n3gative gaming rig mark II

Posted on May 30, 2011 by InV4d3r

After two years and barely a half, it’s time for something new. I’m speaking of the CPU working in my game system. It’s a good old Intel Q9550 overclocked at 3.8GHz. Actually I don’t really want to replace him, because it’s a totally fine CPU, but over the years came the issues. First of all, I had some serious problems with the RAM. I wasn’t able to clock any higher than 1000MHz without running into crashes and freezes. But this is more a board related things.

As the time passes by came a heat problem additionally. I found the optimum settings pretty fast for the CPU and it rarely got any warmer than 60°C at full speed with all cores maximum loaded. It now hits the 85°C mark pretty fast, mainly in games like “DiRT 3” or “Battlefield Bad Company 2”. It’s a unacceptable temperature for a water cooled system. Besides this issue the CPU turns out to be more unstable as it was before. I get a lot of freezes and crashes in several applications. This could have been something RAM related but it’s not.

To make a long story short. I decided to switch to the latest Sandy bridge chipset Z68 in combination with a strong Intel i7-2600K. I was looking for a 1366 board and CPU first, but it turned out to be too expensive. I mean, I want a powerful gaming rig with a little extra tuning and not a hi end rendering engine or whatever you might name. The Intel i7-2600K seems to be the right CPU, with enough horse powers at a very fair price. It’s getting bedded on a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3 and hopefully isn’t the BIOS too buggy.

As far as my experience goes, the first BIOS versions of a brand new board generation are almost crap and can be considered as beta. Even a manufacturer like Gigabyte puts out a lot of bug filled and barely finished products these days, but the technical specifications of this board look very promising. I’m very optimistic that we’re going to be good friends. Anyhow, I’m gonna miss my DFI board, it was kinda killer and stable as hell.

RAM – it’s going to be 16GB of it and for the very first time ever I’m going to put Corsair RAM into my rig. I decided to pick the Vengeance series which looks pretty awesome and they will fit perfectly well with the black colour of the board. Hopefully, everything’s getting here during this week so that I can “go live” as soon as possible.

The curse of sleep

Posted on May 17, 2011 by InV4d3r

I feel so terribly bad today. It was set that I have to go to the gym today and continue training but I simply haven’t made it out of my warm, sheltering bed. I’m not sure where this tiredness actually comes from, but it’s horrible. I can never get enough sleep and I’m that kind of a guy that sleeps no longer than six hours a night, except for the weekend.

I was thinking about going to the gym this very afternoon, but I know how it’s going to be. The place will be packed as hell and all the exercise machines will be blocked by fat and ugly housewives pushing 5kg weights. I’ll try to make it out of my bed tomorrow and hit the road to training. Once again, I don’t feel very well with my whole condition. I feel fat and rusty and like I lost the last spark of power in my muscles. It has to be changed and it will be changed.

What else happened. Well, I’ve silenced my HTPC once again a litte bit more. I added a resistor to the fan located on the side of the chassis and I also exchanged the graphics card. Right now I’m using a Geforce GTX 560 Ti which is much quieter than the Geforce GTX 460 and offers much more power. A lot of frame rates are locked at the magic 60 mark. I’m not sure if I’m going to sell the old card our if I just put it in my fourth PC that is just standing around without any particular function.

Besides all this, well, I was off to Berlin last weekend without anything exciting to mention. It was just my father birthday that needed some celebration so I went there and celebrated. I was not going out or anything like that. I feel like I could need a night of partying again with all its benefits. Maybe somewhere in the future.

Froyo Backflip field report

Posted on April 13, 2011 by InV4d3r

Some of you might remember, I was modding my Android smartphone a while ago and I switched from Android 1.5 to Android 1.6. Actually, not a big step. Afterwards I moved to Android 2.1 including MotoBlur which doesn’t gave me a massive performance improvement as well. But I was finally able to get access to a lot more applications from the Android market. Finally, I found a modded version based on the CyanogenMod for my Motorola Backflip.

It’s an Android 2.2.1 with a lot of bugs needed to be fixed. Camera wasn’t working, which is now fixed. The keyboard wasn’t working correctly, which is nearly fixed. And some GPS issues stressed me as well. I also had the problem, that it wasn’t overclockable, so I had to use a custom kernel, too though. I’m using this particular version on my phone for like four or five weeks now and I’m almost satisfied with.

There are still performance problems which I was able to trick out a little. First of all, I’m using Autokiller Memory Optimizer which handles the whole memory management of Android a little better than it would normally do. Secondly, I’m using a swap file, created with Swapper2, to gain a little more memory space in the backhand. And last but not least, the Android Task Manager, to get a little more on running tasks.

Benchmarks speak a clear language, in comparison to stock Android 1.5 with MotoBlur the new version 2.2.1 almost doubled the performance of the phone. I had like 150 to 180 points in Quadrant Standard benchmark on Android 1.5 and now I gain like 310 to 350, depending on what services are actually running and the CPU clock speed.

During this whole development and experience progress with Android I also bought a couple of applications from the market that I found very usefull though. First of all, it’s Titanium Backup that I mainly used to “deblur” my phone on Android 1.5 and Android 2.1. Sure thing that it gave the phone a blast, but it was also causing some trouble, mainly when it comes to contact management. I’m also a big fan of ADW.Launcher now, which is a fine GUI for Android and I simply thought that it was worth supporting it with a buy. Definitely an improvement. Due to the fact that I also use my phone to listen to some music here and then, I found that PowerAMP is totally awesome and gives some fine audio quality to your ears.

To get this straight, I’m not going public with my modified Android version, this is just a small project of mine to get a little bit more into Android itself. I don’t have time nor the will to release a custom firmware for Android and even support it in any way.

For the rare time being

Posted on March 1, 2011 by InV4d3r

The last couple of days has been very busy for me, not that I had too many “private projects” but some too intense of time. First things first, my gaming system got crashed during the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update process and I wasn’t able to revive it any way. I had to reinstall everthing, had to setup a lot of applications and so on. Good thing about this, the system can now be rebooted again without getting a raid failure, which was one big issue with the previous setup. I’m nearly finished with the system, like 90 per cent, and I only have to restore most of my games profiles. Actually, this whole thing wasted a lot of time on my last weekend and is also responsible for missing, once again, the game of the week feature here in this blog.

Besides all this were I still in modifying and hacking my Motorola Backflip cellphone. I now managed to install Android 2.2 aka Froyo including multitouch, which isn’t a stock feature of the phone, and I also installed an unlocked kernel that I’m able to overclock and also underclock it. The phone now runs with a stock Android, without any Motorola software features, and it’s, compared to the default Android 1.5, as fast as hell. I’m testing the battery at the moment to see, if my also also increased the lifetime of this particular part of the phone. It’s such a hilarious feel to finally have features on my cellphone that aren’t supposed to be there actually. And most importantly, for my subjective estimation, the phone has now a status, where I would say, that one can use it instead of just getting angry about it.

Far from all this nerdish stuff did I come back to a more healthier living style without all this unhealthy, calory rich and fat food. I also visit the gym from time to time and as expected, it’s giving me a boost in many ways. Say whatever you want, after a fine session in the gym, you feel refreshed and the essence of life creeps back to your bones and you feel recharged. I mentioned it in one of my previous posts, I don’t want to exaggerate anything at the moment and I want to keep it on a level where I still have fun with all this too. Getting into a boot camp like training plan as I had it once before is not my intention, even though I can say, that this was fun too. Anyhow, I’m losing weight, I start feeling better now and hopefully my cardio will increase once again. There’s no particular muscle training on the schedule right now, I just want to sustain my back and belly muscles at the moment to get a strong centre for future training plans.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any time for photography or any creative stuff in that kind of way. I also haven’t managed to get a little bit more into the whole Photoshop/Lightroom thing that was actually on my schedule for this year’s beginning. Saying that there was no time is not totally correct, I actually wasn’t in the mood to do anything like this. Maybe later, when my bike is fixed and I’ll be able to get out a little bit more often and most importantly further away.

Androidified backflip

Posted on February 24, 2011 by InV4d3r

After a long period of reading, learning and researching I’ve finally made it and customized my Android phone. The customization included things like the simple rooting of the device, upgrading to a newer version of Android, overclocking and getting rid of some factory default applications. But, first things first. I got a Motorola Backflip (MB300) last year’s October and it was my intention from the very beginning to use this cellphone as a “learning device” to get into the whole Android stuff. Unfortunately did I figured out that this phone wasn’t able to be upgraded by simple clicking “update” here in Europe. The cellphone was shipped with Android 1.5 as factory default. It was more than clear for me to get this device to Android 2.1 which is officially only available in the U.S. for AT&T customers. A lot of theory followed after getting this phone though. Worst thing about this, I had to get back to Java coding.

It took a while but I finally found some ROMs with Android 2.1, also one version without the Motorola BLUR applications that slow the phone on factory default setting pretty direful. I’m not going into detail nor do I offer a tutorial at this point. I tried every ROM I could find for my cellphone and tried to figure out which one has the best performance, which one has the lowest number of bugs and most importantly, which one looks nice the most. Finally I found disturbing bugs in every ROM and none of these ROMs had all the “optical features” I was looking for. The solution for this problem was simple and trivial at once. I picked the ROM with the lowest number of bugs and errors and merged the features of the other ROMs into it. As expected, the system was buggy and unstable the first time but after flashing the phone the fourth or fifth time with debugged ROMs I finally had the Android 2.1 version I actually wanted.

The most important applications from the Android market for me were ADWLauncher, SetCPU, TitaniumBackup and Android Task Manager. The first one was to get rid of the Motorola look. SetCPU is used to overclock the phone and to increase the battery life at once. TitaniumBackup was my companion to figure out which of the applications of the ROM can be disabled and removed. Last but not least, Android Task Manager was and is my RAM cleaner on the phone.

Left 4 Unknown

Posted on January 21, 2011 by InV4d3r

Hardware geeks always suffer from that angst that they do not have the latest and most modern technology at home, same for me. But thanks to Valve software do I now know that my system is too bleeding edge to be known. Take a look at these screenshots

1. Valve announced that my system is a kind of “too new”

2. Here’s my answer to Valve. Of course, did I sent them a record of this “issue”

A BITS too complicated

Posted on January 12, 2011 by InV4d3r

Though I didn’t want write so much about computers, software and all hardware related stuff, I have to write something related to these topics anyway. What happened is the following, I’m still in a progress of, let us say, upgrading with no mercy. As you might know, I replaced a lot of my graphics cards, silenced a few of my PCs (the media centre is still left). I also had some weird problems with my gaming system that just didn’t want to start, finally it was just an empty battery and a new one rescued me from paying another 600 Euro to fix this PC. This PC welcomed me with a new problem, Windows Update and Windows Live do not work any more under the gaming OS (yes, it’s dual-boot with an “editing OS”, too). The problem is pretty complicated and I haven’t found a real solution for that, it’s that BITS is no longer to found in the service menu. It’s just lost – disappeared. After some checking I came to the conclusion that some of the needed files for this service are corrupt and the hash differs, too. It’s barely possible to replace the files without going deeper into the crypts and vault of the Windows system itself and I made a decision. DELETE.

I wanted to get rid of the “editing OS” anyway and the whole dual-boot sucked, because it simply takes too much space and the maintenance is too intense in time. Before I go by and start a complicated software surgery, I simply format the whole RAID and install a complete, new, fresh system for gaming only. The editing one moved to “internet PC” because this one will soon (actually today) be upgraded with a new six-core CPU which is going to kick ass. I’m not sure if I should install a small 32bit OS, too. The thing is, that I’ve found a lot of games (well, three to be exact) with a stupid copy protection that I wanted to play again, that do no longer work under Windows 7 64bit, just because of this stupid protection. I already did a backup of my complete Steam game collection so that it will not take too long to “rebuild the game library”. Right now there are around 180 listed in the Windows Game Explorer and a few additional ones in Steam, too. That’s a kind of a lot of work.

What was and what will be

Posted on January 3, 2011 by InV4d3r

A year’s gone and a new decades arrived. So what’s my resume for the decade that has just passed in the 21st century on this ball called Earth (“How peaceful it looks…”)? Great Scott, I don’t know and it’s barely possible to capture a whole decade in one single blog entry so I simply don’t resume the past decade. But what are my plans for the next decade? Guess what, I just don’t know but I can tell you some of my plans for this year. 2011 will hopefully be the year were I’ll go back to more creative oriented activities. I’ll definately do some more photography and will try to switch to some portrait shots or let us say, I’ll switch from landscape photography to something more human related because for me is the portrait photography something that looks like hard to handle and I want this challenge, because challenges simply makes you better and let you improve yourself.

One thing that’s still unfinished and I simply haven’t found the time for, were the bunch of music plans I had for 2010. I missed to remaster Narcosis’ “Super Satan Terror Demon 665.5” mini CD and to upload it. I also missed to get the original tracks for the CDs so I have to do some more complex re-editing to tracks that I got. It’s such a pain in the ass that the studio were we once recorded this master piece of modern black- and death-metal is no more (/irony off).

The second music project hasn’t been touched since I first announced it here in this blog because of… well… urm… issues? Some might remember, it was this electro, industrial thing called “Degraduated to be machine” which includes till now two barely finished tracks. The problem is, that I was working on the studio software several times but it turned out that my plans are much more complex than they first seemed to be. I want this whole thing to get much better than the first solo CD of mine which was more a bunch tracks mixed together, this second one follows a concept and I want this as perfect as it can be. PERIOD! I guess, it won’t be finished by the end of this year so don’t expect anything.

Something that I’m going to do pretty soon is to upgrade my PC. I decided not to buy me a new Android phone and to upgrade my PC instead. There were to many issues and failures that were bothering me that led me finally to this decision. It’s a kind of sad, because I really liked the black mainboard and the CPU watercooler with its red LEDs inside that made the whole system look so damn eeeeeviiiiiil. I’ll give some details on the upgrade in another blog entry.

Back to music and the whole life thing. I still have this plan to move to Berlin, maybe it’s going to happen this year if I can make it to find a job there. If I can make it I’ll free my guitars from the dust and try to find some guys/girls to start a new band, I still feel like a stoner band would be nice, with a girl drummer.

Some might ask, what happened to straight edge? Well, straight edge will be back as sooner as you think. It might start on January 16th, maybe later. It all depends on the big thing called time and I never have enough time for anything. It’s going to be the “Straight Edge 3.0 Project” with customized rules and a new training plan that does not only inlcude a plan for gym, it will also include some other activities. I currently drink some alcohol from time to time but only small lashings and no hard liqueur. I’m so NOT satisfied with the fact that I started with this bad habit again and it will stop because I simply can’t stand the dizzyness while drinking something.

Any traveling plans for this year? Yes, but nothing totally fixed. I was wondering if I can make it to Asia this year, countries like Japan, Indonesia and South Korea has always been in my focus, but unfortunately is it so massively expensive that I don’t know how to pay for this. For the opposite direction, well, there might be a trip to New York, I always wanted to go to New York, a huge, big, crowded, dirty city that always fascinated me. I also have to mention that I have these itchy feet for Seattle, I can’t help it but Seattle is beside Berlin a city where I can go to at any time. To make a long story short, there’ll be definately a trip to the U.S. but no exact plans for the rest of the world. Hmmm, the orient could be nice, too.

Concert plans. There’s only ONE concert by now I have a ticket for and that is the rocking, mind blowing, beloved FU MANCHU. Yes, I got a Fu Manchu ticket for Christmas again and I will see them in March. Damn it, I fucking love this band. If there’s a Misfits concert somewhere here around Germany I would go there too, no matter what it costs. Till now I am very unsure if I should go to the Roger Waters concert in Berlin and see The Wall for a second time. It would be nice to see the show in Berlin, because for me it’s something special because this very one album influenced my musical taste so much, but once again, the tickets are expensive and the seats you can get at the moment are totally crap. We will see.

Last but not least, gaming plans for this year. First of all, I’m thinking about canceling my ‘World of Warcraft’ subscription because I don’t like the new add-on. The balance between casual gaming and going back to the roots of ‘World of Warcraft’ totally failed, in my opinion. Maybe I’ll switch back to ‘Champions Online’ as soon as you can play it for free or I will give ‘DC Universe’ a try. I’m following TotalBiscuit on YouTube and he’s playing the beta at the moment and it looked nice and auspicious to me. Non-MMO games I’m definately going to play are ‘Crysis’ and ‘F.3.A.R. 3’ in March. ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ sometime by the beginning of this year and hopefully id softwares’ ‘Rage’ in September.

There will be some minor changes to this blog, too. One thing is, that there will be a “Game of the week” post every week with a kind of a review and I will do the same stuff with music, movies and photography. Anyhow, the “Game of the week” thing is for sure and the rest will come up soon and simply follows within the next weeks and month. …hmmm… longest blog post ever… yeah!!!

They have issues too though

Posted on December 28, 2010 by InV4d3r

X-Mas is over and I’m nearly finished with the changed to my PCs where I once again meet a point where I get confronted with a disturbing problem on my gaming system. It does not start everytime I want it to start. When I go by and move the waterpump a little bit the system goes and starts. Another time it’s just a touch somewhere in the case or near the motherboard. I’m not sure till now what the exact problem is but it’s not the power supply unit, it works perfectly. There’s some kind of interference and I don’t know where it is. Hopefully it’s nothing serious so that I don’t have to do a major replacement to the system which will cost me around 650EUR right now.

Besides all this, I’m on the noise hunt and I try to eliminate every disturbing noise that comes from any PC I own. I just silenced one PC with a noise absorber kit by Be Quiet! and it will be quieter if the fans would work correctly or let us say, if they were not so bloody dirty. Well, I freed them off the dust but I guess it was a bit too late and now I have to replace them. It’s very hard these days to get 80mm fans with red LEDs that are declared silent cause everyone switched to 120mm or bigger. The backplane in my gaming system will be replaced by a much quieter one too because I wasn’t able to completely disable the fan without getting an alarm noise and I didn’t wanted to rip the speaker off because of the “you’ll never know”-factor. Maybe it’s the backplane that causes the starting issue (well, NO!!!).

The HDD cases in my media center (which is capable for gaming too right now) are getting completely removed to and will be simply replaced by some uncoupling units. Two hits with one strike, I get rid of the 40mm fans and the hard drives are getting a little bit more “softened” in the case. By the way, the media center is the best working system at the moment without any issues. Like I said, the gaming PC has starting problems and the inter PC seems unstable to me, which leads me to final point.

I am going to say goodbye to Fedora and Linux on this system because I switch back to Windows. It still remains a system for internet but also for audio production and some picture editing. It comes in pretty handy because two monitors are plugged to this system and these two things are handled pretty good if you have a second monitor. It’s a kind of sad that I’ll soon will have no Linux machine but unfortunately is Linux not able to fulfill my needs. Combined with the stability problems it’s the best choice to get back to Windows.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. I have so much hardware lying around that a fourth system is coming up which will be a pure dedicated gameserver and guess what, it’s going to be a Linux system. Till now do I not have any specific plans on that but it will come and hopefully will it come together with a LAN in spring 2011.

For those of you who expect to read some more things about my photography hobby can I tell, that there’s pretty soon something new to say about it because I ordered some fine new stuff for my camera. But more about these things will be here to read later in another post. I’m sorry for posting so much about my PCs and hardware and stuff these days but it’s a cold and extremely snowy winter here in Germany and this is like the perfect time for me to get a few jobs done in these cases.

Fitting and cooling problems

Posted on December 22, 2010 by InV4d3r

So here’s the thing, as you may know, I just got a new graphics card for my gaming system and wanted to use the old one in my media center so that I’ll be to play some of the newer games in full HD. Yes, full HD, which means 1080p at sixty frames per second. What happened is very simple, after replacing the old watercooling block with a triple fan solution the good old Geforce 260GTX just didn’t fit in the media center. It too long on the one side and it’s even too high on the other side. Drive cables are blocking the card and the HDD cage is a bit too near to the end of the card. Well, I was thinking about a solution and I’ve found several ones but none totally satisfying. I wanted to gift the card to someone (NO FUCKING WAY!!!). I wanted to just leave here systemless (NO BLOODY FUCKING WAY!!!). I wanted to replace the fan system with a smaller one or the stock cooler (FOR FUCK’S SAKE???).

Now, here’s the deal. The Geforce 260GTX will be the new card in my Linux system. The Linux system will get some fine changes too though. The media center gets a brand new card, which will be a Gainward Geforce 460 GTX Golden Sample (no more stottering in the jungle stage of SFIV ^^). One HDD cage has to leave the Linux system case and the HDDs will wander to a new one (a two 5.25″ slot solution for three HDDs) so that there’s plenty of room for the oversized, mega huge Geforce 260GTX. One thing I am going to catch now is to do a complete silence modding to the case. I’ve just ordered a silencer kit for the Chieftec CS601 which will hopefully decreases the noise and the “internet experience” will become much quieter than it is now. I also hope that the temperature will not increase to drastically.

Just a side note, today’s the day where I am going to integrate my new Geforce 570GTX into the watercooling circuit of the gaming system. I’m pretty excited about the temperatures the card will have to offer after modding. Another thing, do I need to buy me a new radiator or is the old one still capable to handle the heat?

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…and it's going to happed again and again

Category Archives: Hardware