News

Alright, this train is leaving the station. I've managed to resume work on X-Bomber for now but I have the pleasure of my Graduation on Thursday. Not looking forward to that at all.

I'm finishing up the details for Mission 13.  I had an idea for making the final part look a little less like just empty space in the background.  The finishing touches always take forever but we're not far off v0.76 now.

I'm back home in Northumberland at the moment.  My notebook headphone port blew again so it's off for another replacement I suppose. I should ring up Rock tomorrow to harass inquire about when it'll be finished. Right now I'm developing X-Bomber in AGP-8x, Socket-754 splendour.  My old box is holding up pretty good actually. I transferred all of X-Bomber's stuff across to my external Spinpoint.  because it's USB-connected it doesn't supply any SMART data so I think I might make yet another duplicate for the sake of my nerves.

Annoying thing is that the old 9800XT in this crate doesn't decode Full-HD.  720p it does pretty well; drops the odd frame here and there but not that you can notice.  So I'm replacing it with this: 1GB HiS HD 4670 AGP IceQ.
What, £87 for an AGP card??? -You ask.
Who cares? All the 4650s that come with HDMI ports are about £70+ and as rare as an honest University lecturer. Plus, this 4670 comes close to the 3850 for framerates and draws 9W on idle - better than the 40W (!!!) idle that this 9800XT snorts up.
By the way - why did they stop using XT, GTX, Pro, Ultra etc. suffixes on GPUs recently? ("etc." was probably one that they used on occasion as well) I know it confused the hell outta everyone but you were getting a more impressive name for your money.
Funny how the 9800XT sounds far better than the 4650 and yet in reality it blows in comparison. I'll be interested to see how HiS products perform. I was a little skeptical when I read that the company's mission statement was to "glorify God"... yeah, seriously. The other thing is that I like my graphics cards red and dangerous-looking.  This one's blue and it looks like a toy submarine. Still, I'll report back to tell you how it works if it doesn't blow out my power supply.