The log of the gamer

Strange thing just happened. I have installed Win XP over Win 7, which caused boot menu to corrupt - I could boot only XP’s, so after a moment of googling I’ve found EasyBCD - great and simple boot manager. Using it I restored Vista bootloader on the primary partition of first HDD, rebooted and the screen went black.

WTF, I thought for a moment BIOS had died again (remember my problems two months ago?) but then the computer boots, the HDD LED blinks vividly, so it’s running with no video. Then I thought ‘VGA dead’ with a smile - I would replace the crappy GF8500GE with something newer (HD4770/4830/4850 or GF9600GT/9800GT/GTS250), even started looking for warranty card. I even digged out some old S3 Virge PCI VGA which proved some of my theories - using it I saw the computer booting (bootloader was installed correctly), but then came the idea ‘what if I switch PCI-Express slots’.

Damn I hate those moments of truth.

Anyway, I put the 8500 in second PCI-Express slots, and it worked! Seems like the first (PCIEx16) slot went down to hell, so I quickly changed the configuration of PCIE slots from 16/2 to 8/8 (damn you DFI for those jumpers), reseated the VGA in the second slot and off we go.

Good thing is that I realized this could be the cause - I would spend money but the problem will be there still.

Bad thing is that I don’t know why and how this could be reverted.

After three years of service and five or six removals it’s high time to change the house for my computer. I have chosen Sunbeam Freezing Storm for Core Fan technology and a window.

The case is very stylish, of course it’s black. It comes with all the accessories needed to mount your equipment inside. There are five 5,25″ bays, two (or maybe three - can’t really tell right now) 3,5″ ones, and three slots for mounting hard drives. There are also three 120mm fans included - one for the back of the case and two for Core Fan stuff (it’s just a bar in the middle of the case which allows you to have good air flow directed at your mobo).

I have disassembled my water cooling set and rebuilt it using new case. It’s superb, however, I still need little fixing - the hose coming into the case through PCI slot is squeezed - the temps are a little high due to blocked flow. I should have some time now - I get up before six every day, which gives me two hours before going to work.
BTW the case is a great birthday gift

In my previous post, I described an unlucky situation when BIOS in my computer got corrupted. I’ve been waiting to fix it for two days, when I finally hooked up with a friend of mine, who still happens to have computer with working floppy drive. Fine, I thought, I will do it quick and come clean out of this mess.

Not so fast. First it turned out that his computer is stored somewhere in the basement, so we had to go and pull out of the storage room. Then it appeared that the computer was dead, so we grabbed another one from the storage. This one booted fine, but after entering Windows it became clear that default account has only guest privileges and is unable to detect and install my flash drive I brought with. Damn the machine, we said, and went looking for a nice student in nearby dormitory who owns working computer and floppy drive.

Then this dude happened. First year postgraduate in chemistry, so I thought, it’d be real quick now. So I sat in front of monitor, pull the flash drive out of the pocket, but still something seems strange. Yeah, that’s fucking ubuntu at the desktop. Fortunately, he appeared to use Windows virtual machine due to his fondness of Office 2007, so after 10 minutes of installing floppy drive module and mounting disks I got it working. It took me an hour to make three bootable floppies with three versions of DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D BIOS.

Then I’m back home, put the floppy into the drive and damn! It won’t flash! It just hangs after reading BIOS image from the floppy. I thought floppy was corrupt, but no, two others acted the same. What the hell, I thought, and started to work with some strange runtime parameters for awdflash. Finally I’ve found the combination of awdflash /py/sn/cc/cd/qi/f to be working (actually /qi was the one to do miracles), but the nightmare’s not over. It’s time to assemble to machine again, what is the most annoying of all. Got still a leak in water cooling to catch, anyway.

The outcome is easy - never flash with overclocked/untested/unstable settings.

I came to an idead - DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D with 510-1 BIOS now is not the best of ideas, especially while using X2 processor. So I tried to flash to newer one, 3/29/06.

I used WinFlash as usual. While flashing the progress indicator stopped at 27% during programming flash memory and bang! computer rebooted. What’s left was:

Award BootBlock 1.0

Checking drive A:

INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I don’t have a damn floppy with system and BIOS to flash!

I just got a pair of TCCD-based G.Skill 4400LE sticks. The set contains two 512 MB sticks built upon 437 TCCD chips on Brainpower PCB. The purpose was simple - get another 1 GB of RAM, and have total of 2 gigs running in my rig.

Didn’t have time to test it thoroughly yet. Right now they’re running @255 6-3-3-2,5 with command rate of 2T, together with mentioned earlier 4800LA’s. I may find some time the other day to see what maximum they can reach.

I almost forgot - they were dirt-cheap, paid 98 PLN (just over 20 euros) for it. Quality memory for a superb price.

That’s my first bench of Vantage - never had Vista before, so once Win7 got onboard, I decided to toy with it for a while. My hardware sucks, I know, but there are more important things to be done than buying new PSU and VGA

Anyhow, enjoy the pure power of GeForce 8500 GT run without any tweaks, so I will re-run after upgrade to 2 GB

Time to do something serious. I’ve decided to buy some dry ice in mid January, after dealing with my MSc. Components to be tested are:

• Athlon 64 X2 (Toledo core)
• Duron 800
• some Socket 370 stuff

I guess 10 kilos of dry ice will be more than sufficient for initial run. Maybe I’ll find some more interesting items to play with.

I think it’s quite natural with current rate of introduction of new hardware, that people do play computer games without meeting recommended specifications. The equipment chages so rapidly and it seems that only game designers follow the trend, the effect is that the requirements are going sky-high without any substantial change for us, the players. I guess it’s got also something to do with quality of programming - today there’s a lot more resources to use than 5 or 10 years ago, when designers struggled to use their limited space.

Anyway, I wasn’t about to get deeper into the philosopical aspect while beginning the post, so never mind this digression. The reason is that I recall playing so many games on a hardware below even minimum specs, so it became bothering for me some time ago, what more will it need for me to get wise and buy a console for gaming. Let’s face it - I’ve had some experience with it:

• Quake on 486/66 with 8 MB RAM - switching to 320×200 VESA and making the game window smallest possible did trick - I’ve completed the whole game with frame rate below 15 fps; I even did some mapmaking with this computer
• The same computer ran (after upgrading to 16 MB RAM) Fallout and Starcraft - the latter did OK, unless there was a large movement on the screen, while the former was disastrous in the cities
• Upgrade to Pentium 60 let me finish both games, but then I discovered Fallout 2 and Quake 2 - Fallout 2 was slow, took a long time loading, but was playable, Quake 2 was a total mess
• Pentium MMX 166 was tested with Soldier of Fortune (had 64 MB of RAM and Voodoo2) - barely playable, sniping was impossible, the same with Quake 3 and System Shock 2
• Got myself famous Celeron 300 that got overclocked to 450 MHz - tried to play Warcraft 3 with GeForce 2 MX (it was just about the minimum requirements) but even with minimum details it was too much of a slideshow
• Then I spent a lot of time tinkering with my PC, so the next thing was World In Conflict on Athlon64 X2, 1 GB, GF 8500 - no go, same as Crysis

On the other hand, I was pleased by some of findings like playing Oblivion on Athlon XP@2,4Ghz, 512 MB, Radeon 9500 with high details in 800×600 resolution (I thought it will not even launch) or recent Fallout 3 on forementioned A64 X2 in 1024×768 High. This shows that the recommendations provided by game manufacturers are at least inconclusive and should be validated on your own.

Well, all overclockers know motherboard maker AsRock. It’s famous for its’ hybrid designed mobos:

• Socket 754 with an option to insert add-in card to support Socket 939,
• Socket 775 with support of both DDR/DDR2 and AGP/PCI-Express,
• Socket 775 with support of DDR2 and DDR3.

Some of those cases aren’t really unusual (check for instance Asus P5KC/P5QC), however, this led me to wonder whether it would be possible to combine DDR1 and DDR3  or maybe even DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 on one motherboard. Apart from clear issue of limited space it would be interesting if it’s possible to design such chipset or memory controller and what would be the difference in performance between those two. As we all know, there isn’t much difference between DDR and DDR2, as it has been checked in cases of 939- and AM2-based Athlon 64 systems, and with mentioned AsRocks with Intel’s E6×00 CPUs.

The question remains open and I don’t see if it is going to be verified in any way other to comparing DDR to DDR2, then DDR2 to DDR3 and adjusting the results somehow.