Coyote Blog

We are rapidly coming up on the first anniversary of Vista, and it has been a very rocky year for Microsoft.  New releases of an OS are always difficult, but many users have really turned up their nose on Vista.  My experience has been much the same as everyone else's:  Applications run slower in Vista (I know because I had a system set up to dual boot and A/B tested a number of applications).  Networking, particularly wireless networking, is much less stable than in XP.  Good drivers STILL don't exist for many legacy hardware devices, including may graphics cards.  I ran into any number of quirks.  The most irritating for me was that a laptop communicating with a printer via wireless network would lose connection with the printer every time the laptop was shut down in a way that could only be rectified (as confirmed by MS customer support) by reinstalling the print driver every time I wanted to use it.

Most computer NOOBs probably never noticed, not having anything to compare Vista with and only using their computers for a narrow range of functionality (ie email and internet browsing).  However, many of us who are more comfortable with computers and who rely on our computers as an important tool have either avoided buying Vista computers (Dell, for example, still sells a lot of XP computers) and/or have taken the time to roll back their Vista to a dual boot system or even XP only  (which I explain here).  Which may explain why standalone XP packages are better sellers on Amazon than Vista.

For gamers, most of whom tend to be power users, Vista has been nothing but a negative, slowing games down and requiring use of buggy graphics card drivers (Microsoft crows that they get fewer customer service calls on Vista than XP, which may be, but I can gaurantee, from browsing gaming boards, that gaming companies get swamped with Vista calls from gamers who can't get the game to run on Vista). 

Looming over all of this, though, has been one word:  Crysis.  Gamers have been lusting after this game for over a year, with its promise of knock-out graphics and game-play.  To this end, Microsoft did something clever.  It updated its DirectX graphics engine in Vista to revision 10, and included in it all kinds of new capabilities that would really make a game look fantastic.  MS decided, either for technical or marketing issues, not to ever release these features on XP.  If you wanted DirectX 10 games, you had to upgrade to Vista.  Over the last year, graphics card makers have been releasing hardware to support DirectX 10.  Crysis was set to be the first game that would really take advantage of DirectX 10, and many hardcore gamers upraded to Vista solely on the promise of running Crysis maxed out with the new DirectX 10 features.

Well, Crysis was released a few weeks ago.  You may think I am building up to say it sucked, but just the opposite is true.  It is absolutely fantastic.  Easily the most visually stunning thing I have ever seen running on my PC.  First-person shooter games are not really my favorite, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the game.  (here is a trailer, but unlike most trailers, the game really looks like this in gameplay, maybe better due to limited resolution on YouTube.)  Click below for larger screenshots:

But here is the interesting part.  I keep my system state of the art.  I have close to the fastest Intel multi-core processor currently made running with two of the newest Nvidia graphics cards (8800GT's) running ganged together in SLI mode (don't worry if you don't know what all that means, just take my word for it that it is about as fast as you can get with stock components and air cooling). Crysis, like most graphics games, can have its settings changed from "low", meaning there is less graphics detail but the game runs faster, through "med" to "high" and "very high".   Only in the latter modes do the new features of DirectX10 really come into play.  So I ran the calibration procedure the game provides and it told me that I needed to set the game to "medium!"  That's not an error - apparently everyone else in my position who have a large monitor with high resolutions had about this experience.  I can set the game to higher modes, but things really slow down.  By the way, it still looks unbelievably awesome on Medium.

The designers of Crysis actually did something kind of cool.   They designed with Moore's law in mind, and designed the highest game modes for computers that don't exist today, but likely will in a few years.  So the game (and more importantly the engine, since they will likely sell the engine as a platform for other game makers to build their games atop) has some built-in obsolescence-proofing.

But lets return to Vista and Crysis being billed as a killer app.  As it turns out, none of the directX10 features are really usable, because no one can turn the graphics engine up high enough with their current hardware.  Worse, in a game where users are trying to eek out any tweek they can to improve frame rates and graphics speed, Crysis runs demonstrably slower on Vista than XP.  Finally, those who have run the game in its higher modes withe DirectX 10 features (presumably at the cost of low frame rates) have found the actual visual differences in the DirectX 10 graphics to be subtle.  The game boards are a total hoot, as folks who upgraded to Vista solely for Crysis are wailing that their experience on Vista is actually worse than on XP.

Well, I had a number of emails asking for the specifics of my computer build, so all you non-geeks can move on.  Hopefully I will get a post up on the USA Today putting for-gods-sakes ethanol on the front page of today's paper.  Anyway, here is my computer build components:

• ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard.  This basic motherboard platform is rock-solid.  The premium version mainly brings a quieter heat-pipe design to cool the mobo chipset and a software rather than hardware switch for single to dual SLI.  It is one of the better overclocking platforms, with good BIOS options.  It has a couple of quirks, probably the most important of which is that it tends not to like RAM in 4 sticks -- better to use two.  I chose not to use the newer A8N32-SLI, which is supposed to increase the bandwidth when 2 SLI cards are used.  However, I think the Nvidia chipset for this was rushed (to please Dell) and tests show its not necessarily faster, even with 2 SLI cards, than the one I bought.  Also, I wanted to shy away from bleeding edge for my first build
• AMD 64 Athlon X2 (dual core) 4400+ microprocessor.  This is the 2.2Ghz Toledo core with the larger cache.  As I mentioned yesterday, its a notch or two less fast than the top of the line, which tends to be a better value.  And the consensus opinion is that AMD is dusting Intel right now.  I got the large cache because you can always overclock but you can't overcache.  The dual core is clearly the wave of the future, and more games and programs will support it in the future.  I was a bit worried that I would have some compatibility problems at first, but I have had none, even on Star Wars Battlefront 2, which was reported to have a compatibility issue with dual core
• 2 gigs of memory from Corsair, in 2 1GB sticks.  Corsair is a top company in memory.  I can't tell you how many people struggle to overclock their PC a few percent but have too little memory.  Tests show even going from 1 to 2 gigs shows real results.  I got the Twinx-2048-4000.  I debated between lower speed (ddr 400), lower latency memory and higher speed (ddr 500) higher latency memory.  I went with the latter, hoping that it was better for overclocking, but this is one issue not well addressed online.  The answer is probably here, but I decided it would not matter that much for me.  If you go with 512K sticks rather than 1 Gb sticks there are more options for memory that is both low latency and higher ddr.
• I wanted to try my hand at overclocking, so I wanted a good CPU fan.  Zalman has a lot of great products, so I went with the CNPS9500, which looks cool too.  Its quiet and keeps the cpu ice cold.  It looks huge but it fit fine.
• I may have made a mistake on the case.  I went with an Aspire X-Navigator, which is cool looking and keeps everything cool inside but is loud.  I might next time research for a quieter case.
• I splurged and went with dual SLI, because I love games, and bought two evga 7800GT sli cards.  I never really understood the variations in their 7800GT cards - some variations of memory speed, I think.  The nvidia sli chipset right now blows anything else away - it is the ONLY choice for gaming.  A pair of GTX's would have cost me $400 more.  Again, I find the best price-value point a step or two below top-of-the-line.  I didn't realize until later that DirectX 10 will be a pretty substantial upgrade, which will require new chips to support it.  That means that if you are a gamer, you will probably want a new card in 12-18 months.  Knowing this, I certainly wouldn't pay for GTX right now and might have only gone with one rather than 2 cards.
• I bought a couple of 250Gig Seagate SATA 3gb/s hard drives and put them in a raid 0 configuration.  This makes a 500 gig hard drive that is fast as hell.  This is cheaper than buying a single 500 gig and it is faster, but it will be less reliable since data is "striped" across the two drives, so that if either fails, you lose ALL the data.  Because of this issue, I bought a smaller 160 gig drive that runs separately as a backup for my data.  By the way, this was the one issue I had with my install.  Basically I had to leave this 160 gig drive unplugged until I get windows installed on the raid 0 drives and make them bootable, or else the system would get confused.  Once windows was installed on the raid drives and was bootable, then I plugged in the third drive and partitioned it and all was well.
• Power supplies seem to be a nightmare in terms of failure rates.  I use a 650 watt Silverstone Zeus and it has been fine and it had all the cables I needed.  Note you need at least 500 watt and probably 600 if you are going dual sli.
• Other components include a fast NEC DVD read-write drive (whichever one was highest rated on newegg), a floppy drive (you HAVE to have one to load the drivers for this self build if you are using a raid drive array) and a nifty little drive that accepts all kinds of memory cards on the front panel.  And windows of course.

This article on the Corsair web site provides an outstanding walk-through of how to build and set up your PC, demonstrably sufficient for even the noob since it got me through it.  I actually found this after I bought my components so I was happy to see that the component selection in the article for a high-performance gaming box was very similar to mine.  I also have the logitech cordless keyboard and mouse shown and love those too.

Have fun.

Update:  In response to the question in the comments, this build cost about $2000, which is expensive for a desktop, except that I expect to get much longer life out of this thing with performance that stays top notch for a while and many upgrade paths.  It might have been more but several parts were on weekend sale at newegg and others had cross-promotions (i.e. if you buy the AMD procesor and the evga card you get an extra $30 off).  Also note that this is a very competitive system to gaming rigs (e.g. Alienware) costing over $4000. You could take a few steps to bring this under $1500:  One 6800 GT rather than two 7800GT graphic cards would save almost $400.  One graphics card would let you save about $50 or more in the power supply, and you could easily get a good case for $50-$75 less.  Making these subs would get you a very very good rig for under $1500.  Dropping down a notch on the CPU could save another $200.  Smaller hard drive capacity could save $100-150, though hard drives are so cheap, I think it is short-sighted not to overdo it a bit.  I still remember my first hard drive card for my original IBM PC.  It was 10 meg, and my thought was "I'll never be able to fill that much memory".  LOL.

The build time was probably 8 hours, including windows installation and disk formatting.  This includes three false starts:  one, when I thought the power supply was bad but I had just forgotten to hook up the on/off signal wire; two, when the floppy drive actually was bad and I had to run to compUSA to get a new one; and three, when I struggled, as mentioned above, to get windows installed with the hard drive configuration I had chosen.  If everything had gone smoothly, I could easily have done it in 4-5 hours.

Did I mention I love this rig?  Its like the geek version of showing up to your high school reunion in a Ford GT.

I just bought, or rather built, a new home computer.  My last computer, a Dell, was about 18 months old.  I really enjoyed building my own this time, and Newegg.com makes it pretty easy, and there are lots of articles out there to help.  As with my old Dell, I bought a processor that was one notch or two below the fastest currently available, which tends to be a sweet spot in price-value.  This time, though, I switched from Intel to the AMD dual core ("toledo") at 2.2 Ghz.  Basically both my computers are/were fast machines for their times, though since I built this new one myself, I did a few extras, like going with parallel SLI graphics cards and I overclocked the whole rig about 10-15%. 

The result?  My 18-month-old machine gets a 3dwinmark score of 250.  My new machine gets a score of over 13,000, or over 70 times better!  Granted, this is on a synthetic benchmark mainly aimed at measuring 3d graphics performance, but this is still a huge leap in performance in 1.5 years.  I have also played around with my hard drive selection and configuration to get a jump in performance there as well.

I spent a lot of time researching and picking out my components -- that is the real joy of a self-build, that you know the quality and trade-offs of every single subsystem in the box.  If anyone out there is interested, email me and I will tell you the exact components I chose and why, or maybe I will do a post on it sometime.

UPDATE:  Components posted here.