Category Archives: Hardware

Monitor wishes and video card dreams.

Posted on May 26, 2004 by Snake

I recently purchased an extremely kickass new video card. It felt like old times again. The excitement of pulling the box out of the shipping peanuts…removing the card from the static bag…immediately modding it…making sweet sweet love to it all night long. No, wait. I guess there’s still something left to be desired 😕 . Anyways, upon removing the video card (an ATI Radeon 9600XT), I got the urge to take massive amounts of picage–especially of the copper ramsinks I added. Additionally, I decided to incorporate the pics into a guide that shows how I, a seasoned gamer and hardware nut (or just a seasoned nut), go about purchasing the right video card and installing it flawlessly. I call it the Novice Guide to Upgrading Video Cards and it can be found here. Previewage:

After the overcoming joy of the 9600’s speed and Pixel Shaders, I went right to the multimonitor support; and all I can say is “wow”. The implimentation of multiple monitors on this card is solid. I can’t see why more people don’t use it. I’m sure a lot of computer users have killer video cards and an old monitor, and it is only for their ignorance that they don’t marry the two. Although I’m still testing the capabilities and flaws, I’m still greatly impressed with the former. You can watch two movies at once (especially useful for pr0n), browse two sites at once, keep important apps always visible, leave a walkthrough open when playing a game, have a developer database (MSDN) open on one and the programming software of your choice on the other. The possibilities are endless. Mostly, I like to keep the apps I frequently check open on the second monitor (emule, AIM, Task Monitor) and reserve the primary for my focus. The only problem I can see is that you can’t move the focus from the primary to the secondary in a game without minimizing the game. If I find a workaround for this, I’ll be sure to report.

The only thing better than multimonitor is having two separate computers and a KVM switch; although, the smoothness of moving across both monitors seemlessly is also very sweet.

I’m out, bitches.

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When Hard Drives Go Shitty: An XP Story

Posted on February 26, 2003 by Snake

Around Saturday night, I was playing the Sims (don’t laugh! this game is crack) and copying music from my Seagate slave to the Sims’ stations directory on the Maxtor master. Then I noticed an odd stutter to the music in SCMPX, but I thought it was only because I had the game open currently. Still, it was odd, as SCMPX always runs with an above normal process priority (as dictated by my 1337 ShellMPX app). So, I go back to the Sims and it locks cold almost instantaneously. I restart XP and then the Sims has no sound whatsoever. And whenever I open an app on the Maxtor, SCMPX would stutter and it almost never skips, let alone stutter like that. 😕 By watching Task Manager, I could see that there was 100% CPU usage going down when there was disk I/O occuring. But no programs, even explorer.exe were using the CPU hardly at all. On Monday, I started assuming something was seriously fucked up, so I installed HD Tach, a great HDD benchmark that you can pick up here, and ran it on both drives. Here’s what I came up with:

These results were very disturbing, as you can probably tell. :( They showed the possibility for a total hard drive fault, given that the Seagate was unaffected yet the Maxtor was. To try to rule that out, I did a complete scan of the Maxtor, updated my 4in1 drivers (which are now in an executable form and called “Hyperion”…go figure), updated my SBLive driver package (which now comes with a hardware EQ and compressor…sweeeet), and did a factory recertification test. I thought that if a driver got corrupted, this would set it straight. But, it was still pulling 100% CPU and only 4MB/s in HD Tach. So, I slept on it and then decided at school to rule out a hardware fault by transplating the Maxtor in my sister’s new rig. I did, and it worked fine, luckily. When I went to put the Maxtor back in my rig, I reversed its bay position with the Seagate so I wouldn’t have to use my funky IDE cable voodoo anymore. Then as a final hope before having to reinstall XP, I scoured the XP newsgroups looking for someone with a similar problem. After about an hour, I came across a thread where the dude talked about having slow HDD performance and the answer posted was to reinstall the Primary IDE Channel. So, I Win+Break to Device Manager, look at the Primary IDE and sure enough, device 0 was listed as PIO Mode 1 (which tops out at 5MB/s and uses the CPU instead of the chipset/itself to handle transfers) instead of DMA Mode 3 (theoretical 66MB/s max). So I killed the Primary IDE Channel, restart (taking 1min 9sec), install it again, restart (taking 52sec), and everything is fine and dandy:

This compressor sounds really cool on rock songs, but is a little too problematic for most NIN songs, except for The Becoming. The more disturbing The Becoming, the better 😉 .

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New Monitor, SnakeBot, etc.

Posted on September 13, 2002 by Snake

So, I bought this new monitor last week from emscomputing.com, and it arrived Wednesday. Even with standard shipping and the 2 business day delay until it ships, I still got the monitor in under a week. This is quite extraordinary for an online purchase. For more details on the monitor, see my journal.

Speaking of the journal, it is a new feature I have devised. I thought the idea of a public forum for one’s ideas was a nifty idea and especially since I try to keep everyone from posting news just to rant (*cough*que 😛 ). Anyways, since I’m a savy, resourceful web programmer, I had to make my own journal. It’s sort of a mix between DeadJournal and the DemoBoard in style. So, check it out.

Now, about The Snake Bot. I’ve been working on a bot for Quake 3 that plays pretty much like I do on Hardcore difficulty. Of course, you can ramp my bot down on the difficulty, but on Hardcore, you get the full snake experience. I’ve included chat texts, too. Sometimes, though, Q3 will automatically use a synonym for bot chats. So, you’ll get a momma fucker or mommy fucker every now and then. It just doesn’t convey the mother fucker very well. (I think I’ve used enough fucker to block this page on all educational computers. 😉 ) Pick up the bot here. Save it to the baseq3 directory and just select Snake as a bot in Q3.


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Shameless THG Plug

Posted on August 27, 2002 by Snake

I just read a Column at Tom’s Hardware Guide Guide that affirmed my loyalty to that wonderful hardware site. I used to respect [H]ardOCP a good deal, but in the last year, Kyle has become a right lame-ass bastard. I was especially displeased by one of the last articles I read at his site, Matrox Parhelia Testing. In it, he basically whines about not getting to preview Matrox’s new Parhelia Card. What respectable site would do that? Kyle Bennett is lame-ass.

Anyways, the Column I was talking about at THG can be found here. It’s even written by the man himself, Tom Pabst. Lately, Tom hasn’t done many articles, but his excellent staff (such as Frank Volkel) puts out more than enough brilliant content. Who would ever need another hardware site? 😉

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Site updates

Posted on July 4, 2002 by Snake

I did some modifications to the Imagefolio script earlier. It’s now not so much of a security hazard 😕 (as in, it doesn’t show unnecesary directories) and only shows image files. It always confused me as to why IMAGEfolio showed more than just images, but now it doesn’t…so boom.

Also, I’ve been playing Deus Ex again (seems to have a bit more flavor with XP). Of course, that means also that I’m working on the unfinished but ongoing “How to Deus” Column. You can find it, with the new additions, here.

And if that wasn’t enough, I did two additions to my ghEtTO Hardware Modifications Column. That can be found here.

Loog just came by and delivered his old Seagate 20GB HDD. So, now that I’m off work 😉 , I’ll be swapping the 4GB Maxtor with the Seagate and researching some more Deus.

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VT6X4 Tweak Guide

Posted on July 30, 2001 by Snake

I’ve made a great advance today in the research for my next column. I’ve scoured the net for any and all tweaks related to the Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset and found a really great one. In SANDRA’s memory benchmark, it brought a 103% increase in the FPU and an 89% increase in the ALU (floating point and integer units, btw). Supposedly it works for all Via-based boards, too; even the AMD ones (KT133). I have even left Loog’s (supposedly) higher performing Kingston RAM in the dust.

Now you’re asking what effect this has on real-world gaming. A lot! I’m talking about 9fps (frames per second) more on almost all FPS (first-person shooter) games. What would you do for 9fps more? Some people would suck dick for it, but not Snake. I’ve been watching the new S&L Half-Life timedemo closely and so far I have been able to tweak it up to 84fps; at the start of my testing, it was running at 67fps. And I also have finally broken 10,000 CPUMarks in 3DMark 99 Max. I’d like to know who it was that stated “the Via chipset and Viper II cards are not compatible”, cause they need to be slapped with a trout.

I should start my coding of the column by the end of the week.

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