It has been a while since I did the blog thing as I have been messing about in Florida or something. I saw Ryan posted the specs of the machine he wants to buy, so I thought I would start doing the same, the machine is going to be stupidly over spec and pretty much built from scratch as these things tend to have to be when changing both sockets and the kind of connection needed for the graphics card
Here is the current plan:

• PSU: Not decided yet, something pretty.
• Case: Cooler Master Stacker 830 (not yet released)
• Processor: AMD Athlon x2 4800+ (not yet released)
• Cooling: 2x Aquagate with all the trimmings (CPU, GPU, HDD, Northbridge)
• Video Card: GeForce G70 Ultra (code name - not yet announced)
• Motherboard: TBA
• RAM: 2gig TBA
• Hard Disk: Undecided, will be two pairs of RAID arrays, one for speed one for storage
• Optical Drive: Sony Dual Layer (already owned) & another one for good measure.
• Soundcard:...

Everyone else seems to be in Seattle, so I thought I would break the trend by not being there. I have been keeping myself busy though - our server problems continue getting to the point where I will have Eva from Vbulletin take a look, whether it is free or not isn't an issue, having a site that is up and stays up is far more important to me.

I sent NetRyder to WinHEC on pain of death and he has free stuff already, including a NVIDIA 6800 GT and an AMD 64 4000+ in a shiny case, oh and a load of other stuff that makes the trip more than worth it and the event hasn't even started yet! You can read NetRyder's blog here: http://netryder.osnn.net/winhec2005/ only has a few shots of last nights antics up so far but coverage will continue. Onto the x64 bits and a couple of tasty morsels for you all today!

? Starting with updated Soundblaster drivers for x64 that are set to expire in August you can check those out here: http://www.osnn.net/comments.php?shownews=11982...

That was the worst pun ever and I totally didn't mean it. Oh? Explain why, World of Warcraft, I play it and my stats would tell me that I have played for around four days so far - at one point it was taking over my life, but it seems to be settling down again. Anyway, as it has been so damn quiet on the news front and general stuff-to-play-with front, I thought I would share a small observation I think I made. World of Warcraft was taking far too long to exit and being the patient person I am I pressed Control-Alt-Delete. Task manager sprung up, as expected and I was confronted with my list of running processes. As we already know, 32bit applications will appear as say Doom3.exe*32 well World of Warcraft appeared as Wow.exe - is it actually running in 64bit? I'll double check again today.

Been pretty quiet on the x64 front, but I have had plenty to do - my server, the one that hosts http://www.osnn.net has been having some kind of problem that we are having trouble looking...

The buzz of 64bit is wearing off a little now, which isn't a bad thing - it means I am using a brand new 64bit Operating System and so much of it is working - apart from the increased speed which you also get used to - that it just feels like any old WindowsXP system. I haven’t had any new drivers installed, in fact I leaked the 76.71 set I got the other day to a few places and the general feedback seems to be good, there seems to be a few issues with SLI setups, but that is even the case with the 32bit versions - it isn't something that I can check as I don't have an SLI setup, donations anyone?

I got my uxtheme.dll cracked as I mentioned in my previous blog, was a little bit of hassle and I always like to tip-toe around a new Operating System until I am comfortable with it - there is nothing worse than getting a true STOP error ... not even BSOD covers the frustration this can cause. I had to boot into Safe Mode and rename the existing uxtheme.dll (I went for the old classic...

A busy weekend with lots of alcohol, multiple kebabs and a little progress with Windows x64.

Firstly, I managed to get my hands on some new NVIDIA Forceware drivers for Windows x64 in the shape of version 76.71 which are newer than the last leaked version for 32 bit (although I know build 80.xx is already well into development), anyway here is some information which I am frankly chuffed with. I ran some tests using the Half-life 2 VST, which is available on the menu of Counter-strike: Source. The highest score I ever received with the default settings was around 110 frames per second, so here we go:

Forceware64 71.84 - VST Score: ~70
Forceware64 76.71 - VST Score: ~147

This was done using a single Geforce 6800 Ultra at 425/1100 if anyone cares! Just about all the games I have installed seem to work fine with these, no apparent slowdowns, the games I have check so far currently include (as well as being mentioned below but now at least run...