Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Robotic (Droidic?) Camouflage
If pedaling away from certain doom isn't for you (see previous post) perhaps something like this DIY R2D2 is just the ticket. While larger than the original article it is self-propelled and has all the boops, beeps and chirps needed to successfully camouflage you from any of those pesky T800's. Just hope some roving AI doesn't jack in...
Tools of the Robot Apocalypse Disguised as Socoi/Ecological Conscience!!!
Imagine yourself waking on the dawn of the Robot Apocalypse, the machines have risen up and computers are no longer accepting human input. It's time to get the hell outta dodge but your car is lending CPU time to SkyNet. Ah-ha!, you think, I'll get on my bicycle and pedal away to safety. Unfortunately you forgot that you share a SoBi (Social Bicycle) with friends and it's equipped with a GPS tracker!!!
As you ride off into the sunset, completely oblivious of any danger, they'll know where you are...
In all seriousness, SoBi has developed these locks to better enable local administrators track usage and make their deployment more efficient. The current system requires the cyclist to call in to SoBi before and after usage.
In all seriousness, SoBi has developed these locks to better enable local administrators track usage and make their deployment more efficient. The current system requires the cyclist to call in to SoBi before and after usage.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
New BIOS and Memory Woes. Beware! Wordiness Ahead...
I recently received an Asus Maximus III Gene motherboard to test out. All was well and for an LGA 1156 board, this thing was a rocket. For reasons I don’t even know, it never occurred to me to check the board BIOS to see if there were stability/OC enhancements in the newer revs. About a week ago I finally did look it up and there it was, a brand-spanking new BIOS promising better OC stability and CPU compatibility. Having hit a sub-4GHz wall (Lynnfield i7 870 native at 2.99GHz) on air cooling I jumped at the possibility of eeking a bit more out of my CPU.
The update went well, I have ASUS updater installed so I don't even have to boot to DOS (yes I said DOS, we all know that's what it is....) to run the BIOS update. Everything seemed to be fine but I wanted to be sure so I ran a Prime95 load test to be sure. About 30 seconds in, by system BSOD's. This is the same system that ran a full-blended Prime95 torture test for 8 hours the Venomous XR-T article without a hitch.... Something was amiss.
My first troubleshooting step was to return the system to BIOS defaults for the CPU and memory. This successfully stopped the BSODs but the system was running poorly, even for stock standards. I'm currently running 4GB of Patriot's DDR3-1066 memory and while old by today's standards it had been running fine in my nVidia chipped EVGA 790i Ultra for over a year so I was dubious to blame it outright but I did have some new memory coming soon. In a rare spot of patience I decided to wait until it arrived to tinker any further... Enter the newest player in our drama: Starcraft II.
Still in my patient place and completely oblivious to the root cause of my recent drop in performance, I installed Starcraft II and TRIED to run it. Load screens took forever, rendered cutscenes were choppy, audio was out of sync and, when playing in windowed mode, if I did anything else the system would bust hammer the hard disk in a read/write paging frenzy. Essentially it was unplayable and I was quickly being evicted from my patient place.
Seeing and hearing the hard drive in a constant read/write state first led me to believe that the page file needed to be set. This is a fresh install of Win7 x64 and while I had left the page size at default in the past I went about enforcing a 1x RAM minimum/2x RAM maximum to my page file on my fastest drive: 4GB and 8GB respectively. I rebooted and gleefully awaited my chance to kick some Zerg butt, I would be disappointed.
Upon rebooting the system was running even worse. My HDD activity indicator could have been a power button because now it was on constantly. I had previously lamented to a friend that perhaps it was time to move to a Solid State Drive to improve performance, thinking that my "old" mechanical drive was partly to blame for my recent reduction in performance but this could not be just the HDDs fault so, before breaking out the hammer and administering some percussive maintenance, I did the one thing I should have done at the beginning of this little adventure: check Task Manager and Sys Monitor and see if there was something else going on.
In life it’s said that it’s the little things that hurt and more often than not, your worst troubles can be caused by the smallest things. Looking back, given my experience, I should have caught this in the first 5 minutes. Windows was seeing 4GB of memory still but only utilizing 2GB max. I was puzzled at first, played around with system performance settings, wiggled and swapped memory sticks around and poked at every possible BIOS setting with zero change to the memory seen by the BIOS or Windows so I went to ASUS’s site to look for updated documentation. I downloaded and read the latest addendum for my motherboard’s manual and I discovered that there are differences in how you install memory, depending on if you have a Lynnfield or Clarkdale CPU. Yes boys and girls, not only did I feel like a total hardware rookie for not checking System Monitor in the first place, this whole escapade could have been avoided if I had just RTFM.
I have since installed the memory in the appropriate location and am back to having 4GB of usable memory in Windows. In my defense, I have *never* had a desktop motherboard (Servers? Yes) that cared which slots you put the memory in as long as you populated adjacent channels.
Ah well, lesson learned. I guess the moral is: If it's not broken Don't fix it and if fixing it breaks it RTFM. I’m off to assist Jim Raynor in his campaign against Coalition oppression and the deadly Zerg.
The update went well, I have ASUS updater installed so I don't even have to boot to DOS (yes I said DOS, we all know that's what it is....) to run the BIOS update. Everything seemed to be fine but I wanted to be sure so I ran a Prime95 load test to be sure. About 30 seconds in, by system BSOD's. This is the same system that ran a full-blended Prime95 torture test for 8 hours the Venomous XR-T article without a hitch.... Something was amiss.
My first troubleshooting step was to return the system to BIOS defaults for the CPU and memory. This successfully stopped the BSODs but the system was running poorly, even for stock standards. I'm currently running 4GB of Patriot's DDR3-1066 memory and while old by today's standards it had been running fine in my nVidia chipped EVGA 790i Ultra for over a year so I was dubious to blame it outright but I did have some new memory coming soon. In a rare spot of patience I decided to wait until it arrived to tinker any further... Enter the newest player in our drama: Starcraft II.
Still in my patient place and completely oblivious to the root cause of my recent drop in performance, I installed Starcraft II and TRIED to run it. Load screens took forever, rendered cutscenes were choppy, audio was out of sync and, when playing in windowed mode, if I did anything else the system would bust hammer the hard disk in a read/write paging frenzy. Essentially it was unplayable and I was quickly being evicted from my patient place.
Seeing and hearing the hard drive in a constant read/write state first led me to believe that the page file needed to be set. This is a fresh install of Win7 x64 and while I had left the page size at default in the past I went about enforcing a 1x RAM minimum/2x RAM maximum to my page file on my fastest drive: 4GB and 8GB respectively. I rebooted and gleefully awaited my chance to kick some Zerg butt, I would be disappointed.
Upon rebooting the system was running even worse. My HDD activity indicator could have been a power button because now it was on constantly. I had previously lamented to a friend that perhaps it was time to move to a Solid State Drive to improve performance, thinking that my "old" mechanical drive was partly to blame for my recent reduction in performance but this could not be just the HDDs fault so, before breaking out the hammer and administering some percussive maintenance, I did the one thing I should have done at the beginning of this little adventure: check Task Manager and Sys Monitor and see if there was something else going on.
In life it’s said that it’s the little things that hurt and more often than not, your worst troubles can be caused by the smallest things. Looking back, given my experience, I should have caught this in the first 5 minutes. Windows was seeing 4GB of memory still but only utilizing 2GB max. I was puzzled at first, played around with system performance settings, wiggled and swapped memory sticks around and poked at every possible BIOS setting with zero change to the memory seen by the BIOS or Windows so I went to ASUS’s site to look for updated documentation. I downloaded and read the latest addendum for my motherboard’s manual and I discovered that there are differences in how you install memory, depending on if you have a Lynnfield or Clarkdale CPU. Yes boys and girls, not only did I feel like a total hardware rookie for not checking System Monitor in the first place, this whole escapade could have been avoided if I had just RTFM.
I have since installed the memory in the appropriate location and am back to having 4GB of usable memory in Windows. In my defense, I have *never* had a desktop motherboard (Servers? Yes) that cared which slots you put the memory in as long as you populated adjacent channels.
Ah well, lesson learned. I guess the moral is: If it's not broken Don't fix it and if fixing it breaks it RTFM. I’m off to assist Jim Raynor in his campaign against Coalition oppression and the deadly Zerg.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
GeForce 400 Has Entered the Building
Our friends at NVIDIA have sent us a GeForce GTX 470 to play around with. Second most-powerful in a family of four cards, its siblings are the GTX 480, 465 and 460. The 460/465 cards are the “Budget Gamer” line coming in the mid $200.00 mark and the 480 is the headliner in the show coming in varying flavors around $500.00. The 470 is going for $320.00 to $350.00 right now from various online retailers and will be the primary focus of today’s scribbling.
So, the first thing we ask, what are the primary differences between the 470 and the 480. Let’s take a look at the raw numbers:
The physical i/o connections on the card are identical with the exception of the power connectors, the 470 uses 2–6pin and the 480 uses 1-6 pin and 1-8 pin plug. There are grumblings about there being no media connector and dings against NV’s HDMI audio but, honestly, if I’m going to plug my plasma into this bad boy the audio will be going from my HD audio card directly to my audio receiver.
Aside from the aspect of the faster GPU and bigger hardware feature set, the big difference between the GF 400 series cards and their predecessors is DirectX 11. While the current list of DX11 games is very short it is expected to grow soon and much sooner than the 2 – 3 years some folks in the online community were projecting. With HL 2 part III and Starcraft II and on the list I’m really looking forward to seeing the difference in image quality and performance.
Unfortunately my GTX 280 died a hot and violent death shortly after receiving the 470 so side-by-side benchmarks will have to wait until I get the RMA’d card back. I can say that I have seen improved performance in Metro 2033 (now maxed out and with DX 11 features enabled) Just Cause 2 and even World of Warcraft.
On top of comparing this GPU to the 280, I'm really hoping to get my hands on another 470 to play around with 3D Vision Surround.
So, the first thing we ask, what are the primary differences between the 470 and the 480. Let’s take a look at the raw numbers:
The physical i/o connections on the card are identical with the exception of the power connectors, the 470 uses 2–6pin and the 480 uses 1-6 pin and 1-8 pin plug. There are grumblings about there being no media connector and dings against NV’s HDMI audio but, honestly, if I’m going to plug my plasma into this bad boy the audio will be going from my HD audio card directly to my audio receiver.
Aside from the aspect of the faster GPU and bigger hardware feature set, the big difference between the GF 400 series cards and their predecessors is DirectX 11. While the current list of DX11 games is very short it is expected to grow soon and much sooner than the 2 – 3 years some folks in the online community were projecting. With HL 2 part III and Starcraft II and on the list I’m really looking forward to seeing the difference in image quality and performance.
Unfortunately my GTX 280 died a hot and violent death shortly after receiving the 470 so side-by-side benchmarks will have to wait until I get the RMA’d card back. I can say that I have seen improved performance in Metro 2033 (now maxed out and with DX 11 features enabled) Just Cause 2 and even World of Warcraft.
On top of comparing this GPU to the 280, I'm really hoping to get my hands on another 470 to play around with 3D Vision Surround.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Droid X: This Phone Will Self-Destruct In 3,2,1..
More shocking news in from the cell phone community. Motorola and Verizon have apparently decided to bring the hammer down on the Android modding community with the introduction of eFuse. One of the big draws of the Droid X is it's use of Android 2.1, an open-source and highly customizable OS. With eFuse, if you make any changes to the OS or firmware that it can't certify as factory original, it "kills" the phone requiring a hardware fix to reactivate. Normal rooting may not be able to get around this as it starts certification before the bootloader so it will detect *any* changes.
Needless to say, the natives are restless...
Needless to say, the natives are restless...
Proving the Rumors True, Apple Offers Free iPhone 4 Bumpers
Apple iPhone 4 users can breathe a sigh of relief. Many believed that Apple would go Marie Antoinette on them and tell them to eat the proverbial cake in regards to bumpers for their shiny new toys. It seems that free cases and refunds for those that have already purchased one are in the works.
This just in: Case refunds only apply to those purchased from AT&T or Apple, no third-party cases will be covered by the refund. While I can see their side of this and they do need to protect themselves by controlling refund costs, they should at least quantify a base refund value and offer this to those who can show valid proof of purchase. Just my two cents..
This just in: Case refunds only apply to those purchased from AT&T or Apple, no third-party cases will be covered by the refund. While I can see their side of this and they do need to protect themselves by controlling refund costs, they should at least quantify a base refund value and offer this to those who can show valid proof of purchase. Just my two cents..
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Air Cooling Goodness!!
So, I had an i7 870 and motherboard fall into my lap recently. As I fully intended to OC the bejeezuz out of it, I needed to go hunting for a good cooler and was almost unanimously pointed to the Venemous line from Thermalright, specifically the Venemous X-RT and after installing it I can't be happier.
I know what you're saying.. "James, you *need* to go watercooled, newb!" bah.. been there, done that and may yet return but I just don't have the time/interest right now for a high-maintenance cooling solution.
To make a long story short (I know, too late) at the stock 2.93GHz I'm idling at ~25c and 50c under load. I have this bad boy cranked to 3.6GHz now running 30c idling and 60c under load, this is still almost 40c under CPU max. I've tried to squeeze a little more out of the CPU but my memory can't keep up and the stability goes out the window. I'm hoping to get my hands on some Corsair XMS3 DHX sticks soon so we'll see if that helps. I've seen posts online of this CPU/Mobo hitting near 3.9GHz on air and I'd like to get there myself.
I know what you're saying.. "James, you *need* to go watercooled, newb!" bah.. been there, done that and may yet return but I just don't have the time/interest right now for a high-maintenance cooling solution.
To make a long story short (I know, too late) at the stock 2.93GHz I'm idling at ~25c and 50c under load. I have this bad boy cranked to 3.6GHz now running 30c idling and 60c under load, this is still almost 40c under CPU max. I've tried to squeeze a little more out of the CPU but my memory can't keep up and the stability goes out the window. I'm hoping to get my hands on some Corsair XMS3 DHX sticks soon so we'll see if that helps. I've seen posts online of this CPU/Mobo hitting near 3.9GHz on air and I'd like to get there myself.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
iPhone 5 Rushed Through Engineering
Acknowledging that the signal issue is indeed hardware, Apple is pushing the iPhone 5 out the door. Insiders heard engineers grumbling "Let's see them hold this antenna".
Friday, July 2, 2010
iPhone 4 Makes Sour Apples?
As the iPhone 4 reviews begin to gush (and I do mean gush) from the professional review sites I'm beginning to hear grumblings from folks just now getting theirs. It appears as though you can't activate them unless you're running OSX 10.5.8 and have iTunes 9.2. Now while I understand it's human nature to resist change, I thought you Mac folks were on the cutting edge. I'm running 10.6 on my DELL for goodness sake...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)