to find a game to challenge it!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Happy birthday Euclid!

I googled EATXPWR (the label on the power plug with too many holes) and quickly read that I was far from the first person to be surprised by this switcheroo at the last second. Yesterday I zipped over to PC Village where the proprietor apologized immediately and told me what I needed before I could even explain why I had returned. He told me that supply is low and demand is high for power supplies right now so he recommended against upgrading to an SLI-certified PSU just now. Luckily, he had a $10 20-pin to 24-pin coupler for me.

If a simple cable that reconfigures the wires to different holes was all I needed, why the fudge did they have to introduce this new plug in the first place?!

So after a late family dinner I was too pooped to build my new baby last night. Hopefully my tentative social plans tonight won’t pan out so that I can set up my new box!

I’m loving the new motherboard just by its looks alone. The copper heatpipe is really snazzy and the heat sink and fins are serious business. The board features 1 IDE plug, 6 SATA plugs plus 1 SATA RAID plug (don”t know what the difference is), 4 onboard and 6 expansion USB plugs, 1 onboard and 1 expansion Firewire plug, dual gigabit ethernet, 8 channel sound with SPDIF, and it’s jet black!

I had a little booboo while installing the CPU heat sink. I HATE installing the damn CPU heat sink and my heart stops pretty much throughout the entire procedure. I fumbled with a little guesswork at first but retreated to the wordless pictograms included in the package. It was a little confusing until I realized the paper illustrated installation instructions for 3 slots, 2 of which were completely irrelevant. I thought I followed the instructions to a tee but I screwed it up some how. I connected the clasp on the side of the plastic actuator arm first, then used a flat screwdriver to slip the other clasp on. The final step is to crank the actuator arm to secure the heat sink in place but the arm wouldn’t turn! It felt like it would snap right off if I applied too much pressure, and the heat sink feels really snug already, so I guess it will have to do. Unfortunately I can’t seem to get the thing off now! I guess I’ll have to destroy the heat sink the next time I upgrade. What a start!

So hopefully tonight’s the night! Benchmarks to beat are 45000 in Aquamark 3, and 220 for the DirectX9 SM3.0 test and 780 for the CPU test in 3DMark 2005. For reference, my old Athlon XP 2200+ scored about 2300 in Aquamark 3. I don’t know if that old benchmark will see any improvement on a dual core CPU but I’m hoping for big things from 3DMark05.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

A speed bump and a stumbling block

There is much speculation that AMD will drop its Athlon 64 X2 prices in a week or two. I’m hoping I can get an extension on buying at least the CPU and mobo until this happens. I’m basing this decision on two reviews I read:

AnandTech’s article is very in-depth and has some valid insights about Intel’s upcoming Conroe line. They put many chips, including lower-calibre value chips, through the paces in many gaming and desktop applications and they almost all turn up in favour of Intel. However, this article is quite skimpy on gaming benchmark staging details and almost all benchmarks are from timedemos and other synthetic tests. Timedemos tend to primarily tax the GPU since the CPU usually takes care of things like AI and physics; neither of which come into play in a prerecorded demo. The huge disparity between Conroe and X2 is a little suspicious, but AnandTech is a reputable site so I’m torn. That’s why I consulted HardOCP.

The HardOCP article on game performance is far more detailed and of interest to gamers. Personally, I don’t care which side I pick if they game the same, even if Intel’s chips can render a video clip 20% faster. I don’t do much of that stuff, and I don’t really mind spending another fraction of a second staring at my always-attractive desktop wallpaper while I wait for Firefox to load. This article shows both side’s chips to perform very similarly, and is pretty much the only article to do so. Plus, they test actual gameplay instead of timedemos, let tests go for 10-20 minutes while capturing benchmarking statistics throughout, and they report the minimum, maximum, and average framerates in various configurations. My biggest problem with HardOCP’s article is that they only test the top-end enthusiast chips which are about $1000 USD each. These benchmarks are all but irrelevant to me since it’s foolish to assume that lower models will scale down predictably.

Benchmarks aside, I would have benefitted from some speculation about the longevity of these platforms.

The Conroe chips plug into Intel’s aging socket 775, while the X2′s take advantage of AMD’s new AM2 socket. It would be nice if I could upgrade a few times in spurts instead of having to do a complete teardown like I’m doing now. I’m fairly confident that AM2 will host at least one more generation of AMD processors (maybe their much anticipated 4×4 quad cores) but I’m not so sure about 775.

Also, AM2 is being released with NVidia’s new NForce chipsets with the 570 on the Asus M2N SLI Deluxe board I have on hold now. That’s a great feature set from a line of stable chipsets, plus my NVidia GPU will undoubtedly run better on a south bridge of the same brand. Also, Intel has no SLI support right now and probably won’t offer dual-GPU mobos for at least a couple of months.

It’s so tough to decide what to do. I’m spending a lot of money here and I don’t want to make a (too-frequent) habit of that. I certainly don’t want to buy a 4200+ chip today only to see the much-improved 4600+ sold for even less 2 weeks from now.

I’ve printed and highlighted some key points from a few benchmarks and I’ll bring them along with me to the store tomorrow. They didn’t have any information on falling AMD prices as of last week, but perhaps they’ll be able to confirm some of the speculated discounts. AnandTech says AMD will drop X2 prices in July, and there ain’t much July left.

Chances are I’ll stick it out for a week or two and nab that 4600+. From what I’ve read, AMD will be the first out of the gate with multicore CPUs and they’ll certainly be limited to the AM2 socket. The current Intel benchmarks are phenominally tantelizing, but in terms of bang per buck I think AMD is the way to go. The money I’ll save by buying another 7900GT for SLI instead of being forced to buy the next generation with a single PCIe slot solution from Intel might alone be enough to tip the value scale back toward every nerd’s favourite underdog.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Godzilla or Mothra?

Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
$168

I figured I’d grab an SLI board to help future-proof my purchase, assuming my video card will still be for sale by the time I deem mine outdated. This bad boy has the brand new AMD AM2 940-pin socket, a 2GHz FSB supporting up to 800MHz DDR2 memory, dual gigabit ethernet, 8 channel sound with SPDIF, some new application-specific overclocking engine, and a cool looking copper heat pipe drawing from the chipset. A sturdy backbone for some heavy components!

Unfortunately the board has 6 SATA2 plugs and no IDEs so I have to fill one of the 3 PCI slots with a $30 Promise PCI IDE controller for my 2 optical drives. I briefly considered investing in a $130 Plextor DVD-RW but decided against it.

AMD Athlon64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+
$379

My first foray into dual-core! I’m a little concerned about gaming performance since I’m coming from an Athlon 64 3400+ at 2.2GHz and each core on the X2 4000+ is only 2.0GHz. Current games that don’t support dual-core CPUs will only run on one core, but upcoming games will start supporting both soon enough and then I’ll be sailing. I originally opted for the 4200+ which was only $35 more, but changed my mind when I saw that it only had 2x512KB L2 cache vs the 4000+’s 2x1MB. I might see a hit in performance in physics-heavy games. Will double the cache make up for 200MHz? Hope so!

BFG GeFORCE 7900GT OC
$339 ($299 after $40 mail-in rebate)

This beauty has been the apple of my eye ever since I heard about it! The 7800 series blew everyone away at launch, but the 7900 bent over its predecessor and paddled it like Peggy Hill! Not only are 7900′s significantly faster, they also have FEWER transistors which means a shorter data path and less voltage, thus less heat. The 7900GT is the “lite” version of the beefy 7900GTX, but it offers about 80% of the speed for half the price so that’s good enough for me! This thing is actually faster than the 7800GTX! I can’t wait to pop this baby in and play some 16-colour Leisure Suit Larry 3!

The BFG brand came highly recommended as the company features high quality parts, overclocked GPU and RAM out of the box, and an unprecedented lifetime warranty. From what I’ve read there’s a huge overclock ceiling on this card using only the stock cooler (thanks to the low transistor count) but no doubt that will blow the warranty. I’ve had bad luck due to my inexperience in overclocking with my well-loved 9800Pro so I’ll probably dine with this beauty queen sans-makeup.

Kingston 1Gb ValueRAM DDR2-667 x2
$114

While budgeting this little summer vacation-substitute I incorrectly assumed that DDR2 was backward compatible, so I’m grabbing a pair of 1GB DIMMs of DDR2-667. A friend of mine has 4 gigs but I think that’s overkill. There’s room to expand this way, though my next memory upgrade might replace these sticks with some 800MHz brutes.

My HDD, CD-RW and DVD-RW drives, and my old case and PSU will be all that’s left of my old box by the time I’m done. I’ve got to figure out in advance how to install a fresh copy of XP on my SATA HDD with no floppy drive, but assuming the new nForce chipset has easily copied SATA drivers I should be able to inject them into a custom XP install using the amazing freeware nLite app.

Once I’m up and running and have installed my necessary apps I’ll give Prey another play-through and hopefully write up a review! That game runs great on my current system and I can’t wait to see my new hardware eat it for breakfast!

I’ll post some before and after benchmarks as well.

The parts come in Tuesday! Can’t friggin wait!!!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Temptation, thy name is upgrade

The Ageia PhysX is a CPU on a riser expansion card that is dedicated to processing 3D world physics – mass, viscosity, friction, malleability, flexibility, fragility, and all-round explodability.

But let’s back up a little first.

Lifelike physical behaviour of game worlds is something we gamers have been trained to take with a grain of salt. In most games, world physics haven’t evolved much at all since Qbert hopped onto the scene, one cube at a time. Most of the world is absolutely static and unflinching, as if every object was nailed down to the one below it, while select items have simulated but scripted lifelike properties. For instance, you might be able to push around and pick up a book on a desk, but a bookshelf is just an unmovable elongated cube with wood and books painted on for effect.

To some extent this design shortcut is the product of laziness – time is money, and it takes a lot of both to assign weight, density, and other properties to every single item in a game world. Even if this feat were feasible, modern CPUs would have a very difficult time calculating the interplay of objects while still presenting the game onscreen in a timely, smooth, playable fashion. Not every game can afford to be a newtonian masterpiece, nor do they need to be to steer the player to the end of each level. However, physics as superfluous eye candy has always been welcome.

Some games classified comfortably in the “retro” category do a great job of emulating realistic physics while keeping the CPU free for more mission-critical calculations. For instance, missile weapons and many interactive objects had weight and velocity constraints in the first-person CRPG Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (fun fact – the physics were programmed by pere du Xbox Seamus Blackley). The game’s immersion factor, which may seem laughable by today’s standards, was unparalleled due to little touches like these, drawing the player head over heels into the subterranean unknown beneath the land of Brittania (as occurs literally in the Ultima games). Make no mistake – Ultima Underworld was Oblivion before the Pentium days.

Game designers took note of gamers’ acclaim of such immersive worlds, and physics became adopted more and more into gameplay. Full blown physics simulators such as flight and driving sims became far more realistic and challenging with the introduction of dynamic wind, weather, temperature, and craft damage. Makers of games in other genres took notice as well, showcasing experiments in gameplay such as the destructable environments of Red Faction 2 and the exhilirating physics puzzles of Half Life 2.

Which brings us to today. Ageia, a company we’ve never heard of, wants to convince us that a $250 PCI or PCI-Express 4x expansion card will enrich our gaming experience beyond our wildest dreams. That’s a rather hefty price tag to peg on a technology that will only be supported by 5-15 titles on or around launch. Of course, this situation is very similar to that of a little company called 3DFX, makers of the first 3D-accelerated video cards, and we’ve all got one (or two) of those in our systems these days.

So what can PhysX bring to the table? Ageia founders Manju Hedge and Curtis Davis shed some light on this technology:

The Physics Processing Unit (PPU) is a dedicated processing unit that was built from the ground up to accelerate the algorithms required for physically based simulations. This includes things such as Rigid Body Dynamics, Collision Detection, Fluid Simulation, Soft Bodies and Fracturing of objects. It will revolutionize your CPU/GPU system by unlocking the potential of the system by allowing each of the processing components to do what is best at. The PPU makes the games move and interact! We are really bridging the gap between the visual appearances and the movement of games that should go along with the graphics of today.

A high-level summary, but it succeeds in whetting some nerdy appetites! With CPUs branching into the realm of dual and multi-core designs, dedicating processors to tasks seems to be the wave of the future. This is interesting to see, as servers have recently evolved in the opposite direction with virtualization, running multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer.

This idea could flourish or fizzle depending on the strength of technical and marketing muscle, and could have wide-reaching ramifications for PC design in the future. For instance, perhaps PCs of the future will forgo the powerful CPU entirely, dedicating individual tasks to RISC (reduced instruction set computer) chips that excel at one or few specific tasks. Enthusiast products like Sound Blaster’s X-fi sound card platform already take advantage of dedicated processors to offset CPU load.

But these technicalities are pretty dry and meaningless for the average consumer. Nobody’s going to open up their computers to plug in a $250 administrative assistant for their CPUs without some coercing in the razzle dazzle department. This is the area of debate, as it was with 3DFX, and will make or break this venture.

As physics enhance moving demos but don’t do much for static screenshots, the onus is on Ageia to provide many high quality video demos such as this one in order to entice prospective customers. Cell Factor is a multiplayer deathmatch shooter akin to Quake 3 whose environments are littered with movable and destructable objects. Smacking these objects around with gunfire and flailing corpses will constantly reshape the arena, forcing players to adjust strategies on the fly and bend the landscape to their advantage. Strategy isn’t illustrated very will in this video clip, but the eyecandy certainly causes some sugary pupil caveties!

Cell Factor is definitely how I pictured launch titles for this technology – zillions of cubes and pyramids flying all over the place like a commercial for the new Batmobile shooting its missiles at those uber-cool pyramids of icecubey blocks. I don’t find this implementation particularly interesting. I want to see this processor chugging subtley behind the scenes.

I started thinking about PhysX while watching a Stanley Cup game the other day. One burly gentleman gave an opponent a nasty lesson in physics with his shoulder and hip, sending his adversary to the ice barely in one piece. The commentators remarked at how this crushing hit could have been absorbed by the larger recipient if he had kept his head up and compensated by shifting his weight. “YES,” I thought to myself, “this is precisely what I want to see in PC hockey games!” Animating 12 players and a few refs on a static playfield must be child’s play for a powerful PPU. The same goes for a basketball game, cars on a track, planes in the sky, or the rippling gelatinous masses of two sumo wrestlers! I’m not much of a sports fan, but this technology makes me excited about the very fundamentals that make these sports challenging in the real world.

I’m also interested in the prospect of objects decomposing and splitting realistically. Half Life 2 did a lovely job of simulating this, as acquiring my crowbar and going to town on some wooden planks near the start of the game was a giddy and gorgeous prelude of things to come! Just imagine HL2′s gravity gun in a physics-enhanced environment! Firing a cement brick at a car would result in the front 2/3 of the brick pulverizing into powder, denting the thin car exterior and wrapping the roof around the internal roll cage, causing the vehicle to sway slightly and displace the sand beneath in a concave divet.

Of course, the game will have to be written to specifically take advantage of this hardware. Some developers are enthusiastic about this technology, but others are pessimistic. Says Kevin Stephens of Monolith Studios, makers of horror shooter and physics playground F.E.A.R.:

I reiterate; the success of this evolutionary and powerful technology is dependent almost entirely on the strength of its launch lineup, the silverness of its PR tongue, and of course the body count of its first killer app. Ageia will really have to hit the pavement to prove the worth of their little miracle, as its benefits are entirely unapparent in static screenshots.

Will the PhysX card usher in a new era of realism in realtime computer animation? Is Ageia the next 3DFX or is it doomed to be the next Virtual Boy? Please leave a comment and share your opinions!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Bodies in Motion

I was hoping for a slightly better card but my options were limited. I’ve got a Socket 754 motherboard which not only means I’m stuck with AGP for now, but if I want to upgrade to the new stuff I’ll have to buy a Socket 939 motherboard with PCI-Express, a 939 pin Athlon 64, plus a new video card all in one go. That’s a hefty investment, especially since I’m drooling over the uber sexy 7900GTX, so I thought I’d get a little something to tide me over. I was hoping to nab a 6800GT but those are out of print for AGP, as is most everything. I read about the 7800GS for AGP which is a hefty $330 CAD, but I was advised against it by my favourite local computer store, PC Village Canada, who warned that it was a pretty good card but didn’t give bang for the buck. I had my sights set on the BFG brand 6600GT since theirs are overclocked and have a lifetime warranty, but despite the fact that the store advertised a $50 mail-in rebate for the card, it too has apparently been discontinued all of a sudden. So the Asus 6600GT it was. It ran me $207 with tax.

I like the look of the card, as it’s a one-slot profile which is a lovely change from my previous card’s 2-slot profile which was, ‘ow you say, coocoo for ze cocoapuffs. The low profile alone will undoubtedly allow for nicer airflow in my already crowded case. The card has only 128MB of DDR3 which I wasn’t crazy about, but I figure it’ll last me at least another year or so or until I can afford a proper upgrade. The package came with a bunch of CDs, none of which I cared about, though it came with Joint Operations (which Otto might say is “flagrant false advertising”), a DVI to VGA coupler, a short SVHS to RCA video out, and a poster (!?!?) with quick install instructions.

I benchmarked my old 9800pro with 3DMark 2006 which scored 256 on the first 2 tests and gave me a lovely slide show.

I uninstalled all ATI drivers and software and booted into safe mode. I ran Driver Cleaner Pro to gut out any ATI remnants and I shut ‘er down. I opened up my old girl, ripped out the 9800, plugged in the 6600 with ease and after one false start (turned the on PC, beep, no video. Turned off and on again, eureka.) my monitor was singing the CMOS calypso.

I booted into Windows… well, almost. I got stopped just before the desktop, prompted with a lovely message serenading me to the tune of “Your hardware has changed significantly since you activated Windows. I suspect you of the heinous crime of trying to fool Microsoft so you have 3 days to verify your honesty by reactivating, you (probable) scumbag!”

I selected the option to activate over the internet, but it prompted me with a web proxy config screen. Pretty roundabout way to say it couldn’t connect to the internet. I hit cancel and clicked the activation bubble in the icon tray after my desktop displayed. Sure enough, my firewall prompted me to allow access to the app. I accepted and the bits and bytes went on a wild and wacky ride to Washington.

“This CD key has been installed on too many computers. Please enter another CD key or call this number toll free to be grilled under a 1000 watt spotlight.” This is a damned legal copy of XP by the way. Microsoft Genuine Advantage indeed.

So I called the number and was greeted with a chipper voice recognition fembot. With her feminine wiles she coaxed from me the 48-digit verification key displayed in my activation window. I had to speak slowly and in monotone and it took a good 3 minutes to relay the whole thing. I swear she got more and more hot for me with each relayed sextet.

And my reward for entertaining this cybernetic chatty Cathy? “The key you have provided is invalid. Now connecting you to an agent.”

So I’m connected to an Indian woman on quaaludes who asks me to repeat the first 6 numbers of the huge code. She asks whether I’ve installed Windows on more than one PC (I figure she probably knows the answer better than I do) and I say I might have put it on a laptop but I can’t remember. She dreamily and throatily dictated a new 48-digit verification code which I inputted, I clicked Finish, and voila!

I installed the drivers and rebooted and everything was hunky dory! Well, mostly.

First order of business was to benchmark this baby! So I loaded up 3DMark and was happy to see that all the greyed-out tests had now been enabled. I flagged the first 2 to make for an even test and put ‘er in gear. The first few seconds looked very promising, but when all was said and done the new card scored a paltry 250 – a full 6 points LOWER than my old card!! Yikes!!!

But benchmarks aren’t everything so I booted up some games to get the real scoop.

Guild Wars undoubtedly ran faster. I went into a heavily populated town with a big smokey bonfire in the middle and enjoyed about double the frame rate I used to. I whipped the view around and was confident I was getting some good GPU results.

Half Life 2 was surprisingly choppy, but I wasn’t too concerned since that game is optimized for ATI. I tried the free tech demo The Lost Coast which makes heavy use of pixel shader model 3.0 and that ran brilliantly! HDR (High Dynamic Range – simulates pupil dilation reaction to light changes) is really something else, and the way Valve accentuated it with bloom for overbright colours is really striking! Strangely, when I looked right down at the ground the framerate plummeted – like less than 1 frame per second – but when I looked forward and saw that same ground texture tiled 300 times it ran smooth as silk (at 1024×768). Very odd.

Call of Duty 2 was a bit disappointing, but the game is in fact a notorious PC gobbler so I wasn’t terribly dismayed. Having recently finished the game in DX7 mode (which looks like a beautiful CoD expansion pack and runs solid at 60 frames) I wasn’t terribly inclined to give it another go.

I then decided to go for the gusto and installed F.E.A.R., a certified GPU slayer which ran like ass crack on my 9800. I was VERY impressed at the improvement on my 6600. The game has a very handy benchmarking utility which reports the high, low, and average framerates and what percentage the scene was rendered at certain framerates. I found a very happy medium of great graphic quality above 25 frames and recently finished the game. When it’s at a playable frame rate this game is quite awesome. Not as good has Half Life 2 (or 1 for that matter) but a great game with awesome AI and the best bullet time since Max Payne.

Finally, I picked up Elder Scrolls: Oblivion which ain’t running too bad. We tried the game at my girlfriend’s place and found that it looked fantastic at nearly full quality at 800×600 with 2xAA. I gave this setting a try at home and was very impressed and surprised at the image quality, smooth frame rate, and clarity of textures and fonts at this low resolution, so it’s a keeper.

So after a few code blue coronaries I can safely say that my new video card eats my old one for breakfast with Canadian bacon. I am also proud to declare that my additional $70 bought me about 3 frames per second more than my girlfriend’s 6600LE which of course is mandatory for me marbles.

And I’m happy to declare that, since construction on her floor has concluded, my girlfriend’s PC hasn’t crashed once. I suspect the power tools and open hanging wires made her power fluctuate below normal levels. A weekend of Oblivion was certainly a fair test since she was stable all weekend (and so was her computer).

So buy a video card! It’ll make you happy! Wee!!

Now back to my Kahjiit archer agent and his feisty feline exploits!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

A Tale of Two Vidies (yes, groan)