Dusty PC Part II
More dusts!!!! This one we have here says that his PC always hang when playing 3D Games. After opening up the casing, we saw the clip holding the cooling fan to the heatsink on the graphics card has already melted!!! The heatsink is also clogged with dust. No airflow goes through the heatsink and it slowly heats up and melted the heatsink.
This other one is even more powerful!!! I think this person’s room is ultra dusty. He says the PC cannot power up. Touching the external of the PC makes me feel itchy all over! The power supply fan is clogged with dust!!! Opening up, It’s layers of dust and hair everywhere. Most of the components are definitely gone. Check it out below!
Call of Duty: World at War
Just got a copy of this great game! This is the fifth installment of the very popular Call of Duty series. After the modern setting of Call of Duty 4, we are now thrown into the Pacific Theater and Eastern Front of World War II.
As with all previous games of this series, most major infantry weapons used by the Japanese, American, German and Russian forces are accurately modeled. Action is fast paced with fantastic graphics and sound effects. It’s an AWESOME game! Stop reading and go get a copy first!
The story mode features two campaigns, one featuring the United States Marine Corps battling the Japanese Army in the Pacific, and the other following the Soviet Red Army advancing on Berlin.
The American campaign is focused on Private Miller of the U.S. Marine Corps, who is captured by the Japanese while scouting Makin Island and is about to be executed when he is rescued by Corporal Roebuck. Miller joins Roebuck’s unit in a series of incursions through the islands under Japanese control, including Peleliu, where Roebuck is promoted to Sergeant, and culminating in a battle in Shuri Castle on Okinawa. Reminds me of scenes from the movies “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” with all the banzai attacks and the Japanese all over the battlefield!
The Soviet campaign is focused on Private Dimitri Petrenko of the Red Army, whose unit was defeated and ruthlessly executed by German forces at Stalingrad. Along with Sergeant Reznov, he takes revenge on the Germans by sniping their commander, General Amsel. Three years later, Petrenko and Reznov meet again on the Eastern Front, advancing on the German town of Seelow and further through Germany until the final battle in Berlin where they help capture theReichstag. Just as Petrenko claims the building by putting up a Soviet flag, a German survivor shoots and wounds him before being killed by Reznov. With Reznov’s encouragement, Petrenko is able to plant the flag, a gesture symbolizing Germany’s defeat.
A third playable character in the campaign is Petty Officer Locke, a weapons operator on a PBY Catalina, who is seen only in the mission “Black Cats.” Locke’s squadron makes a midnight raid on a Japanese merchant fleet transporting supplies for the Japanese force on Okinawa, and later rescues the survivors of a destroyed U.S. fleet.
Thats all for now, Back to the game…
Photostation 2008.1
“hey…can give me some advice on building a new system for my photoediting?” Recently, there were a few people that asked me on my recommendations for building a new workstation as their main photoshop station. I gave some ideas here and there. Now, I’m going to list the components that I think it more or less meets the requirements for Windows Vista x64 and Photoshop CS4 with the occasional stress relieving gaming sessions.
Robotech’s Photostation Version 2008.1
CPU – Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz
Intel Core i7 920 Processor. The latest and greatest from Intel. i7 920 is 40-50% faster then most of the Core2 processors. Choosing the lowest spec for the i7 9xx series ensures high overclocking headroom and value for money in this economy climate.
Motherboard – Asus P6T Deluxe OC/Palm
ASUS P6T Deluxe OC/Palm is probably one of the most fully loaded socket 1366 motherboards to arrive on the market for the Core i7 processors, based on Intel X58 chipset with ICH10R. Features not found on most competing motherboards include a small 2.5” LCD display for overclocking options, thats where the name “OC Palm” came from. Three x16 PCI Express slot with support for SLI and Crossfire, a PCI Express 4x slot for RAID Controllers or other hardware. Support for SAS hard disk drives on certain ports, an impressive 16-phase voltage regulator circuit and several other features common to high-end boards from ASUS, like Express Gate (which allows you to immediately load an internet browser and Skype even without a hard disk drive installed), passive heatsinks with heat-pipes for the chipset and voltage regulator circuit and solid aluminum Japanese capacitors. Lastly, most reviewers are able to clock the Core i7 920 from 2.66Ghz to 3.6Ghz easily on stock voltage.
Memory – Corsair XMS3 TR3X6G1600C9 2GB x 6
Intel’s new Core i7 has a completely new, onboard memory controller with three memory channels, rather than the two channels supported by most other platforms. This increases memory bandwidth –as long as three matched memory modules are installed.With the memory controller on the CPU core, we have to watch out on the voltage and use only Core i7 certified memory that at max 1.65v. No high performance RAMs here.
Currently, there are only this Corsair XMS3 TR3X6G1600C9 available in Sim Lim Square. 6 Pieces in 2 packs of 3 each will give us 12GB of RAM.
Graphics Card – HIS 4850 IceQ4 TurboX
As this is not a gaming station, An overclocked HIS 4850 IceQ4 TurboX would suffice. Note that Photoshop CS4 only supports single GPU, so don’t expect and performance increase from SLI or Crossfire.
AMD HD 4850 Series has been one the market for a while now. The first cards all had to follow AMD’s reference design specifications. But now that this limitation is lifted, most add-in-board manufacturers are coming up with their own designs to reduce cost, add performance or improve cooling. With their IceQ4 cooler, HIS is able to factory overclock the card to 685 GPU and 1100 memory.
Storage - Adaptec RAID 5805
For data protection of all our precious photos. Definitely we need something decent. The Series 5 family of high-performance Adaptec Unified Serial™ (SATA/SAS) RAID controllers offers both high I/O transaction and high bandwidth processing for use with cost-effective, high-capacity SATA drives or high-performance SAS drives.
The Adaptec RAID 5805 utilizes industry-leading dual core RAID on Chip (ROC), 512MB of DDR2 write cache, and connectivity with the latest x8 PCI-Express to deliver over 250,000 I/Os 1.2GBs. Using SAS expanders, it can connect up to 256 SATA/SAS devices. It’s able to support RAID6 which is dual parity to protect against 2 HDD failures in the Array, Online Capacity Expansion and Online RAID Level Migration. Don’t ever scrimp on data protection!
Storage – Hard Disk
6 x WD Caviar® Black™ 1 TB, 3 Gb/s, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM in RAID6
6 pieces of this Western Digital 1TB drives running on RAID6 would give you an effective 4TB of storage for your precious. Connect the drives the the Adapec 5805 for RAID6 Config
3 x WD VelociRaptor™ 300 GB, 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 10,000 RPM
3 of the fastest SATA drives in the market will take care of the Operating System, Programs and Swap Files. Configure RAID1 for 2 of the drives on the Adaptec 5805 while the remaining drive can be connected to the motherboard’s onboard SATA port for swap files and temp folders.
2 x Icydock MB455 Hotswap Hard Disk Enclosure
To put all our HDD into the Casing, we would need to use the Icydock MB455 Hotswap bays. This will allow easy replacement of HDD in the event of HDD failure or upgrades. The key thing is there will not be any need to shutdown to replace HDDs. No downtime at all.
Power Supply – Corsair HX1000
The heart of the whole system, the power supply is the most important part of any computer. A stable system overclocked or stock requires a rock solid power source.
The Corsair HX1000W features twelve SATA power connectors to power all our HDD and six PCI-Express connectors, both 6-pin and 8-pin compatible, to power multiple high-end graphics cards and two EPS12V connectors for dual CPU configurations. The truly independent dual transformer, dual rail design allow for optimum load balancing resulting in greater performance and stability. Industrial-grade 105°C primary, secondary and solid state capacitors provide up to four times the lifespan of traditional components.
The HX1000W not only delivers one thousand watts of clean power for the highest performance enthusiast systems, it does so at greater than 80% efficiency thanks to the double-forward switching design and multiple rail DC-to-DC converter. Due to its best-in-class efficiency the HX1000W is able to run cool and quiet with only a single 140mm thermally controlled fan.
Optical Drive – Plextor PX-B910SA Bluray Writer
The latest drive from Plextor gives us Bluray recording capabilities up to 50GB on Dual layer disks.
Chassis – Silverstone TJ-07B
Not a new chassis, but with so many 5.25” bays to fill, we would need something like the Silverstone TJ-07B to hold them all. The TJ07 should be capable of cooling just about any combination of components. It is designed to provide fresh air to as many components as possible, and has many, many possible configurations. Its screw-based construction and its huge size make it a breeze to setup.
Monitor – Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP-HC x 2
We are talking value for money here again, one of the best LCDs in the market, losing only to the Eizos, Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP gives 1920 x 1200 resolution each, 3000:1 Contrast Ratio and 110% colour gamut. To add to that, it comes with built in card readers! Since our HIS 4850 IceQ4 TurboX has got 2 DVI outputs, we should not waste it! Just imagine the amount of screen estate from 2 of these superb monitors.
DAMAGE
Thats all for the Photographer Station. I did not put in things like keyboard, mouse, speakers, soundcards and tablets as these are more of a personal taste items. Lets see the table below for our total damage for whats listed on top. Prices are as of this writing.
Not too bad…..costs less then a AF-S VR 400mm f/2.8. Oh yah.. Don’t forget to add in that Windows Vista x64.
Thats all for now. Do let me know if you need some better configuration.
Project Perth Day 10 – 3 Nov 2008
Perth – Singapore
Ahhhhhhhhhhh….the last day of the holidays. And also the final entry in this journal. Time flies when you are having fun! Woke up at 0445 and left for South Perth Esplanade with Cereal. We reached there around 0530 and setup our tripods.
Weather was overcast again! Not much of a sunrise.
We took pictures till around 0645 and left for our hotel and breakfast. Reached back around 0715 and went back to sleep before waking up at around 0830. PiG baked the pies we bought from Woolworths and we had that and coffee for breakfast. After breakfast, we did our final packing and checks on your luggages before dumping everything into the boot of the car and checking out of a hotel for the last time. The hotel was kind enough to allow us to leave our car parked there till 2pm. Final round of shopping today, we hit Hay Street and Murray Street malls for 3 hours of shopping. PiG was fascinated with a part of the mall at Hay Street called London Court. It’s a Tudor style shops selling some souvenirs and stuff from London.
At the end of the shopping, I got a book from Dymocks called Top Gear Top Drives, Some Roc Candy sweets and PiG got more clothes, accessories and souvenirs for Princess and nghuiyen.
We left for the airport at around 1315. Pumped up the petrol to full tank for the last time at a Gul station along Great Eastern Highway before reaching the airport at around 1345. Unloaded the luggage and returned the car to the Europcar bay.
At the check in counter, the lady asked me to weigh my backpack as she says it looks big. It’s 10.2kg!!! She then told me to distribute some of the weight to the PiG as the limit is 7kg only. I passed my notebook to the PiG and took out my camera and slug it on my neck. This reduced the weight of the backpack to 6+kg as it was weighed when we went through the Australian customs and security checks later.
After checking in our luggage, we had some Red Rooster just before going through the customs. Red Rooster is slightly better then Chicken Treat but it’s still far from KFC. Final verdict, KFC is still the best. I had a small hiccup while going through the security checks. They had to rescan my backpack but everything went fine and we are through to the boarding area of the airport. PiG did some more shopping while I took a break on one of the chairs around the terminal. Did a little bit of reading before an old lady approached me to do a survey on Australian tourism. I did the 30mins survey and went back to my reading. We finally boarded SQ226 a Boeing 777-200 at around 1620.
Nothing special on the flight back, I went through Tora Tora Tora, an episode of Top Gear and an hour of Jay Chou’s Initial D. We landed right on time at Terminal 3.
What a trip, 1784km from Perth -> Albany -> Pemberton -> Margaret River -> Busselton -> Perth. This certainly can qualify as one of Top Gear Top Drives. I will definetly do it again.
Whats next? Some say Alexander the Great once walked its streets, and a great battle between Zeus and Gigantes once happened on the islands…all we know is it’s Greece!
| <—Back to Day 9 |
This site is brought to you jointly by Robotech and PiG. Here, you would find travelogs of our phototrips, technology reviews and some photography related articles.