oyvindhauge.com – Page 13

A HTPC/Gaming Rig Part 3

I have earlier written about the first two stages (1 and 2) of my living-room-gaming-PC project. I am quite confident that this is not the last update either as the project continues to evolve.

After installing a new video adapter with a fan making more noise than a 747 jet engine I had to do something. The noise coming from the stock fan on the AMD/ATI HD4870 video adapters is just too loud for my living room. The video adapter’s temperatures are extremely high as well with an idle temperature over 70 degrees Celsius and load temperatures far over 80 degrees.

Thermalright T-Rad2 - Image from thermalright.com

The first step was of course to replace the cooler on the video adapter. The Thermalright T-Rad2 had got good reviews (Bjorn3d.com), it was small enough to fit within my Lian Li PC-C32B casing, and it could be fitted with two 92mm Nexus Real Silent case fans, which again could be connected to a fan controller. The installation of the cooler and the fans was fairly simple. Just make sure you have everything you need, a bit of time and some space. The results was really amazing! The idle temperature dropped to around 45-50 degrees Celsius and the load temperature reached just above 60 degrees. The readings are done with HWMonitor and they are probably not 100% correct. Nevertheless, they should give pretty clear indications of the significant temperature reductions. More interesting, the noise from the horrible stock fan was gone.

Reducing the noise from the video adapter did of course introduce another problem, the noise from the CPU cooler. When the noise from video adapter was gone, the CPU cooler continued keeping the neighbors awake at night. To mend this problem I got a Xigmatek HDT-SD964. This cooler received good reviews as well (spcr), it fits inside my case, and it can be fitted with one or possibly two 92mm fans. The noise was once more removed and the temperature dropped significantly. Idle temperatures were measured to 12 and 17 degrees on the two cores of my AMD 4850e CPU. I doubt these values are totally correct as my living room is warmer than that. Load temperatures while playing Far Cry 2 reached 25 degrees.

The problem now is that the PSU makes a bit of noise. It is nothing I cannot live with but I wish it was a bit more silent and I suppose I will do something about it one day. The computer is however fairly quiet, and the noise is a lot less annoying.

Current configuration

Lian Li PC-C32B HTPC casing
NorthQ Giant Reactor 1000 Watt power supply
ASUS M3A-H/HDMI motherboard
4096MBs of OCZ DDR2 Gold
AMD Athlon X2 4850e CPU with a Xigmatek HDT-SD964 with one Nexus 92mm Real Silent fan
Sapphire HD4870 video adapter with a Thermalright T-Rad2 cooler and two Nexus 92mm Real Silent fans
Auzentech Prelude sound board
2 Samsung F1 1TB hard drives in RAID 1 for data storage
Samsung F1 500GB hard drive as system disc
Samsung SH-S203B DVD player
Zalman ZM-MFC1 Plus fan controller
2 Nexus 120mm Real Silent case fans

AMD/ATI Video Adapters connected to a TV – turning it on and off again

I have earlier written about my problems connecting an AMD/ATI video adapter to my TV using a HDMI cable. The problem is that when I change the input source on the TV I will just get a black picture on the TV when I switch back to the PC. The only solution I found was puting Vista into sleep mode and awakening it again. Thanks to frankk74, a forum user at the AMD/ATI support forum, I have now found a way better soultion.

hdmiOn, is a very small and simple program which turns the monitor off and on again. By doing this it enables me to switch input source on the TV and back again to the PC. Then I simply start hdmiOn using a shortkey and I have a perfect picture again. Many thanks to thydzik for this simple soultion. Why cannot AMD/ATI come up with something as simple as this? I just recently installed the new AMD drivers but the problems remain the same.

Most anticipated games of the first third of 2009

After a great fall with plenty of new games I still have a backlog consisting of Fallout 3, Dead Space (360), Red Alert 3, X3 Terran Conflict, and Sins of a Solar Empire together with a couple of older games like Assassins Creed (360), Hitman Blood Money (360) and Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare (360). However, it has as always been a bit calmer around Christmas as December and January are normally pretty quiet months. The rest of the year though seems to bring a lot of new games worth waiting for. 2009 is already under way and it is about time to start looking ahead for the games to come. The following games which have confirmed release dates first third of 2009 are the ones I expect the most of.

Grand Theft Auto IV The Lost and Damned - Screenshot rockstargames.com

While January is a totally quiet month, February has a couple of titles worth watching out for. First out is the next addition to the horror shooter F.E.A.R. from 2005. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin hits the shelves on February 10th. The first game was a very good shooter with great explosions and scary moments. I still think my laptop is named Alma after one of the characters in the game and I am looking forward to facing here again. I have seen a couple of in-game videos and I am not that impressed. However, based on the fun I had with the previous game I will most likely check out this game closer when it is released. Next up is the downloadable content to Grand Theft Auto IV. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned will be available February 17th through Xbox Live to 360 owners only. GTA IV was criticized because of the lack of checkpoints, too high realism (in other words no fun), poor cars, annoying friends and so on. Despite all this, it was claimed game of the year, received great critics and I loved it. It is therefore natural to look forward to the next extension of the game. Hopefully, they have fixed a few of the mentioned problems.

Empire: Total War - Concept Art totalwar.com

I am really looking forward to March as it will give us a few great games. First up is the highly anticipated strategy title Empire Total War which will be out March 3rd. 10 days later, the 13th, it is time to kill zombies again. I really enjoyed killing zombies in Left 4 Dead and I want more. Resident Evil 5 looks very promising and I am in particular looking forward to the two player mode. Hopefully it will be as fun as it looks. The last game on my March list is Guitar Hero Metallica which will be available in the U.S. on March 29th. However, it is not available here in Europe until May (why do we get everything later?). As fan of Metallica for almost the last 20 years I really am looking forward to the game after trying Guitar Hero World Tour a while back.

April promises us another strategy gem. A new expansion to the Company of Heroes series, Tales of Valor, will be available on April 13th. I really enjoyed the last installment of this real time strategy title and I am looking forward to the next one. Company of Heroes was actually the first strategy game I have played which was quite hard to beat. When that is said, I have not played that many strategy games the last years but it was a thrill struggling (though sometimes quite frustrating) with a decent computer controlled adversary.

Other titles you might want to look out for: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II on February 18th, The Sims 3 on February 20th, The Godfather 2 on February 24th, Killzone 2 on February 27th, Halo Wars on March 3rd, Tom Clancy’s EndWar sometime in March/April, Dragon Age: Origins on March 23, Stormrise on March 24th, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena sometime in March. While I do have super high expectations for all of these, you might fancy them.

[gamelist mode=tracking user=jayzon69 filter=random limit=8 view=table]

I also maintain a list at Gamespot of the games I am tracking (some of which you should see above). If you are interested in other PC games you might want to see this extensive list created by Adrian Werner (great job Adrian). International readers might want to check out the GT countdown and if you ware a Norwegian you might want to see what Norwegian news reporters are waiting for as well: Aftenposten, Gamer, Itavisen, and Vg.

Librarything

Through the blog of Atle Frenvik Sveen I was made aware of a service which may be said to be a crossbreed of IMDB and last.fm. Librarything enables you to register your books and even more interestingly get recommendations of books you might like.

I recently created a profile and I have just added the books resting on my desk. Adding book is easy as Librarything (potentially) searches more than six hundred databases in several languages. As I registered an account just a few days ago I do not have any experience with the recommendations. However, according to Atle they are quite good.

As you should see above, it is quite easy to integrate a list of your books into your web site using pre-made Java Scripts. Librarything provides an API as well but I have not tested it. However, it should be possible to integrate a whole lot of information about the books you have in your catalog into your site. The best thing is that the site provides cover scans for most of the books and they let you integrate these scans into your site as well, for non-commercial purposes that is. They did not have the cover for one of the books I had on my desk. However, they had the cover of an earlier edition of the book which was written by a Swedish author. EDIT: A user had uploaded that cover scan for this book as well so I was able to get a cover for this book as well.

I will start using Librarything, at least to see how it works. I might also include it here in my blog. Regardless of what I do, you should check out Librarything for yourself.

A HTPC/Gaming Rig Part 2

A long while back I wrote about the first step of building a HTPC/Gaming rig for the living room. The PC has since then gone through a couple of changes and had a couple of problems.

Video Adapter and TV

The first problem I had with the old configuration was that when I connected it to my TV (a Sony W3000) using a HDMI cable I was not able to change input source on the TV. Let me explain. When turning on the TV, selecting the correct input (the PC) and then booting the PC everything is working perfectly. Well that is everything works perfectly until I want to change the input on the TV to let us say the Xbox. Changing it over to the Xbox works fine but when changing it back to the PC I just get a black screen. I have of course reported this to ATI/AMD support and written about it in the AMD forum but I have not found any solution so far.

As a consequence of having this problem and as I was going to use the PC for gaming purposes I had to get a new and more powerful video adapter. Silly enough I went for another ATI/AMD adapter, a Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 with 512MB of memory (is RAM). This card did of course have the same problem as the on-board 780G chip-set. I was still not able to change the input on the TV without getting just a black picture. The unfortunate “solution” to this problem was as I wrote about earlier, sending Vista into sleep-mode and reinitialize it. When the computer is reinitialized it apparently starts a handshaking process with the TV and I get a perfect picture again.

Hard drives and RAID

Samsung Spinnpoint F1 - From samsung.com

As I planned to use the PC as a media center and storage for photos, videos, music and so on I preferred using a RAID 1 configuration. RAID 1 uses two hard drives and mirrors the drives so that they have exactly the same content. Even though RAID 1 is a waste of space it reduces the risk of loosing data significantly. One is of course still vulnerable to a simultaneous hard drive crash like in case of a fire or similar but one should be safe from data loss in case of a single drive malfunction. The solution was getting two more hard drives. First, I got another Samsung F1 1TB and used it together with the one I had as data storage in RAID 1. Second, I bought a Samsung F1 500 GB drive and used it as a system disc.

Installing Vista using a RAID or getting the RAID working in Vista was not as easy as it should. It could of course be caused by the fact that I have never done it before. However, a Google search reveals that there are other people with simmilar difficulties. After fixing the BIOS, connecting the drives to different SATA ports and reinstalling Vista a couple of times it was finally running and working as expected.