Apologies for the lack of Blog updates, it's been a busy time for me lately. Focusing on recent events, last Friday was my new friend Katie's birthday, so I went out with her and a bunch of her friends for a night of drunken debauchery. Okay, so it wasn't quite like that... I wasn't drunk. ;o) That was then followed by waking up early(ish) the next morning to decorate what will become my room back at my parents place. Things are finally getting towards a manageable state on the move front, I'm pretty much organised apart from a handful of minor obstacles. Be warned though, I might be left without Internet access for a little while during the following few weeks, so don't worry if I disappear off the face of the planet for a while - I'll be back.
Things are equally busy on other fronts - Last week saw Beyond 3D publish my review of a couple of Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO boards, as you've probably already seen. It's always a pleasure to do some work for Dave, and the feeling of having an article up at a site which is quite simply the pinnacle of 3D hardware knowledge always gives me a real glow of achievement - It's kinda like being on Mastermind or something. ;o)
There's been no respite at Elite Bastards either - I published my review of the Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO² there today (What is it with me and those boards?!), and I should be having a couple of graphics boards show up in the next day or two for review, which should keep me juggling moving and benchmarking in an... 'Interesting' fashion. God knows how I'll pull it off, especially seeing as I have another little project that I think some of you will like that I want to sort out in the next couple of days.
The best news on the EB front lately was being shown a piece of what can only be described as 'fan mail' from someone pretty high up the hierachy at a well-known company. A quick e-mail in his direction, and things could be getting far more interesting on the sample and information front for us, all being well. So, hopefully we might be able to provide some far more comprehensive coverage of product launches very soon, fingers crossed. :o)
Having said that, the 'best news' moniker has been stolen away from that information these past couple of days, by the fact that a couple of our forum members have dug into their own pockets to donate to the site. It may sound overly emotional, but it puts a lump in my throat thinking that people are willing to part with their own hard-earned cash, entirely of their own free will, to fund our little Internet adventure. I've put a lot of time and work into various facets of the site over my time with Elite Bastards, but it's always been primarily for my own satisfaction and enjoyment (as well as helping out and empowering our readers, obviously) over any financial gain. So, it really means a lot that people think that we're worth something in cold, hard cash. That may sound weird, but that's just me.
Anyway, that's my quick catch up Blog for the day, I'm sure I've missed loads of stuff, but I'll hopefully be able to keep you all filled in during the run-up to Christmas, Internet connection permitting. :o)
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
In a word... Argh!!
I think this explains it all.
Right now, my house has no power, and hasn't done since about 11am this morning. So, I'm sat here at my parents right now typing away from my laptop. Which is fine, except I have a bunch of news to post that I can't get to as it's stored away in Outlook on my main computer, and some work on an article for an NDA which expires tomorrow that is also out of bounds until the power comes back, which won't be until tomorrow morning some time.
Technology is great... Until the power goes out. :P
Right now, my house has no power, and hasn't done since about 11am this morning. So, I'm sat here at my parents right now typing away from my laptop. Which is fine, except I have a bunch of news to post that I can't get to as it's stored away in Outlook on my main computer, and some work on an article for an NDA which expires tomorrow that is also out of bounds until the power comes back, which won't be until tomorrow morning some time.
Technology is great... Until the power goes out. :P
Monday, November 14, 2005
Fitter, happier, more productive...
After my solely geek-related last entry, I figured I should really dedicate a post to how I'm doing right now. And the answer is - Pretty damn good. I'm sleeping better, exercising more (yes, that's right, exercise - I'm going for runs every evening, slowly building my fitness and stamina back to somewhere close to where they were a few years back), eating better, and generally doing well all round.
I move out of my place almost exactly a month from now, so a fair bit of my time has been taken up with trying to arrange everything - Clearing things out at my parents place, clearing things out here, arranging storage for the stuff I can't bring with me, decorating, and so on. But I'm really looking forward to leaving the dump I call my house now - It doesn't hold any real use for me now, so I can't wait to get the burden of it and bad memories that go with it off my hands. All of this has eaten up a fair bit of my reviewing and writing time, but don't worry, normal service will be resumed soon enough.
Anyway, it isn't all hard work for me - Friday night, my good friend Gemma came down from Southampton for the night, firstly to catch up on everything (I haven't seen her in the flesh in forever!) and secondly to take what would have been Tara's place going to see Jimmy Carr (a British stand-up comic, for you non-UK people) as I'd booked the tickets several months ago. If you like old-school gags and joke telling, and aren't easily offended, then it's great stuff and I thoroughly enjoyed it...
"I went to Ask Jeeves the other day. I asked Jeeves... Why is Google so much better?"
Then, of course, Saturday was the England - Argentina friendly, and one of the best games of football I've had the pleasure to witness (Helped of course by the fact that England won - Just). I've also been dedicating some 'me' time to ploughing through watching Lost - I got fed up of waiting each week for episodes in the UK to air, so I went off and found the US episodes. I finished Season One last night, so I'll probably start off the second series tonight. Good, intriguing stuff indeed.
Anyway, this seems as appropriate a place as any to finish with a word of thanks to all of you who've comiserated me, talked to me, worried about me or helped me out over the past few weeks, every one of your comments and thoughts were much appreciated. As you can hopefully see though, I'm doing just fine. ;o)
I move out of my place almost exactly a month from now, so a fair bit of my time has been taken up with trying to arrange everything - Clearing things out at my parents place, clearing things out here, arranging storage for the stuff I can't bring with me, decorating, and so on. But I'm really looking forward to leaving the dump I call my house now - It doesn't hold any real use for me now, so I can't wait to get the burden of it and bad memories that go with it off my hands. All of this has eaten up a fair bit of my reviewing and writing time, but don't worry, normal service will be resumed soon enough.
Anyway, it isn't all hard work for me - Friday night, my good friend Gemma came down from Southampton for the night, firstly to catch up on everything (I haven't seen her in the flesh in forever!) and secondly to take what would have been Tara's place going to see Jimmy Carr (a British stand-up comic, for you non-UK people) as I'd booked the tickets several months ago. If you like old-school gags and joke telling, and aren't easily offended, then it's great stuff and I thoroughly enjoyed it...
"I went to Ask Jeeves the other day. I asked Jeeves... Why is Google so much better?"
Then, of course, Saturday was the England - Argentina friendly, and one of the best games of football I've had the pleasure to witness (Helped of course by the fact that England won - Just). I've also been dedicating some 'me' time to ploughing through watching Lost - I got fed up of waiting each week for episodes in the UK to air, so I went off and found the US episodes. I finished Season One last night, so I'll probably start off the second series tonight. Good, intriguing stuff indeed.
Anyway, this seems as appropriate a place as any to finish with a word of thanks to all of you who've comiserated me, talked to me, worried about me or helped me out over the past few weeks, every one of your comments and thoughts were much appreciated. As you can hopefully see though, I'm doing just fine. ;o)
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
System upgrade time
Now I have more time and money afforded to me, and thanks to some irritating instability of my Pentium 4 system (When I say irritating, I mean random hardware-related reboots irritating, not stupid little application error irritating), I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and put some thought into upgrading my system. I wanted to build a machine that would last me into the future (Like that ever happens!), so here's what I ended up with.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+: As with many people right now, when it came to choosing a CPU my mind was caught between going for stellar single core performance, or more modest performance on a dual core platform. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that much of my time is spent on the desktop . On a quiet day, I'll have Outlook, Firefox and Azureus running, but it isn't unusual to have a lot more going on at one time - Take last night for instance, where in addition to the aforementioned applications I also had Excel, Frontpage, WinAmp, Paint Shop Pro, Notepad and a host of Windows Explorer windows open at one time. So, I opted to go dual core, and I haven't regretted it one iota - If the move to a HyperThreading capable CPU was a boost, the move to dual core is a giant leap. It's something you need to experience for yourself rather than have it explained to you, but things feel smooth!
Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard: Picking a motherboard was an easy choice for me - I've been using the 'vanilla' A8N-SLI in my test system for some time without issue, with my only niggle being the annoyingly loud southbridge fan. The A8N-SLI Premium removes this issue thanks to a passively cooled southbridge, and throws in BIOS-level SLI switching as an added bonus. A stable, decent performing motherboard with all the features I wanted at a decent price made this a more than obvious choice.
2x BFG GeForce 7800 GT OC vieo cards (SLI): When it came to picking a video card, the decision was made easy for me for a number of reasons. Firstly, I already had one of these boards sat around waiting for review, so picking up a second identical card gave me the opportunity to run an SLI configuration for a real pixel-pushing behemoth. Secondly, much as I would have loved a Radeon X1800-based board to partake in anti-aliased floating point blending abilities and other feature packed goodness with, the price difference between an X1800 XL and the £200 BFG board was too much to stomach - The price:performance ratio of this part is simply unbeatable right now. And boy do these things perform! I don't remember having such a tingly feeling playing games since I moved from a Radeon 8500 to 9700 PRO some years ago - F.E.A.R. at 1280x960 with 4x AA, 8x AF and everything on maximum (Yesy, that includes soft shadows!) is a sight to behold, as was Call of Duty 2 last night at 1280x1024, 4x AA and 8x AF with everything maxxed out.
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card: This was the biggest 'luxury' on my list, and to be honest I really haven't stretched its legs yet, but I felt that my old Audigy board was ageing and could probably do with something later and greater to take its place. The X-Fi certainly seems to have its share of nifty tools, and I haven't noticed any performance impact from sound effects in-game as I did on occasion with the Audigy, so I can't complain. The only downside right now is that I've found it impossible to get the optical output working, but that's a whole other story.
2GB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM (CAS 2): We seem to be rapidly approaching a world where 1GB of RAM won't cut it, so this seemed as good a time as any to make the move to 2GB of memory. It's hard to appreciate how much difference the added RAM is making in the context of the whole system, but certain things certainly seem nippier when in the past there'd be a bout of hard disk thrashing, so I'd like to think it's done some good.
Enermax 535W SLI power supply: It's a power supply, and even I can't get excited about that! It has all the connectivity I need, adjustable fan speed, and it just works, which is all I ask of it. If it doesn't blow up and kill or electrocute me, then it's a good unit in my book.
So, there you have it - A little time and a lot of money later, I'm left with a system that I can be more than proud of - It performs great, feels responsive, and makes gaming more enjoyable than I remember in a long time... Mission accomplished!!
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+: As with many people right now, when it came to choosing a CPU my mind was caught between going for stellar single core performance, or more modest performance on a dual core platform. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that much of my time is spent on the desktop . On a quiet day, I'll have Outlook, Firefox and Azureus running, but it isn't unusual to have a lot more going on at one time - Take last night for instance, where in addition to the aforementioned applications I also had Excel, Frontpage, WinAmp, Paint Shop Pro, Notepad and a host of Windows Explorer windows open at one time. So, I opted to go dual core, and I haven't regretted it one iota - If the move to a HyperThreading capable CPU was a boost, the move to dual core is a giant leap. It's something you need to experience for yourself rather than have it explained to you, but things feel smooth!
Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard: Picking a motherboard was an easy choice for me - I've been using the 'vanilla' A8N-SLI in my test system for some time without issue, with my only niggle being the annoyingly loud southbridge fan. The A8N-SLI Premium removes this issue thanks to a passively cooled southbridge, and throws in BIOS-level SLI switching as an added bonus. A stable, decent performing motherboard with all the features I wanted at a decent price made this a more than obvious choice.
2x BFG GeForce 7800 GT OC vieo cards (SLI): When it came to picking a video card, the decision was made easy for me for a number of reasons. Firstly, I already had one of these boards sat around waiting for review, so picking up a second identical card gave me the opportunity to run an SLI configuration for a real pixel-pushing behemoth. Secondly, much as I would have loved a Radeon X1800-based board to partake in anti-aliased floating point blending abilities and other feature packed goodness with, the price difference between an X1800 XL and the £200 BFG board was too much to stomach - The price:performance ratio of this part is simply unbeatable right now. And boy do these things perform! I don't remember having such a tingly feeling playing games since I moved from a Radeon 8500 to 9700 PRO some years ago - F.E.A.R. at 1280x960 with 4x AA, 8x AF and everything on maximum (Yesy, that includes soft shadows!) is a sight to behold, as was Call of Duty 2 last night at 1280x1024, 4x AA and 8x AF with everything maxxed out.
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card: This was the biggest 'luxury' on my list, and to be honest I really haven't stretched its legs yet, but I felt that my old Audigy board was ageing and could probably do with something later and greater to take its place. The X-Fi certainly seems to have its share of nifty tools, and I haven't noticed any performance impact from sound effects in-game as I did on occasion with the Audigy, so I can't complain. The only downside right now is that I've found it impossible to get the optical output working, but that's a whole other story.
2GB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM (CAS 2): We seem to be rapidly approaching a world where 1GB of RAM won't cut it, so this seemed as good a time as any to make the move to 2GB of memory. It's hard to appreciate how much difference the added RAM is making in the context of the whole system, but certain things certainly seem nippier when in the past there'd be a bout of hard disk thrashing, so I'd like to think it's done some good.
Enermax 535W SLI power supply: It's a power supply, and even I can't get excited about that! It has all the connectivity I need, adjustable fan speed, and it just works, which is all I ask of it. If it doesn't blow up and kill or electrocute me, then it's a good unit in my book.
So, there you have it - A little time and a lot of money later, I'm left with a system that I can be more than proud of - It performs great, feels responsive, and makes gaming more enjoyable than I remember in a long time... Mission accomplished!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)