Friday, June 24, 2005

v7.1 - Without Coffee

Morning Folks,

No slurps today due to the fact I didn''t get a coffee this morning.

There are benifits of getting to work early in the morning and leaving early in the afternoon. First off, the line ups at Tim Horton''s are next to non exsistant before 6am. This makes for a fairly stress free morning of driving to the office and pulling in, placing your order and driving to the window for that first extra large double double of the day. I pulled into my regular Tim''s this morning and was amazed at how long the drive thru lineup was. Basically, if I had decided to stay and get a coffee, I would still be there waiting.

I had two choices. Wait for a coffee to do my musing and end up getting here and not having enough time, or skipping the coffee and writing.

Of course I choose the later and here I am writing away. The facility operators here assure me there will be coffee ready soon. Although the office blend coffee here isn''t all that bad, there is still no comparision to a Tim Horton''s coffee.

What the hell, may as well throw in a slurp here for fun.

{slurp}



Ahhhh, almost like actually drinking coffee.

You may recall me mentioning some issues I was having with my home PC. Last night I took it apon myself to do some work on this bad boy and seeing if I could get it fixed. First thing I did was pop the case and do a cleaning. There was quite a bit of dust buildup on some of the fans (namely cpu and video card) so I cleaned those off. Then I decided to remove the sound card. My system board comes with an on-board sound card, but I put in my SB128 PCI for the heck of it. Lately I have been noticing some odd sound issues on this machine and I thought I would drop the sound card and go back to the on-board sound. Then, I thought about overclocking the system back to where it was before my birthday (when I received my new video card). I overclocked it back to the 2.4GHz I had previously enjoyed and lo and behold the system booted just fine. No issues.

Next step was to ensure everything was running ok. I decided to drop back to the BIOS and watch the heat sensors. I was surprised to see how much cooler the system ran when I had my cpu fan cranked down to its slowest speed. The CPU was running fairly cool and the inside of the case was staying cool as well. I''m tempted to take the side mounted fan and turning it to face out instead of in so I can get more air pushed out of the unit. I feel the amount of hot air being blow off the CPU and video card was greater than the exhaust fans blowing the air out. This creates a very hot zone within the case which may be causing a number of issues regarding my performance and locking. I ended up turning my cpu fan up to about 3000rpms and everything started to stable out (temperature wise). Now, for the real test.

I logged into my machine and started to play World of Warcraft. This test wasn''t going to be bang on because of the cooler temperatures outside during the day. Inside my house wasn''t as warm as it was the day before so this test wasn''t going to be all that accurate. I fired up my level 16 Warrior and ran around the zone killing green con mobs for just over an hour. The result was MUCH higher framerates than I''ve had in the past. Much smoother animation and movement around the zone. I was quite surprised and happy to see the system performing as I expect a system to perform. I have all the graphic details cranked for the absolute best possible detail and quality. I also play the game at 1600x1200 resolution and it was looking very very SWEET. I dinged level 17 on the Warrior and ran back to town to logout. Happy with my test, I dropped back to Windows and downloaded a little application for my system board. I belive it is called EasyTune and it allows me to tweak my system while in Windows. Normally I would love to play with something like this, but I downloaded it purely for the heat and fan monitoring. After logging out of WoW, I was surprised to see the temperature inside my case had only climbed 1 degree Celcius and the CPU had climbed 2 degrees. Prior to this tweak, I had assumed my WoW client was locking up due to the heat. If I am to believe the system wasn''t over heating before then I can only assume there is something else wrong.

I have done a lot of browsing on the WoW Technical support forums and have found a lot of other people having similar issues with their machines. While these issues are not video card specific, they do seem to be affecting a lot of people with a lot of various other configurations. This leads me to believe my issues (although very annoying) are not my problem and it is indeed shitty graphic coding on Blizzard''s part.

Tonight, I have decided to play WoW and watch the temperature very closely while doing so. I suspect my findings will be similar to what I saw above with very low heat increases.

Keeping in mind the only 2 changes I have made to the system were dropping the rpms of the CPU fan to 3000rpms and increasing the speed of the CPU from 2.0GHz to 2.4GHz.

Meh

Well, that''s all I have this morning. This is my last day of training and I''ll be back in the office on Monday and back to my regular schedule. :) Hope you all had a great week and a safe and happy weekend.

{slurp}

Cheers,

Al

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