Regenerative Blogging

I appreciate that this blog has been sparse on updates, but I'd like to give a few short messages about the future of this blog, and indeed my future:

1. This blog needs a re-vamp - name's too hard to google, sounds like a 15-year-old came up with it (because he did) and I don't feel like I'm writing with as much finesse as I'd like.
2. That house didn't come to me in the end - my friends live there, but the landlord (my pal's dad) didn't trust me on the grounds of my contractor job, pity...
3. The SLA 3D Printer design is virtually ready - I've enquired about pricing for the laser cutting and it came to £400 inc VAT, add £160 for 3D printed parts (I need clamps for the Projector mount among other things) and you have an expense comparable to a cheap 4K monitor (yum).
4. Talking of which, my PC needs new hardware - not just a new GPU, but both my monitors predate LED backlight technology and I generally need to invest in my PC to reinvigorate it.

I know, a pitifully short update, but I'm still thinking over which direction I can take my life such that I can take the time to make engaging, fully-featured posts without the slovenly tiredness that characterizes the end of a working day.  I need to bring my income in-line with my values and skills as much as possible and earn enough to afford tools and materials without working myself into the ground.

See you on the other side...

All quiet on the whimsical front...

I've been a bit of a ghost on this blog for quite some time now, so much of my energy is diving into my SLA 3D Printer Project over at the Tawe TMD blog it's unreal, I'm actually making use of my University Education, in my spare time, no less!

Anyway, here be a few life-related updates on my end:

1. Me and two of my pals have found a terraced 3-bedroom house only 30 mins away from my parent's house to move out to; the deal is that my pal's gran owns the place and staunchly refuses to sell, old age doing what is does to your sentimentality; this pal's dad has negotiated a bargain rent for us, the magic man that he is.  The only caveat - it's suffered hideous treatment from the previous residents, with some of the doors showing their cardboard honeycomb structures!  That'll take at least a month to work into an acceptable condition...
2. I've found some employment at an engineering firm in Farnborough on a contractual basis, I'm hoping to secure a full-time position by way of performance but either way, combined with the through-the-floor rent at the new place (shared rent ftw) means a massive boon to my projects, assuming I don't blow it all on an Ivy Bridge Extreme PC I don't need.
3. I want to be free...  because rule of 3...

Just for fun, I'll throw in some of the project ideas I have buzzing around my noggin, simply because containing my imagination is like keeping water in a bowl made of paper towels - not fun when you are trying to focus on getting just *one* project done:

• A new PC Case:  I've got an eye on a few manufactured cases to replace my antiquated workstation case, such as the Zalman Z12 Plus or even going mini-ITX with a Corsair 250D, but I still want a case with as many Bitfenix Spectre Pro 230mm fans as possible so I wouldn't count on that.
• PC Upgrades:  my GTX 560 is now thoroughly trounced by a card that doesn't even have a PCI-E power connector (The GTX 750 Ti), my HDD is 6 years old and my Corsair RM850 is going completely to waste only powering 250W during gaming sessions; not so sure I want to give my i5-2500K up though, a truly timeless CPU.
• A Python Recumbent Bicycle:  I don't really feel like I'm being so efficient on an upright bike anymore, the most glaring problem is the wind, but there's also the issue of the huge moment arm that gravity has in bringing your head into sharp contact with the road.
• A Model Railway:  There's space for a shed at the new house, and my pals are okay with it, why not?
• Network Attached Storage:  Not a sexy thing, but it'll be a fun exercise in configuring a linux PC and backing up will be easier than with a USB3 HDD.
• A new Kick Scooter:  I've got a Razor A5 Lux and it flies at warp speed compared to walking, but why not make one with a 100mm suspension fork and hydraulic disc brakes?
• 100 things to do with a Raspberry Pi.

Do you keep a PC lineage?

One of the benefits of Asperger's Syndrome (sadly one which you don't necessarily appreciate when scared to death of being discovered as such when talking to people) is that I keep a mental Rolodex of all the PCs I have ever owned.  This is off the top of my head mostly, so don't expect the strictest of accounts:

0th PC:  Mum's Socket A Machine

• CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1833MHz
• Motherboard:  Some Abit model...
• RAM:  I suspect 1GB DDR-266 since it could at least play MOHAA on XP...
• GPU:  Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 64MB
• HDD:  ~80GB EIDE
• Resolution:  1024x768

This PC isn't strictly mine, hence the fact that it's my 0th PC.  While this is the PC that got me into gaming, I could hardly wait to be able to mutter 12-year-old swears about the rangers in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault without my dad browbeating me, having heard me in the same room (taking the computer away was like meta-death to me).

1st PC:  1st PC?...

• CPU:  AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1467MHz
• Motherboard:  Abit KV7
• RAM:  1GB DDR-333
• GPU:  ATi Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB
• HDD: 80GB EIDE
• Monitor:  Viewsonic VX924 1280x1024

My first PC...  so goddamn old the CPU doesn't even have a sticker on my case's CPU lineage:

Unrelated items:
1)  The Pentium II Xeons were installed when my case allegedly housed one of the PCs rendering Lost in Space.
2)  The central barcode - Apparently scans as 'SEC' o.O
3)  Right items - random stuph that has ended up in my PC over time.

That said, this PC was instrumental in allowing me to graduate from muttering at MOHAA to screaming unspeakable possessed noises at it instead (seriously kids, DON'T attempt MOHAA on hard when you're 12).

Talking about this PC also reminded me of what stuff I also had in it:  for the longest time, or what felt like it, I had an all-copper Cooler Master HSF with the noisiest freaking fan I have ever heard aside from delta fans; combine this with barely-effective dual heatpipes at a time when a 1.6V CPU was considered a "Low Voltage" model (1.75V being the norm for AMD CPUs), and you have a genuine waste of space!  A waste of space that was replaced not before time by a Zalman Flower cooler and suspended 92mm fan ;)

Maximum Overclock:  ~1.8GHz

2nd PC:  SWAG in the proper sense of the word...

• CPU:  AMD Sempron 64 2800+ 1.6GHz
• Motherboard:  Some Socket 754 make
• RAM:  1GB Generic DDR2-667
• GPU:  ATi Radeon X1300 128MB
• HDD:  250GB SATA-1
• Monitor:  Viewsonic VX924 1280x1024

Not a great deal is known about this PC because it was so goddamn poor, plus the fact that at 15 I had pilfered a small trust fund to...  ahem...  fund it.  It spent several months (anything from 3-6 months from memory) stashed in my dad's shed after Maplin refused to return it (lack of receipt ;) ).

Maximum Overclock:  Did Not Attempt

3rd PC:  The Advanced Massive Dominator

• CPU:  AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2GHz
• Motherboard:  Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32X
• RAM:  Bizarre mismatch of 1GB Generic DDR2-667 and 2GB Super Talent DDR2-800
• GPU:  ATi Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB
• HDD:  250GB SATA-1
• Monitor:  Viewsonic VX924 1280x1024

Now we're getting somewhere!  Definitely a moment of pride for me since I now had a PC that could toast those Netburst heathens!  The defining title for this PC?  Battlefield 2 :P

Some notable facts about this PC:

1. The RAM Mismatch is down to me being completely unable to afford a replacement 4GB or even 3GB kit (DDR2 is still an anomaly of DDR pricing, with DDR2 costing more than either DDR or DDR3); I had to ship it in from the US, as well.
2. The Motherboard had a separate daughter-card for audio output - ostensibly for a cleaner audio signal; It was mounted on an offset PCI-e 1x slot that was also flipped round.  As well as this, 2 x 40mm fans were in the I/O panel, never turned on since they were just too fecking loud!
3. This was the first PC that was housed in my current TDZ 2000 GX1 case, before that it was in some no-name "Gaming" case which didn't even have a single 120mm fan mount, relying on 80mm fans throughout.  I ended it's tenure properly by giving it a puddly, poorly executed gold paint job.

This PC now enjoys a peaceful retirement as my dad's main PC, with the exception of the monitor, but that's another story!

Maximum Overclock:  ~2.6GHz

4th PC:  Defection Part 1

• CPU:  Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz
• Motherboard:  ASUS P5K Premium WIFI-AP
• RAM:  4GB Corsair Dominator DDR2-1066 Dual Channel
• GPU:  ATi Radeon HD 4850 512MB
• Sound Card:  Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi SB0770 OEM
• HDD:  750GB Samsung HD753J
• Monitor:  Dell S2209W 1920x1080

Yep, you read that; I bought Intel for this PC; was definitely impressed with a lowly 65W TDP under the previous 90W TDP, as well as it's increased efficiency in all regards.

This is the point it began to dawn on me that I'm not very lucky when it comes to overclocking - I only managed to squeeze some 600MHz out of this CPU when others were reaching 1GHz increases >:(

Nevertheless, this was the first foray into 1080p and DirectX 10 (I was with ATi so ADD A POINT ONE!!!).  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is the game de jour with it's DirectX 10.1 adding sooooo much improvement to it's notorious performance issues; not that this was too much of a celebration since before I discovered how to turn noprefetch on I suffered hourly Blue-screens, sometimes within minutes of startup.

Interesting fact regarding the HD 4850 - I modded it's BIOS to overclock it permanently so that it would remain that way without needing the intervention of Rivatuner.

Following this was a stupid, ill-thought-out attempt to sell these bits in order to upgrade; forgot to account for depreciation and the fact that I used an iCute 600w (now forever rebranded iFryAllYourCircuitry with thanks to Autobot on the Bit-Tech Forum), which I suspect treated the VRMs to under-spec voltages for several years - this caused the motherboard to die on the poor fuck I sold it to, don't ask me how VRMs can "get used to voltages", it's the only theory I've got...

That left me without a PC for 1.5 years...

Maximum Overclock:  ~3.2GHz

5th PC:  Defection Part 2

• CPU:  Intel Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz
• Motherboard:  ASUS P8P67 B3 stepping
• RAM:  8GB Corsair DDR3-2000 (running 1866) Dual Channel (2GB x 4)
• GPU:  Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 1024MB
• Sound Card: ASUS Xonar DG
• HDD:  750GB Samsung HD753J
• Monitors:  Dell S2209W and Viewsonic VX924

And so we come to the end of this carousel of silicon to my current machine:

What can I say?  2 screens is liberating enough to justify 2 desks :)

You know what, fuck it, I'll let you go TMZ on the internals:

A veritable nest of wires can be beheld...

A healthy PSU fan transplant - yes, it is possible!
Thankfully un-furrying a CPU cooler is much easier with an air duster.

Among the car-accident wiring and wholly ineffective sound-deadening foam there's an Air Penetrator in there somewhere...

The collapsed defeat of a Perks For Pocket Change post, will probably just leave it like that TBH.

That Sharkoon 1000 80mm fan really showed off a good shutter; god I love my camera!

This is my current gaming/CAD machine; she runs very well and Windows 7 is remarkably smooth given that it's on a 6-year-old HDD.  The dual-screen setup is odd in that the screen heights are dissimilar both in resolution (1080 vs. 1024) and in physical height - this leads to the pointer seeming to jump vertically when crossing the border.  The best thing about it though is using it in CAD, being able to view both the model and some research material at the same time is such a breeze to say the least; the other thing it's good for is to view a slideshow of railway station pictures during a loading screen, as well as a few gadgets to monitor CPU, Memory and GPU utilization.

Maximum Overclock:  4.6GHz at 1.425V - toasty and risky...

I hope this recollection stirred fond memories in you all, especially if you began in the BBC micro era or similarly early days.  I for one love to tell stories like this and I'm only 22!  Being an OAP suddenly sounds so much more fun...

When the Heroes joined the Company

Let me tell you how I first came into contact with Company of Heroes; upon seeing adverts in Custom PC, I thought that the 3 soft-pencilled men standing in formation was to be another WW2 shooter, something I had already played enough of given MOHAA and Bf1942 ate so much of time that could have been spent buying clothing that's marked up like it's 1943 and the "correct" brand is selling sky-high priced food into my local ghetto...  blimey, that's dark...

Anyway, that was until my brother obtained a new graphics card which contained a copy of COH, he wanted nothing with it for one reason or another and I fired up what I expected to be an FPS - I am way past Chamberlain for how wrong I was.  As I said before, this was a total game-changer; I stopped thinking like an ant colony when playing RTS... et cetera.  Point is, I've just played through the campaign again, and now I can properly compare COH to COH2.

I won this one with many snipers and Arty...  there were some tanks and rangers in the picture somewhere, too...

I'm too tired for paragraphs, have some bullet points:

Goodness

• Gameplay is stellar, as it should be if it were to deserve a sequel
• Story doesn't try to be anything more than a Company going through the war - if you are going to make a game story, either make a Novel or keep it simple
• More tigers

Gimpiness

• Gigantic Difficulty Spike on Mortain Counterattack level, similar to COH2's Partisan level; best to use Airborne Company and paradrop AT guns and troops and just let those buggers wreck your base!
• Graphics are noticeably lower quality (why am I even mentioning this?  Graphics never go DOWN in a sequel)
• More tigers

Overall, how should I expect the previous installment to be better; let alone the first campaign in such installment?  I shouldn't, otherwise why bother, right?  Anyway, have some death:

Ever gotten so immersed in a game you forgot to take screenshots?

The First company of... okay, heroes, I've no Kerbals currently

Recently gotten round to re-installing Company of Heroes; they seem to have shifted to steam, which is a goddamn boon since I no longer have to remember my convoluted COH login.  I've also had the opportunity to compare it to COH2, so consider this an epilogue of sorts.

What I imagine the landscape of love and dating to look like...

The cutscenes of COH2 I found to be stiff and lacking character, and I can say that they certainly don't hold a candle to the highly stylised, watercolour cutscenes of COH (above).  These have this effect often seen in animated comics, with static images sliding in relation to one another for effects of movement and depth, and they definitely help to cement the atmosphere of a dreaded undertaking at the beginning and a costly aftermath at the end.  COH2 cutscenes, even away from the interrogation room, simply have no charm.

The UI in COH2 is genuinely something you don't notice being slick until you use something less so, as in COH.  In this case it is marginally less so, but for one thing the units are more difficult to keep track of since they are buried behind some kind of blue shield; in COH2 they are always on display.  If COH2 sorted its buttons out (they sometimes skip a beat, not activating upon a click), this would be a whole-hearted step forward.

A poignant scene of morose victory.

I still cannot give a full opinion of COH yet, since I am only 4 missions into the original campaign (there are 6), it'll be a god knows how long, and god knows how much wasted productivity, before I can review it...  Perhaps...

Company of Heroes 2: The Human Floodgates open!

I don't really feel all that bothered about spoiling the story for this review, since Animal Farm is pretty much required reading in English Secondary Schools; if you are *really* that bothered about it, the back button comes in useful today.

The Mighty Whitey SturmGeschütz, commanding it's very own native population

COH2 centres itself around Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's headfirst charge into wiping the Slavs off the face of the earth, and I'm not just lacking tact today.  The Campaign sees you through 14 missions chronicling the actions of some guy who leads some soldiers, then becomes a journo who inexplicably stumbles on some facts about the war that fail to uphold his communist sense of self, consequently his CO assigns him to a "СТРАФНИКИ" (Strafniki) Penal Batallion where he continues to uncover uncomfortable trinkets to the point where, his faith completely destroyed, he attempts to defect; attempt being the word used since he gets caught.  The delivery of this narrative doesn't do anything to break the mould, it's told a lot like a distinctly more popular title, Battlefield 3, through flashbacks and the fact that the character is under interrogation.

It doesn't help that the animation has a stiff, railroaded quality to it, indicating that it was done using the game engine; the campaign also suffers from what I like to call "Call of Pripyat cut the crap Disorder" - super brief cutscenes lasting a few seconds which add little to nothing to the exposition ("So, the underpass was filled with gas after it was sealed?").  This happens twice, once when you breach the fortress walls and see dead Soviet Prisoners that could already be seen during gameplay, and once more showing troops charging the Reichstag.  The only saving grace to this otherwise mediocre story is the ending, which I will leave up to you to uncover...  or just give youtube a bell, I did that for the story of Modern Warfare 3.

Well, it was either that or some powermongering git with a pistol...

While COH2 was never meant to set the world alight with it's dashing wordplay and eloquent social observation (here's to you, Dishonored!), it doesn't need to; not when the gameplay leaves the game comprehensively spoken for.  Company of Heroes completely turned my perceptions of RTS gaming on it's head, and up until that point I believed the ability to churn out tanks like queen bees on E was the height of tactical achievement.  With it's ability to give even single machine guns imperious weight and heavy tanks the weight of celestial bodies, suddenly you felt like a right gimp chimp when that Panther sped into the cottage out of control as though it were coming to breakfast.  This forces you contribute more to maneuver and demand less in slaughter.

This is especially so when even the environment seems to be after your dignity, frozen rivers can cave in under artillery or even the heavier tanks,  towing them under the ice to provide a new home for all kinds of weeds and fish for centuries to come; Infantry shouldn't feel too safe away from the rivers, blizzards occasionally ravage the battlefield regardless of what us mere monkeys are fighting over, and fire is often all that stands between them and hypothermal metabolic seizure.  This is somewhat pretentiously called "ColdTech", and a system which shows you precisely what your units are perceiving through the fog of war is called "TrueSight"; personally, I'm not so sure that features which cause people not to see what destroys the nearest building causing them to freeze to death warrant the status of separate coding packages.

Snow could be the death of your men out here

The two armies in the conflict are balanced spot on against one another, with the Red Army suiting human waves, bombastic artillery and other assorted zerg rushing; the conscripts are offered anytime for free pretty much throughout the campaign and they are often the first to snuff it in combat, so when you get the chance to let them fall in with better units, do it.  The Wehrmacht, having more class than this, is much better suited to considered tactical planning with more expensive but more powerful units and fewer soldiers to a squad.  I tend to do a lot better when playing the Wehrmacht, moral implications of Lebensraum aside.

Worthy of honourable mention is the Theatre of War DLC, offered to pre-purchasers (me) and available with a lot of skins and a few commanders for £30 on steam (or just buy the digital collectors edition for £70).  Fucking steep, but just about worth it when you consider that Relic stated they were going to add to it, and Relic is not a company to abandon a fanbase.  This is a series of missions, co-op and singleplayer, which place you into specific situations in the war that limit resources to the point where most modern commanders would give up; this is where the game genuinely beats out any other RTS you care to name, and shows that the scale of an RTS, while admirable in the major, can be just as stunning in the minor.  The example I would like to pick out is the mission where using just infantry, 2 starting Katyushas and abandoned Katyushas scattered across the map, you need to knock down all the German buildings in the region with civilian buildings netting an extra minute.  You have to count on footsoldiers to scout out these buildings, since the list includes ammo caches on capture points, MG bunkers and other trivial constructions; to make matters worse, panzer IVs stand in your way (thankfully they are the "stubby" variant).

Scorched Earth is visually arresting...

Sound design, something I feel is not often considered in game reviewing, even though it could be the difference between mowing the human lawn and avenging the villages wiped off the map in the name of meaningless racial purity - there's a reason why I still play Medal of Honor: Airborne from time to time in spite of it's right honourable brownness, and that is because the attention to it's soundscape is exquisite; that and the fact that I am terminally addicted to it's upgrade mechanic.  There is a clear, distinct hierarchy of weapons communicated by how heavy they sound, i.e: sniper rifles trump infantry rifles, the T-70's 45mm vs the Sdkfz 222's 20mm and ideally the Tiger vs many T-34s :) .  I have to say that the idle chatter in this game falls significantly flatter than that of COH, probably owing to the indoctrinated nature of the soldiers dampening their personality, so ultimately it does fit in and keep the immersion going.

So what does it come to?  Definitely not a 10/10 given how flat the story felt to me, but no lower than a 9/10, yep, let's go with that.  For an RTS trailblazer, it doesn't get much (or any) better than this; was it right that the game was put before the story?  Absolutely.

Dual CPU Motherboards - The End?

Dual CPU motherboards, where will they go, will they ever go?  I am a frequent reader of Custom PC magazine, a UK publication owned by bit-tech; but it's not often that dual cpu motherboards make an appearance, not even in the "Crazy-but-Cool" category; the last time I can observe one is in issue 104 back in May 2012, page 36 (yep, I spent some 45 mins of my time checking that!).  In the November 2003 Issue, the 2nd issue and the oldest issue I own, there are two SMP motherboards on review and also the first Athlon 64.

This is a question I bring up because I spent some 2 hours on Ebay checking out potential motherboards for my new PC, a backup PC that will serve as my main PC when I am on my Easter and Christmas breaks from university and perhaps stand in for the actual main PC should it break (if my Graphics Card or CPU become silicon crackers through an OC'ing accident or a fall, I'll probably have to wait 2 months for the money to get a comparable replacement).  One of the specimens I came across was this, an Lga771 Dual CPU eATX motherboard for £30; accompanying CPUs were similarly astonishing at £7 for two and Israel can provide a suitable stack of memory at 8GB for £25.  Better still, spend £33 more and you get 8 cores with 16MB total L2 cache :)

To put this into perspective, £40 will get you a bog-standard Lga775 board that supports Core 2 Duo CPUs (sure, you can go as low as £15 if you fancy the Intel 915 Chipset THAT much), I spent £8 on a Pentium E2160 that didn't play ball with the ASUS P5SD2-TM/S I had because of it's obscure SiS chipset from the depths of Netburst, and I hold onto a stick of 2GB Corsair Dominator which has a bluescreen-churning brother simply because to get the same amount of DDR2 for £25 these days makes you supernaturally fortunate.

What this signals to me is that Dual CPU motherboards are becoming less relevant to the common man - Why would an enthusiast get an eATX monster-board that requires a corresponding cage to put it in (looks like a deal?  It comes with everything but all the things that make it a computer case as opposed to bent metal and plastic...  thanks lads) when a single CPU socket can play host to 8 CPU cores, even if the individual cores are not much cop?  There is also the fact that the cores arms race between Intel and AMD has juddered to a halt, largely due to the fact that programming an existing single-threaded game engine for parallel computing is a task comparable to writing an entire new DirectX Generation.

So why were these things desirable to begin with?  I suspect that back in the days when Pentium 4 was "winning" the Gigahertz war while simultaneously being tailed by Athlon XP at every turn (so much so that AMD called a 2.2GHz CPU a "3200+"), trying to edit a word document while a game was idling in the background could be described as flaky at best and rage-worthy at worst; what we needed, we thought, was a second CPU to handle the word document or perhaps something more risque like running video encoding alongside Bf1942 or maybe just open piles of word documents without reducing the windows desktop to a single-digit frame rate.  

Then along came Athlon 64 which roundly trounced Pentium 4, followed by Athlon 64 X2 2 years after in 2005; Netburst's final stand was with the Pentium D, the Presler models practically on fire with a TDP of 130 watts.  Two CPU cores in one package was a big deal in 2005 simply because it became so much less stressful to Alt-Tab Half life 2 to look up a walkthough owing to the second core being available for the browser; as was said before, parallel coding for consumer apps is a significant stumbling point even today.  In 2006, Core 2 Duo from Intel was released, finally putting that crispy-pink burnt old Netburst dog to rest and ushering in the "multicore war", a war which saw AMD, now on the losing side, stuffing as many cores as was humanly possible into an ageing architecture, resulting in this virtually meaningless overkill today.

Intel, meanwhile, saw no reason to give the enthusiast more than six cores and the consumer more than four; even the server motherboards of today don't get more than 16 physical cores from them.  And herein lies the answer - CPU cores simply outstripped the ability of reasonably-sized coding houses to take advantage of them, why trouble ourselves to code for more than 4 cores when the user is probably going to use the 4th core to surf the net while our program runs anyway?  Why take on such a gargantuan task within a 1 year release cycle?  In the aftermath of all this, we enter Core ix generation (I did my best to delineate the x from the i!), and TDP now becomes the battleground with Ivy Bridge i7s at 77w from Sandy Bridge at 95w (Haswell moves some of the voltage regulation circuitry on-chip, hence the 84w TDP).

The one customer base that stands no chance of relinquishing these gems, however, is computing-based research; Organizations that not only stuff as much CPU and RAM as they can into a case only 44.5mm high, but daisy chain hundreds of the damn things and pack them into a practically refridgerated room that reaches 30 Degrees C in spite of that, all to simulate a mouse brain in real time.  A fascinating phenomenon in relation to this is that for 8GB of RAM, error rates due to cosmic radiation is around once per 9 years non-ECC, 45 years for ECC memory; remember that as memory increases, the error rate increases with half as many years between errors for double the memory - the upshot is that based on these statistics, even WITH ECC, a server farm totalling 400TB of memory will have a single-bit error every 7 hours and 53 minutes (1 hour and 35 minutes without).

When PCs have arguably reached the point where CPUs are considered must-have at the same level as network cards, it is easy to forget just how desirable dual CPU boards once were - they once commanded massive attention from performance freaks and made a colossal difference in performance to everything imaginable; the idea of multi-tasking as fluidly as we frequently do now on an 11" netbook was a pipe dream worthy of comparison to interstellar travel.  Since server farms are compulsively upgrading to expand their research capability, there will be a steady flow of decommissioned server motherboards for us to play with, and if that isn't a dozen of fun, tell me what is!

Perks for Pocket Change: Hobo survival for Graphics Cards

My GTX 560 has really been getting on my nerves recently, with it's fan ragged and rattled by 2 years of only seeing an air duster twice (Delta fans all over the world attempt to pull a Yao Ming face...  and pull it off somehow, stunning server monkeys everywhere).  Problem is, this particular Graphics Card has a proprietary bolt spacing as a result of the GTX 560 spec for such things being "Scatter them over the board for giggles if you like", i.e:  There is no reference card.  It is upon this situation and others like it in future, which I bestow this installment of Perks for Pocket Change:

How to wrap up cool:  GTX 560

The Problem

Taken off google image search on account of "couldn't be stuffed to revert my card" 

As I mentioned before, the fan for my GPU is noisy as hell, due to a combination of the card being OC'd to 952MHz and the fact that the fan bearings are bashed; in any other situation I would by an aftermarket GPU cooler such as the Akasa Vortex Neo, but due to the bizarre bolting that remains out of reach.

The Build:  Phase 1

Only the outer 4 holes are used(?)

I chanced upon a discovery:  An 80mm fan fits snugly in the fan recess once the original fan and shroud are removed; this calls for a hoedown of all the fans I had in storage:

From Left to Right:  Cooler Master 92mm fan (80mm mounts), Intel (Delta) Reference Fan, GTX 480 Reference Fan, Zalman 92mm fan (came from a flower CPU cooler), GTX 560 cooler

Here is a rundown of the fan characteristics:

• Cooler Master:  Quiet and powerul, but frame wouldn't be too sturdy once it was cut for radial airflow
• Intel Reference:  Reasonably quiet, good airflow, open and sturdy frame
• GTX 480:  Showed promise when it sported the same connector as the GTX 560 fan, but stuttered upon application of 5V; doesn't bode well for reliability
• Zalman:  Simply too big

I ended up selecting the Intel Reference Fan and with a junior hacksaw, cut away the push pins and half the outer frame to get a fitting result:

My handiwork

Cable ties sorted out the mounting issue

Ordinarily, this section would be 'The Perk' detailing how well it turned out, but unfortunate events put paid to those plans; the new arrangement sat idle well enough at around 31 Degrees C at 51MHz (50 Degrees C idling at 952MHz, it does that sometimes), but under Furmark it hit 90 Degrees C and crashed; the prelude to which featured an alarming temperature climb which I have no evidence for sadly, so just take my word for it.

My theory as to why this went down was that the fan that the air was shifting wasn't entering the heatsinks but simply blowing away at the sides since air readily takes the path of least resistance.  This is the wrapping up part of the project where paper...  yes, paper, will come to the fore.

The Build:  Phase 2

A good place to begin is to make some support struts for the shroud you are about to build - to do this you take an offcut of paper long enough for the strut but several times wider, and you fold it up, tape it down, and you have a  sturdy support for the shroud worthy of Brunel...  If the only alternative material was papyrus:

Be sure to channel air through the fins by making the shroud as wide as the fan to begin with, then touching the fins at the end.

The Next step is simple enough - sheet her up!  Also be sure to account for the sides of the fan as otherwise it is these parts that most of the airflow will go instead of the fins.

Legit Larrabee?

The Pocket Change

To make things crystal, I am assuming that the Graphics Card is already owned, and that the items being bought are specifically to initiate this project; so here we have:

• Intel Reference Fan - £6 on Ebay, and you get a free heatsink for future projects!
• Paper - I used 80gsm Copy Paper which is around £3 if you take the cheapest packs, that said the choice is ultimately yours and cereal boxes could work even better.
• Standard and Double-Sided Tape - Poundland offers both for £1 I suspect.
• Cable ties can be had for as low as £1

Totals out to £12

The Perk

Evaluation will occur based on this scoring system out of 100 points:

• Cost - for every pound under £30, 1 point is obtained
• Looks - only 10 points given that I could care less about them
• Practicality - 60 points, this is the heart of the matter

With that in mind, here are the scores:

Cost:  18 points

While a replacement fan may be cheaper, it would not necessarily be easy to find if possible at all.

Looks:  3 points

Doesn't scream 'Professionalism', so don't think you can get away with this in the IT Dept. unless the computers you work with remain shut for decades at a time.

Practicality:  30 points

While I have noticed a drop in temperature when idling at 952MHz (47 Degrees C vs 50 Before), after a while my PC will still crash when doing Furmark, so maybe that was the result of my own stupidity and pig-headed refusal to downclock back to 810MHz (EDIT:  I've caved in, and the cooler is now capable of sustained 100% running):

Playing Chicken with GPU temps, if only to prove that my card is indeed overclocked (if you can even see that).

Also of a concern is durability, don't go manhandling this card, I'd suggest 3D printing an adjusted shroud - or modifying the stock one - to accomodate the new fan ASAP.

Final Score:  51%

This isn't the kind of handiwork I would rely on for a server, nor would I want people to gaze at it; that said though, it does work well enough while a proper solution to the dilemma is sought.  I can only suggest this when you have a card with a non-reference cooling solution that you want to shut up, but cannot find an aftermarket cooler to fit the bill.

On a side note, I still stand by my previous post; the upshot is that I really don't care who uses the title or the entire system.  I personally love open source stuff even though I am a lamentable coder.

EDIT:  The cooler has disintegrated, I redact the Practicality score to 5 points, making my Final Score 26%; you may have better luck with superglue but then that brings a lack of flexibility into play.

Space Program of the Second Company of Kerbals

This is a warning to anyone who has work to do, who is trying to build a future for himself whether through a business or a career; people who wish to become free in the future to pursue whatever nonsense pleases them:  Do not download an open beta for a game which has been making you count the days forever - get the current task far out of the way, preferably in the opposite hemisphere.  I bring this up in light of two new games I have attributed to my recent spike in procrastination; these be Kerbal Space Program and Company of Heroes 2.

Both of these titles are open beta currently, and in spite of my cut-and-shut attempt to mix those two names up in the title of this post, they need distinct attention.

Kerbal Space Program

Sorry to lead you on a bit, but I really cannot give a comprehensive opinion on this title currently.  All I can say is that the method of building spaceships couldn't be simpler - all it lacks is some cylinders which are wide at the top and narrow at the bottom (EDIT:  You can rotate these parts, according to the controls), to enable a colossal fuel tank to sport a tiny, frugal engine without it looking like a toothpick supporting a barrel of crude oil.  I say I lack much of an opinion because all I have achieved to date is:

• Numerous crashes
• One satellite in a comet-style eccentric orbit
• One satellite off into space...  somewhere...

So yep, no opinion.

How North Korea would handle a space program, except that Kerbal looks too well fed...

Company of Heroes 2

Company of Heroes wasn't just an RTS to me, not even just a great RTS; it completely changed how I thought about the entire genre to the point where I feel entitled to all future RTS games being called "like COH but".  I remember playing titles like Red Alert (featuring the funniest death sound ever to grace a nuclear blast), C&C Generals (which for some reason I played to death) and Star Wars:  Empire at War (Space battles only, the ground levels can eat a gun).  All these titles were good, but they lacked an essential quality that sets COH well apart, and that is a essential humanity in the way the game feels; the dialogue from your units and others sounds organic and improv-ed to a T, the vehicles move according to their weight and all munitions used have a distinct, vibrant impact.  COH2 has proudly carried on the tradition... to the Eastern Front!  Relic could have just made another expansion like Opposing Fronts or Tales of Valor, but no, they gave the theatre playing host to half of all the blood spilt during the conflict it's own damn game - exactly what it deserved!

Oh, right, is it any good?  Are you mad?  Why would I wax lyrical about probably the least relevant (wrt gameplay) facet of this title like it was the goddamn life's work of Brunel if I didn't love this game?  I fucking adore it and wait like a widowed bride upon the cliff pining for her soldier to return home!  I especially can't wait to see how they handle the drama of the Eastern Front through the campaign; we needn't worry about gameplay getting lodged in the works since it is as streamlined as a swan with twice the bite.

In conclusion, say what you like about COH2; you scratch it's back, it introduces yours to a dagger, it will keep you starved and awake, it will even have you fight to the death when the writing has been sandblasted into solid steel mounted to the wall...  but it is never, ever dull!

Haswell hits home!

These are just a few things I have heard about Intel's next-gen CPU platform, Haswell:

1. It has been overclocked to 5GHz on just 0.904V
2. Another overclock took all 4 cores to 7.012GHz
3. Disable half the CPU cores, and 8GHz is possible!

Now, as someone familiar with CPU technology since AMD's Athlon XP days, I can tell that if you tried to do ANYTHING on these computers, they would gib and die; but this is the case with all these publicity overclocks: No.1 is self-explanatory since if it could run at that voltage at 5GHz, then there would be no question - it would be sold like that!  No.2 has an alarmingly low BCLK of 91.07MHz, which would completely fuck up the clockgen causing cascading failure of many system buses including SATA; No.3 runs at 2.259V, and the video is a parade of screenshots with no live footage, also the BCLK is suspiciously stable given how No.2 fared.  In spite of all of these overclocks offering no useful benefit to anyone, they still serve to lift spirits - anyone remember Sandy Bridge and how it wowed us with Stable Overclocks of 4.9GHz on air cooling?  Okay, not quite along the same lines, but I can make a conservative estimate that Haswell will allow 5GHz overclocking to become the rule, not the exception.

Another thing I would like to address is AMD, and it's Kabini (Laptop), and Temash (Tablet) CPU lineup; this is quite exciting for me, fondly remembering Athlon 64 and how it showed that the Emperor, Netburst, had neither clothes nor testicles.  Touted as AMD's final hope, these CPUs do indeed look quite the contender for Intel's godawful Atom (seriously, since when did a good CPU only ever only do things one at a time?), but the one that *really* caught my eye is the A4-5000, which is a quad-core at 1.5GHz, a GPU with 128 shaders at 500MHz, drawing only 15W; I feel the need to press that home:  This is a quad-core which can merrily power an 11in netbook!  Not only that, but this includes the GPU, so overall system power isn't likely to exceed 30W, ever.  I seriously hope AMD does manage to cling to life, and Haswell doesn't wreck it's shit for good, but then again that is just my inner 12 year old talking, change happens...

On the GPU front, Nvidia is prepping to release the GTX 780, basically a Titan for play-it-safe scrubs like me, not those rich-fuck-scrooge-mcduck early adopters!  Meanwhile ATi (not AMD!) has booted the HD 7990 6GB out of the door and taken the GPU performance crown back...  yep, I said I care not so much for graphics, funny since CPU performance is completely moot these days especially for gaming.  There is, however, one question I have - If GPUs are getting more power efficient, where are the performance passively-cooled graphics cards?  All we have are those silly little HTPC cards with crudely machined aluminium blocks for heatsinks, how about a passive GTX 760?  I'm sure that the concept of a PC with only 2 fans in the entire thing appeals to a great many gamers (I know I'd like to silence my GTX 560, but then again I bumped the clocks from 810MHz to 950MHz so why the hell am I complaining?), after all, the NoFan CR-95 found a market despite the fact that it is basically a GIGANTIC fuck-off block of copper (180mm diameter x 148mm height, frankly I'm surprised it "only" weighs 730g).  I wouldn't care if it took up 4 slots, If I had a silent PC in the works I would snap that mother up!

Well, that's my lot on the scene, I would love to know how you think the perennial CPU war of AMD vs Intel will pan out, will AMD finally be steamrolled despite it's ingenuity; perhaps comments on whether passive performance cards are a good proposition?  Your minds and mouths are weapons free...

Metro: Last Light - The big picture this time...

You know the saying "Fail to plan, and you plan to fail?", that is exactly how I feel now after that previous post; I acted out on passion towards an unrelated subject, one which is quite personal to me being male, terrible-looking and subject to a lot of rudeness and sometimes outright hatred from women in my time as a result (Some group of girls whispered about pushing me under a train, within earshot, at Cardiff Central Station, lol).  I struggled to put my finger on why this was until this morning, when some dots connected and I realized:  This is the work of the game weaving it's immersive black magic so proficiently, that I am seriously pissed off that this part of the story is so goddamn uncooked!

To understand how this is so, we need to start at the bottom:  The Graphics - yes, I know that great graphics push GPU power to stratospheric levels which in turn benefits GPGPU apps which then thrusts forward knowledge in medicine; but I personally consider them trivial compared to what we will get to.  Even so, it seems that the engine, while gorgeous, runs generally well at 1080p full detail on my i5-2500K and GTX560 non-ti; minor lag happens when masses of lights are introduced, but this is tolerable.  While we are on the subject of trivial matters, the gunplay is also relatively generic; it works and it does feel responsive enough to carry the game along, but it's not a patch on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with it's bullet drop and extensive upgrade trees with trance-inducing detail on how a block of magnesium will make the gun 0.1kgs lighter or some shit, or maybe that's just me going aspie in you lot.  So yeah, not the most astounding in terms of basic gameplay, but trust me, the devil's in the details.

Let's be honest here, when we want big-budget FPS action, we leave Metro well alone and fly over to Gears of War or Halo or relentlessly fished species of piscine that usually ends up covered in breadcrumbs.  When you fire up a Metro title (or a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title for that matter), you are here for the wasteland, this is the entity that takes the show for all it's worth and doesn't let go until there's nothing but bones.  This is mostly down to just how unflinchingly brutal and primal the environment is not only on the surface, but in the Metro as well; humans are on the verge of falling back to instincts wherever you look with bandits raping lone females, nazis acting like gods over "mutants" and even a wife who slept with one of these devils to save her husband, who subesquently got shot anyway.  This is exactly how violence and sex should be used in a game, not to cynically draw in the lowest common denominator but to show us just how close we really are to nature despite the best efforts of Victorian moral codes and attendant suppression of animal urges.  Speaking of moral codes, the moral points system makes an ambivalent return with actions like listening in on the prostituting wife or saving the potential rape victim making a white flash appear; these count towards the ending which is not to be spoiled!  I say ambivalent because the ending I got (the "Bad" ending, but how the hell is that the case?) left me almost in tears and genuinely made me think about whether people would talk about me in such a respectful, beautiful way should I die (Answer:  parties will be thrown, as well as bricks... at my tombstone.).

Neatly, this lets me come to the "Relationship" in the game; the way the "bad" ending went forced me to imagine how elegant the romance would have been if more time was given to it instead of Andrei the Fucking Blacksmith, that oh-so convenient plot device who serves only to give you a car, A CAR!  For christ's sakes!  He only appeared to save you from buckshot to the face in the previous game and suddenly he's worthy of appearances for fan service?  You might say he was in the book, but game stories run much faster than book stories do; a trivial incident like this can punch well above it's weight in a book because you describe every single solitary detail and the reader can take it all in at his pace; games lose that ability to their own pacing, therefore it would be perfectly acceptable to cut him out and have him leave a note or something, saving precious development time for more pressing characters while you work in almost as much hardship as your metro dwellers.

To wrap this all up, don't think for a second that I feel in any way bitter about this game; there is beauty in the beast and a beast can be found in any beauty no matter how divine.  I feel that in at least one regard a HUGE opportunity was missed to produce one of the quirkiest and most inspiring "love conquers all" stories of our time simply because of a lack of framing for Anna's early misandric conduct, something to explain why she acted like she did and more relevantly something to account for why she suddenly fancies you halfway through the game beyond "I was often left alone by daddy, I need feel-good now".  Apart from that, Metro: Last Light really does shine like a lighthouse made of rubies towering above the sea of grey goo that is FPS mediocrity, it just goes to show that combining "cool" elements and pleasing the largest number of demographics is truly the path to hell when it comes to making a momentous piece of art... yes, art...