Monday May 12th 2008

	The New PC 3:22 am-Turk Comments (0) « Hide Default Permalink Just because I had mentioned to Gawain that I was going to geek out and post some case porn. The first shot is my old new pc. Then you got the new pc insides. Which I think I did a good job on with my use of zip ties. The old pc has the same number of fans. Yet some how it is noisier. The new case is slick as hell. It has a front air filter that can be pulled out and cleaned. It also has they handy hard drive bays that you attach two things (mounts?) that allows you to slide the drive in and out. Very hand for when you need to pull shit out and replace it. And I’m happy with everything else about the new computer. All of the items I ordered have (so far) worked as I had expected. I went out and bought Crysis to determine what my pc was able to do. I’m happy to say I can run it on high and I get a good 40-60 FPS most of the time. To round out this one above is my messy computer area. Also here is a new poll: Do you build your own Computer? Yes No View Results  Loading ...
	Computers, Newegg, Poll Print	Views: 169 Popularity: 22%

Thursday April 24th 2008

	New Computer Time 4:12 pm-Turk Comments (2) Show » Computers Permalink It’s time for a new computer. I used the Tech Report 2008 system guide The Grand Experiment as a blueprint. Here are the parts and Newegg prices: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 $199.99 Asus P5N-E SLI $119.99 Mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2-800 $75.99 XFX GeForce 8800 GT 512MB $229.99 Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB $89.99 Samsung SH-S203B $26.99 Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer $90.99 Antec Sonata III w/500W PSU $129.95 Grand Total Spent: $963.88 I’ve been wanting to get a duo core processor for a while. Also Age of Conan is coming up and I had concerns if my current pc could handle it. Luckily I came into some money and I had a $1000 buck budget to build a new computer. I lack the initiative to select my own items so I usually find some tech site that has this kind of info put together before hand. I had some worry about getting the processor from Newegg, as it has been out of stock. It seems to go fast. Hopefully this build will last me for a while. I also hope to be able to play Crysis on this machine as I would like to see what all the hype is about. Now I sit back and wait for UPS to get my stuff to me. And hurray for being able to spend hundreds of dollars in a matter of seconds. What a rush.
	Newegg Print	Views: 300 Popularity: 21%

Friday March 2nd 2007

	More PC Stuff 2:03 am-Turk Comments (0) « Hide Computers Permalink I ordered my new video card for my computer. It’s a Sapphire Radeon X1950 XT and with the ram I bought last week this will be the last upgrade I do to this PC. About the only thing I can upgrade now is the hard drive. Which I do have my eye on this 500 gig hard drive. Because this video card I ordered is a huge bastard I had to get a new power supply just to be able to run it. The card is huge. It’s almost two pci cards long. And it takes up two slots in the case. It is my last hurrah to get this year old pc of mine into shape to be able to play Supreme Commander, Vanguard, Gothic 3, and all the other PC games coming out that need the extra horse power. I really need to build a new computer again. Which I’m doing for a buddy of mine. Just picking the parts for him made me mad. He’s getting an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz system. All of which costs under thousand bucks. Just about the same amount I spent on my PC last year. How computers age. That’s just the way it is. As long as this new card lets me play Supreme Commander at more than 10-15 frames per second I’ll be happy. I’m really doing all of this for this game. I could give a shit about Vanguard really or anything else. But the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation I’m willing to blow the dough on just to play it. Of course not that I have the cash on hand to buy the actual game. But that will be a purchase I make next check I guess. Edit/Update It turns out that the power supply I ordered is shit. The thing has way to many negative reviews about it dying. I don’t want to have to get it replaced in 1-6 months as many reviews say. So I’m going with this one, which I have in my second older PC and have had no problems at all. It kinda pisses me off in two ways. First it pisses me off because it’s my own damn fault for not reading the reviews for that pos power supply. Secondly it pisses me off that Newegg can charge me right away, yet I have to wait 2-3 business days before I get a credit. Well I’ve learned my lesson. Next time I’ll research the product out before I go and buy it. I’m just lucky I was able to catch it before Newegg shipped it out.
	Newegg Print	Views: 645 Popularity: 61%

Thursday February 22nd 2007

	PC Games And Ram 5:56 am-Turk Comments (6) Show » Computers, Games Permalink Since I got my Xbox 360 I’ve been letting my PC gather dust. The last four games I’ve bought have been for the 360. I picked up Rainbow Six Vegas, Dead Rising, Viva Pinata, and Crackdown. The last PC game I picked up was Star Trek Legacy. Recently there has been a few PC games that just performed poorly on my PC. Gothic 3 and Vanguard are two I can name off of the top of my head. Both of which sounds like that unless you had two gigs of ram of more you would have trouble. So last week I ordered two gigs of ram from Newegg.com. The 2 sticks of Crucial Ballistix DDR 500 (PC 4000) Ram arrived on the 20th (the same day I picked up Crackdown). I have yet to put the ram in to my PC. I really hope going from 1 gig to 2 gigs will give me that extra punch to play some of these PC games. Specifically I want to be able to play Supreme Commander without having to worry about turning down the graphics and still getting 10-15 FPS. I realize I may need to upgrade my ATI 1600 XT at some point to really get a performance increase. I think my next purchase will be the ATI 1950 Pro before I just go and build a new PC for myself. Sometime later today I’m going to force myself to stop playing Crackdown and I’m going to install my ram. Then all I have to do is install Gothic 3 and see if I do get a performance boost. Which may lead me to buy Vanguard. And then theres always Supreme Commander.
	Newegg Print	Views: 784 Popularity: 73%

Tuesday May 3rd 2005

	Guild Wars 3:37 am-Turk Comments (8) Show » Misc Shots Permalink I’ve been playing Guild Wars since the 27th of April. I was able to get a pre order box so I could play starting at 12:01 am on the 27th. I’ve had my eye on this game since around this time last year. Guild Wars comes at an opportune time as my adventures in the World of Warcraft are being made very un-fun with the inclusion of the so called “honor” system and a contest to encourage this so called honor system of Blizzard’s. Guild Wars at this moment in time feels like a fun game. The biggest selling points right now are no monthly fees to play and the fact that just about everything is a private instance means I don’t have to worry about getting ganked (farmed for honor) as I try to level. I can’t stress how antisocial I am at this time because of this bullshit going on in WoW. So it’s nice to be able to be all alone in an area in Guild Wars if I want to be. Another huge selling point as it turns out is that I can play the game from work. There is only one port number that needs to be open for the game to work and that port number happens to be open on this isp the hotel uses. The ability to play at work is really amazing seeing how just about every other port number on the internet is closed here at work. The ability to play at work has many downsides as the these six screen shots above can show. The Intel Extreme Graphics Technology powered 82845G Graphics Controller in the work computer just doesn’t have the muscle to run a game like Guild Wars. The horrible graphics really isn’t the problem. The problem is that about 20 minutes into playing the computer crashes to a bsod that points to one of the driver files for the onboard vid card. Which is really frustrating. I’ve updated to the latest drivers provided by Intel. I’ve lowered every setting in the game that I can. The damn thing still keeps crashing. Granted this pitiful video card is not supported by the game. I was just hoping to have some luck and make it work via tweaks. And I’m contemplating buying a cheap ass pci video card to put into the work pc I use. It all depends on how things go at the hotel in the coming weeks.
	Guild Wars, Newegg Print	Views: 1,282 Popularity: 44%

Wednesday February 18th 2004

	Benchmarks 12:33 am-Turk Comments (0) « Hide Computers Permalink I got my new video card the other day. After installing the card I of course fired up Camelot to see how it ran. This is my first Radeon card and I was a little worried. But it ran fine. The next thing I did was benchmark my new pc with 3DMark 2001. I’ve always been very anal about benchmarking my computer whenever I got a new video card or piece of hardware that improved my pc. Here is the 3DMark results of my old pc that I made when I got my GeForce 3. This result is a look at my old pc and the new pc (using the GeForce FX 5200 in both). And finally here are the benchmarks of the new pc with the Radeon 9600 XT. So far the new pc is doing better than I had hoped. I’ve installed and ran every 3d accelerated game I got that gave the old pc trouble. The list which includes Morrowind and Soldier of Fortune 2. And they both run like a dream now. I also downloaded and installed the Unreal Tournament 2004 and Painkiller demos. Both games performed great even with all the settings turned up. I’m looking forward to playing all the games that would never play on the old pc. On a side note about the video card I got from Newegg.com. It did not include the coupon for a free copy of Half Life 2. The retail box I got was a lite version and it only came with the card, the driver disc, and a cable to hook my tv up to it. So if you followed my link to buy the vid card from a few posts ago consider yourself warned.
	Newegg Print	Views: 352 Popularity: 23%

Thursday February 12th 2004

	New PC Part 2 5:30 am-Turk Comments (0) « Hide Default Permalink So today I picked up my router. I went with the NETGEAR RP614. I picked this specific brand mostly for it ease of use with Dark Age of Camelot, which is important. I also picked up a replacement for the cd/dvd combo drive I destroyed. It wasn’t the same as the one I destroyed, but the price equals out after mail in rebates. I only tried out the dvd playback so far, with any luck it will work as advertised. I also ordered the new graphics card that will go in my new system. I picked the Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600XT for two reasons. Reason one is that I’ve heard lots of good thing about these new Radeon cards. The second reason is that it supposedly comes with a coupon to get Half Life 2 for free. Which are pretty good reasons. Either way I can’t go wrong. The damn thing is twice as fast as my poor GeForce FX 5200. So I’m sure I’ll be happy. I had some initial problems with the whole file sharing thing with the router. I had some help from Ppapa (the leader of the Camelot guild I’m in), who is like a computer expert. Now I just need to let my firewall let one computer talk to another and I’ll be all set. The router itself was very easy to hook up. I literally plugged it in and rebooted my pc’s and it was working. It was pretty cool running Camelot on two different computers. I was able to use my buffbot with out worry of it lagging out. This is the kind of inspiration I need to get me to 50. I played for a few hours last night before work and ended up getting in late. When I get home I’ll be firing up the pc’s and logging in to Camelot.
	Newegg Print	Views: 295 Popularity: 15%