Daring to be stupid

I know, I vanished from here for a while. That happens. Apologies to my arbitron-rated two readers.

Through a long and convoluted series of events, about a month ago I wound up with a full refund for a defective Radeon 4850 that I purchased last year. As of this morning, I now have a Radeon 5770 on the way to me.

It's not that I don't like Intel's onboard graphics - the G45 chipset seems perfectly competent for 2D games, much older 3D games (though it seemed to have trouble with Warcraft III, of all games) and accelerated desktop stuff. I've learned from all this that whenever I have the cash to spare and when the 'Clarkdale' Core i3 processors with integrated GPUs come out I'll be able to build a tiny mini ITX system that will do everything except play games.

Why, then, the Radeon 5770? Well, my brother got a laptop recently and I sent him a copy of Left 4 Dead for his birthday, but I can't exactly play it with him using the onboard graphics. I was also thinking about reactivating my WoW account for a bit and, well, let's just say I'd go insane having to play either of those games with the low settings that would be required to make them playable.

I'd originally thought to get a Radeon 5850, but ultimately couldn't figure a reason to do so - the 4850 I had before was plenty fast for me; the 5770 is a little quicker and yet uses less power, puts out less heat and is on a shorter PCB. These are all big pros in my book. Also it was $100 less.

As I mentioned yesterday, my current thoughts to upgrade Rune are another post for another day. These coincide nicely with this post and this day, so, follow the logic...

Currently Rune is equipped with an Asus M3A78-EM motherboard, using the AMD 780G / SB700 chipset, an Athlon X2 4450e, 2GB of RAM, an Hauppauge HVR-1800 TV tuner, a buncha Samsung hard drives and a PATA DVD burner which I believe is also a Samsung.

Some possible changes to my entertainment center provide an opportunity to throw in a handful of upgrades. A new processor isn't really needed, but if they wind up with a 45W model of the new 45nm Phenom-derived Athlon II X2s I could see myself picking one up for cheap. A memory upgrade isn't really needed either, but depending on what I rebuild as my main system I might have spare RAM, so that could wind up as 4GB (2x2GB) instead. Continue reading "Updating the HTPC"

A few weeks ago one of the guys from work (Hi Mike) and I were talking and he mentioned I hadn't updated this in a while. In addition to be shocked that there are, in fact, real live human beings reading this occasionally I realized that maybe I ought to write a new post.

Last week I bought an Intel DG45ID motherboard to replace my P5Q-E and Radeon X1600 Pro. My continuing focus on hardware well-supported by open source and desire to build a tiny mini-ITX system led me to the Intel DG45FC, but I don't have the spare cash lying around to build a whole tiny system right now. In the interest of testing software support, I figured the micro ATX board using the same hardware would be a good compromise.

I installed it on Friday without any problems, however, sadly, the 775 retention bracket I added to the P5Q-E to provide the Xigmatek heatsink I'd been using (HDT-S1263) with a more stable base would not come off... that might make it difficult to sell, unless I find someone who wants both. Continue reading "Experiment results!"

This has been a very slow burn but recently I've realized that working with computers all day has worn on me; I'm to the point where the stereotype of not wanting to even look at one when I get home has become true. I don't know when exactly this started, but I know that having to stretch my system's upgrade out to nearly two months with the troubleshooting was a kind of breaking point.

I don't have a lot of thoughts on this. It might be considered poetic - my hobby gets me a good job, but the job is so involved that I lose interest in the hobby - but I think it's mostly just a little sad.

The most recent example of this, the experiment that is the reason for this particular post, happened just this past weekend. Since Ubuntu 9.04 came out I've gone back to using it for pretty much everything (I had a few issues with 8.10 that, due to my lessening interest in tinkering, I didn't look into fixing and had been running the alpha releases of 9.04), but I hadn't bothered with getting any kind of hardware accelerated 3D for desktop compositing or games or whatever.

I decided to set it up over this weekend, though, and ran into a bunch of problems. My Radeon 4850 is supported by the open source RadeonHD driver but, as it is a new driver, work is ongoing on a lot of features. The latest Catalyst release (9.5) seemed to work pretty well but I ran into some odd issues that I couldn't resolve. So I decided to try this "experiment."

I have, sitting in a box, a Radeon X1600 Pro, based on an older architecture and supported very well by the open source Radeon driver. The experiment was simple: pull the 4850, install the X1600 and see how long I would go before I wanted to play a game, as I like to play them at the highest quality settings I can and would want to use the 4850 for that.

I actually made the swap on Sunday and haven't missed it yet. Playing games on my Xbox 360 with friends over Xbox Live has been the gaming entertainment order of the day. And I have a stack of books and comics I'm slowing working through.

I'm not sure where this will go - it may end with my assembling a tiny low power system to replace this full size one I have now - but I think it will be interesting, if nothing else.

Last week, on Monday, I beat Halo 3 in a day. It was about 8 hours of play time from start to finish on the normal difficulty. And that was with spending far, far too much time dealing with the flood in one of the final levels near the end.

I liked the previous two games a lot, but this was on a completely different level of fun. From the minute I got my hands on a gravity hammer to the first time I fired the Spartan laser, to ripping turrets from their mounts and using them as handheld weapons I spent probably more than half of the game giggling maniacally.

I even ordered the soundtrack. The only complaint I really had was the Flood level.

In Halo once the Flood showed up they were just a pain in the ass, but it was expected given how the story unfolded. It was the only part of the game I didn't enjoy. Halo 2, which I must have started and stopped playing a dozen times over the course of two years and finally beat last Sunday, was even more fun. I liked the arbiter's levels (running around cloaked with the energy sword was a great time) and I thought the story they had going was interesting and well-paced. Except for when you had to start fighting off tons and tons of Flood.

Halo 3 was the same. Great story, really well paced, fun things to do in the course of the levels... except for that damn flood level. I died more times in that level than in the entire rest of the game. Give me more explosives! Make it less annoying! Do something! Maybe I'm just more of a casual gamer now than I once was, but I just ran out of patience really fast once I got to that point.

Bungie, if anyone out there is listening: if you guys do another Halo game and someone says "let's have a level filled with the Flood!" just smack him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and say "no."

I'm a bit of a comic book geek. Not a huge comic book geek, but enough of one to read through endless strings of wikipedia articles on various characters and order collected volumes when I have some spare spending cash. Green Lantern is my favorite, if you're curious.

The pic on the left there is a piece done by Alex Ross used on a variant cover of the first issue of the newest Green Lantern series. It's also on the cover of "No Fear," a collected volume of the first several issues in the new series. It's one of my favorite superhero images.

Anyways, the power conversation seems to pop up every few months and with Watchmen out in two weeks I thought I'd bring it up again. It starts when someone asks "if you could have just one superpower, what would it be?"

My answer has probably changed several times over the years, but right now I'd have to say super speed, both for the obvious benefit and the not-so-obvious ones.

I figure if you can run at ridiculously high speeds you'd also need superhuman reflexes to prevent yourself from running into walls / people / trees / cats. You'd have to be able to process your surroundings for those reflexes to kick in, which means improved hearing and sight, not to mention a brain able to comprehend whatever you're seeing at whatever speed you're seeing it. Also you'd have to be extra tough to be able to withstand the high g-forces of a superspeed turn.

I've often thought of the corollary to the super power question, which is "what would be your kryptonite?" My answer to this hasn't changed since I finally figured it out: baked goods.

Oh yes, I'm a sucker for tasty pastries and muffins and pies and so on. So if I was a superhero and the villains needed a way to stop me from interfering in their nefarious schemes, all they'd need to do is open a bakery... a bakery where superheroes eat free. I'd go there all the time! They could just schedule their villaining for when I was eating and I'd be utterly hypnotized by some chocolate-stuffed croissants or whatever.

Of course, it also being a bakery that other people could frequent, this means the villains could make a killing on a legitimate business while they're out killing legitimate businessmen!

(boo!)

Riiiiiiiight. Anyone who happens upon this and feels the need to reply with their answers to those questions, please do so. It's always a fun conversation topic.

A while back, the Tech Report posted a news story saying that Analog Devices was leaving the PC Audio market. Then in December more news popped up saying that Conexant was going to be taking over the line, including taking on all of ADI's PC Audio people.

While I expect we'll be seeing more SoundMAX codecs in the future, it looks like for at least one new motherboard, the socket AM3 M4A78T-E, Asus is making use of a Via audio codec, specifically the VT1708S.

Back in the day before HD audio codecs were all over the place, some really nice sound cards were based on Via's audio hardware (no, really. Just Google the Chaintech AV-710 and you'll see what I mean). So to see their HD audio codec show up in a new motherboard (alongside other non-realtek parts) gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Some info about Via's VT1708 can be found here, although there's nothing specific about the "S" version.