Minor

New spare parts = minor update to secondary desktop:

• i7-950
• ASUS P6X58D Premium
• 3x4GB PC3-12800 (triple-channel)
• 2x ATi FirePro 3D V8800
• 64GB OCZ Vertex 2
• 500GB 7200RPM HDD
• Plextor PX-880SA
• Antec TP-650
• Lian Li PC-68

Upgrades to parents' desktop, too:

• i5-2500
• ASUS P8Z68V-LX
• 4GB+2x2GB PC3-12800 (dual-channel)
• Radeon HD 6950
• 128GB OCZ Vertex 4
• 1TB 7200RPM HDD
• Corsair TX650
• Lian Li PC-68

And a new basic recording studio computer for my friend?

• i7-930
• Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 (rev. 2.0)
• 6x2GB PC3-10666 (triple-channel)
• Radeon HD 5450

...Except that Gigabyte motherboard supports up to 14 hard drives, and I have a bunch of the spinning kind lying around. I also have a pretty big case just sitting there, empty. Maybe a 6Gb/s RAID0 system drive and a 3Gb/s RAID10 data drive? Just for fun? I mean, why not, right?

Also, finished Hexen II and man, that game is all kinds of rough. Need to talk more about that series some time soon; my memories were brought into question after recently playing through the first three games and their expansion packs... Still have to finish-up Portal of Peaevus and Heretic II though. Also, GRAVEN.

Toasty!

The Radeon 8500 in the 9x build just kinda died... Fan spins, but that's it. Replaced it with an 8500LE, but then realised that fan had seized... At which point I looked wistfully at my overheated 9700 Pro. So, in went the GeForce 3 Ti 200... And I quickly noticed that quality control on NVIDIA's 9x drivers seems a little lax; reproducible NVIDIA control panel crashes, a BSOD, a seemingly broken uninstaller... Got it all going eventually, and ran hardware diagnostics just to make sure it wasn't something else causing the instability. Also, the sound effects + CD Audio starting working together in Hexen II for no apparent reason.

Otherwise, I recently completed a project that involved expanding, upgrading, and re-provisioning a Linux-based renderfarm that now collectively sports over 2.7TB of RAM, just over 800 CPU threads turboing up to 3.7GHz, and 84 GPUs delivering over 760 TFLOPs in a single 21-node rack. It gets noisy sometimes... And also kinda warm.

Oh! Hotshot Racing is rad, and I'm really enjoying it!

3114

So going all-SATA on the DFI NFII Ultra Infinity was a fun exercise; finding the correct Silicon Image 3114 controller drivers and getting them onto a floppy disk took a couple of tries - needed the "SATALink" variant 😒 After that, however, Windows XP SP3 was good to go, and all of a sudden I had no more computers to build. Put fresh batteries in all of them, and now it's time to take stock of what's left; see what's worth keeping, what's destined for the e-waste station, what I can give away and what I hope to get a few bucks for.

Anyway, I installed Hexen II and Portal of Praevus on the 98 SE computer and... Yeesh. It's hooked-up to an old 1680x1050 LCD, and the closest video mode the game wanted to support was 1280x960... Which that Pentium II cannot handle on its own. To get GL Hexen running, I had to remove the game's custom opengl32.dll, and then things were pretty great on the Radeon 8500... Except there was no sound; just CD audio. Manually re-installing the sound card drivers via Device Manager got sound working, but not at the same time as the CD audio, so... That's weird? Anyway, the same visual glitches present on the Steam release are still there on era-correct hardware so I guess I'll just play it on steam until I get to the Mission Pack? Ergh.