by Matt | Oct 27, 2008 | Culture, Tech
The U-Verse install just wrapped up and I have to say I’m fairly impressed. The techs showed up at 10am, ran a whole new line from the pole, did 3 wall drops and a couple new outlets and wrapped it up before 3pm. Everything seems to be working perfectly. TV’s and the DVR took under 10 minutes to get up and running. The internet connection was soon after. I just ran a bunch of speed tests and I’m getting a completely steady and rock solid 9.5-10mbps down 1.3-1.5 up. Crazy.
So, now that the tech has left, I’ve gotten my box of Cat-5 out of the closet and I’m going to attempt my own wall drop so I can have a direct connection from the modem to the Xbox. Wish me luck!
Matt out
by Matt | Aug 12, 2008 | Games, Personal, Tech
I rarely extol the virtues of giant computer companies, except perhaps, when they give out delicious candy for free in the way nVidia has. Being a supporter of their brand of graphics cards over their competitor, ATI, when I built my last PC I opted for the then top of the line GeForce 8800 GTS 512. Time passes and nVidia buys physics card maker Ageia and their line of PhysX products. That was nice, I assumed that in the next generation we’d see integrated GPUs and PhysX chips working together. Apparently, all PhysX chips are are regular old GPUs with drivers meant to support physics rendering. Why? Because nVidia, through a driver update, just added PhysX features and support to their already existing line of cards. If you own a 8000, 9000 or new GTX 200 series card, you’ve already got the capability of having really cool physics acceleration.
nVidia released a whole host of stuff which you can find here. They’re calling it their “Force Within” pack. We get a new Forceware driver (v177.83) plus a couple game demos, fluid physics tech demos, the UT3 physics upgrade pack and a full game called Warmonger.
Like I said, I’m not one to usually heap praise on big companies, but this is pretty cool. nVidia said they were going to fully support PhysX, the gaming community and more and it seems like they’ve actually delivered.
So, if you’ve got a graphics card from the past two years, check it out. Just thought I’d pass it on.
Matt out.
by Matt | Jul 31, 2008 | Personal, Tech, Work
It’s the middle of the summer and somehow in my tiny little air conditioned office, it’s friggin Christmas! I just got my order of photo equipment from B&H that I added into my departments budget on my arival. Two new lenses, the extender/battery grip for the camera, a portable flash unti, a bunch of smaller things like cables and batteries and adapters. I’m excited! And this is just the first batch. The rest, including an entire studio setup (lights, stands, etc) will be here in about a week. Huzah!
by Matt | Jul 14, 2008 | Tech
For nearly 3 months now I’ve been sans cell phone. I’ve actually been torn between enjoying being completely “off the grid” and being able to call people in a pinch. Well, it couldn’t last forever and now with my wife’s AT&T contract expired, we’re free to get away from the great devil phone company and get us both phones at a company that doesn’t suck the souls out of it’s customers.
That would be T-mobile. Sure, they’re not 100% perfect, but I’ve never dropped a call in the Houston area on a T-mobile phone. AT&T on the other hand, drops calls for my wife nearly every day.
Now my biggest hurdle is the phone itself. It seems that, following a complete removal from the T-mobile website and store fronts, my phone of choice, the Motorola KRZR K1, is either discontinued or being replaced with something else. I’m actually kind of upset about this. It was the perfect phone. It was the single most hackable piece of technology I had ever used up until recently when I got my DS. It was great. You could put just about any java game or app on there, load it up with MP3s as ring tones, all sorts of stuff, all with minimal effort. I’ll be very disappointed if there’s no equivalent to replace it.
That brings me to the lack of suitable other choices. There’s really only three that I’d consider in my price range. From Motorola, the W490 and the ROKR and the Samsung Katalyst. I used to really like Nokia phones, but the Nokia selection that’s available to T-mobile is really kinda weak. The Nokia 6263 is really the only thing I’d consider from that camp, and that’s more of a last resort sort of option. Actually, so is the Katalyst. Crackberries are right out. Not even going down that road.
That leaves me with a phone that’s a step below the phone I want, or essentially the same phone only in a form factor I don’t like. Awesome choices huh?
Then of course, there’s stories like this here and here. 16 new phones for T-Mobile coming in July/August. Crap. Now what do I do? Wait another month? Granted, nearly half of the announced new phones are Nokia and most of those are “budget” phones that will probably replace the current “free” phones that come with new plans, but still. Point is that new phones are landing this month and I’d be pretty pissed if I got a phone tomorrow only to find out that it’s discontinued and replaced with something else by Friday.
I hate phones. Can’t we just go back to parchment paper and carrier pigeons?
by Matt | Jan 11, 2008 | Tech
The install/build went fine last night. I had a little trouble with the hard drives but other than that it was smooth sailing. The PSU swap went easier than I thought it would. Actually I think it worked out for the better. I had my doubts that I even needed a bigger power supply, my 500w should have been enough, but the new one I bought has 3 seperate 12v rails and much better cable sleeving than my previous unit. I was actually able to hide/flatten nearly all my cables around and behind things for a pretty clean look. I also picked up some extra long SATA cables for that very reason. Nothing is “hanging down” across the middle of the case, which is nice for a change. So, the PSU was easy, the DVD drive was easy. Even the video card was easy. When I got to the hard drives I had a little trouble and it was completely my own fault for not thinking about it. I left my primary (OS) drive and simply upgraded my storage drive. Problem was that I upgraded to an SATA storage drive, so it was on a completely seperate chain. The old IDE hard drive still had it’s jumper set to Master (if slave is present). I forgot about the “if slave is present” part and it took me about a half an hour before it dawned on me just to remove the damn jumper. After that she fired up like a champ.
The new video card more than tripled my AquaMark and 3DMark scores. I went from 34,000-something in AquaMark to an impressive 124,000. In 3DMark, which is probably a better indicator, I went from 1500 to 12,000. That’s a huge jump.
It’s a beast, it truely is. I’ve never owned a giant, double slot video card before, and this thing takes my breath away. I gave the CoD4 demo a try at 1600×1280, full settings, and it never dropped below 60fps. Now I’ve got to get my hands on a game or two to really give it a run for it’s money. That, and go back and play some older games at the resolutions they were meant to be played at. HL2 at 2048 x whatever it is.
by Matt | Jan 4, 2008 | Tech
I’ve done it. I’ve gone ahead and ordered my new and final (for this build) computer components. Living with a “temporary” value graphics card for the past few months has taught me the importance of graphical horse power these days. Before you could get away with simply lowering your resolution a little, or turning off anti-aliasing or something. Not any more. CPU and memory aren’t a tenth of the importance that they were 5 years ago. Now, processors have flattened out a little and graphics are more important than ever. Hopefully my new beast will be able to handle whatever I throw at it. Here’s a run down of the final specs. New items I just purchased are in red.
- Antec SoHo file server case with custom paintjob
- SeaSonic s12 650W PSU
- Gigabyte S-series (MA790FX) motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+
- 3Gb of Patriot Extreme DDR2 PC6400 memory
- BFG Geforce 8800GTS OC (92nm) 512mb (linky)
- Western Digital 500gb HD
- Samsung 20x DVD burner (sata)
- Plextor 20x DVD burner (ide)
- Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS
- Vantec Nexstar external enclosure (for old HD)
Let the gaming begin!
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