Fatality of the Fatal1ty brought out the Roccat from its Kave

About a week ago, I finally understood how using the front audio ports of a case can be a bad idea, especially if they case is on the floor. My 2 year old Creative Fatal1ty headset’s cable was hanging from the top, and they got entangled with my feet when I tried to go to the kitchen, and they broke because of the force. This is not the first time this entangling happened, but this is the first time for this new case (i.e Silverstone Raven RV03). The ports are very tight. So instead of them coming off the socket, the cables came off at this little box like thing where the two cables (i.e. audio out and mic in) separate from the thicker one that goes towards the headset.

R.I.P Fatal1ty, you served me well.

No point trying to repair it. It would give bad sound quality anyways. This would be my excuse to try out a new and better headset.

Why I cannot buy a Windows Phone just yet

Ever since they released Windows Phone 7, that’s what I wanted to buy. Alas, it wasn’t officially selling in Japan back when I bought the iPhone 3GS. Well, it is not being sold “officially” in Japan even right now, but you can buy an unlocked phone from Amazon. For example, the *unlocked* HTC HD7 is only JPY40,000 which is pretty decent. But I cannot buy it just yet, as it is missing few features: hardware wise as well as software wise. Read on.

Missing hardware features

1. Front facing camera. This is pretty much it. Of course, there is still no software support for a front facing camera as there aren’t any VoIP apps. But the support is coming soon (it better!) and I don’t want to be stuck with an already outdated phone.

Forgot that I had a big enough flash drive for the job

A while back I bought a 16GB flash drive. I mean, a good while back. But it was a very slow drive. Read speed was OK, but write speed was terrible. 4-5MBps on a good day. Doesn’t matter, I lost it a long time ago.

I do have my age old Transcend 1GB drive, which is very fast for a USB2.0 drive. But as you can see, you can do nothing with 1GB these days. Or, specifically ONE thing. Install Windows using the USB drive.

Right now, I do not have my DVDRW drive plugged in. I cannot plug it, even if I wanted to. The SATA cable is not long enough for to reach the SATA ports, going behind the motherboard. It’s a looooog way from the drive to the SATA port, thanks  to the 90 degree rotated orientation of the board with my Silverstone Raven RV03 case.

I was thinking of buying a USB3.0 flash drive, but tbh, I don’t really have much use for one. I mean, why would I need a flash drive? Few things come to my mind. Flash BIOS, run memtest, make UEFI screenshots…and that’s pretty much it. Dang, again I forgot the most important one. Install Windows!

But then again, I have not been lucky with installing Window using USB drive since my old P5B-E motherboard. The Gigabyte P55 board didn’t support it, my laptop doesn’t support it (mind you, it doesn’t even have an optical drive! how stupid!), so I didn’t expect ASRock to be on my side.

But how can I test this? I don’t have a big enough flash drive. Wait! I have a 8GB SD Card, which I use in the camera. And I also have an adaptor which the SD Card can be plugged to a USB port. (I had forgot all about this. ) The SD Card is pretty fast as well. Just like my 1GB drive. Getting write speeds almost 30MBps. So this should do the trick, right? Yes, it did. It worked without a hitch. So I guess I don’t need to buy a new flash drive.

P.S.

Now you don't need a flash drive or a DVD drive to install Windows 7 on your PC. If you already have Windows installed, all you have to do is make a recovery partition similar to what PC manufactuers do, and you can install Windows from that partition. Check out the article here.

Crysis 2 DX11 + high res texture pack performance on HD5870

So finally Crytek released the DX11 patch along with high resolution texture pack. Now there are more graphics options to choose in-game. But can you bring back the popular saying, “can it play Crysis?”? If you turn up all the settings, it looks as if it is right back in its territory.

I have been kind of playing with the settings and finally managed to settle for a good performance settings while retaining all the eye-candy as possible. The following screenshots will do the talking.

1. All settings at Ultra + DX11 enabled + High Res textures turned ON: 23FPS

Intel Sandybridge, here I come (Core i7 2600K, ASRock Z68 Extreme4)

After a lot of thought, I went ahead with the Sandybridge upgrade. If you know me, you should know that I am always looking for the sweet spot when it comes to performance for the $$$. This time, things have changed.

Why did I have to upgrade?

Well, I didn’t have to, but there were few issues with my old PC.

• It wouldn’t POST some times. It had warm boot problems.
• I couldn’t add a second graphics card, if I wanted to, because the SATA ports would be right underneath the second card, rendering 4 out of 6 ports unusable. Of course I might not add one right now, because there is no real need at the moment. But definitely when BF3 comes out. Maybe I would buy two GTX560’s or 570’s.
• I was doing a lot of video encoding stuff. A faster CPU would benefit.
• And most importantly, fun! And we got our mid-year bonus + I made about 40k in the last couple of months from overtime work.
• Besides, I could sell my old stuff off, so that I can make some of what I spent, back.

So what did I upgrade to?

• CPU: The top of the line Sandybridge Core i7 2600K. I bought this off second hand, for about $40 less.
• Motherboard: Brand new ASRock Z68 Extreme4
• Cooler: Antec Kuhler 620

Let’s see why I chose each of them.