Computing

Fun with overclocking!

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Been Overclocking the hell out of my i52500k the last couple days. I’m currently running it at 4.0 GHZ (Factory setting is 3.3) and getting a big improvement in rendering. I rendered one clip at 3.3 and it took about 35 seconds. Overclocked to 4.0 and got down to 20 seconds. Best of all the hottest temp the processor got up to was 115F. Added the ThermalTake Frio to the case and so far it’s done a brilliant job keeping everything nice and cool. At idle right now it’s between 95 and 102 F.

I’m happy with the results anyway. 🙂

My shit is still there!!! Sorta.

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I’ve got some good news. I recovered everything important from the hard drives! Some of my raw footage for reviews were ruined though, so I’ll have to do another film session. But pictures, audio and compiled videos are all safe, sound, and backed up onto other drives and computers. I can still do stuff! Which I’ll need to soon because this downtime has caused me to fall somewhat behind on projects.

Finally up yet again on windows 7. Tomorrow I’ll tear into XP yet again… This time I’m not touching the microsoft administrative tools to format the drives. Mini partition tool will do the trick. I use that anyway for on the fly drive resizing.

Anyway, the next three days I’ll be ordering bread. Time to go back to that nap trick I did last time so I won’t go completely insane.

Just when I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, a boulder rolls into view.

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Had a bit of a setback last night while formatting one of the new 1 TB drives. For whatever reason the drive controller didn’t like it when I tried to format 2 things at a time. Which is strange because under XP and 7 there is usually no issue, it’ll just do it. Not in this case…

For whatever reason it tore apart the RAID I had. I lost everything but the two operating system drives. Things like my games and video footage/completed episodes might be gone. I say might because right now I’m running Disk Internals RAID recovery. I’m using that and have managed to possibly recover my Steam drive. Most of the files seem to be there. I opened up one folder to export the contents and the program seems to be taking it’s sweet ass time opening it. I’m going to guess it’s the one folder that had half a million files in it… Just my luck.

This means I’m going to be down even longer than anticipated. My drive tables are completely fucked. I’ll have to redo everything as soon as I try to recover all of the important files.

Almost finished up

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Built my RAID configuration tonight and got most of XP done. Aside from having to tweak XP and 7 I’m pretty much ready to go to town. At this point in time I’m formatting one of my hard drives for the first time. It’s taking forever…

Decided while I had downtime that I’d spend some time cooking tonight. Made some nice spicy fried rice and tomato flower soup. Very colorful and warming on a very cold evening.

Now to read up on what I’ve missed while doing some personal engineering.

Open Thread

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Been so hell bent on finishing a project that I neglected to post for the last couple days. I’ve been having fun in Adobe Premiere CS5. Handles ALOT better than CS4. Has fewer bugs and it hasn’t crashed once so far, which is always good when working on a project. Also took some time to make chicken and rice noodle soup and a thai omelet with the pepper sauce I made the other day. omnomnomnomnom.

Windows XP still has better sound.

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As soon as I get a hold of a couple drives for my Steam RAID array I will be doing a dual installation of XP and 7. Windows 7 does a wonderful job handling tasks and gaming. However, XP still offers more options for sound. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that windows 7 does a great job neutering my X-FI elite pro. The PAX drivers I installed recover most of that via emulation, but when it comes to soundcard hardware control XP is still superior.

When I use FRAPS to record something I can just press a button and it selects what u hear by default. Pressing the same button turns off recording and puts me back to the device I was using before. Under windows 7 however, you have to set what u hear manually before gaming. Otherwise you will only get either your own mic or game sound recorded. Before anyone tells me that I may have an extremely dated card, let me tell you that I have a SoundBlaster X-FI elite pro. If I wanted to I COULD get a soundcard designed for Windows7/Vista. But then even the newer cards have lower DACs (digital-to-analog converters) than the one I currently have (and a must for voice recording). Thank you Mr Bill…

Of course I have no issue running two operating systems on one computer. It wouldn’t be the first time.

More win 7 prep work plus a stupid story.

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One of the things I like about Win 7 is in gaming. Under XP I had an issue with the mic changing from Line 2 Mic 2, to standard microphone when playing any Source game. I just tested TF2 in Win 7 and it stayed on Line 2 mic 2. These PAX drivers are possibly better than the actual X-Fi drivers. I also got all of my adobe products running under 7. Tomorrow when I work on another episode I’ll do a test rendering on both operating systems.

On an unrelated note, apparently one of my dumb assed bosses thought I worked yesterday. He started panicking because I didn’t show up for work yesterday. It took me coming in today reading the schedule and pointing to him that I was marked as “off” to make him realize that I wasn’t “absent”. Everyone else thought he was an idiot, but that’s pretty normal around the store. I don’t think anyone takes him seriously.

Overlord Victorious!

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Did some more experimenting under Win 7. Managed to find out there was somewhat of a fix for getting SourceSDK working under it between a gadget and a dll. Now with this fix I think I can fully move on from XP. That was pretty much the entire reason why I stuck with it up until now. That and I didn’t have much of another reason to go to 7. But with the desire to use adobe premiere pro and after effects with more RAM I think it’s time to move forward. XP has served me well since the last decade. Now that I can have everything that I want in win 7 working perfectly I can rest easy.