Well, in the future, maybe. Anyway, racist toys are racist. Guess who this is supposed to be?
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
E-Peen Enlargement (Fun w/ Hardware)
Because I have nothing better to do and no one can really stop me, I figured I might as well share my latest experience in throwing together pieces of silicon and plastic into something that can convey information through flashing patterns of light into one's visual cortex.
This will probably take more than one post, so I'll start with the basics. I'm still receiving the final shipments of parts, so most of this will be first impressions on the hardware itself. While I ran a quick test to see if the thing at least POST's, that's all I've done with the parts connected to one another and the power turned on. Anyway...
1. Mobo: ASUS P5Q
An interesting, even sub-optimal choice for a gaming rig. For two reasons: first, it uses the 8-pin ATX plug for the CPU. Definitely something to watch out for when picking a PSU; while theoretically you can get away with just sticking a 4-pin(which I have done in the past) in there, it will NOT POST with this particular mobo. Asus has done a good job hiding this fact; all the screenshots that are detailed enough to even show the plug depict it with a 4-pin cap over half the plug, but don't be fooled, you WILL need an 8-pin or 2 4's in that spot.
The second "flaw" in this board is that it was not built for SLI. Don't even bother, there's not even a second slot for another card to go. I consider SLI to be a pain in the ass and not worth it, esp. with ridiculous size of video cards nowadays, so it's not a downside for me. This seems like a pretty solid board if you aren't looking to build a complete monstrosity.
2. Proc: Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield
I won't comment on the performance because I haven't booted in OS yet with this thing. One thing I will comment is THANK ZAKARUM they fixed the stock fans that come with the chips. One thing I don't want to hear when pushing those pegs into the mobo is the cracking sound of silicon screaming that their old heat sinks packed standard as part of the intel experience. Also, the fan was damn silent on POST; to the point where I didn't even notice the damn thing had booted until that pleasant Asus logo showed up on the monitor. Yeah, that doesn't say much, but compared to the ridiculous full-blast my old Pentium-D fan was getting, it's a big jump.
3. GPU: Zotac 9800gtx 512mb DDR3
I will not comment personally on the performance because I haven't tested that yet (though I have commented profusely on the size already). I will say that if nobody on this side of the globe heard of Zotac, they have now. Spec-wise, it's the best card you can get in the ~200 price range, and one of the best 9800 GTX's period, and will likely surpass many of the first wave GTX+'s.
It's factory overclocked, and also, this monster eats two 6 pin pci-e jacks from the PSU. No surprise, but if you're looking to SLI, you should consider that when looking at the PSU, because the pci-e plug adapters that come with this thing don't seem to work--my dry run w/ just the proc, PSU, and GPU didn't even try to POST until I removed the adapted plug and actually put in the two legit pci-e's from the PSU. Fan is also surprisingly civilized for its size, though I imagine that things will not be so quiet while gaming.
Also, while I have made less rational comments about the size, people upgrading from much lesser cards will be somewhat shocked at the bulk when they see this thing for the first time. Zotac needs leibensraum. It takes up two slots worth of space and also runs the length of the mobo, completely occluding at least one of the lesser pci-e ports and potentially blocking access to drive bays. Still, an investment in a piece of hardware like this would justify also getting a case that will accomodate its needs.
4. PSU: OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI 700W
To date, I've found that, interestingly enough, the stickiest issue when combining hardware is the power supply--there's just so many variables that go into whether a PSU is compatible with whatnot, and it's not nearly as standardized as the other stuff. This one seems to fit my needs quite nicely. Plenty of power in all the right places, the right plugs (2 4-pin ATX's fix the mobo issue), and is very cleanly packaged and runs quiet enough. There is a good sized fan in there, and plenty of breathing room. 'nuff said. The PSU is one of those things that wins little praise if it does the job correctly, but invites endless wrath if it doesn't. In my case, the former is true.
I might do a followup when everything gets in and the box is completely finished.
This will probably take more than one post, so I'll start with the basics. I'm still receiving the final shipments of parts, so most of this will be first impressions on the hardware itself. While I ran a quick test to see if the thing at least POST's, that's all I've done with the parts connected to one another and the power turned on. Anyway...
1. Mobo: ASUS P5Q
An interesting, even sub-optimal choice for a gaming rig. For two reasons: first, it uses the 8-pin ATX plug for the CPU. Definitely something to watch out for when picking a PSU; while theoretically you can get away with just sticking a 4-pin(which I have done in the past) in there, it will NOT POST with this particular mobo. Asus has done a good job hiding this fact; all the screenshots that are detailed enough to even show the plug depict it with a 4-pin cap over half the plug, but don't be fooled, you WILL need an 8-pin or 2 4's in that spot.
The second "flaw" in this board is that it was not built for SLI. Don't even bother, there's not even a second slot for another card to go. I consider SLI to be a pain in the ass and not worth it, esp. with ridiculous size of video cards nowadays, so it's not a downside for me. This seems like a pretty solid board if you aren't looking to build a complete monstrosity.
2. Proc: Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield
I won't comment on the performance because I haven't booted in OS yet with this thing. One thing I will comment is THANK ZAKARUM they fixed the stock fans that come with the chips. One thing I don't want to hear when pushing those pegs into the mobo is the cracking sound of silicon screaming that their old heat sinks packed standard as part of the intel experience. Also, the fan was damn silent on POST; to the point where I didn't even notice the damn thing had booted until that pleasant Asus logo showed up on the monitor. Yeah, that doesn't say much, but compared to the ridiculous full-blast my old Pentium-D fan was getting, it's a big jump.
3. GPU: Zotac 9800gtx 512mb DDR3
I will not comment personally on the performance because I haven't tested that yet (though I have commented profusely on the size already). I will say that if nobody on this side of the globe heard of Zotac, they have now. Spec-wise, it's the best card you can get in the ~200 price range, and one of the best 9800 GTX's period, and will likely surpass many of the first wave GTX+'s.
It's factory overclocked, and also, this monster eats two 6 pin pci-e jacks from the PSU. No surprise, but if you're looking to SLI, you should consider that when looking at the PSU, because the pci-e plug adapters that come with this thing don't seem to work--my dry run w/ just the proc, PSU, and GPU didn't even try to POST until I removed the adapted plug and actually put in the two legit pci-e's from the PSU. Fan is also surprisingly civilized for its size, though I imagine that things will not be so quiet while gaming.
Also, while I have made less rational comments about the size, people upgrading from much lesser cards will be somewhat shocked at the bulk when they see this thing for the first time. Zotac needs leibensraum. It takes up two slots worth of space and also runs the length of the mobo, completely occluding at least one of the lesser pci-e ports and potentially blocking access to drive bays. Still, an investment in a piece of hardware like this would justify also getting a case that will accomodate its needs.
4. PSU: OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI 700W
To date, I've found that, interestingly enough, the stickiest issue when combining hardware is the power supply--there's just so many variables that go into whether a PSU is compatible with whatnot, and it's not nearly as standardized as the other stuff. This one seems to fit my needs quite nicely. Plenty of power in all the right places, the right plugs (2 4-pin ATX's fix the mobo issue), and is very cleanly packaged and runs quiet enough. There is a good sized fan in there, and plenty of breathing room. 'nuff said. The PSU is one of those things that wins little praise if it does the job correctly, but invites endless wrath if it doesn't. In my case, the former is true.
I might do a followup when everything gets in and the box is completely finished.
A few thoughts on the latest KDE
As any self-respecting fan of the best Linux/Unix desktop environment in existence, KDE, knows, the latest major release (4.1) was unleashed on the general public Tuesday. This comes after a good deal of controversy surrounding the 4.0 release, which despite its nice round release number was essentially a beta not intended for day-to-day use. (See, for example, this blog.)I tried KDE 4.0 as a frontend for several distributions, including openSUSE and (K)Ubuntu, and found it nearly unusable. For a bit of background, the big innovation (besides the shift to the QT4 toolkit as a base) in functionality seemed to be a blurring of the distinction between panel and desktop. Interchangeable widgets took the place of the traditional desktop icons and panel addons such as launch menus and clocks. In KDE 4.0 the problem was that there were too few such widgets ("plasmoids" in KDE parlance), it was too difficult to find replacements for KDE 3.5 functionality, and many old configuration options—a hallmark of the KDE philosophy—were nonexistent. To top it off, many popular KDE applications, such as Amarok, looked and felt out of place, and you could forget about GTK apps like Firefox looking anything but straight-up ugly. The whole graphical system in KDE 4.0 was unstable, and I wisely decided to ignore the forum flamewars and just wait for the promised stable 4.1 release.
Now it's here, and after reading a positive review, I allowed it to become my graphical representation of Ubuntu 8.04.1. To my surprise, it has not crashed once, and I have been able to configure the desktop in a manner that suits me. The whole system looks fantastic, from login to shutdown, and the built-in compositing window manager functions well and easily rivals Vista and OS X in eye candy. It doesn't have the same massive list of configuration options available in Compiz Fusion (a more complete compositing windowing backend), but that's probably a good thing for newbies. All the old KDE programs look fine, and it's easy to integrate Firefox and its GTK cousins with the package gtk-qt4-engine-kde4 and the "Use my KDE style in GTK apps" configuration option set in the oddly Mac-like kcontrol replacement, systemsettings.
Furthermore, the somewhat clumsy file manager, Dolphin, now has tabbed browsing, the lack of which would have been a deal-breaker and is the worst part of GNOME's otherwise capable Nautilus. (Its quick ctrl+S selection filter and ctrl+H hidden-file viewer are things I've always wished Konqueror had included.) I still think there was no reason to replace Konqueror as the file manager, but I'll give Dolphin a chance. And speaking of file managers, the accessibility of files has improved greatly with the addition by default of a file-management widget on the desktop (taking the place of the usual set of desktop icons). The cool thing is, you can now set your home directory (or any directory) as your "desktop" and have multiple "desktop" directories, as I do in the screenshot (which, by the way, shows off four virtual desktops). You can even use a remote directory for this purpose.
This fundamental shift in the way we view file management and accessibility calls to mind other possibilities as to how KDE could take this a step further. For example, what about an expandable folder widget with simple navigation buttons that can spawn appendage-like extensions for subfolders without launching Dolphin and allows drag-and-drop operations among them? And maybe you could a launch little a terminal with a middle-click in that directory to perform quicker and/or more complex file-management tasks (e.g.,
cp script.sh script.bak && mv *.sh subdir/ && chmod +x subdir/*.sh)? The set of possibilities for making basic computing more efficient and slicker is huge in KDE 4.1. I look forward to the community's efforts to build lots of cool little apps like this for the Plasma framework.One test that KDE 4.1 has yet to pass is the test of time. It's going to be tough to stop using GNOME in Ubuntu (Kubuntu's KDE 3.5 sucks) and KDE 3.5 on Debian and Arch (it's so configurable!), but after an evening of putting 4.1 through its paces, I'm ready to let it take that test.
(By the way, here is the XKCD comic from the plasmoid in the screenshot, which Olga so thoughtfully sent me.)
The Last Lecture
Last week on July 25 Randy Pausch passed away. I'm sure most of you heard about The Last Lecture given by Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. CMU was presenting a lecture series from beloved professors chosen to speak about basically whatever they wanted including life lessons, advice and personal philosophies. Pausch had diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and knew he had only a few months to live. He gave a lecture about "really achieving your childhood dreams" that was inspirational to say the least and became known as The Last Lecture. He surpassed the predictions for his survival and ended up speaking at the CMU graduation a few months ago.
If you have a free hour or so you can watch the full lecture or read the transcript.
HOWTO: Call someone a wuss in German
My roommate this summer is an automotive engineering student from Germany. He's a big fan of cars, beer, and Starcraft, so naturally we get along like a pair of Hefeweizens in a summer Biergarter. Sometime over the course of the past couple of weeks, he used the word "Warmduscher" to call me a wuss. The word translates as "someone who takes warm showers." Lol. Because all real men shower in water no warmer than 20 degrees C.
Apparently there is more than one way to insult a person's manhood in Germany.
My favorites:
1) Frauenversteher, literally a "woman-understander"
2) Kondombedienungsanleitungsleser; a "condom-manual reader"
3) Originalspielkäufer; someone who doesn't pirate their video games
4) (for Jay) Linuxsauberrunterfahrer; someone who closes Linux with the shut down button and doesn't just unplug the power supply.
((Thanks to my other German friend Ute (yeah Lifton lab!!!) for the wonderful link.))
Apparently there is more than one way to insult a person's manhood in Germany.
My favorites:
1) Frauenversteher, literally a "woman-understander"
2) Kondombedienungsanleitungsleser; a "condom-manual reader"
3) Originalspielkäufer; someone who doesn't pirate their video games
4) (for Jay) Linuxsauberrunterfahrer; someone who closes Linux with the shut down button and doesn't just unplug the power supply.
((Thanks to my other German friend Ute (yeah Lifton lab!!!) for the wonderful link.))
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