Of RipJaws and Eden

Previously, I’ve told you guys about my GeForce upgrade on my media centre. The performance boost was, well, kind of okay, but at last I felt it was time for an overall upgrade on the system. I’ ve got this AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition in my PC that I usually use for some work on photos and on the other hand it’s simply a machine I use to manage my mails, websites and these kind of things.

It finally turns out that the processor plugged into this machine gets a little bored so I’ll do an exchange and my AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition moves from my media centre to this working machine. Both system still run on the AMD 7xx chipset and the media centre will now get the upgrade to the AMD 990FX chipset in form of an Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 board.

I’ll put 16GB DDR3 12800 G.Skill RipJaw modules on this system, so that I finally do not have to suffer on a memory bottleneck. I personally think that this is a good foundation for my EVGA GeForce GTX 560ti 448 Cores Classified. I was able to get a performance increase on games like “Batman Arkham City” but the overall system performance became pretty bad during the last year and a half so it’s time to make an upgrade and most importantly get a fresh and new installment of Windows 7.

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I’ve exchanged graphics and sound card drivers a lot in the past and I also had to struggle with several hardware and software issues that also caused new bugs, if you know what I’m saying.

Anyhow, I don’t expect a performance boost of 200 per cent but I’m certain that the overall system performance and feel of smoothness will increase and a lot of crashes and bugs will get fixed with this new setup.

In preparation for this did I also give the new XBMC version (called “Eden”) a try, which is currently out as a beta release. I was a little disappointed. I did a fresh installment and imported my old library to get everything as clean as I could. The movie library did not work as expected. I was missing movie posters. I wasn’t able to get movie information. The new skin itself is not a thing I’m going to be friend with because all the items are drawn much smaller and it looks like as if there’s something missing on the GUI.

I also tried several video add-ons and most of them did not work properly as well. To summarize, this is still a beta version and it does not represent the final product, but I will wait for a long time until I’ll finally do the update from “Dharma” to “Eden”. I’m fine and comfortable with my current media centre software. So why changing a good and running system?

I hope I can get everything done within the next 5-7 days and I’ll keep you informed.

I ain’t superstitious

A lot of people totally freak out these days, because a new year is just around the corner and lots of people start making new year’s resolutions. You might expect what’s my opinion about these things; yes – it’s complete bullshit.

Let’s take it logically and without all these emotional influences some people are affected to use with events like New Year’s Eve. It’s just some digits on the calendar that change and nothing else. And here’s the thing. So many people waste their time on reviewing the last twelve month, start predicting what’s to come next and how wonderful everything was the years before.

Some just sit and complain how fast everything goes and ask themselves where time has gone to. Actually, I personally do not care about it. Time is fixed and does not run fast or slow. It’s also without any sodding meaning what has been in the past, because it has no essential influence on the current moment, except there was an event with certain aftermaths.

It’s pathetic how some people turn New Year’s Eve into such an occult event. What is this, medieval age? The dawning of the of the superstitious idiots?

I don’t have a problem to have a nice time in company with some friends, but what I hate is this backslapping at midnight, like you’ve been friends for eras without even knowing who the hell this guy is in front of you. There have been several New Year’s Eves that I also used to stay on my own and doing something useful (like overclocking my graphics card). Best thing about it, I was able to get to bed early without having a terrible hangover.

I’ve spoken to a friend this very morning and he’s got the same opinion about this whole thing. Why not just hanging around with each other like every other common day, without these ridiculous rituals or whatever people do to still the hunger of their superstition?

Steamworks’ waiting line

I wouldn’t say, that I’m a completely busy person, but to some degree, my spare time is limited and I hate wasting it. As some of you might know, Steam’s making the holiday sales these days and one can find a lot of great deals to get some excellent games. Like I did…

…but the bad, not to say the worst thing about it, is the terrible overload Steam servers have to suffer. I’ve recently bought “Test Drive Unlimited 2” and it took almost two days to download the game. Actually, this is not totally correct, to download the game that I’m able to start it. After hitting the start button, the game itself started an update procedure with a 1998-like speed of 14KB/s.

patience

Almost every larger game I’ve bought suffers and struggles on the correct usage of bandwidth. I “only” got a 16MBit/s connection, but I rarely hit a download peak of 200KB/s on average. This is totally exhausting, especially when you want to play a game on Steam while you also want to download. Each download gets suspended or paused after starting a game, which can be reversed, but you always have to do it manually.

I had the same problem during last year’s holiday sales even with a 100MB/s connection. Steam is one of the leading platforms, not to THE leading platform in digital game distribution. Why the sodding hell are they so way behind to provide proper bandwidth? It wouldn’t cost that much to and it also will save a lot of my rare free time.

Laudanum

It’s been for a very long time now that I’m carrying some kind of “emotional baggage” with me. Actually I’m not sure if that’s the correct term for the current circumstances, but for some reasons do I feel depressed and exhausted for a very, very long time now. There’s nothing that can give this whole thing a change. Time passes by and its speed is permanently increasing. I’m not satisfied with anything.

I’ve been this moody during summer time and the time period before and I refuse to say that this is just a meteorosensitive phase. I seriously have no sodding idea where those moods are coming from or what causes them. Even in a moment of pure happiness I feel totally depressed and down.

Laudanum

One reason for all this may be the unavailability to capture the current moment. This sounds a lot like phantasm, but I always feel like, I can’t grab what’s there right now, I’m always on the chase for something that’ll be in the future. When I reach that very point I was chasing, it instantly turns out meaningless. I was thinking about this for a long time and I still haven’t found a true solution for this issue.

Fulfillment is what I’m missing and I don’t know where I lost the ability to capture the now and then. I’m like stuck to dates and schedules set fix in the future. On the other hand I also lost a lot of my patience. Not that I get instantly mad and furious, it’s more a lack of concentration and patience while doing things. It even affects my work. My head’s fulfilled with future plans and multiple paths to walk on and kinds of totally different projects that nothing is getting done in the end.

I really long for a journey offside all these things and by that I don’t mean three weeks of vacation. I seriously feel like I should change something for real. But, for Christ’s sake… I dunno

Back in the 19th century people went to a club where they could buy some Opium and fell deep into their minds and review their thoughts and feeling. Sodding hell, get me some Opium!

The Upper-Classified

You may remember a post I published by the beginning of December where I stated that totally, totally, totally want the EVGA GeForce 560ti 448 Cores Classified. It finally happened. The card has been shipped and will probably be here with in like one or two days.

I’m totally excited about the abilities of the card. Things like temperature, stability and most importantly overclocking capabilities. I remember the EVGA GeForce 570 DS HD with a pretty similar cooling design, but this one was a pure noise terror. Those very, very few reviews that do exist about the  EVGA GeForce 560ti 448 Cores Classified say, that the noise level is pretty low actually and the temperatures are moderate, too.

This is exactly what I need for my media centre. Silence and undisputed, raw GPU power. To be honest, I buy this graphics card just to be able to play Batman Arkham City on almost maximum details fluently. Yes, there you got him, video game  freak buying hardware for just one game.

Whatever the case, Mrs EVGA GeForce 560ti 448 Cores Classified is on her way to Mr Hardware Freak and as soon as this romance gets hot and wet I’ll leave some details right here in this blog.

(By far the worst final sentence I’ve written here 😀 )

The X-Mas underdose

It’s holiday season and the oh-so-holy Christmas is drawing dangerously near. If haven’t already noticed. Well, consider this a last note to get to a mall near you and get a whole lotta bunch of cheap useless stuff to gift. I personally lost connection to Christmas a few years ago. I don’t know why, but I actually don’t give a sodding damn about Christmas. The main reason is the media overkill you get during holiday season.

It starts on Black Friday and ends somewhere in the middle of January. A lot of things happen but from my point of view I see nothing in common with the old traditional Christmas. I’ve found myself several times grabbing some extreme good deals on several shopping platforms on the internet but there was no single, bloody moment where I’ve found myself getting some rest or get some reflectiveness.

Candy cane christmas - by *Ophelias-Overdose

I’m also not very sure how this could look like. Just sitting there nearby a mistletoe reviewing my previous. Doing some extreme cuddling action under the Christmas tree with my better half. I just don’t know. Biggest epic fail about it, I once knew. Not really knowing, but, you know. Argh, *sigh*, it’s complicated.

Maybe it’s the lack of snow this year. Maybe it’s the fact that my head is filled with routes and network protocolls. Maybe it’s the fact that I simply missed to get some Christmas influences. I was off to the Christmas market one time, but more for a drinking reason than a reflective one. Additionally, I don’t watch much TV and when I watch, it’s VH1 or National Geographic. Not the kind of broadcast you watch, when you want to become christmasly influenced.

One premiere this year, I got all my presents together that I want to gift on Christmas. [enter applause here] Ans also got one present for me personally. I like myself sooo bloody, sodding much this year that I HAD to buy me a present. Whatever the case, it does not bring back the true traditional meaning of Christmas and that’s some kind of, well, dunno…

We are 4-48

When you want to have something exclusive, you have to use some exclusive methods to get it. Nvidia announced that they put out a new graphics card which will be settled in the upper mid-range segment. It’s called GeForce GTX 560ti 448 and is basically not a 560, it’s a 570 with a few cuts on the shader units.

Whatever the case, I want this bloody card. And secondly, I want this bloody card by EVGA. And last but not least I want the “Classified” edition with improved cooling design and two more phase units to beat the shit out of every game with some monster overclocking. Well, until now, I’m just waiting. I had the standard version of the 560ti 448 but I wasn’t very happy with it.

The performance is okay and slightly improved in comparison to my GeForce GTX 560ti, but it was too loud. Not too loud for a common system, but too loud for my media centre. 1,500rpms in idle mode were too much and the card went back to sender.

So, here I am, waiting and waiting for the “Classified” edition. I ordered this card at three different resellers to get some special assurance that at least ONE reseller will get this card and send it to me. The person who’s dignified.

Never change a running system

I’ve been thinking about redesigning my home’s network infrastructure for a while now and Cyber Monday gave me a nice opportunity to grab some cheap WiFi devices. It was time to replace my obviously oversized Netgear VPN router in combination with a Linksys WAP54G access point. To have everything combined in one device, that was the goal. And this goal was reached – almost.

Two Buffalo WHR-HP-G300-NG routers were the deal I took on and they arrived pretty soon. I’m very, VERY familiar with WRT routers, or let us say DD-WRT itself, but these two Buffalos cost me nerves, if you know what I mean.

I use one router as a router (sure thing) and also as an access point (makes sense). The second router is getting used as an access point in client bridge mode to connect my media centre with the rest of my network. I unboxed the devices, switched them on, ignored the standard firmware and instantly flashed the recommended DD-WRT firmware.

This is where the real struggle began. First router worked perfectly fine so far. WiFi signals was kind of awesome and connection speed itself also improved. I configured the second router and nothing was happening. Client bridge mode was not working.

I checked my settings and everything seemed okay, actually, everything was already alright. While researching and debugging I got a connection out of nowhere. I was happy and almost ready to get some sleep. Well, I had a connection for like five minutes and everything broke down again.

A week of research followed. I’ve found one workaround, which was to run my client bridge router in client mode only. That helped to get rid of the fitful disconnects. I also found one DD-WRT firmware version that was able to keep the connection even in client bridge mode but disconnection followed after almost an hour and the router completely crashed.

Meanwhile, I replaced the second router with my old Linksys access point that handles the client bridge mode perfectly well. Connection on my media centre is fine and my buffering problem is also solved. So here comes the second issue.

One of my smart phones  has got a problem with the WiFi. It is connected, but it is not able to connect to the Internet. Strange, totally strange weird too. Well, my client bridge problem is not solved actually and I’ve got a smart phone that can no longer connect to the Internet. Leads me to the conclusion, never change a running system.