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[jough]

Half-Life 2 at max settings + Aftermath Expansion Levels + HDR Lighting = Crazy Delicious

[slink]

Half-Life 2 at max settings + Aftermath Expansion Levels + HDR Lighting = Crazy Delicious

I didn't think it looked that much better than at not nearly max settings. I first played it on my 3000+ with a nVidia 5700 and it looked really good, then I upgraded to this insane machine and it looked well... The same with a bit of AA and AF. Not that I'm saying that sucks and that it isn't pretty. And the HDR stuff from Lost Coast was very nice but... Well, part of my problem is really that playing F.E.A.R. demonstrated how disappointing I found the HL2 AI.

/geek rant

Quake 4 I've found disappointing so far too. Except I haven't really been expecting more from it... It's too much like Quake2 and Doom3 combined. And spec wise your machine will kick it's ass.

[jough]

Thanks, Slink, that's what I wanted to hear.  My machine will kick some game that I want to play's ass.

I built the thing yesterday, very very carefully, packing everything neatly into the very (too) small case until I made sure that no cables were touching the board or getting into the way of the fans, and then I powered it on and it came up for a second and then shut off.

I figured something must be WRONG.  So I checked connections, reseated the memory, double checked the plugs and stuff, and tried it again.  Same thing.  It lit the LEDs in the front, the DVD drive spun up, the hard drive clicked, the little lights on the keyboard flashed for a second, but the display never lit, and then it turned off again.

I kept unplugging non-essential stuff.  Then my dad, who has a master in electrical engineering, came over and noticed that it seemed like I probably had a stuck switch (the power button in the front is one of those "soft" buttons, unlike the switch on the PSU) and he removed the little connector from the reset button and power button switch pins and put the reset button on the pins for the power button.  I switch it on, and NOTHING.  I started to panic a little.

The old man laughed and pushed the reset button.  The machine SPRANG to life.

Because I got a faster-than-Paris-Hilton SATA II hard drive and the fastest DVD burner they make, installing windows took about 7 minutes.

The thing isn't fast, it's sudden.

Anyway, my display should arrive today and I had to make an SP2 slipstream CD because SP1a seems to only recognize the first 120mb of the dang drive. 

I will look forward to loading this bitch up, getting some games running, and seeing what the onboard GPU can do, which probably ain't much, but it'll be better than my laptop I'm sure, and Half-Life 2 already looked gorgeous on my laptop.

I didn't much care for Doom 3 as a game, although the graphics were good (although not as impressive to my eyes as Half-Life 2, which is all the more impressive because it played really well on a three year old PC with a crappy video card that used shared memory).

I also got a copy of Far Cry with something that I ordered, maybe the motherboard.  I don't know anything about it other than it's also a First Person Shooter.

The only game I'll probably really play for awhile anyway will be San Andreas, which again already looked really good on my laptop with an older GPU and very little graphics memory (64mb).

I'm hell of excited to get everything together and just get started doing stuff.  With the fast HD and DVD (not HD-DVD) it should take like nine minutes to rip and burn a DVD.

And I have an extra 5.25" bay in the front for my eventual Blu-Ray drive.

[CortJstr]

I didn't much care for Doom 3 as a game,

This is the nicest thing I have ever heard about Doom 3. The reviews I saw gave it like 4/10 or something like that.

[misterqueue]

Doom 3 reminded me of one of those silly demos people with Amigas used to put out.  It would be really pretty and flashy and at the end maybe it would say something like "Destructor X Team!  Hello to all our International Friends!" in big block letters that swirled and looped around the globe.  And you would stare in awe and say Ooooh... but they were never ever fun to play, NEVER.

[jough]

I really loved the original Doom and Doom II - I even made my own level once with one of those editors that were popular back in the day.

Quake was okay, but Quake II was awesome.  It was the first (and last) game that I bought hardware just to make the game experience better - I upgraded to a 3Dfx graphics card that handled the coloured lighting, and a 5.1 Soundblaster Live! card and speakers.

The lighting made SUCH a difference in the game - you could see the rail gun or rockets lighting the walls of a corridor as it flew through the air, and it was really pretty most of the time.

Now Quake II is so old but it was a very enjoyable game that I played all the way through more than once.

I didn't really play much Quake III, as I usually just play single player games if at all, but then I really liked the Star Wars Jedi Academy games that were built using the Quake III engine.

Doom 3 was more of a technological showcase than a decent game. The whole flashlight/gun thing where the flashlight would cast a too narrow beam for too short a time and then you couldn't shoot while the flashlight was on was really weak, and most of the game just being BLACK made the graphics a moot point.

I thought the Doom 3 gameplay was pretty repetitive, although the later levels are pretty neat - when you ride the monorail and see the Martian landscape, or the level where you had to go through various teleporters to get to different parts of the base, etc.

I found the "hell" section to be underwhelming, but then again, what could they do to be impressive?  Okay, I guess they could've made it more like the alien world from the original Half Life, which was really impressive at the time and cleverly "alien."

Quake 4 I have not played yet because I haven't owned a computer capable of playing it.  The new one may not even play it well without a schmancy video card that I will get later in the month, but I'll try it anyway.

Mostly I want to just have a reliable platform on which to type PHP code.  You don't need a lot of processing power for that.  This system ought to punish at ripping/copying DVDs, though, too.  Or re-encoding video to watch on my Palm.

I just got my display in the mail, so I'm going to finish doing my backup and then get her set up.

I have a tradition of naming my computers after computers or *****s from sci-fi movies or television shows.  The new computer is simply "M5," from the Star Trek episode "The Ultimate Computer" (I had to look up the title - my geek kung-fu isn't that strong).

[arkabee]

installing windows took about 7 minutes.

holy shit.

i've been feeling like SNL's caveman attournery lately doing my work,
but,
holy shit.

i need to give up and/or just disclaim everything with "i only know anything about shit that is useless and obsolete."

[Lister]

Re: Doom3 - Penny Arcade knew it all along.

Right now we're at a point where there isn't much more to do with graphics.  We have the colored lights, and the bump maps, and the normal maps, and the cursed 'bloom effect', and five thousand ways to render shadows.  And it takes five times the art department to get it all in, which means less money for the people in charge of making the thing fun to play.

Anyway.  As long as we keep advancing tech, the power available to mere mortals will continue to grow, and that's a thing I like.  Even though you no longer need to upgrade computers for anything related to most kinds of work these days -- Gone are the days when programmers needed dual processors and RAIDs just to compile...

[jough]

Man, I've been having nothing but damn problems with building this box.

First I thought it was a bad switch on the case, but then the next day the OTHER switch started acting up.  I put the power switch back on and it worked fine.  Huh.  It's not the switch.

Then the hard drive would just disconnect at times.  WTF?

The hard drive is next to the system panel pins for the power switch, LEDs, speaker, etc.

Anyway, now I don't know if it's the motherboard (probably) or as some on the Anandtech forums think, the power supply (possibly). 

Since changing out the power supply is a hell of lot easier than changing out the motherboard, I'll try that first.  It's just a royal pain in the ass and is delaying the joy of having a new computer.

Plus, New Egg's site says that I cannot return or exchange the motherboard, even though it said nothing of the sort when I bought it.  I haven't actually talked to anyone from New Egg, though.  I'm hoping that they'll be reasonable.

[slink]

I had a problem with one of my SATA drives when I built this machine (based on an Asus A8NE board if that helps), which was fixed only by erplacing it. It was the same problem, the computer would boot with the drive visible, but if I clicked to go to it it would vanish. Seemed to be some problem with the 80gb's from Maxtor and the Asus from what I could tell online, but, I don't know what hardware you are using so...

Apart from that, the only things I can think of would be to ensure that you have the Silicon Image SATA drivers, but they should be handled automatically by the motherboard drivers (nForce or Via?). That's all I can think of off the top of my head but I'll have a think.
The usual trying the drive in another machine would, I should think, be the best bet from the sound of it.

As far as Far Cry goes, it's not bad. The outdoor bits showed great promise, but the minute you get in doors it gets generic and tedious.

[jough]

Well, New Egg has issued me an RMA for both the motherboard and case.  The motherboard has numerous problems and I'm just going to return it for a refund and buy something else.  Asus's good name is severely tarnished around here.  This board is a piece of shit.

The case does have a short in where the system panel bundle plugs into the switches in the front.  If the replacement evidences the same problem I'm just going to do a little surgery and put some black electrical tape around the outside of the switches so that the exposed parts can't touch any other metal part of the case.  I think it's a design flaw, although it seems that they're about 50/50 with the QPacks on this problem.

The keyboard that they sent was also crushed on one corner, so that's going back too.

Oh well, I'll have to wait another week or two before I can get my new PC built.