{"id":579,"date":"2007-03-17T00:06:26","date_gmt":"2007-03-17T08:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/?p=579"},"modified":"2007-03-17T00:06:26","modified_gmt":"2007-03-17T08:06:26","slug":"hyperion-becomes-hyperdrive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/17\/hyperion-becomes-hyperdrive\/","title":{"rendered":"Hyperion<\/em> becomes Hyperdrive<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those who may have been wondering, I did get all the gear from NewEgg last Friday, and spent Sunday rebuilding the rig. The Full Monty:<\/p>\n

Proc:<\/strong> AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane 2.3GHz (stock cooler)
\nMobo:<\/strong> GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 w\/ NVIDIA nForce 590 chipset
\nRAM:<\/strong> Kingston 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
\nHDD:<\/strong> 2ea Seagate 100GB SATA drives (from Hyperion)
\nOptical:<\/strong> 2 ea LITE-ON 20X DVD+\/-R IDE Burner with LightScribe
\nVideo:<\/strong> EVGA GeForce 7900GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express<\/p>\n

Cue “6 Million Dollar Man” theme.<\/p>\n

The results:
\nI had some trouble with the Windows install. Big shock, I know. Using a known good install disk, there were about 20 file copy failures in the initial process. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out WTF, so I went ahead and let the install finish, ignoring anything that wouldn’t copy. Once it had installed and booted, I went back and used the msconfig \/ expand function to pull those files off the disk and into the file system. I may have missed one somewhere, however, as I can’t get the rear speakers in the sound to work. Not a critical issue, but it’s gonna annoy me eventually. And I also somehow lost the right to a USB<\/acronym> mouse, since any mouse will now only work when plugged into a PS\/2-USB adapter. (USB<\/acronym> keyboard works fine.)<\/p>\n

Everything else seems to be ok for now, so I’m going to leave it be.<\/p>\n

Performance: Rocks. Flat-out, this is the quietest computer I’ve used since a Commodore VIC20 back in the 7th grade. If I really<\/em> stress it, the CPU fan will spin up a bit, but otherwise this thing runs at minimum rpms and near silent. Same with the video card. In fact, it may have only been the eVGA’s fan spinning up, I haven’t run Speedfan to figure it out yet.<\/p>\n

Video performance has been sweet. DarkStar One<\/em> runs glassily smooth at maximum resolution and effects, even during a 10-bad-guy furball in an asteroid field. The same goes for X3: The Reunion<\/em>, which I could finally now play, if the damn thing didn’t bore me silly. The only bummer so far in the gaming aspect is just that: Mechwarrior<\/em> doesn’t support widescreen aspect ratios, so everything is short and wide. I tried to configure the card and monitor to not stretch, but it won’t work. Maybe I’ll get lucky and someone other than M$ will pick up the license from FASA.<\/p>\n

Hint. Hint. Hint.<\/p>\n

So. It’s faster, but how much? Unknown. I never ran any real benchmarks on the old rig, so I only have anecdotal evidence – and really not even that until I run something like a DVD encode on it. Hyperion<\/em> was pretty damn fast itself, so it’s hard to see at this point. If video game graphics peformance is an accurate benchmark, I’d say I got a 20% – 30% increase overall. <\/p>\n

In any case, it makes me happy :)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those who may have been wondering, I did get all the gear from NewEgg last Friday, and spent Sunday rebuilding the rig. The Full Monty: Proc: AMD Athlon 64 Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}