Creative X-FI Fatal1ty Platinum Upgrade

This is my first non-onboard sound system in a long time and I decided to buy something nice to power my z5500 speakers. The difference is noticable, sound can go much louder and is clearer than before. So I couldn't ask for more really. $285 AU, UMart.


(above) Yummy, lots of gold connectors and black. Looks quite classy. I'm sure we can put a copper slug where that heatsink and get some LN2 onto this baby ASAP! (lolz)


(above) The front IO panel looks very nice and has everthing you need. And obviously the IR port for the remote.



(above) The front IO panel is connected by something that looks like an IDE cable. I got pissed off when I saw that ugly bastard, I thought I had gotten rid of those damn cables finally when I upgraded my DVDRW to a S2 drive. Oh well, it's long and doesn't follow the same annoying path an IDE cable would so it isn't that bad! It also requires a floppy style power cable to power it, which is easy as to do. It comes with a Molex to Floppy adapter as well.


(above) The remote, it works, 'nuff said.

(above) And finally the IO Drive resting in my PC, the flash really forces the matte black and glossy black inconsistancy to show, it looks great under normal lighting conditions.

I will add some benchmarks with the SC added tomorrow, but I expect a slight drop in my score.

Crysis Trailer & Sound Fix

So undoubtably you've got Crysis and you also probably find those 5 trailers you watch at the start exceedingly frustrating to watch, made worse by the fact that sometimes you cant skip them for some reason. The solution to this is extremely simple, I worked this out myself. Goto:

C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis\Game\Localized\Video\


And rename all the .SFD files to .sfd.bak. That way if you want to restore them at a later date or patch you can! I renamed all the Trailers, the Background movie that plays in the menu, 75MB! And the first video you are forced to watch everytime you start a new game.

Finally to stop that annoying sound loop that occurs in game, s_soundenable = 0 then s_soundenable = 1, to reset the games sound in console (~). This will have to do until the patch comes out.

Enjoy!

2x Raptor X150G Raid 0 Upgrade

I picked up my 2 Raptro X150G drives today, and Windows Vista. $879 AU from umart.


(above) Nothing exciting to look at until you peel off the sealed anti-static bags.


(above) The raptor drives simply come in a little pouch with a card that tells you to not expose the HDD to direct sunlight and not press on the lens cover, i'll try to remember that.


(above) The drives look frankly awesome up close.


(above) Here is a shot of my PC as it stands. It's very messy because I never bother to hide cables as things are always being taken out and put in, it's too much work. I run my PC with the side door off as well becuase it drops my system temp by 4-5C.


(above) Here are the 2 new raptors in the HDD cage wiring all ready to go. My plan of attack is to install the drives, bench one of them, install Vista, benchmarks, backup my original 320GB drive, format the 320GB drive and finally copy all the data off my 80GB drive and get rid of it.


(above) Raptors in the Striker Extreme BIOS.


(above) I also benchmarked my old HDD before I switched over.



(above) Here is a single Raptor drive after being formatted. What I expected pretty much. Faster than both my current drives.


(above) And finally the Raid 0 setup in all its glory. The Raid 0 setup was extremely easy to do. I am using a 32KB stripe size.

(above) And of course an updated 3dMark06 score. 50 marks higher, not that I was expecting an increase.

These should last I feel until a Desktop ready SSD is available.

Preview of my first TF2 fun map

I'm a huge fan of Half-Life, HL2, EP1 & 2, TFC, TF2, CS, CS:S... The list goes on! I've made a few maps for CS and CS:S in the past, most played at the moment being blood_assault in CS:S. I only ever made one map for CS:S and it ended up being fairly popular which is nice. Anyway the theme for all my mapping is, keep it simple and make it fun. I don't really plan much I just whack something together and start playing. Anyway here is a small preview of cp_choke_fun. It's based around the last part of dustbowl, except there is more choke. Single sided CP maps are the most fun!

Brief Hardware Review

So first on the agenda is the current hardware I am running, I have a general feeling that I am looking to replace everything over the next few months. A brief look at my system:

Hardware Item	What I have	Modified?	Keep it?
Case	Antec p180b	No	No
PSU	Thermaltake Tough Power 750W	No	No
Motherboard	ASUS Striker Extreme 680i	O/C'd	No
CPU	Intel E6600	O/C'd	No
HSF	Thermalright Ultra-120 w/ 120mm fan	No	Yes
Thermal Paste	Arctic Silver 5	N/A	Yes
RAM	Corsair DDR2 6400 XMS2 2x1GB	No	No
Video card	MSI Geforce 8800GTX	No	For now
Primary monitor	Benq FP222W 22" Widescreen LCD	N/A	To become Secondary
Secondary monitor	Samsung 172x 17" LCD	N/A	No
Sound card	Motherboards on-board	N/A	No
Speakers	Logitech Z-5500 THX	N/A	Yes
Headphones	Sennheiser HD 555	N/A	Yes
Primary HDD	Seagate SATA2 NCQ 320GB ST332062 0AS	No	To become secondary
Secondary HDD	Segate ATA ST380011A 80GB	No	No
CD/DVD	Pioneer DVD-RW DL DVR-212 SATA2	No	No
Mouse	Logitech MX Revolution	N/A	Yes
Keyboard	A Logitech multimedia keyboard	No	No

So all in all not a bad system. I am having some significant benching performance problems, I believe this is due to a poor motherboard, the fact that I am running Vista and because it currently is pirated I am unable to install the motherboard drivers, whether this has an impact on performance or not I will soon find out, as I am purchasing a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit OEM. See below for first 3dmark06 1.1.0 benchmark.

This is essentially what I will base my benchmarks on from this point forward. It's fairly obvious what is letting my system down so I will just move on.

I have decided that my Antec p180b is no longer required. It is essentially too small, it does not comfortably fit an 8800GTX SLI system with ease, it fits - just, I daresay any case on the market will not meet my requirements. I have been playing with a permanent hardware-on-bench/laboratory style setup where I do not use a case at all and gives me the freedom to switch hardware with the greatest ease and run extreme cooling events without having to disassemble my PC, a case on hand wouldn't hurt though. I did eye the CoolerMaster Stacker 830 Nvidia Edition as it is a simply awesome looking case, see below.

I will talk in much greater detail soon about my planned setup, I think it will end up being very cool and absolutely unique.

My PSU, the Thermaltake Tough Power 750W is a joke of a PSU, its the kind of PSU people would laugh about around a watercooler or forum, it's no mystery why I would omit my PSU on my OCAU sig. I originally purchased 11 months ago a Silverstone 850W PSU however it was DOA and this was just as December/New Years rolled around and of course RMA/Warranties close down until 15th of January where I purchased it, so I needed a stop gap and only had enough money for the Tough Power. I ended up not bothering to RMA the PSU because I gave up after my system really struggled overclocking. I threw the Silverstone in the bin a few days ago. My planned replacement is the Tagan ITZ 1300W PSU. It is highly recommended and for a reason.

It's spec'ed fairly well and it's put together nicely to, it does lack a feature I rate highly which is modular cabling but the performance of this PSU puts me in a position to not complain about a minor annoyance, if you look below you will see how it faired over at hi-techreviews.com. I have never seen such on the mark voltage readings before, they don't falter under stress either.



It's fairly clear that the Tagan is a winner for its performance and capability, it has the cables and power to run the next DX10.1 cards in SLI from Nvidia which is exactly what I want.


The ASUS Striker Extreme is a failure of a motherboard, I am definitely looking forward to binning this. It's luxury features in the end did not cut it, it's frankly still poor even with the latest 1305 BIOS revision. I am not looking to replace this right now as my next CPU/Motherboard/RAM purchase will be a shift to next gen tech, PCIEx2 and DDR3. There is not yet a standout motherboard to chose from, however if I were to pick a new motherboard it would absolutely be the X38.

My current CPU once a workhorse is now a generation old, well and truly taken over by its stronger Quad Core brothers. QX9770 is what I am getting Jan 08, it is the best. I had up until recently been running my E6600 @ 3.4GHz but my PC has started to lockup/reboot so I just put it back to 3.15GHz it's not worth the effort of attempting to push my current system harder. The E6600 was a great CPU though. My current CPU and future CPUs that are going to be air cooled, will be done so by my Thermalright Ultra-120 HSF. It is the best air cooling device around. I envisage keeping this until I switch to water cooling. "I use Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste at every opportunity as this is a no-brainer." This is the sentance I had typed up before I thought I should actually have a look around for benchmarks of the latest and greatest, it now seems that AS5 is second now to Tuniq TX-2 and by a margin I would consider significant enough to purchase some new thermal paste.

My Corsair 6400 XMS2 RAM is dog food when compared to the godlike Micron D9 RAM that is going around at the moment, frequencies as high as 1200MHz with low timings. An upgrade to good DDR2 memory would boost my system performance a fair bit but again due to the soon to be released DDR3 memory - it is not worth it. There are a lot of people that are saying that DDR3 will be slower initially due to greatly relaxed timings, I do not believe this will be the case. DDR3 brings a fair amount of new technology and there are snippets of very fast DDR3 floating around already. DDR3 has a Prefetch Buffer of 8bits instead of DDR2s 4bits, runs at a lower voltage 1.5v instead of 1.8v and it's maximum possible density per module is up to 16GB!

As you can clearly see, 1333MHz with -very- relaxed timings at 9-9-9-24. This is just the first batch of IC's to come out though so we are all expecting great things. DDR3 will apparently be around until 2010-2012. Most exciting is the potential for massive amounts of RAM and the final shift to 64bit systems. I'm still avoiding it as the 64bit environment is just to unstable. With the release of SP1 for Windows Vista, 4GB of RAM will definitely last until the user base for Vista 64bit and XP64 is much bigger and the bugs have finally been ironed out.

My Nvidia 8800GTX is second to the 8800 Ultra cards that are currently out a single 8800GTX is not really a top of the line solution, SLI is where it is at. Not worth upgrading the 8800GTX at the moment because with a potential release of the 9800GTX early next year I think it is worth holding out and saving for its release. Maybe even going for 3-way SLI. Or ATI's 4 card crossfire. The graphics card market is giving me a headache at the moment just thinking about the money required to purchase 3x 8800Ultras. It will be interesting to see if the 780i brings anything to the table.

I have decided to purchase a Samsung 275T a 27" wide screen LCD is what I want to replace my current primary 22" with. Relegating my 22" to secondary display.

I am purchasing tomorrow 2x Raptor X150g drives to become my OS drive in Raid 0 configuration. I plan on keeping these until SSD drives are fast and available. I will also be adding a few TB drives to my system for some roomy storage.

My DVD-RW drive is playing up a bit in terms of the tray not closing when I press the button it is also additionally no longer the fastest, so I will be looking at a Sata2 20x drive. Also a BR or HD drive/wr drive would be nice, wait and see for now.

And finally I want to get a nice stylish keyboard that doesn't look so retarded, all the basic multimedia keyboards are shaped weird and do not have any sharp style which is what I want. I don't want gimmicks I want style, sometimes form is better than function.

So essentially I will systematically replace what needs to be replaced with the best and keep track of my 3dmark06 scores along with others.

First

Welcome to my blog, how very web 2.0 of us ~

I've started this to showcase various experiences with top end hardware.

My hardware generally now has a 6-12 month life before it's replaced and my blog is themed around this, buy the best, push it to breaking point, then throw it in the bin.

First we set the stage, where I have come from to arrive here and then where I am going.

I got into the Hardware scene in a big way by around the time I was 14-15. I've done only 3 major case mods, the second getting published in Atomic magazine and the later 2 (1, 2) can be found online at the OCAU database (Oh yeah, I am Australian). I also wrote a beginners guide to overclocking when I was 15 and it still stands at OCAU. It's a little embarrassing how poorly my article is written and structured, but I had a good feel for what I was doing, and hey that was like 5 years ago.

I did one thing I was particularly proud of and that was building my own watercooling system. I machined/milled my own CPU waterblock which I designed and fabricated by myself entirely.

It cost $25 to make. I spent more on the lovely Eheim laboratory silicon tubing. Nothing beats the hours I spent battling to modify the Heto 2800 pump (Less than $30!) to stop it from leaking. I of course prevailed and everything worked. One of the greatest senses of accomplishments I have ever felt.

I had my fair share of problems, the coolant became ridden with algae as I had made the mistake of forgetting to put something to stop it - radiator coolant does not do this just prevents the corrosion you get from mixing gear that has Copper and Aluminum. Algae loves warm water. I remember watching the motherboard PCB bend as I tightened the stainless steel bolts clamping waterblock onto the CPU, the bend was huge. Nobody was using spring based mounting bolts then, it took a few mounts until it was nice and flat. Nothing beats the time when I had gotten up from my desk and all of a sudden the PC started to tip over and fall off in my haste to save it I accidentally grabbed some of the piping. Hearing a cracking sound and then the powering down sound of my monstrous 120mm Sunnon fans was disturbing, even more disturbing was the puddle of water at the bottom of the case that had appeared. What truly shocked me was that I didn't kill it, 20kg of dead weight supported briefly through a motherboards CPU socked, power loss and loose water and it still boots up first go. The Epox 8RDA+ was eventually retired after the caps started leaking.

If we go further back to before I had the watercooling setup I was one of the early 8RDA+ adopters to stick some lovely chopped up blue Thermaltake heatsinks onto the Mosfets. It was exciting back then, since additional cooling on the motherboard for anything other than the Northbridge and maybe Southbridge was unusual. Pictured here you can also see my (still favorite) SLK-800 heatsink, if only they were still this big.

Around this time I retired my AMD Duron 900 the first CPU I purchased with my own money. I ravaged the shit out of that CPU. Constant overclocking and tweaking. Constant adjustments to the heatsink. Constantly moving the computer around. All this activity took its tool on my 900. Notice how all the edges around the CPU core are completely chipped away? It still worked. I have never seen any CPU with that much damage still work, I've seen hairline cracks and tiny notches on the core and they won't boot, this thing was still running overclocked fine!

So that's what I was doing in my youth, I am returning to a very interesting time in my life, this time I am going to experiment much more, and I have a lot more money to spend. In maybe 6 months to 12 months time I want to be overclocking with Liquid Nitrogen, DICE and have a go at Vapor Phase Change cooling. I also want to further develop my metal working, soldering skills and Autocad design. Early on you can expect a more social and relaxed discussion as I move to get back into the front lines of performance computing.


Lots of benchmarks, theory and real world chaos to come!