Tim Smalley’s weblog

We talk about a lot of things in the office to help pass the time by - a lot of these topics focus around general industry trends because, after all, when you get a bunch of geeks together in a small space, they tend to talk about all things geeky. One topic that has really stuck out in my mind recently was one that Joe recently wrote a column about.

He asked what was the game that turned you into a hardcore gamer. There’s already an interesting discussion going on in the article comments and I’m really surprised by some of the responses.

The game that led me down the path of no return was Asteroids on the Atari 2600. I don’t know whether that’s me showing my age, or just me developing at an early point in my life, but I couldn’t get enough of that game. What’s great then is that an updated version was released on the Xbox Live Arcade.

I purchased it in an instant… without thinking twice. I knew I could go back to my childhood, playing a game that I used to play almost religiously… or at least when my parents didn’t tell me it was time to do some homework, or because Coronation Street was on. Yeah, I hated that show - it got between me and my game and I never liked anything coming between me and my game.

The game that really got me into PC gaming was probably Civilization - I used to play that game during my lunchtime at school. We had to break into the school network to get it installed, but that effort was well worth it. We then followed up with Civ2 when that came out in 1996, as it added multiplayer support over the network (well, technically it was introduced with CivNet in 1995, but we were quite content with Civ at the time)… but damn, that game sucked up a lot of my time.

I could go on and on about the games that I’ve been crazy about… but nothing comes close to Asteroids and Civ for me. Anyway, we’re interested to hear as many different angles as possible on this - please share your own experiences with us in the comment thread.

Ever since Nvidia launched its GeForce 9600 GT, I’ve been pondering a number of things - the biggest one being ‘why now?’. There are many cards in the performance mainstream market, and I think the problem boiled down to the fact that Nvidia was caught off guard by the Radeon HD 3850.

The result was a slew of cards from the green team that didn’t really compete with ATI’s excellent mid-range offering and just served to confuse the market. So what we’ve ended up with is The Sea of Grey, as I’ve coined it.

The problem is that because there are so many good-to-great products, the consumer doesn’t know where to start. Is the 9600 GT better value than the 8800 GT? What about the 8800 GS? And where do ATI’s cards fit into the picture?

Well, I hope that this article goes some way to answering the questions - I’d stick to the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3850 512MB cards… and if you need something that’s in between the two (in terms of price), look at the GeForce 9600 GT.

It’s been coming for a while, but today I can finally say that I’m the Editor of bit-tech.net. Over the last few months, I’ve been running bit-tech but I’ve not had the title to go with the job - instead, I’ve been on a trial period to prove that I was up to the task.

I didn’t doubt for a minute that I wouldn’t be able to handle the job though, as I announced that I would be taking over the Editorial Reins at bit-tech in April. Since that announcement though I have had a few very tough months in my personal life and without the help of the other guys that work with me on bit-tech, I don’t know where I would be today. One thing is for sure though: the site wouldn’t have continued to progress in the way it has.

Things are moving along like a well-oiled machine at the moment with everyone pulling in the same direction. The changes we’ve made to the site have generally gone down pretty well in the community and there are some more community-orientated changes to follow in the future. I’ve always been a very community focused guy when it comes to bit-tech, because becoming a member of bit-tech’s truly awesome community was ultimately how I ended up getting a job working for the site… and look where that has got me today.

BFG Tech’s GeForce 8800 GTX Watercooled Edition…

It took me a while to get the thing up and running because BFG Tech supplied me with the wrong hose clamps. I ended up driving around Camberley looking for some suitable hose clamps to keep the hose from my Corsair Nautilus 500 secure. I finally ended up at a rather small plumbing supplies store, where they charged me 80 pence for a pair of 12-18mm screw-down hose clips. So far they’ve worked awesomely.

I bought my Dell 30″ Orgasmatron™ home from work so that I could test the card in an enclosed enviroment, since most of my testing at work is done on an open test bed. I wanted to record some temperature readings inside a real chassis, as end users looking to buy the card aren’t going to install it in an open test bed. I’ll probably bring an air-cooled GeForce 8800 GTX home later in the week, too.

I’ll let you know how it goes - I’m hoping to have a decent gaming session this evening.

Last night I finished a review on a pair of Intel CPU’s - they fit in nicely with this week’s theme on bit-tech with it being IDF week. You should see that review on the site later today all being well. Things are incredibly busy at the moment, as I’m building up for going on holiday in the middle of September. I’m really looking forward to that - it’ll be my first real holiday for nearly 2 1/2 years.

I do a lot of travelling with work obviously, but there is rarely the time to actually play the tourist in some of the places that I visit. I’m heading back to Taiwan for a couple of weeks, as I really enjoyed visiting in June when I went to Computex with work.

I’ve got several reviews in progress at the moment, and there’s a lot of new stuff coming out in the next couple of weeks - hopefully I can get some of that done before I go away in just over 2 1/2 weeks time. I’m currently looking at a dual GPU card from Leadtek which I hope to have ready to write up by the end of tomorrow at the latest.

I’m going to i25 on Sunday to report on happenings there and there’s also a batch of Radeon X800 GT’s that I’ve got to review next week - I’m really looking forward to playing with this card as it seems to have hit a really competitive price point with the possibility of doing a bit more than what it says on the box, too…

There are many other products to review before I go away, you’ll hear about them in due course - I’d better get on with some work now as there’s a lot to do…

Take care.

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.

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.