Excessive GPU heat

When I bought my VGA card back in April I decided to go with a specially cooled model of the evga ACS³ series. Because this series contains a special heatsink design, it can cope with higher GPU and VRAM clockings. The 8800GTX KO I bought contains a GPU clocked at 625MHz instead of 575MHz while the DDR3 memory is clocked at a juicy 2GHz instead of 1.35Ghz.

Now that it has been loyally pleasuring my visual needs up until now I started experiencing unexplainable crashes, especially while playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which is even more weird since Crysis was running smoothly. I basically tried everything: I installed XP, lowered the resolution and texture size, removed the game mods, installed all kinds of stable and beta drivers - all caused the game to freeze after 5 to 10 minutes followed by a BSOD after another 2 minutes which just told me that the graphics card was the root of it. I installed the same game on the PC of my girlfriend which happens to have almost the same VGA card (8800 GTS) and the same mainboard. Of course there it worked like a charm.
I finally found out that the card was massively overheating both while idling and under load (85C and 98C respectively) which is way too high, considering that I cleaned the dust off the fan regularly. Setting the fan manually to 100% didn't help but at least using an 18W/220V industrial fan remedied the situation but was unbearable noise-wise.

Frustrated and already sad about having to send it to RMA I carefully unscrewed the covering metal case of the board in a desperate move. What joyful sight that resulted in: The heatspreader was basically blocked by a wall of dust, making it impossible for the fan to send any air through that part:

Now everything's back to normal - except that my newly ordered mainboard turned out to be defective and waits to get replaced. No meddling with hardware until Christmas is over, sniff.

Crysis beauty

While it was surely not even remotely necessary I actually did buy nVIDIA's 8800GTX board about three months ago with no special title in mind - unlike my hardware-buying rampage back when Oblivion came out.

I was quite impressed trying Bioshock a few weeks ago as it not only ran smoothly, it also looked pretty. Properly drawn fog effects and realistic water ripples are really a neat sensation but that's about it from the DX10 side. So obviously that's not what makes Bioshock exceptional. Fact is that the guys at 2K Boston did a great job at bringing Rapture to life, in all its glory and decay. You constantly get the impression of being in a city under the ocean with water flowing down walls subtly, pressure noise on the structure and humidity everywhere. Of course character animation is stunning as well, not to mention the story-telling.
After sneaking through the countless corridors of Systemshock's universe not even too long ago, I couldn't resist to feel right at home. Sure, Shodan was far more attractive than Atlas/Fontaine and just thinking about her voice still gives me the creeps, but I expected *shock - and that's what I got.

Of course the DX10 hype isn't what many people expected and luckily I'm not one of them. After Bioshock I went out to see what more the market was offering, full of hope that developers might have drained every last bit out of modern hardware to gain even more visual firework. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition surely was there before Bioshock and was meant as a tech demo or at least only get attention for being the first DX10 title for the desperate. Thus I can understand that it just isn't more than a beautifully bloated arcade shooter.

Then Hellgate: London got released which I was reading about every now and then since almost three years. Hearing that it also supports DX10 renderers made the waiting sweeter. But bummer - it was just a large-scale Hack 'n Slash RPG with the collect/upgrade/sell mechanisms that made you love (aka get addicted to) Diablo half a decade ago.

So I sorta didn't have high hopes for Crysis. Luckily I was wrong about that. But why? Because the best possible approach is not expecting much? Or was it just because other First Person Shooters didn't evolve beyond the F.E.A.R - Half Life 2 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R core (with all due respect to these titles)?
I assume it's simply due to the fact that Crysis is good and more bang for the buck than many titles to come, even across several genres. That's what was high time for a potentially endangered PC games market in my opinion. Usually companies are run by money and money is time which in turn lets the world experience some of the most awful console to PC conversions ever (where the hell does my PC happen to have its triangle button?). But it wouldn't matter anyway as the PC version appear weeks or months afterward and some late bad critiques won't scratch the sale numbers on the console market.

For example, I totally adore the Gothic world and never complained about the serious flaws in the latest and last Piranha Bytes (R.I.P) title but I see those as being the reason for frustrated buyers. The need to fix hardware bugs after a release usually is a pure PC phenomenon not to mention the extra work needed to make the engine run on/with all kind of hardware during development.
So why isn't the PC games market not dying out? Or is it actually in the process? The only apparent advantage that I could think of so far is the availability of upgrades which give the PC a technological ledge but in turn makes it difficult to support all the different components. It's clear, just by looking at the numbers, that consoles can never offer such amounts of raw power in respect of CPU/GPU/RAM. For a PC player the only reason to invest into a new console is the release of a [put in your favourite system]-only title (e.g. Final Fantasy, or The Darkness in my case).

With Crysis the PC markets gets a refreshing reference title in all respects. After trying the demo I decided to order the full version and have since not encountered any drawback at all. Even if one might turn up, the good points are simply too overwhelming already. Clearly, DX10 doesn't make a huge difference except for the insane hardware requirements, but they're as nice-to-have as in Bioshock. What really caught my attention is the way the environment is designed to be completely natural and interactive. That starts with the expected vegetation, animals, leafes falling down the trees and sun rays getting lost in the top of trees. You can either pick everything up or alter it's shape in order to be able to:


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When you lob a grenade in one of those shacks they get torn apart while bullets barely scratch them.


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Apart from dozens of surprises, one of the most fascinating details was the way the CryENGINE2 handles filled barrels.


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Crysis demands power and my card can barely catch up. But that's totally fine by me because now it's finally busy, at least during those times when it doesn't have to display my E17 desktop.

Persona 2 in pSX

I'm a huge fan of the megami tensei (女神転生) series by ATLUS (and formerly Namco), not only because of its exceptionally eerie atmosphere but also because of the great soundtrack and unmatched NPC interaction. With interaction I don't mean a simple four-way dialogs as you find it in the Elder Scroll based on a like-dislike-meter. In Persona, for example, you'll have to find out the personality which can be one of cheerful, timid, gloomy, bluff, temperant, arrogant, wise and fool or a combination of up to three. Depending on the (mix of) personalities, the demons react differently to interaction with either fear, anger, happiness or interest or a logical mix of two. To make things more complicated there are countless (well, in fact only 57) ways to interact with a demon which depends on which character or combination of characters of your party you use. Interactions thus range from reading horoscopes and giving advices to interrogations and passionate gazes. I didn't yet mention that talking is not always an option, especially if a previous action made the demon hate or fear you. Anyway, successfully negotiating with demons is important because they might present you items or join your cause.

Unfortunately, the current shin megami tensei titles such as Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga don't feature such complex interactions, but therefore other great ideas.

Well, as I lost my saves of Persona and bought an import copy of Persona 2 I decided to give it a spin. My PS2 is quite loud though and I'm obviously too lazy to clean its fans so I decided to make ePSXe run my gentoo system. Portage told me that epsxe was masked so I looked around a bit more and finally found pSX, though not in portage. After manually adding some missing ia32 libraries it was all set up - no need to download and configure plugins for each and every vital part of a PSX emulator as in ePSXe. It just workd out of the box, even with real optical drives. OK, I prefer using an image after all:

# cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile persona2.bin --device 3,0,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw persona2.toc

Using a normal (read cheap, without support for dual-shock) PS2-controller to USB adapter works fine after:

# modprobe joydev

See for yourself: