building a new compy again

So about the time I got Torchlight, there was also the announcement about the new 3D zero-gravity space shooter game (Shattered Horizon [shadoobie]) that is Win7/Vista/DX10-only. Arrgg!

The PC I built in early 2006 is not going to get the job done, without a lot of upgrade, in which case I might as well build a new one. Is that even going to be possible? I have some requirements: AMD Phenom II quad-core cpu, 3+GHz, min 4GB DDR2 RAM possible, PCI Ex 2.0, DX10 possible, micro ATX-size case.

Turns out that is just now doable, with caveats. Shuttle is now making a case/mobo combo that will take a Phenom II, but only certain ones: those needing < 100 watts of power. There's a sticker on the cpu socket that warns you about this...so the highest-end cpus can't go in there (940, 955, 965) because they are either 125 or 140 watts. I only found this out by reading some of the user comments at Newegg. I'd have found out when I opened the case, of course, but if I'd already bought the 965 I'd have been unhappy. Newegg offers those two as a bundle, but that's kinda stupid given that that cpu can't go on the mobo. I went with the 945, 3 GHz quad-core, 95 watts.

In addition, Windows 7 is available as a free beta for the next 5 months. I don't know what happens after that, probably they want money or it shuts down. Well, it's Win7 Ultimate, which is actually more than I really want; Pro is what I want...but for test-drive purposes, this is ok.

Bought some of the new pieces in person at MicroCenter, and mail-ordered the case/cpu pair from Newegg.

Things went together like a breeze, which was great. Win7 installed with ZERO hassles, and nearly zero personal involvement. Other drivers went in super-quick/simple, also good, and it ran the first game I tried out...which was, interestingly, Bioshock, which does not run properly on my XP box. Works great, so I need to try some other things out, too, like UT04 which has quit working on my XP box. Need to try out Oblivion (and when the hell is Elder Scrolls 5 coming out?).

Case/mobo comes with two monitor sockets on-board, and the video card (ATI 4670) has two more, so i could put four monitors on this. Think I'll see about getting another 24" one...four monitors. That's what I'm talkin' about!

Gotta put a carrying handle on top of this one, too.

Win 7 boots pretty damn fast, and the wake from sleep is damn fast, too. Hooray!

The trick will be to not install so much stuff that if I have to do a complete wipe/reinstall it won't be too hard...

A month or so ago I got a dual 1TB raid unit set to mirroring. I have pushed all the mp3 stuff from the old pc onto the raid unit. It's not real fast, but does ok to play music. And all the machines can see it. (actually this "not too fast" issue is alarming/weird--should be at least 100T ethernet going in the back, but it seems like no more than 10T at best)

See you again in 3 years or so on this same topic.

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Bioshock has behaved weirdly for me...Oblivion has been great, except when i was trying to run bioshock, which was having/causing some really weird audio problems. So long as I steer clear of BioS, everything else seems ok...which won't be hard to do, because I've reached a point in BioS where I literally cannot continue, there's some bug I'm hitting.

Oblivion plays quite fine on this system, even with a bunch of the graphics aspects near maximum (which, btw, are pretty but unhelpful: if you turn on nearby grass, there will be plenty of cases where an outdoor opponent drops a weapon and you can't find it).

I've been playing with some different techniques this time: You can run sneak to 100 on the very first guy in the tutorial, there's a sweet spot where, as reported before, you can set a weight on an arrow key and just walk away. You can do something similar with most of the magic schools, too, which is also interesting. I'm level 35 now, have done very little fighting overall, and I am absurdly easy to kill. I went with being a Khajiit, which is a weak character to begin with, so I'm mostly having to play by letting summoned things do the work. The reason I went ahead an leveled up is that I being so weak I needed to get to the point where I could kill/soul-trap grand-level souls (aiming at chameleon 100), and you can't even encounter them at level 2 (well, excepting that you kill some necromancers and get black soul gems). But I'm level 35, and I haven't even started the main story line, or gone very far with Mages Guild, or even the first task for fighters guild.

In addition to being a weak character, my armor and blade skill levels are low, which contributes to my being easily killed. Turns out that "fortify blade on self 100 pts for 30 sec" spell is far better than "fortify strength 100 pts".

Oh...the other reason I'm easily killed is that I set the difficulty to max, which makes for a really different game experience. At least until I got to chameleon 100, I got killed entirely too often. At normal difficulty, with sneak 100, you can sneak in the day without being seen...not even remotely possible at max difficulty.

So it's been interesting again...