Tim Smalley’s weblog

On Sunday night, I popped along to a local quiz night with a bunch of mates from Tesco. We went along with the intention of getting drunk and having a laugh at how bad we were at answering the questions in the quiz. Unsurprisingly, we did get rather drunk, and had a laugh. However, the surprise was that we managed to finish second in the quiz. Shocker.

We were expecting to finish in the bottom few teams, but we walked away with a £50 prize. Having said that, while being surprised, there was an element of disappointment in that we didn’t win it when we were so close. There were a couple of questions that we argued over and finally settled on the wrong answer. If we’d have answered those questions correctly, we would have ended up as clear winners. Shame, I guess there’s always next time.

I’ve been messing around with that XGI card that I talked about earlier, and I’ve had some ‘fun’ with it, as they say. To cut a long story short, it’s been a bloody awful experience. Drivers sucking fairly hard for the most part. I mean, what kind of card causes instability in the form of a BSOD in the best game of 2004? An XGI Volari, obviously…

There’s other shizzle relating to that too, but you’ll just have to wait for the review before I say any more about it.

Finally, it’s my birthday tomorrow, so I’ll be taking Friday off after some heavy drinking to commence around 6pm. It’ll go on until I drop down at some point in the early hours of the morning. Timmy, my old housemate, is coming up to stay for the weekend. I’ve not seen him for a while, so I feel that there’s a pretty big session to be had.

I doubt I’ll update again until I’ve recovered some time in the middle of next week, but we can hope that it’s a little sooner than then, as I’ve got work to be getting on with again on Monday.

I’ve had a rather busy week this week, so sorry for the lack of updates first of all…

I wrote a rather long column on bit-tech this week for those who didn’t see it. I basically go in to where I feel the state of UK trade shows are at right now, and where I think they should go. After all, it is about time someone, somewhere, came up with a project that would work. That means the necessary advertising with your target audiences in plenty of time for the event to be a success.

I’m not expecting anything quite on the scale of CeBit, because one of those shows is enough each year - it’s a long haul for those of you who have never been. I’m expecting something that will drive more interest in to the market on a large enough scale for consumers to want to go along and attend.

The two public days of CeBit were hugely busy, and it’s great news for the German hardware community. The UK needs something like that here, something to get more gamers interested in computer hardware, and to get more computer hardware enthusiasts in to gaming - you get the idea. There are some fantastic games out there at the moment, and they’re more often than not overlooked.

Maybe CTS could be turned in to something like this? Have a few days of ‘trade only’ access, and then follow it up with a couple of days that are open to the public. Maybe the public days would have to be before the CTS awards night, though… as that always ends up as a very late night. This year was no exception - there were plenty of sore heads on Wednesday. I felt absolutely great when I woke up on Wednesday, but that was because I was still drunk…

Lets just say that the night was an eventful, and entertaining one…

As I said yesterday, I was going to be working on some low end cards, one of which is an AGP part. That required me to dig out my ABIT AV8 3rd Eye motherboard - the motherboard that I had used for most of the AGP video card reviews on bit-tech. I’d spent a long time getting an operating system installed, without video card drivers, with a wide selection of games to use for video card evalutations.

I’d gone so far as to make a ghost of the partition too, to enable me to return back to a fresh install after every review without three or four hours of installing game after game. Now, I’d not touched the system at all, it was stable, and had a clutter free operating system the last time I used it.

This morning was a totally different story all together. I install everything, as normal and fired the board up… CPU Fan spins… nothing else… No Display, no post, great! Go Tim!!

I change the video card for something else, a little older - an All-In Wonder 9800 Pro, it POSTs!… Superb! That is, superb until I got close to booting Windows. It resets before the Windows boot screen appears, so I go through the BIOS and check it for the usual problem areas, nothing there. So I reset the CMOS - still no better! Then, out of the blue, it decides to tell me that the partition is corrupt with /Windows/System32/ being corrupt. After 90 minutes of trouble shooting, the fucker decides to tell me that it’d be funny if the hard drive corrupt itself. By this time, I can’t even get the system stable in Safe Mode!

I then load fail safe defaults, and go about cleaning up the mess with an OS repair. It’d be good if I could do that without the motherboard blue screening during Windows setup though…

That’s it, throw that board out and get something that works.

Thankfully I have a reasonable supply of spares, just in case something like this happens. That isn’t the point though, the majority of consumers don’t have a vast array of spare motherboards that work with their current CPU and thus, can’t find out what is broken, or even find a ‘quick fix’ for the issues that they have. I guess I speak for the majority of consumers who buy a product and expect it to work when you plug it in. We can live in hope, though…

This week should prove to be yet another busy week for me with bit-tech. There are some very important decisions that are being discussed at the moment. While I can’t go in to detail, they will change things quite dramatically. Over the last week, I spent good amount of time with Wil. We spent a long time talking through things together, which enabled us to really start to understand just how important bit-tech is to so many people. Don’t worry, we’re not closing the doors just yet.

Now, moving on to the coming week, there are several cool articles coming out on bit-tech. I have had a second look at the most-impressive Radeon X800 XL - I still can’t believe how cheap this video card is - a real GeForce 6800 GT killer. If you follow the surveys that take place on the Steam network, you will see that the GeForce 6800 GT is the most widely-used video card from this generation with close to 20,000 users reporting that in their video card driver description. The Radeon X800 XL is looking to take some of the market away from NVIDIA, and this is good news for you guys, as we’re likely to see the GeForce 6800 GT drop down in price to compete.

Interestingly, there are more X800 XT Platinum Editions than GeForce 6800 Ultra’s… Hmmm, remember not long ago when everyone was slating ATI for the ‘Phantom Edition’? To me, both IHV’s struggled to keep up with the demand, despite what either vendor claimed. It’s going to take some time for anything to topple the superb Radeon 9800 series - it dominates proceedings by quite a margin.

Monday should see me looking at some low-end cards (fun!), with one of them being a first for bit-tech - we’ve never reviewed an XGI card before, so it should be pretty interesting. Computer Trade Show takes place at the NEC, Birmingham on Tuesday and Wednesday, so Wil and I will be down there to have a look around. While the show isn’t the most exciting in terms of new kit, it’s a great place to establish good contacts and relationships with distributors, vendors and etailers. The Tuesday night always ends up as a rather late one, with just about anyone who is anyone in the UK tech industry present in the bar. It was my first press outing for bit-tech last year - I made some good contacts and some great friends in the industry. It will be good to meet up with them again for another session in the bar.

Thursday and Friday will probably be the recovery path. That may not happen though, as I’ve got a mates birthday on Thursday evening - I can’t really miss it either, as it’s her 18th. Having said that, it should be quite a fun night. Most nights are in Loughborough and it’s a rare occurance when there’s a night without something to talk about afterwards. I’ll no doubt be nursing a hangover on Friday, but I’ll just have to work around that as an occupational hazard - there are things that I need to get finished before my queue of kit gets out of control.

There’s also tidbits of SLI still to investigate, that’s taking a bit of a back seat at the moment though, as I’m waiting for new drivers from NVIDIA - they shouldn’t be too far away though. Here’s hoping that they’ll be available to me by the end of the coming week, as I hate having things sitting half done.

I’ve finally managed to get things working on my own webspace after numerous issues with logging in, and then getting the MySQL database to work propperly. Turns out that the latter was something simple! Oops!

Thanks to the support guys at Catalyst2, they’ve managed to get me up and running. Look out for more updates on what I am up getting up to, they should flood in fairly regularly now.

As a consequence, my old weblog at blogspot will no longer be used.

Take Care.

I’ve been wanting to establish a place to blog about things for a while now, and I’ve finally settled on this as being my home. At least, for the time being.

I wanted to start blogging on my personal web space, but I seem to have forgotten the password for getting me in to my control panel. Oh well, I should have thought to save my important emails the last time I formatted my hard drive. I’ll just have to contact the support team first thing in the morning. It doesn’t help that my hosts are running an older version of cPanel - apparently, the new version of the software would allow me to request a lost password.

I’ve spent most of today waiting around on other people, namely couriers that don’t turn up. It’s a pain in the ass when you have to wait on someone else before you can get anything useful done. I wanted to go out shopping this morning, as I could do with a new pair of casual shoes because my other pairs of shoes seem to be getting a little long in the tooth, or unfashionable - they’re not from the ‘05 range!

Instead, I spent the day waiting for a CityLink van that didn’t turn up. While frustrating, it was beneficial in another way - it meant that I finally had some time to myself. I had planned to take a day off after a tough week that has had its fair share of travelling to and from meetings, while still having to find the time somewhere to write up an article.

On the subject of articles and reviews, I’ve got an increasing number that are in an orderly queue at the moment that I work through in my own merry way. I’ve recently changed a few of the game titles that I use in video card reviews, and that has meant that I really needed to get a decent way through a few of the new games that I recently got hold of in order to decide whether they are good enough to be used as a base for evaluating video cards. One of these titles is Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. This arrived on my door step at the beginning of the week, but due to many bit-tech commitments taking over the early part of the week, I had not had the chance to remove the plastic wrapping until this morning.

I had noted several performance issues with the Demo, specifically on NVIDIA’s hardware, but the full version of the title seems to address these issues. I must admit, I really enjoy the job I do, it allows me to keep my mind ticking over, while doing something that I have a great passion for. One of the perks of the job is being able to experience the top game titles in a way that not many people can. How many of you can say you played Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory on two GeForce 6800 Ultra’s at 1600x1200 with all of the ‘candy turned on…?

Ok, I’ll stop rubbing that in now…

I have to say, that it is one of the nicest, if not the nicest-looking PC game at the moment. Those of you who own a GeForce 6 series video card should check it out - the HDR lighting is absolutely fascinating, while not having the massive performance hit that was experienced with Crytek’s implementation in FarCry patch 1.3 - you may be able to experience this on a GeForce 6600 GT if you give it enough steroids.

I’m working through several different articles at once at the moment, with the new-look bit-tech coming very soon. I’ve got a pretty large treat in store for when the long-awaited new-look arrives over the next few weeks or so (providing poor Rich doesn’t suffer too many set backs!).

Many of you will know that I haven’t really commented on NVIDIA’s SLI at the moment - this is coming soon. I just keep on hitting more and more questions every time I fire up a new title. I’ll save my overall impressions on SLI until I release the series of articles, but the series seems to keep getting longer and longer. It’s hard to say exactly how good or bad I think it is right now, as I often don’t know until I’ve written several thousand words on the subject. This is when am am at the point where I begin to sum things up in my (usually long winded) concluding remarks.

There should be plenty to chew on by the time I am finished anyway.

I’ve got an Ebay auction ending soon, so I guess I should go and attend to that.

Take Care.