Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Grand Theft Auto IV - take the slow lane!
khenry
It’s here! It’s been great fun sitting on the sidelines just watching people on forums and the media in general go mad for the game.
Producers of the film Iron Man have their excuses ready (see paragraph 7), quick to blame the game if their film doesn’t open well. Having read Iron Man 200 in school, which has been adapted as one of the plots in the movie, I would have watched the film twice even if I had bought a console and the game. Marvel also has another shot at the market with the next Hulk film in the same season, so that, coupled with the inevitable UK summer downpours will guarantee them an audience.
Given that this game has been so eagerly anticipated, who in their right mind would go to Computerandvideogames.com and play the game’s entire story mode from a walkthrough?! Are they insane? Surely no-one could be that impatient to race to the end of the story which has taken four years’ work, without taking time to enjoy it?
Someone must be, otherwise Future wouldn’t have tied up that online deal, but I’m not linking to it and getting accused of spoiling anyone’s fun. As the previous games have showed there’s still plenty to do when you complete the story mode, so take your time, disconnect from the net where you might have the game spoiled for you, and enjoy.
Even without a PC version, it’s good to have the latest in a long line of multi-million sellers arrive and more importantly, provide Rockstar with a defensible game to overshadow the pap that will be Manhunt 2. If GTA IV was landing in my place right in time for the first bank holiday weekend since Easter then I’d want the fun and the novelty to last as long as possible, even on 360 where I’d be in a race with the first fault to hit the console.
Not yet rated
Loading ...My fan club
khenry
To cut a long story short, the death of my PC’s mobo three weeks ago didn’t take any of the expansion cards or RAM with it. However, it did kill the Phong’s twin 120mm fans and that was the other reason for seemingly unstoppable overheating. Moving the parts out of a case with only 80mm coolers slowed down the buildup, but within half an hour the temps were back up again.
I was lucky to get another three weeks out of the coolers but they were clearly going downhill (though without the distinctive noise of ball bearings failing) before they just stopped spinning. They were ripped out today after failing to spin up from either the 3-pin header or conversion to Molex.
So it’s back to PC World for another pair of the fans I bought last Friday. The original set had a good innings of four straight years’ daily use. I’ve installed a spare Jeantech 120mm which I purchased in a PCW sale for a fiver (UPDATE: It was branded Jeantech, but turned out to be made by someone else.). I’ve now moved it to the rear of the case if its air shifting ability lives up to the ratings on that Italian site. The Scythe fan will now go at the front. So my sole LED cooler will still be the 80mm side panel fan.
At least there’s a practical, rather than merely visual argument for using LED fans now. You know they’re past their prime for cooling when the lights begin to fade, but in the next summer component sale when 120mm coolers drop to a fiver, I’ll definitely pick up a “standby” pair so that fan failure won’t put either machine out of action for long. I’ll also re-seat the CPU and HSF and give that a final test before I go out. If AS 5 just can’t keep the temperature down, then I’ll have to consider a final Socket A heatsink on top and another change of TIM.
UPDATE: Stuff it, I’ve had enough. Phil’s review of the Scythe Kaze family of fans (page 58 of Issue 57) was both funny and well detailed, and after everything I’ve just been through, I ordered one now. The noisiest 1900RPM version was sold out, so I’ll start with the midrange and hopefully not have to work my way up.
Not yet rated
Loading ...Case transplants
khenry
You don’t need a photograph from me when Danny Bird’s great shot shows up Cooler Master’s case in all its glory from Issue 55. Looking at the RC 330 V2 out of the box, leaving aside the more stylish front end, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Cooler Master’s and Jeantech’s cases rolled out of the same Chinese factory between Issue 10 and the present day.
Cooler Master has sliced half a centimetre from the width of the case, compared to Jeantech’s Phong. It has also “bubbled” out the grille on the case panel where the CPU baffler/air duct sits unless you’re installing a tall HSF over your CPU. If using a LED fan its hexagonal rather than circular shape will show off more light. Othewise, the RC 330 V2 shares the height and depth of the older case and also features nice looking but slightly cheap-jack, flimsy buttons and stamped-in blanking plates at the rear. Lining up the side panels for both cases show that the 80mm fan or air duct vent is in the same place, even if the Phong 1.5’s bottom right air vent on the side panel is nearer to the bottom left.
Like the Phong, the Cooler Master’s first five hard drive bays sit behind any front-mounted fan which you’d choose to install. Instead of side-mounted USB and audio/mic ports, Cooler Master chose to house them in one of the external free 3.5in bays, leaving one space if you were clinging on to your floppy drive until the bitter end, perhaps using Scan’s FDD with multiple card readers. There’s an equal number of 5.25in drive bays. You’d make a point of keeping CM’s external covers in a safe place when installing drives, though the fact that the front bezel is a large grille, discourages using more than just a DVD Burner. It’s a good touch that leaving the central two 5.25in blanking plates in place, conceals almost all the unnecessary Molex wiring from the PSU. You can still see the innards though the other gaps in the grille.
Despite being supplied with two 120mm fans in the Phong, a second large fan for the RC 330 starts from less than £2 from some online retailers. I bought Akasa coolers from PC World in the end, which brought a retail package of their own screw sets, power converters and quoted specs for noise and air pushing (1700rpm, 29.75db and 59.05 CFM for the 120mm at £9-10, and 2500RPM, 23.5db and 32.37CFM for the 80mm, for £4). In issue 57, just £9 would buy you a range of improved varying fan speeds and cooling capabilities (see Custom Kit) if shifting air took precendence above looks. Whatever your opinion on LED fans, the rear 120mm cooler certainly helps to expel any tiny amounts of extra heat that the lights may generate inside the case. It’s nice to have an enhanced lighting effect without the Dremel, even if it’s not proper modding. That said, I am about to have a third old case sat around doing nothing, so I’ve got plenty of spares to start proper case modding as a future project.
Adding the tool-free capability allows the RC 330 to supercede the Phong, despite the similarity of the drive cages. As long as you line up the motherboard in the case to match the slots before installing the board properly, you could use the vertical rack mount to hold expansion cards in their slots without punching out the wrong blanking plate, for which you’d need a conventional screw-in cover. However, if you’re installing more than the graphics card shown in issue 55 then screws are less fiddly all round.
That was a relatively painless case move last weekend, though one loose standoff required the pliers treatment to prise it away from the motherboard’s underside. With proper brass standoffs in CM’s case, that shouldn’t be a problem next time. Hopefully, the transfer of Socket A parts to the Phong will end my recent overheating issues once and for all.
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
Loading ...Abit too hot to handle
khenry
“I decided to upgrade my Socket A backup PC as that was truly for the scrap heap despite outlasting my Socket 939 rig.”
Maybe I should edit that and add the words “by a week and a half.”
I’ve just enjoyed the perfect storm of computer upgrades by necessity. You’ve already read about my shotgun upgrade choices (dead mobo is in the corner of the above pic) and how I changed my PSU following an electrical cut-out, and overheating. Sadly my backup PC was still Chernobyl on the inside and two more fans in the case at the front to set up proper air flow, changing the LED fan at the back which wasn’t shifting any air, going back to a branded 9800 with copper heatsinks all round rather than a bare OEM Sapphire which was a small furnace by itself. Even running it with the side cover off in a room with no heating on, all failed to cause temperatures to drop. In fact, when I removed the cover, the machine maintained the temperature as if I’d never bought the Antec PSU.
The system then refused to stay stable for long enough to image it, wasting an activation. Thankfully MS happily allowed another activation on a second motherboard within 48 hours, without needing to contact a call centre. That’s a clear sign that Vista’s the new kid, and Redmond doesn’t care what you do with your OEM XP discs anymore.
So here I am having installed the MSI KT880 Delta board. I’d had it lying around on the shelf since Jan ‘06 because the Abit NF7-S2G had been such a tireless workhorse, that there was no need to upgrade. Since the Abit’s BIOS had begun to freeze up on the temps/voltage reporting page, I didn’t want a second set of VRMs or other capacitors going bang, so it had to go - for the moment.
One of the main self-inflicted causes of this latest problem was the curse of cheap TIM. I can’t remember the last time I installed it, but the white gunk had shifted to the ceramic shell of the CPU rather than the main chip over time which contributed to its overheating. Artic Silver 5 - in a small enough dollop not to get too overly spread - was the TIM purchased with my Freezer 64 Pro and I’ll never buy the cheap stuff again.
Aside from hiding the voltage and temperature information behind a sub-heading rather than a main BIOS page, the KT880 Delta lived up to MSI’s profile at the time - reliabilty over speed, compared to the comparative Nforce/2 chipset’s running like the clappers. This is despite the fact that I wanted it to run everything by default, but the KT880’s maiden settings proceeded to overclock the CPU by 100Mhz (ie within the range of the next version up of the Athlon XP 2800+, which IIRC had more cache), and overvolt the DIMMs by 0.10v and produce an extra 25Mhz. It’s strange to have read CPC all this time, only to end up with a baby steps overclock just from installing the parts! Given that I had heat problems already I wanted to get true temp readings to compare with the previous board, so everything is back down to normal.
Despite reminding myself about many of the basics (including working a fan’s screws through its holes to allow a flush installation when attaching to the case) and fully exploiting my old case because of the motherboard tray, it was a losing battle. I’m going to need a new chassis. Since the Issue 55 build your own case has received barely any negative comment on Ebuyer’s review page never mind Scan, and I want to get both machines up to 120mm cooling, it’s a no brainer to get the Cooler Master RC 330 and have a case that has the same cooling power, yet looks better than both the Phong and its competition from issue 10, Cooler Master’s own Centurion.
Then I have to decide whether I’m going to take my latest build out of the Phong and play musical motherboards yet again.
Not yet rated
Loading ...Power corrupts
khenry
Once my upgrade was assembled, I caught up with everything I needed to know about power supplies yesterday when I was educated about the kind of generic piece of junk powering my backup PC. It didn’t even feature correct voltage information, thankfully not a problem affecting my Hiper model.
I wanted to push the boat out and have a modular PSU to cover not just this stopgap build, but the next round of parts for a potential future Intel powerhouse. Since it sports multiple 12v rails, it was a shame that my choice, a Cooler Master Real Power 700W model highly regarded by PC Pro (and now pictured in the previous post), turned up dead on arrival. That deflated the buzz of upgrading to my first ever modular unit, even if it’s taken £80 off the cost of the stopgap build.
Up until last weekend I was lucky that perhaps only one PSU I’ve ever owned out of a sea of generic tat, contributed to the death of a PC. That death occured eight months after the whole computer was hit by lightning through the mains, giving me a crash course in surge protection. On further reflection, other generics which died, didn’t take the motherboard and other components with them like the lightning rod.
Learning more about PSUs from the forum, PSU Sensei James Gorbold and Upgrading and Repairing PCs has made me grateful for six years of problem-free daily operation from my generic timebomb, whatever its true wattage. It’ll take a plug-in volt meter to get some meaningful information about its performance, but its waste heat could literally help warm my lounge. Therefore it fits the bill of the other generic stooge power units from issues 26 and 42.
Whilst waiting for the next PSU labs I can pull out every issue from the past year and see who’s picking up the awards. A decent working modular PSU will let me move my Hiper to the backup PC and afford better protection to all my components, both ancient and modern. I look forward to putting my last generic model on the scrapheap later this year!
UPDATE 17/4/08: Change that to later this week. After finding out all I needed to know about power supplies with a crash course my generic model decided to cut out without warning, this morning. Rather than have a second motherboard die off in the same week, I opted for a stopgap model becuause they’re only Socket A parts. Whenever the PSU labs is printed I can upgrade to a modular PSU in the future. The model I chose, an Antec Earthwatts 430W, can return to its box and become an emergency spare.
When a manufacturer like Antec states that its PSU will work at a certain voltage, it’s much more likely to be accurate and it’s the same cost as the generic model it’s replacing, six years on - that buys 80% efficiency and native PCI-E as well as two extra SATA connectors, over the previous model. Tomorrow will be another morning of waiting for the Ebuyer truck - at least it’s for an easy upgrade that can be done alongside moving hard disks and reinstalling XP Pro. I’ll remember that I do this for fun, when I’ve finished!
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
Loading ...The Upgrade Cascade
khenry
“Personally, I’m keeping my old machine which passed its third birthday at Easter, together as a single unit.” Famous last words.
In the middle of last week the machine cut out during Supreme Commander Forged Alliance and something, whether it was the BIOS, or circuitry on the motherboard, blew. I needed to swap out the AGP card to get a display, which was the top line of the BIOS logo where the machine froze and refused to post at all. Damn, I thought, I’ll have to spend hundreds of pounds on new equipment. A tragedy. 
In the end, key reviews over Christmas from issues 53 to 56 influenced my emergency rebuild, even if I’d wanted to upgrade for a long time and had my birthday as another reason to make the move. Not being made of money I decided to upgrade my Socket A backup PC as that was truly for the scrap heap despite outlasting my Socket 939 rig. The Intel super-machine can be constructed in the future when I have the budget to justify a bigger case. For that reason I kept the venerable Jeantech Phong case for no-brainer cooling and of the LG optical drives, the burner was a SATA model. My WD 500Gb hard disk could also now run at its full SATA 300.
As I was happy with dual core Athlon X2 chips but wanted PCI-E 2.0 for peanuts, I opted for the MSI K9A2 CF motherboard and stepped up the Athlon X2 range from the 3800+ to the Socket AM2-4400+. This 2.3Ghz model, the fastest CPU within the price range of my Socket 939 X2. Together with the board review, issue 53’s processor labs showed many of the lower AM2 X2s (below the rare 1Mb cache per core and Black Editions) benchmarking with negligible variances in fps ratings in the game benchmark tests.
The final contribution from issue 53 and 54 was ATi’s Radeon HD 3850. The events in the labs test now feel like a repeat of the GeForce4 Ti4200 and Ti4600, vs the Radeons 9600 Pro and 9800 Pro, then XT - ATi’s HD 38xx cards support all official standards fully, but Nvidia’s 8800GT is just faster with brute speed and still available, with the 9600GT set to take over. In an attempt to make Crossfire more attractive, ATi cut the price, meaning that the twice-tested Sapphire 3850 dropped to £83, and the review street price of £100 would buy you the 512Mb version if you thought there were games that would make use of it. I chose Corsair’s TwinX Value RAM from the Issue 55 Build Your Own PC thanks to the memory set’s low power demands.
Originally I was going to attempt to overclock my Socket 939 CPU and made the hallowed trip to Yoyotech for an Artic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro on the same day that I bought Issue 55. I’m glad that it won’t need reinstalling before decent Phenom CPUs arrive (so maybe never). Once this monster was attached, it sat in the same relative postion as the Issue 55 case photo, almost fouling the first RAM bank. I had to detach Jeantech’s air baffler but could leave the 80mm fan to sit directly over the Freezer 64. This would give me the welcome effect of helping to vent cool air thanks to the Artic Cooling’s much discussed but still very scary cooling ability.
As it turned out, my Hiper Type R 480W PSU, a slight update on an earlier version which luckily provided a 24-pin ATX connector. It benefitted from the choice of power friendly GPU and DIMMs. When Sapphire’s PCI-E converter was chained to a Molex plug on my unit because it was the spring 2005 edition rather than the one from Autumn 2005, it could power the Radeon 3850 without any problems. This PSU’s fan audibly strained to cool whichever chipset feature was overheating on the dead Gigabyte board.
Since the installation of the MSI board the Hiper has since returned to problem free, near-silent operation and its red LED light now mixes in with my green side fan. This machine has been on for 12 hours and thanks to the Artic Cooler, the case temperature has failed to breach 30 degrees and the air from the case is barely warm. That makes the PC ready for any extended heatwave in summer. Looking at my initial benchmarks using Vista Business, it’s faster than the issue 55 Build Your Own, that but machine would sail past my build, espcecially in the multitasking stakes, by promoting the Pentium D chip to a Core 2 E-series. Then overclocking would probably become unnecessary. This build gives the option of a better chip in the same socket just as the P31 Chipset does for Intel processors, until Nehalem’s socket makes its debut anyway.
It suited my purposes to move to the modern generations of RAM, GPU connector and processor socket for £200. The power supply I bought proved to be unecessary, but that’s another story. Right now, I’m off to finish that multiplayer game of Forged Alliance, and my hardware won’t blow up in the middle of it this time.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Save money, then the planet
khenry
It’s great news that Fujitsu Simens showed off a flatpanel that can dwindle down to zero watts in standby at CeBIT. Hopefully the prototypes will be a step closer to launch as of CeBIT since they were first mooted last November. PC Pro’s Switch IT Off campaign was very successful with practical suggestions like gang sockets with one single secondary on-off switch.
It’s hard not to be cynical, particularly in my own property. At a personal level only people who have to pay the bills will change their behaviour in order to save money and the help to the environment will be a rewarding fringe benefit. That benefit will still remain secondary to my wallet, especially since I was recycling seven years before my council made it compulsory and watched as their new contractors failed to collect the recycling on at least two occasions, with no comeback.
If you’re waiting for the perfect screen to make you finally ditch your CRTs, a TFT that won’t use any power in standby looks great on paper. I would still wait for reviews regarding its general performance. However, every single electric device becomes environmentally friendly if you unplug it. I’ve chosen to do this with my mid-range MD recorder and any other device in my home that lacks an off switch. That leaves the fridge and cable modem as the only devices left on 24/7.
I believe that’s a better solution rather than falling for any more “energy saving” badges like the tags you see on washing machines which proceed to take almost an hour longer on a normal wash than the older less planet-friendly types, basically using in electricity what they save on water (yes you, Hotpoint) and the fridges that waste copious amounts of power staying frost free and makes such loud cracking noises you think you’re being burgled at 3am (Thanks, Whirlpool). Bah, I’ll cheer up when I get my next electricity bill…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Goodbye Virgin Media
khenry
After asking how badly one big company can screw up, I had my answer today. Virgin Media has decided to copy BT’s fine for people who don’t want to pay their ISP/Cable/Phone fees by direct debit. Virgin’s charge has been raised to £5 per month over BT’s £4.50 so clearly, the thinking was “I’ll have some of that profit”. I’d already switched phone providers but then moved the line rental as well when BT tried to recover revenue lost by switching with this charge.
The issue is that for broadband users only, a credit card refund is quicker to obtain (depending on the card issuer) when the ISP screws up your charges. Also, when telephoning to start a new contract, Virgin Media demanded the 16-digit numbers of their debit cards more often than they started a proper direct debit, so it’s not clear whether these customers have to effectively sign up all over again to avoid this fine.
I saw that Plusnet won Custom PC’s ISP of the year last year and remembered its multiple awards from sister mag PC Pro in the past. Finally, one happy relative is still with them after four years. On the second call where the operator answered all my questions to my satisfaction, I joined up. I will enjoy telling Virgin Media to stick it, using its pre-paid envelope.
To be fair, without an arrogant move such as overcharging for the same service which wouldn’t necessarily improve, perhaps customer inertia would have kept me at Virgin until September, marking six years with the firm. Even though there’s no contractual tie-in, I’ll probably give Plusnet the full year to see how well it performs and if it’s no better than Virgin, it will remain cheaper than my current package, for the same speed or faster, by £10 per month.
UPDATE: Following on from Combatus’s comment, it must also be noted that Plusnet don’t care if you’ve switched away from paying line rental to BT as long as you still have the line. I was surprised that some ADSL providers still keep this as a condition, but that’s their lost business.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Creative Blabs
khenry
Just how badly can one big company screw up? We all know that the relationship between IP, Copyright or patent holders and the community that mods them can be fraught with legal action when the Goliath in question feels threatened. As we know, Creative just about got away with the token charge for Audigy 2 support in Vista due to its cheap price (a fiver), compared to a more Microsoft-style £20 which it demanded for Live! Drivers on CD for Windows XP seven years ago.
Who knows what possessed the company to openly threaten one of its driver modders at the end of last week? Just follow the thread to see the reaction. The company was already hit by the rise of the on-board sound chip which has enjoyed a rise in quality in the past few years. This has led many builders to decide to redress any potential peformance hit to FPS by overclocking instead, rather than spend out even £20-30 on a separate soundcard. Since Creative is the Intel of the soundcard market, it will be seen as an unfair abuse of power even if the company is legally justified.
Aside from Creative’s Godfather-style reaction to Daniel_K, the real problem is, soundcards tend to last nearly forever and so it’s only through software hinderances that you can truly discontinue them - not even a change of bus has really forced a mass uptake of the X-Fi range. I have Live! cards which have survived surges and lightning strikes and are still going strong. It doesn’t help Creative that musicians laugh at SB cards, while consumers at the other end are replacing less often. My current Audigy 2 was sent to me in the ordinary post using a jiffy bag and no antistatic packaging, then fell onto my mat from the letterbox. After that beating, I plugged it into not one but three motherboards and carried on using it in the last four years, where it runs my best CD player very close for music playback quality.
If I knew that my next motherboard wouldn’t contain multichannel integrated sound I would probably have ripped out my seemingly indestructible Audigy 2 and used it in the new board’s token PCI port. Personally, I’m keeping my old machine which passed its third birthday at Easter, together as a single unit. Looking at the way this company has treated someone whose modded drivers provided a service at the users’ own risk, it’s one case where I’ll be happy to save money and not bother with a Creative card for the forseeable future.
Not yet rated
Loading ...Knowing the right place to say something
khenry
I’ve just watched the BBC Breakfast interview with Catherine Sanderson, the blogger behind La Petite Anglaise, who lives in France and was fired over the content of her blog, then took her employer to a tribunal and won. In terms of blogging she had already achieved a degree of non-commercial success, with traffic between 40,000-100,000 hits.
However, there are two sides to both blogging and whatever you decide to post on a Facebook page when addressing the potential effect on your work. The Argos employee that posted “This job is [rubbish]” deserved to get the sack, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just quit a job you hated rather than have to explain why you were fired. If you want to be an office party animal, better to get the job and show that at the party rather than ruling yourself out in advance.
So if you’re going to blog and work then keep your gob shut about your colleagues - unless of course they’re all great, or you’ve already left the job in question. It all worked out happily in the end, and her David v Goliath struggle has now become a book. See her blog for her own links to the media reports.