For some, this happens in 3d. For me, it was happening in 2d. I was going to RMA my card but so many people were having the problem, it can’t be hardware. I eventually found (hopefully) a workaround according to ATI forums and HardOCP forums. You overclock the idle clocks by editing an XML file. Apparently it idles so low in 2D that it breaks spec? Breaks I dunno. ATI hasn’t goddamn said anything so the community has come up with workarounds.

Nvidia’s card is bad this round, ATI’s is better but this crap is annoying. Maybe they’ll have a driver fix but I was following posts as old as Nov 2009. So I don’t see a fix for a long time.

The card is fast but it wasn’t as dramatic as when I bought my last ATI card. I don’t know if the economy determines what leaps video cards make. Maybe TSMC sucks at 40nm.

Update: I screwed around with the clocks some more and looked up the cold bug. I’m running the new 10.4 drivers which really didn’t help with stability but I’ve managed to make it playable most of the time. When it starts up or resumes, it’s buggy. Argh.

I had an RMA on it but I’ve cancelled it since I got it working. Double argh.

So when you ship it off, you have to wipe your personal data (or at least they recommend it) but trophies can’t be backed up! Wtf. I don’t have a ton of trophies but I wonder if this is going to be an issue for other people.

So the turn-around time they say is 3 weeks. And it’s out of warranty $150 repair. Take into account that this is the last hardware backwards-compatible 60gb PS3 model that I’m shipping out, I’m really worried that this is a lost game. I can’t repair it forever and I can’t get a new PS3 unless I break out my old PS2 (which is not that reliable). Maybe I should just get a PS2 slim and a new PS3 when they update it.

In other news, a friend of mine got in an accident. He’s fine but he’s selling his bike. Sad to hear that his bike riding is taking a hiatus but I’m glad that he’s ok. His car looked really bent-up in the pic he sent.

Ableton Suite 8 came today. I’m installing it now. It’s like 62gb installed with all the samples. I was super-impressed with the demo. It’s so smooth with the workflow and creative construction with sort of a loop-centered mentality. Hoping to make some really big strides forward from linear things like Logic and Cubase.

Fast forward to this past weekend when all my new parts came in for a brand new gaming rig. The parts were much less money and much faster. It’s a hilarious cycle. And even as shiny as my new toy is, I know it will return to dust when FPSTechDemo 2012 requires a house-glowing flux capacitor to run.

Here are some quick stats.
BOX: Antec P182 Case
CPU: E8600 3.33ghz dual core
MEM: 4gb DDR3-1600
VID: ATI 4870X2 2gb
MB: asus rampage extreme x48
evga 790i ultra

It was a dramatic build. I spent 16 hours straight (skipping dinner and lunch the next day) putting it together. At first, I cabled it all up. Then it would just turn on / turn off. It wouldn’t even stay on. So piece by piece, I dismantled it trying to figure out what was wrong. I thought it was a short, I thought it was the CPU, it could be anything.

So then I dismantled everything and put the motherboard on a towel. I had the power supply in the case powering the board with a single cpu fan hooked up to the motherboard. The board has a power button on the board itself so I didn’t even have to hook up the chassis jumpers. Nothing else (no cpu, no memory, no cards) were hooked up. Eventually I replaced the power supply and the motherboard with retail-bought replacements. This was annoying because ripping out a motherboard and power supply is like removing your skeletal system and then your circulatory system.

After making these swaps, everything seemed to run fine on an EVGA 790i Ultra motherboard. I lost the ability to do crossfire but I was fine with that for now. About 3 months later, I wasn’t quite done with this thing. I ordered another 4870×2 to do quad gpu. I put the asus crossfire board back in. It was a tight fit in the case and the heat coming out of the back really did warm the room. It was a bit louder too (the whole thing was loud by itself). It was marginal gain for the titles I play so I returned it.

Yes it plays Crysis. Although Very High still isn’t playable. High looks just fine. Even the developers said that they threw that setting in for future systems.

3 years ago, I spent $3k like I always do and got a 7800gtx and an AMD fx-57 with ddr400. I put a 8800gts 640mb (older process) about a year ago. It’s incapable of playing Mass Effect, Crysis, any CPU-bound RTS game and DX10 (because I don’t have Vista). It’s fine really. I play WoW most of the time and everything else is consoles (cept Portal and steam-stuff). Valve and Blizzard try to appeal to mass-market and don’t do “tech demos”. That’s fine. However since I got a 24″ LCD, things are running slower at 1080p. I’m getting spoiled on AA settings and image quality (especially in WoW). A new rig could be under $3k and last another 3 years.

I tried posting some questions around the intertubes but no one cares about WoW benchmarks. It’s such a simple game that people don’t even pay attention to it. This was my post in the WoW forums (no response).

If you have a massive new machine that was built for games outside of WoW (but you play WoW anyway), help me understand what life is like.

- What AA setting do you use? I encourage people to talk about 16-24x FSAA at 1080p or higher. :)
- Can you force AFR with SLI or Crossfire cards? Benefit?
- What can you run in the background if you have dual or quad core?
- What transparency modes can you run in? ATI calls this Adaptive AA, Nvidia transparency AA. What’s the nice balance for you?
- In Shatt (which is CPU bound), what FPS do you maintain and what CPU do you have?
- Do you run any hacks to enable larger distance drawing etc?

Since there are few recent WoW benchmarks, can you give me an idea of what FPS you get in CoD4 or Crysis etc (which have no limit on benchmark results)?

So now I’m taking it upon myself to do some testing.

The test

Orgrimmar to Azshara internal /timetest benchmark on WoW 2.4.3. V-sync disabled for timetest. Both

The Hardware

AMD FX-57 PC:
AMD fx-57 2.8ghz
8800gts 640mb
2gb of DDR400 timings at 2-2-2-5
AF 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA Transparency off
177.83 driver version
XP 32-bit
1920×1200 (all settings max in WoW client)
Fullscreen

Mac Pro:
Octo-core 2.8ghz 45nm Xeon 2008 model
10gb ddr2 fb-dimms
8800gt video card
OSX 10.5.4
1680×1050 (all settings max in WoW client)
Maximized Windowed Mode
Full screen glow disabled (osx suffers greatly)
4x AA

The Results

What is wrong with OSX drivers? My slower PC looks better (more image quality, more resolution, more effects) and is 3 years old. XP on the Mac Pro is a completely different result! It’s not the hardware. The Mac Pro is a killer workstation for sound and video but that doesn’t mean that a fast nvidia driver is out of the question. There’s one little bit of software that needs to be optimized to open up the Mac Pro for a whole new market and use. I’m not trying to oversimplify the work involved but I’m trying to make a point.

Apple has no pull at Nvidia or ATI. They can no more get faster software than Microsoft can get simpler software. It’s just not in the cards until OSX market share is 50/50 with Windows.

Update: Friend of mine ran this on his G5 with a X1900. 52.812 avg.

I ran this again with a new rig. Forced transparecy AA, Forced 16AF. All other driver settings forced to high-quality. E8600@4ghz,ddr3,4870×2. I ran it once with forced quality (set to insane levels — which looks great) and one with normal settings compared to old PC and Mac.

Updated Results

The quality is so nice and LCDs can’t show more than 60. I think I’ll leave it on.

24″ Dell on an Ergotron LX arm. It’s pretty handy. It can rotate really easily and pivot like the Dell stand couldn’t. The desk is a bit more flexible since I can clean it off if need be. I don’t know if I’ll get another one. Need to imagine the logistics.

Quality is very high on these things. 5 min setup. It can lower itself all the way to the table and a bunch of other crazy positions.

The other 3 drives I put into the Mac and got some tasty software mirroring going on. Helps with I/O when recording.

After buying a NAS, I can rip a CD in 320kps to 130mb and still store 4,800 CDs on the LAN. So I’m ripping all my CDs to mp3s and storing them in a box. It’s a slow process not bound by CPU but by the speed of the CD drive. My Mac Pro is yawning while every drive I have is spinning and sending delicious tastiness to a central location.

In doing so, I realized that NIN – The Downward Spiral is probably one of the best electronica albums ever made. If only for Track 10 – A Warm Place. So much high-school period music, so much delicious packing away of repressed tunes …

Mounting the drives in the Mac Pro rails. The screws are attached to the rails and you just have to screw them down onto generic drives.

Sliding them in, worked very well. The rails are even numbered. Dell should study these things (except the door is weird when putting it on).

The MP comes with a 2600XT card and 2gb of RAM (two 1gb dimms). The next thing will be getting the 65nm 8800GT when the kit comes out (in a month) and some generic memory from Newegg. But I’ve found that Newegg doesn’t carry it quite yet but OWC sells it at reasonable prices. The new MP needs 800mhz memory (server memory really) and OWC has 800mhz memory at Newegg’s 667mhz prices. So it’s probably a good deal. 2gb is fine enough but 4gb might help with audio projects, I’ll see.

I migrated all my stuff off TL’s G5 and plan on returning it to him. He was nice enough to loan his quad-core G5 to me so I could test out a Mac-based DAW setup. But at some point I was going to have to give it back so I wanted to do that sooner than later (I had it for over a month iirc) just to not be rude. The G5 is nice but it’s not in the master plan of where the platform is heading.

After the ritualistic unboxing, I moved my mini to my TV and am very happy with it functioning as a Slingbox/Slingcatcher/Apple TV/Media Center type thing. I had to run a bunch of cables for a few hours to make this all happen. I ran out of Mac Pro playing time because of these logistics. But it’s ok, there’s plenty of playing time yet.

I started by patching with Software Update, downloaded some apps. Some apps I just dragged and dropped from the Mac Mini (go OSX). Bootcamp apparently comes standard now so I created a 100gb XP partition (a 320gb drive came with it). I can create a software stripe for more OSX space later with standard SATA drives from Newegg. I rebooted and installed XP (horror), that was actually the longest part of the night. The Mac drivers CD I made for my mini seemed to work ok for the Mac Pro. It had the chipset, network and video drivers to make XP happy on the Mac Pro. After a few more reboots I had a dual-boot thing done.

I held down ALT on the keyboard after rebooting XP to choose the partition to boot from and was back in OSX land. I then downloaded VMWare Fusion 1.1 beta to check out if it can read my Bootcamp partition (I read this is a new feature), I haven’t tried it yet. But combine that with Fusions DirectX9.0 ability, I might have a really nice PC replacement thing going here. We’ll see.

Next up is testing audio projects. This is the main driver behind 8 cores. I have no problem crushing my 1 core PC (3 years old) and even the G5 was skipping and dropping audio with some of my more thick projects. I’ll see how the MP does under this load, hopefully it gives me more power to play/pause and record without having to freeze CPU-heavy tracks.

So I got my ref number for repair, stripped it down and now I’m just waiting for the UPS box to show up. At least they throw in a month of Xbox gold in (I guess). How many of you have had the red rings?

I really don’t want a new laptop, so I ordered a 100gb PATA-6 (I don’t know what the six means) drive off newegg. It’s a 7200rpm drive which is a step up from the 72gb 5400rpm drive that the powerbook came with. Also a step up from the original drive is reliability. Every time the drive would click, it meant that it was seeking for some block of information so the Mac beach-ball would spin and spin, apps would time out and crash, things would hang and it was generally really annoying.

So when the drive arrived, I was excited but quickly found out that I didn’t have the right sized screwdriver (even in my set of micro drivers). Weird. Ok, so some quick googling and amazon ordering got me a Phillips #0 screwdriver that worked great. Before I was nearly stripping the screw heads and that’s not good. The #0 wasn’t a perfect but it didn’t strip anything and could wedge itself pretty tight into the phillips head screw channels.

I followed a guide in japanese to take it apart, it’s mostly pictures anyway. A similar guide in English is here if you care. It’s best to go slow and not force anything.

So since there’s about 40 screws you have to take out, a big workspace with no pets or children is recommended ;) . Take the battery out as usual. Then take the cover off behind the battery, this is what you have to do to replace the memory. Then take off a bunch of screws on the bottom and side and disconnect the keyboard ribbon cable. A small piece of plastic came off and I was flipping out but it’s normal apparently. After taking the keyboard off, you’ll see the hard drive in the lower left hand corner.

There’s four screws holding the drive in. You have to move the ribbon cables (see the guide) and move some thermal tape around. I took off six screws off the hard drive itself which isn’t neccessary (oops, hope I didn’t break the seal, ah, it’s dead anyway). Then just take the ATA adapter off the old drive and put it on the new drive (I bent some pins doing this).

A big tip: I placed the screws in groups on a table in order of when they came out. Keyboard screws, memory cover screws; groupings like that. Putting the screws back in was much easier this way when you work backwards.

So then I booted it up and the OSX install DVD saw the new drive. That’s the test for happiness. Things run a little bit snappier. It’s not some shiney new Macbook but it’s not a $3000 fix either, it was $104.

This is a widget off Microsoft’s gadget site. It really has no point and kind of meanders to life as an ironic creative sophomoric attempt. All these community sites deteriorate into a cesspool just as the gadget site is starting to. Eventually either moderators and quality content silence the squeaky wheels or the squeaky wheels start hitting the Top50 pages. If the Top50 sucks, then the population of the community sucks at which point complete suckage is achieved.

“Pop some bubbles” it says. I assume that when you click on a bubble, it plays a sound. I really wonder if the bubble animates or “pops” but honestly I don’t want to support their efforts in a HTTP download count increment. Maybe HTTP download count excrement.

Apple’s site is conversely filled with slightly higher quality content but it’s had more time to do so. With the greater amount of content, Apple can pick (or just have) a better Top50. However, there are some real stinkers in there. There’s a bunch of useless toys as well as countless website plugs.

All in all, it’s the same as Vista. 80% polish, better than the last release.

Check out that screenshot above. It’s a Nvidia tech demo. My new 8800gts video card still has lots to test and tweak still. Not really a smart buy on my part. DX10 is nowhere around except demos and even the runtime is married to Vista (ahem $399). I’d say that the above picture might impart some static benediction for my reckless consumerism even when stricken stupid by a massively-multiplayer-northern-virginia-mortage-game (MMNVMG).

Oh right, stricken stupid.

Brak. Grawk. Meat. Grok, grok. Meat good. Grrrr. Mongo think gooch shading pretty played out these days. Brak.

UPDATE: Ran into this little gem. It’s off windowsultimate.com where they say I can download a wallpaper just like the retail box that is “displayed on my mantel”. I’m not impressed by the fake blog, as arstechnica has already covered, it’s a sad attempt to justify the $399 price tag maybe?

An Ultimate-centric wallpaper showing off the “strands.” Just like the ones you see on the Ultimate box you have displayed on your mantel, and that grace the front page of this website. 30″ widescreen edition (2560×1600 pixels)