I’ve got this thing on RFD and the guy wants to see some pictures. I guess I’ll call it a modding/water cooling post. I basically really wanted to do a mATX water cooled build, so I had an E6850, P5E-VM HDMI, and Radeon 3870 in here with an MCP350 pump, Enzotech (never again) chipset block, D-TEK FuZion GFX GPU block, Swiftech MCRES-MICRO, MCR320, and Primochill 3/8″ ID 5/8″ OD tubing.

It was a very nice little build and ended up not even taking up any extra bays so the expansion capabilities of the case were not impacted.

Ran into some problems with GRID when I first installed it on my secondary machine and thought I’d share the fix. System specs are below:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ @ 2.35GHz
eVGA mATX nForce4 SLI
2×1GB Corsair Value Select
2x eVGA 8800GTS 640MB SSC
OCZ GameXStream 600W
Seagate 320GB 7200.10 SATA
Samsung DVD Writer
Silverstone SG01B-W

All of this usually has no problems powering a 1680×1050 21″ display, but GRID would periodically (usually within about 10 seconds of starting a race) start to stutter in a way that looked a lot like hard drive buffering, but lasted for too long (5-30 seconds) and then it would go away for another 10 second. Very annoying.

The problem, it turns out, is mostly isolated to SLI systems running Vista without Service Pack 1. Driver updates and other standard fixes didn’t do anything, but an update to Service Pack 1 took care of it right away.

Quite honestly this is one thing I really never thought would be an occupational hazard of working at a computer store….

Mike, if you’re reading this, no I do not frequent California, USA…

You know, I have to wonder if gamers are going to migrate to consoles for all their gaming just to escape inconveniences like registration and copy protection. I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth that I bought a good few years back. Now, I confess to being a moron and losing the CD case, but at the time I had the CD key written down and wasn’t worried about it. Fast-forward 3 or so years and now I can’t read the CD key because it’s so smudged.

I don’t think I ever actually created an EA online account because all of my aliases including my real name were already taken with numbers on the end of them reaching into the hundreds (I’m exaggerating, but you catch my drift), so now for the first time I want to play it online. I was asked by a couple of the guys I met at Fragapalooza to play some BFME and not having my key I decided to buy a key second hand (let’s face it, how many copies of this game is EA producing these days…) for $10. I entered it and it won’t work online because it’s alrady been registered.

Now I can understand if it was like Blizzard where two people cannot use the same key at the same time, or I had basically gotten scammed because the key he sold me was banned or something, but this is just a case of EA making the game hard to play even when you’ve gone out of your way to have a legit copy.

Well, I’ve linked the EA support staff to this post and I’ll be interested to see if they’re willing to do anything. Wish me luck.

edit: it looks like I can send in the disc with $10 and they will send me a replacement product key. Yay.

Well I decided to take my birthday off of work and go to the PNE. For those who don’t live in Vancouver, the PNE or Pacific National Exhibition is like a big homeshow, livestock show, flea market, and amusement park all rolled into one with live entertainment such as SuperDogs, street performers, pig races, and musicians.

This is the Peking Acrobats. They did quite a few stunts, but I thought this was one of the most impressive ones. Note that the bottom chair is balanced on pots, NOT sitting on its 4 legs

Here’s me racing my little brother around a race course made of bales of hay. These are little tricycle style tractors. I don’t think it was built for my weight, but oh well :p

Over the course of the day I got a variety of stuff for free by telling people it was my birthday. I got cotton candy, kettle corn, face painting (pictured above), free rides for my mom (too cheap to buy a ride pass and hasn’t been on a coaster in 30 years. It was hilarious!), and a sno cone. I was actually asked for ID to prove it was my birthday by the girls in the sno cone concession stand. Haha.

And for no particular reason at all…. An alpaca.

If you were thinking “Predator”, you weren’t too far off the mark. Acer has their product page up for the Aspire Predator, a gaming machine that they want to use to compete with the boutique builders.

It’s liquid cooled, SLI ready, features 8GB of RAM, and one of the funkiest cases I’ve seen in a long time. All of that said, who wrote the marketing materials?

NCIX will of course be carrying these machines, once they’re released, but if you want more information now, you can get Faster, Deeper, Harder, and Further here

The user Schnoops over at www.overclock.net put together a fantastic reservoir side panel for the Antec Nine Hundred (900) case. It reminds me of the old aquarium side panel that Lian Li came out with years ago.

You can check out the original thread here. Very cool work

Microsoft has a handy error message that pops up on Windows Home Server if you press anything other than Ctrl+Alt+Delete before you log in.

Thanks for the instructions, guys!

Viper John has a new product out that could very well revolutionize the way we plumb our PC water cooling. It’s called a Viper Tight Bend. It sounds kinda dirty, and when I explain what it is, it may seem a little pointless, but let me tell you that it’s NOT.

A VTB is basically a chunk of tubing that is pre-bent to a 1.25″ bend radius in a “U” shape. What does this mean? It means that you can make turns that were previously impossible without kinking your tubing or using coils. It also means that if you are making that tight turn to something sensitive like a chipset block, you don’t have to worry about the coils and tubing putting pressure on the barbs and/or block which can cause leaks or damage to the fragile chips underneath.

This picture demonstrates how effectively a VTB thrashes the regular bend radius of Tygon R-3603.

Well my day two coverage is actually being written on the morning of day three. It’s amazing how the hours and days seem to blur together at an event like this. I overheard Yellowbeard from Corsair saying on the phone “We’ve been here all weekend” when he had actually been here Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and we laughed about it afterwards. I guess you had to be there.

Speaking of being there, here’s me at the event set up next to the Corsair rig within the Intel booth. We’ve had a LOT of people come check out the booth and of course it feels good to show off my hard work in person to people. No one even raises an eyebrow when I tell them that between 8-10 hours goes into a machine like the Dream Machine.

Me again with the Dream Machine and a lot of the swag that Corsair showed up with. They’ve actually got Corsair branded energy drinks, which have been a big hit along with the Intel chair pillows.

Thankfully our Intel guy, Ross, was kind enough to provide me with one of these. The chairs here look okay at first, but you sit down for a while on one and it starts to be not fun.

Now when I arrived I was very confused to see all of the staff with pink hair. My natural assumption was that they wanted to be highly visible in case people needed help. Actually it’s in support of the Weekend to End Breast Cancer. At 4pm on Friday they brought out the shavers, and every one of the staff members shaved his head.

nVidia also generously offered $1000 per shaved head in addition to the staff members up to $10,000. This Tech Tips host was very impressed and decided to do his part by getting his head shaved too. I didn’t clear it with the girlfriend, so we’ll see how that conversation goes when I get home. :p

Here’s everyone who went bald all together. Thanks to everyone here (including the girl who paid $160 to shave the event organizer’s (Gil’s) head, Fragapalooza raised more than $15,000 for breast cancer research. God knows a bunch of guys like us want to preserve as many breasts in this world as we can.

There have been other neat events like a wall sit for an nVidia video card. I’ll be covering that in an upcoming Tech Tips. Apparently there is also a dance-off today and you can bet there’ll be some good footage from that. Stay tuned!