x64 Something and x86 Something Else

Been a while since I blogged, but I have been keeping myself very busy of course and my Tauren Hunter is now almost level 60 in World of Warcraft. While not gaming, I have also been to Seattle and back, staying only to play with Vista and to drink some Corona.

I got Vista installed in my now "old" system, old only because my newer system is well, newer. Iguana is a 3400+ Athlon64 on an MSI K8T Neo FIS2R and a gig of Crucial ram all packaged nicely in a Lian-Li PC65 case, I have installed the 32bit version of Windows Vista Beta 1 on it. Why would I do that after tasting the sweetness that is 64bit? Purely to follow the trend, alot of the initial drivers will be 32bit only, obviously and I really want to provide the feedback that Microsoft deserve for flying me out there and buying me a steak dinner, oh and getting to touch an Xbox 360. Woo, but I already wrote about that here:

http://www.osnn.net/comments.php?shownews=12217

I am continuing to play with Vista, while carefully tip-toeing around what we can and can't talk about, having only spent one day at Microsoft being bombarded with PowerPoint presentations, videos, talks and real-time demonstrations, it is very difficult to differentiate what we can and can't talk about. Everyone seems to have behaved so far though. I will most likely switch to the 64bit version in a later beta, most likely sometime after beta2, which should be more feature complete - really looking forward to that one, but for now it is time to hammer out more of the basic bugs so the funky looking stuff can come later, not that it isn't very pretty already.

The new system? Almost what I was thinking about ordering, my trip to the USA speeded things up a little, as well as slowing them down too (Barclays blocked my card - twice - I had that much fun!) I now have a CMStacker case, but the fun doesn't stop there, an AthlonFX57 Processor on an Abit AN8SLI Fatal1ty motherboard, 2 gigs of high end Corsair memory and two of those 7800 GTX cards that everyone is raving out. Pretty damn nice to be honest and rightly so, I have some mental block that is stopping me from figuring how much I spent on the damn thing. I have a load more room on my desk anyway, as this the case is so huge it just can't be kept on there, so has to live on the floor - something I hate to do, all that dust down theare, but it has plenty of filters (except with the crossover fan - which I still need to look into!)

When installing - once again I had more problems with the damn SATA drives again, got the bios settings correct but the official NVIDIA drivers for Windows x64 let me down and caused that same old crashing loop, again I had to refer to www.planetamd64.com for my drivers, although once installed the latest official 6.66 set installed with no issues.

I also upgraded the Motherboard bios from 1.3 to 1.6 and then just could not get Windows to boot or even re-run setup, the only solution was to roll back to 1.3 (even tried 1.4 and 1.5 with no joy), that was kind of crap, there are alot of complaints about these bioses on their forums - lets hope the next set works out better eh?

I am also playing with the unreleased 77.79 NVIDIA drivers for WindowsXP x64, no bugs so far which is nice, as always, no real feedback about those yet, though I have opened Zoom Player a few times and it seems the gamma bug is gone, but I only installed the drivers late last night so haven't really played with them long enough to confirm anything. I just wish there was a way to enable and disable SLI without having to reboot - I only need to because I generally use dual display, something I don't think I could do without these days.

It also seems that the crash on exit bug disappeared in World of Warcraft, which leads me to believe it isn't an NVIDIA driver bug at all, could be VIA? A very strange one, but I am glad it is gone.

I have been checking out the F.E.A.R. demo and it does indeed look very cool, I just hope they give it a good bit of polish as it could be something very special indeed. I was initially thinking it was a good cross between Doom3 and Half-life 2, but then I pressed the Control key, it has slowdown like Max Payne. Awesome stuff and using my new system it works great, but I would be worried if it didn't frankly - I have been able to run every single game I have tried at Maximum settings even without the SLI enabled.

I will try and update more as there is plenty to talk about and as always this all comes of the top of my head.