Tag Archives: Gigabyte

Of RipJaws and Eden

Posted on by
Reply

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.

 ...

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.

It works!

Posted on by
Reply

I’m so happy. I’m sooo happy. After days of working on my new PC yesterday was the day where it was time to turn it on and see if it actually works. And it worked and still works. I mentioned previously that I had some serious problems with the water block that might additionally have caused a short-circuit on the system, but I was able to solve it.

I was expecting a children’s disease here and there while setting up the whole system, but it wasn’t the huge hurdle I was expecting. I had some tiny problems with the RAM. With completely full stacked RAM slots and without X.M.P. enabled the motherboard simply wouldn’t start and was caught in a boot loop. There was one system freeze on the very first installment of Windows 7, which could finally be solved by updating to a newer BIOS version. ISRT is not working at the moment. When I go by and enable RAID XHD the system denies to boot. It is not even able to boot a Windows 7 DVD or anything else. I’m pretty sure that this is just a BIOS related issue that is going to be fixed by Gigabyte within the next couple of weeks.

As you may know, I’m a benchmark addict and I just couldn’t hold to do a little 3D Mark 11 from the scratch. I gained around 6,600 points without any tweaks and tuning, which is around 700 points more than I my old system. Man, I’m so excited to finally overclock the CPU and even the graphics card. Till now the whole system is pretty basic. I spent a lot of time in doing some quick researches on drivers and utilities used on this board. ISRT was the only one that actually needed an update to give a software response. Anyhow, it’s not working in hardware so I decided to use this drive for ReadyBoost at the moment.

For the time being I’m going to restore my Steam library and install the most common program to get me back to track. I guess after get a little bit more into the whole infrastructure of the board and learning about its little bugs I’ll do a couple of benchmarks.

n3gative gaming rig mark II

Posted on by
Reply

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.

We’re reaching multimedia, baby!

Posted on by
Reply

After being away in beautiful France for nearly two and recharging my batteries and simply staying away from everything that looks like complex work on a machine simply called computer I built up my new media center after getting back home. And of course catching enough sleep. The hardware moved from my old ‘I-don’t-know-the-exact-name’ case to a Thermaltake Element S VK60001W2Z case which is much quieter than the one before and can hold much more hard drives. On the final stage the case will hold nine hard drives with an overall capacity of something around 4 – 5 TB.

The media center was built for two things. First it’s a simple media center for listening to music, watching movies and pictures or simply surfing the web. Got it? Yap… Secondly does this PC replace a game console. Thanks to the fact that Xbox 360 controllers also work on Windows very well I can play a lot of games while lying on the couch. Well, of course I will I use other game controllers as well because I’m gaming nerd I have special controllers for every game genre.

For gaming I use Windows 7 Pro 64bit as operating system and for the whole multimedia thing my choice fell on Linux Mint because it’s pretty lightweight, got a great multimedia performance and I just like the overall file handling under linux because I can arrange a variety of disks much more comfortable.

The hardware itself is not very luxurious but will fit the matters. It’s an AMD 9550 CPU built on a Gigabyte DDR2 motherboard stuffed with 4GB RAM. The graphics accelerator is a Gainward 9800GT and the sound will be put out through a cool SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium. By now there’s only stereo output because I don’t have a surround speaker system but this will follow within the next two or three month. I am going to stuff the machine with multimedia content within the next days and then I will finally see how it works and give it a review right here in this blog.