Hot! Hot! Hot!

Right now it’s no secret that the hottest video card on the market is the ATI Radeon X4850. Now this isn’t the fatest or best performance card on the market, but it is by far the best performing card for under $200. If you want high end go with this cards big brother, the X4870 or if you have a lot to spend, the X4870 X2.

I am already planning my next upgrade to be to the X4850 from my X3870. Word on the street is that the X4850 runs circles around the Nividia 8800 series and even the 9800 series. The closest Nvidia card performance wise will run you around $350 $400-$500 compared to $180 Average for an X4850. Nvidia does make the hot to trot 260 and 280 chipset cards but price comparison wise for what you get ATI is your man of the hour.

I know ATI hasn’t been up to par the last couple years or so but they are coming back hard and fighting for us little guys with the smaller budgets. Thanks ATI for finally rewarding our loyal dedication to your products by producing even greater products that we can actually afford. If you’re in the market for a video card give ATI a second look.

Craigslist

For those of you that haven’t heard about it yet… wake up. Craigslist is like sliced bread in terms of greatest things ever. Local newspapers hate it, but for the rest of us it’s pretty great.

Craigslist is basically an online free to use classified ad service. On Craigslist you can find anything from a toaster for $5 to a prostitute for $300. That’s actually one of the detractors of Craigslist. For some reason they felt obligated to offer an erotic services section in addition to their dating classifieds.

The site also offers up some wonderful entertainment value. If you’re ever bored you should stop by and browse the ads. Some of them are very colorfully written while others leave you to wonder, what in the world are they thinking? There is even a best of section where the funniest posts can be viewed. My wife and I have spent hours digging through this section laughing our asses off and some of the hilarity posted.

So tonight’s is a simple post. If you haven’t seen it, head on over to www.craigslist.com and select the city nearest you. You might find that thing that you have been looking for. Or you might just find something that you didn’t know you wanted. If you’re not looking for STD’s and possible jailtime, I’d highly recommend avoiding the Erotic Services section.

Also on a side note I might add that I myself have been known to post a few parts for sale on our local craigslist. So far I’ve sold a laptop, an AMD processor, 2GB of ram, and a video card at various times. I usually let them go cheap to get rid of them and the people buying them have all been local and have come right to my place to pick them up. It saves on shipping and allows you to get some quick cash in your pocket. Thank you Craig of Craigslist. Genius idea.

How fast is too fast?

Apparently anything faster than 2.8GHz. I have to say I am a little disappointed. Not too much but some. I was really hoping to squeeze atleast 3.0GHz out of my Black Box Edition 5000+. Unfortunately despite appearing stable during two excruciating stability tests, one including running Crysis timedemo’s on extremely high settings (slow but puts the system through a good workout) I am unable to keep it stable beyond 2.8GHz.

It’s really deceiving because I can get it to POST and all the way into Windows clocked up to 3.2GHz by cranking my voltage up to 1.5v. It even ran all the way through about 30 minutes of Crysis time demo’s in various settings and ran through 3DMark 2006. I was monitoring the temperature the entire time and it never went about 60 degrees C when the max for this chip is supposed to be around 70 degrees C. But alas, about 20 minutes into a good round of Supreme Commander, just when the fight is starting to really heat up, the game crashes.

I know what you’re thinking, maybe it’s the game. Well I thought that too so to test it out I clocked myself back down to 3.0GHz and turned the voltage down a touch since I could get it to run 3DMark and Crysis at only 1.45v. I Fired up Supreme Commander and sure enough, 20 minutes in almost on the mark it crashed back to the desktop. That really had me asking myself “What the heck is going on here?” So I had to test it and find out.

So I dropped back to stock voltage and set my clock to 2.8, a mere 200MHz overclock, the same speed I was running at for our LAN party we had over at GBLAN on saturday. I launched SUPCOM once more and low and behold, it ran for an hour and a half straight. Long enough for me to get my ass handed to me three times by an adaptive AI on a land map. Son of a bitch. This chip just isn’t stable past 2.8GHz. So much for my goal.

I really can’t feel to badly about this. The thing with “overclockable” processors is that they are usually higher end processors that failed to meet a specific goal in terms of speed. If it had met that goal, it would’ve been sold as that speed of processor. So instead they find a good baseline speed that all of these failure chips can run at easily. In this case, 2.6GHz or stock 5000+ x2 speeds. So the overclockability is in the fact that this chip might run stable somewhere between the actual intended speed (probably 3.0GHz in my case) and the stock speed. Sometimes you get lucky and get one that was supposed to run at 3.2GHz and sometimes you’re me and get one that apparently couldn’t even handle 3.0GHz.

Even with a 200MHz overclock with only having to change my multiplier and not have my voltage turned it is still better than what I paid for. Also it’s a lot safer than having my voltage cranked way up. Heat is usually the only concern when it comes to that but you never know. So all in all, I’m not really an unhappy camper, just slightly disappointed. Otherwise this chip is screaming fast and has netted me some pretty fair improvements over my previous processor and platform. Results below.

Super Pi Mod;

1MB  Previous (X2 4400): 40.297 seconds   Current: 31 seconds

2MB Previous: 1 min 33.250 seconds          Current: 1 min 11 seconds

Also my 3DMark06 basic score rose from 8072 points on the old platform to approximately 9500 points with the new. So not a bad net gain in total. I’m pretty happy with my upgrades. I’m even more happy with how little I spent on them.

Dual Cores all around!

So my upgrades arrived just on time Thursday. I was completely geeked out. I spent hours carefully installing my new gear, taking my time, readjusting everything from my power cabling to where my hard drives were mounted to accomidate my new board. Finally around 11 I had complete success, everything was in, cabled up, and ready to go… or so I thought.

I’m pretty sure I jinxed myself by boxing it up before actually testing it. When overhauling your PC you should always tested it before putting your case back together should you need to make any adjustments. As sweet as that gigabyte board is for all the features it has included on it (Solid Caps, 6 Sata Ports, Phenom capable) it gave me a pretty big scare. First attempt to turn it on, no post. No post, no post, and finally no post. F%#@! Did I do something wrong? If it’s a bad board I’m going to cry.

So I took everything back apart, uncabled my drives, removed all the USB connectors, basically got it down to a simple Motherboard, Video, Ram config. Still no post. Did I fry my vid card? I hope to hell not. I pulled that out and ran with the onboard. Still no post. Whew… it’s not my precious video card. So what the hell then?

Finally I thought back to all those stories I’ve heard of people who bought new motherboards to have them not post. They called tech support to find relief. What was the resolution of their problems? 9 times out of 10 it was a jumper setting. Okay, what jumpers do I have on this thing? Is one in the wrong place? There’s only one spot for a jumper and there’s no jumper there… Oh, it’s the CMOS clear jumper. Of course there is no jumper. Maybe I need to clear the CMOS. So I applied my trusty screw driver to the jumper posts and turned it on, counted to ten, shut it off.

POST! It freaking posted. Okay, set for default Bios settings. Save and reboot… NO POST!!! WTF is going on with this thing!? After many more attempts of the same and trying different settings, optimal defaults, fail safe defaults, I finally went into the bios and turned off everything. Hard Drives, integrated periphials, everything I could find with a disable feature. Save and Exit… POST! Got past POST! Updating DMI with new AMD Processor information. Whoa, did that just say it’s finally updating the system with my processor information? Is this it?

YES! I can now successfully reboot my computer without having to flash the bios. I put my video card back in and reset all the bios settings. Still POSTing! I’ve got it. It’s only 2AM by this point. I get everything put back in and start my Windows repair process after scraping together a floppy disk for my new raid drivers. Wait a second, the raid is only reconize two of my four raid drives. One from each array. Crap… It’s not reconizing the actual raids. I have to reinialize all my drives. Everything is gone. Word to the wise, back up your raids to an external hard drive when installing them onto a new raid controller. I am still without everything.

To finish that part of it, I did finally get windows loaded up on my computer. Windows XP Pro x64 installed in about 10 minutes minus user prompts which I didn’t always catch right away because I was by that point drifting off in my chair. Finally at 2:45am while downloading a bizillion Windows Updates I turned off my monitor and crashed on my bed.

The End Game. So I woke up and finished. Everything is working great. Everything is so much faster now. Windows open immediately. I can install multiple programs at the same time and they are installing faster than I can switch windows to click finish. Amazing. Worth every penny.

So I take my old board, chip, and ram out to my wife’s computer. I physically get everything installed. What’s this, it won’t reconize her Windows install. No problem, I’ll run a repair install. Now it won’t boot. Blue screen followed by an almost instant reboot. Why is everything running so slow? I’ve run this motherboard for a year and I’ve never seen it run so slow. What is going on with this now?

After close examination I discovered two of the backplates are touching the PCB causing a possible shortout. Simple fix, two screws and they’re both gone. What else do I find. Oh… I hooked up her hard drives in a different configuration than before. Oh, I still have the drive jumpered for Master. So I pulled the jumper for the default Master/Single config. Wow, there’s the speed I was used to. 1 minute long POSTs suddenly take seconds. It’s rebooting in a matter of half a minute now instead of in 5 minute intervals. Crap, I already hosed her OS. Oh well. Fresh install.

Oh no… now her monitor is flickering rapidly and won’t display anything. WTF!? I’ve never had that happen in the middle of a windows install before. Actually it was right after, when the setup was doing it’s finally reboot. This was supposed ot be our moment of truth to know if the OS install was going to take or not. Damn!

So I hooked it up to our TV which just happens to have a VGA input. Awesome, still posting, and there it is. A fresh windows load, and it’s working! So now we are underway. Now about that monitor? What am I supposed to do about that? Now a another trip to Circuit City.

I say another trip because first thing that morning, after selling some parts on our local craigslist and doing some computer work for a buddy from work, I’ve raised $90 to get my wife the new video card she needs for her new rig. When I was there the first time I had looked at their site and determined that I should get her an Nvidia 8600GT 512MB that they had on sale for $99.99 from $149.99. I got to the store to my dismay to discover that they did not have that card. Infact there wasn’t even a place for it on their shelf. Great, now what I am going to get her? I only have about $100 total.

I’m talking to the salesman about my situation when I look down at the shelf. What do I find? I find an Nvidia 9600GT 512MB on sale for $99.99 marked down from $199.99. WOW! The salesman in vain asks me if I want to order that 8600GT and get it in a week. I looked at him like he was nuts. “Um no… I think I’ll take this much better card for the same price thanks.”

So there it was, her video solution, literally 90% of the funds for it were raised in the two hours leading up to it’s purchase. Not bad for a days work. Now I gotta find her a monitor to replace her rather generic Dell 17″ FP. I go back to Circuit City mostly out of necessity due to the fact that Best Buy is closed already for the Holiday. Wonderful. What do they have? Not much. They had a 17″ WS (widescreen) for $129 open box which basically means used. Next price level, a 17″WS of another brand for $189.99. Wait a second, what’s this sitting next to it? Why it’s a 19″ WS for $199.99. Bingo. So there it is.

I bring it home, get it unboxed, use it to load the rest of her drivers, and the rest is history. We’re now both on AMD dual core processors with very powerful video cards. She can run all that she plays on High/Ultra settings, I can run most of what I play on the same. Crysis is the exception but that seems to be everyone’s exception. If it weren’t for that monitor going dead, we’d had even completed this on a minimal budget. What can you do sometimes though? Sometimes the karma of a good morning comes back and bites you in the afternoon.