• 22Jan 08

  New speakers and mouse, yay!

  I've been happily playing on my new rig for a while now, I can say it's definatly worth the purchase, especially since I can now play stuff like Supreme Commander and The Witcher at all high.
  Though it does also present a few problems though, I still have a almost complete module for Neverwinter Nights (1), but for some reason NWN doesn't seem to like 8800's or dual cores. Beta drivers managed to get the game to run, at around 30 FPS!
  Changing settings doesn't make that much of a difference, something is simply screwing the game up. I'm not the only person with this problem though. I hope they find a fix soon, because my old PC ran it better on all high.
  
  But apart from the occasional dual core or 8800 conflict, it's been a good ride so far.
  
  I've had, for the longest time, a collection of completely random speakers all plugged together. Where I got them all from, I've no idea. The subwoofer plus satelites I was using gave horrible sound by itself, but I managed to get that fixed by taking the speakers I had before that, and putting the subwoofer in the "left speaker" socket. It still gave pretty bad sound, but it was doable for a bunch of free speakers.
  I had been stuck with these things for years before my X-fi managed to crank up the quality of the sound immensely. But age was taking it toll on the set. On the power button especially, I had to put a piece of paper under the button, or else it simply wouldn't go on.
  And my mouse, I had bought it years back at a PC hobbyist convention. Me and my dad had looked around, I believe I even bought Baldur's Gate 2 there (so that would automatically make it the best convention of my life, I guess ). But on the way outside, I recalled that I could actually use a new mouse, and if I remember correctly, just along the exit was a barrel full of these cheap Logitech optical mouses, for 15 euro's. At the time I was pretty poor so it was an easy choice for me.
  Now generally the mouse was fine, however, it did have the weird tendency to sort of "hiccup". At completely random moments, sometimes with months in between, sometimes only minutes, it would suddenly either have your cursor at the top of the screen, or in games, it sometimes even had you spinning really fast. Weirdest thing I've ever seen. But 1 poke at the mouse and it would be gone.
  But still I couldn't help but feel that the mouse was kinda creepy, so the choice for a new mouse was quickly made, I mean, if I'm equiping myself with top range hardware, I can't leave ye aulde mousy out.
  
  My judgement had fallen on the Logitech MX518, because, if I WAS going to get a new mouse, I'd want one with on the fly sensitivity changing, even though it probably wouldn't be that usefull overall. And it looked pretty cool, I thought.
  As for the speakers, I was originally looking at a Cambridge Soundworks set, a friend of mine had cheap 2.1 set from there, and let me tell you, the sound that came out of those tiny speakers! Holy! And the Subwoofer is probably enough to topple buildings.
  However, I wanted a 5.1 set, simply because it seemed cool.
  However, after some sniffing around, I found out that Logitech had this speakerset with similair specs and supposedly great sound for 200 euro's less ( the Cambridge thingy was 500).
  However, I was playing a bit of Warcraft 3 at one of my mate's place, and he had a pretty cheap ( I think 45 euro's, he said) 2.1 set from Creative. And the sound coming from that was perfectly fine too.
  That's when I thought, hey, why not just take a budget set, I don't need power because my mom comes storming into my room whenever I put my sound a bit over the top.
  So I went looking for a decent 2.1 Creative set. (the 5.1 had phased from my brain for a minute there).
  I came upon the Creative Inspire T3100, every review I read was positive to insanely positive, so that one was definatly worth a purchase, I thought. Untill I went to the Creative site and saw that they had the exact same set as 5.1. (Being the Creative Inspire T6100)
  Looked up some reviews: same deal.
  One reviewer said: If you're looking for a budget 5.1 set with great sound. Look no further.
  And I heeded his advice.
  
  Now, I ordered the mouse and set at this online shop, the prices weren't really that far apart, but I think the MX518 are in short supply or something, because I couldn't find a store that actually had them in stock, so I just ordered them where the expected time was the least.
  So after I placed the order I waited a few days, but then I came upon a site that had both of ém in stock for 5 euro's more or so.
  The other store still had 2-3 days waiting time for the mouse, so I figured it would be ok to just cancel that one and order from the other.
  Guess what? I look in my email that evening: Shop 2: Order confirmed: will be delivered tomorrow. Shop 1: Cannot cancel order because the required products came in on that day! Will be delivered tomorrow!
  And I was like.......ugh......
  But anyways, I just returned the second shop's delivery and they made no fuss about it.
  So I fired up my mouse and speakers.
  
  I can be short about the mouse: I was able to game with it the moment I had it, so there's no problems there. It looks pretty kewl and it doesn't have the weirdness the other mouse had, and the shape of the thing is a bit easier on your hands. So it's a good purchase.
  Now the speakers: The subwoofer, it's totally overpowered. I've the bass almost as low as possible, I was testing out various songs to see how it sounded, and guess what: my mom and dad both came seperately not so lon after each other to tell me that the house was kinda shakey. So I put the bass a bit lower, went outside my room, closed the door, and listened. I thought "hmm, that aught to be fine".
  
  So I go downstairs, and say to my dad "hey, it's fine don't you think?" So he puts down he paper, and we listen......and we heard "thunk thunk thunk thunk". And I was like "hehehe, nevermind." So now it's almost as low as it can get I think I may need to put something under it, apparently a plank or a tile can do wonders, but I've yet to try it out.
  The speakers: Well, they're pretty good, the quality difference was pretty small, nothing like the first time I tried the X-fi on my old speakers, but the fullness of the sound (I have no idea how to put it in English ) is great.
  Funny enough though, I do think I'm more suspectible to bad quality sound now. I was watching ZeroPunctuation yesterday and I was like "eww."

  The only thing I might still be getting for my PC in a while, is a CPU fan, and this huge (and I mean HOOGE) fan for my case's sidepanel. In total I think about 90 euro's, I guessing? Then I think I'll be done fooling around with my PC for a while.
  
  In other news: This is the last week of my internship, so it's back to school soon. I'm wondering what our first project will be.
  The first year was a standard IT course, but I'll be getting the first lessons on application development soon. I've been practising C# here when I had nothing better to do, and I dare say I'm starting to get the hang of it! I'm currently making a simple textbased RPG, the PC's here have Nvidia TNT2's, can't really build any DirectX or XNA stuff on 'em .
  
  Cheerios!

  • Posted Jan 22, 2008 5:35 am PT
  • Category: Computers
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• 25Oct 07

  Jippie, 22 inch monitor right here!

  Okay, things are coming along fine with my new comp. Been playing lots and lots of Supreme Commander lately, and I have to say it's the first time in a while that I've actually had so much fun with a game. Interpret that how you will.

  I ordered a LG 226WTQ-SF 22 inch flatscreen yesterday, and it arrived today.
  It has a 3000:1 contrast ratio and a 2MS response time.

  Funny thing, I was supposed to bay in cash to the delivery guy, so I got up fairly early (for me on a vacantion day) to go to the nearest bank.
  So as I'm riding along I see this delivery type van pass by, and I didn't really pay attention to it, but just as it was gone, I wondered "hey, did that read TNT? (the delivery service, make your jokes)"
  And I was like, oh well, probably looked kinda like it.
  So I get the money and ride home only to find a strange 22 inch LG monitor box standing in the room (my dad had already claimed it, hehe) apparently the dude just dropped it off without asking for any cash.
  Now there wasn't any sort of billing form inside the box neither. So now I'm kind of hoping they just got stupid and thought I already paid for it. But I'm guessing that's not the case. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

  Anyways, it's a nice thing, and it's pretty big, I still have to get used to it now.
  Annoying that my brightness and color settings are still kinda messed up, my old monitor was horribly dark, and I tried to compensate somewhat by toying around with the settings, or maybe I'm just not used to such a bright display anymore.

  Next month I'll be getting a pretty nice surround set, and then I'll have nothing left to spend my hard earned cash on....except perhaps a new mouse, but this one is still perfectly fine, neat little logitech mouse, picked it up on the way out of some computer convention perhaps 3 or even more years ago, and it's still working perfectly. And that for 15 bucks.

  Cheers!

  • Posted Oct 25, 2007 3:36 pm PT
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• 3Oct 07

  Assembled my new PC! Huzzah!!

  Hurray, I have my new PC up and running now, although I still need to install some more stuff like Xfire and copy lots of files, like music. It's good to go

  After some looking aroundand thinking I decided I'd just buy a XFX 8800 GTX xXx version instead of the XFX 8800 Ultra Extreme, that's about 70 bucks less for very little loss. This GTX is faster then the standard Ultra's, even.

  I also decided to go for Corsair memory, because the Kingston RAM I was aiming at just wasn't being delivered to any shop anywhere. Still pretty weird, but it's solved now. Although the Corsair was a bit pricier for exactly the same, about 30 euro's more in fact. But hey, I could still be waiting for the Kingston stuff to arrive if I hadn't ordered Corsair, and even then there was no garantuee it would actually be there at that time.

  So now my setup looks like this:

  OCZ Gamesxtream(or something like that)600 Watt PSU
  Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 1.1
  Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 2,66 Ghz (but not for long, I think)
  2 x Corsair Dominator 1GB @ 1066MHZ
  Nvidia XFX 8800 GTX xXx 756MB (specs) Factory OC'd.
  Western Digital 500GB 16MB cache SATAII
  Creative Soundblaster X-fi
  
  All that in a Thermaltake Kandalf fulltower.
  
  And my old floppy driveand DVD-rom.
  
  Now, starting up, I immedialty had problems. For some reason my DVD drive which had been functioning perfectly in my old pc just wasn't being detected. After lots of fooling around I decided I'd just snatch the DVD drive from my mom's PC, which nobody ever uses (not even my mom ) and try that. Well, it definatly worked, but I also found out why we tossed that thing into that horrendous PC again. I inserted the Windows disc and it started installing, but at a speed similair to how your grandma would play games. And just the sound of the damn thing was enough to send shivers down your spine. And even worse, the damn thing crashed (or it could have just been taking a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time) while it was copying the damn setup files. So instead of risking our precious Windows disc with that monster, I decided to just hijack one of my dad's drives ( he had a reader and a reader/writer anyways ) and that worked. So after installing the whole bunch I decided I'd try it with my own drive again, for some reason I thought it might work this time. But instead it just gave me a BSOD on startup.
  
  However, going back to my dad's drive, everything was fine. However, my onboard LAN wasn't being detected, which isn't really handy when you're trying to install the latest drivers and such.
  So I took a look at the Gigabyte website and downloaded the drivers. However, I saw that it was too big to fit on a floppy, so I started up my dad's comp and began moving small amounts of files at a time when I noticed my MP3 player lying on the desk.
  
  And I went like: "Hey MP3 player.....MP3 player with USB connection...wait a minute...USB connection? Argh!"

  So after just transferring the files withthe old worthless MP3 player I could go about my business (with my old PC playing some tunes in the ...err..background). So after installing Service Pack 2, drivers for soundcard/videocard etc.

  Up until now I had my new PC on my desk with an old monitor which we still had standing around (old broken piece of beep btw) and my old keyboard and one of those microsoft mouses which tends to actually work every now and then. But I decided it would be better to switch the comps before I started some play testing, as the old pc was still wired to my new keyboard (Logitech G15 btw), my actually working mouse, monitor and speakers.
  
  However, now I witnessed some of the negative effects of this case, because even though it had 4 fans already installed and lots of blue LED's everywhere, it was just was too freaking big! I just put in at the spot where the old one was, but it stuck out from under my desk, not exactly handy when your chair is right next to it, so practically I'm now being pushed away from my desk by my own PC.

  However, at the time it was already late and I was anxious to see some gaming action, so I thought I'd just live with it for an hour or so and go to bed.
  So I installed Oblivion, and fired it up. To my surprise it said that it was unable to determine my video card and set the graphics to Medium. So I was like "WTH!"(getting flashbacks from my previous card, an Xpertvision Radeon 9800,the horror) however, going into the options menu there wasn't really anything wrong, it said "8800 GTX" and I could activate HDR and such, so no problems there. So I just decided to launch the game and see if anything was up.
  
  So I start, keeping the rest of the settings on medium, just in case. But everything was fine, I was able to turn up every single slider and turn on every single feature, and I never dropped below 50 frames in anywhere (that is, inside, outside and cities), with Vsync on, that is. Seems to me like the frames don't get higher then 60 with Vsync on. With Vsync off I was getting frames around 120 outside at times, but it also gave me some drops to around 40 sometimes, so I'll have to look into that further.
  
  The sound was pretty nice too, I definatly noticed a difference in quality, but I guess anything is better then that onboard thing I had on my old PC.
  
  The only problem is, my dad wants his DVD drive back (naturally) and mine still isn't working, and even worse, I think it still has the Morrowind CD stuck inside ( I hope that isn't causing the problem, that would be weird).
  I guess I'll just go buy a SATA DVD reader/writer in the afternoon. They aren't too costly, although I should be saving up for a new monitor and speakers. (I'm aiming for aLG 22 inch LCD and a Creative G500 5.1)
  
  And I guess I should try to position my case better, the way I have to lean to the right the be able to reach the keyboard isn't exactly what I call comfortable, but I doubt a huge case like that will look good on my desk.

  Cheers!

  • Posted Oct 3, 2007 3:13 am PT
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