As 2011 wound down, I did a little work to the Big Red Machine. Since its i7 (1366 socket) platform is still holding up well against Intel’s SandyBridge (v1 and 2), there’s no need to do a clean sweep for another year or even more. But as it gets close to it’s third birthday, a few updates were in order.
First up was a graphics card update. The overclocked gtx 260 has been holding up well, but is starting to show its age by not supporting DX11 for the latest releases. With Radeon cards outperforming their Nvidia counterparts dollar to dollar, I jumped over to team red and picked up a beefy Asus 6950 with 2GB ram. The card hits a good price point (right about what I spent for the 260) and matches up well with Nvidia’s gtx570. Even if it’s not the baddest boy around, this thing is a monster.
It sets up shop over three expansion slots and is about a foot long. Just a couple years ago I thought the 260 was huge, but now it looks modest. The 6950 also has a total of 6 outputs, for running more displays at once (with AMD Eyefinity) than I’ll ever need.
This particular 6950 excels at staying cool. It has a huge heatsink under that metal cover with several “direct contact” heat pipes, and two 100mm fans. I can definitely push this hard without cooking the box. New benchmarks for the graphics card will be posted soon.
After the gfx upgrade only one other thing was bothering me – the SSDs that were still sitting loose in the case. So, I finally popped for a 5.25 bay device to house up to 4 drives. Ok, I may have paid a bit more for one that matched my case perfectly, but it is a nice dock. Each drive can easily be swapped and locked, has it’s own activity LEDs, and has a direct backplane connection. I had to rearrange the other drives in my case a little to make it fit, but it’s so much cleaner now. My two RAID 0 SSDs are in there now, and I’ve got two more slots already connected up should I want to drop in a couple more.
Posted Friday, January 20th, 2012 1:18 AMNo Comments
A very quick recap of the 50th edition of the LAN party in Lou’ville. There were about 300+ gamers there, so the turnout was really good for a January event.
Starcraft 2
Gratch, Keeper, and I played the crap out of this, and mostly took a beating in the 3v3 ladder. Sill tons of fun and those two are getting better. Gratch and I were in a “why not” mood and competed in the SC2 tourney even though we’re well below the requisite skill level. As expected we were we trounced in the first round. In my case I faced a Rank 6 diamond Zerg and his b’lings overwhelmed me 17 minutes in.
Nation Red
This game was having a free weekend on Steam so all four of us loaded it up and spent a few hours blasting away at zombie hordes. It’s a buggy game, and very simplistic, but just the thing for bleary eyed twitch gaming.
Duct Tape Wars
Challenge: build a shotgun (i.e. fling a duct tape ball, and also a full roll). Scoring: There rounds for accuracy with shot (balls), three rounds for distance with shot, and one distance round with the full roll. Turned out to be a bunch of flinging straps that were just like the bottle cap shot a couple LANs ago. The best scores came down to how well you fired it and not what you built. Oh well, TBT had a couple poor shots and settled for second place.
And somewhere over the course of three days and two nights I even got 5 hours of sleep!
Posted Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 12:20 AMNo Comments
Another edition of the massive music festival has come and gone, but this one bearing the significance of being the 20th Anniversary of Lollapalooza. D and I saw the very first edition back in 1991 and it still stands as one of the best days of live music we’ve seen. Back then, Lolla was a single day, single stage, touring festival and the lineup consisted of (the brand new) Nine Inch Nails, Rollins Band, Violent Femmes, Butthole Surfers, Ice-T, Living Color (in their hey’), Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Jane’s Addiction. For the past seven years, Lolla has been grounded in Chicago, initially as two days, then as three. We’ve been to 4 of those 7 now, and it just keeps getting bigger. Just how big? Lolla sold out this year, with 90,000 attendees per day.
We returned to this event with D’s brother, Mike, and nephew, Justin. After their first Lolla last year, they couldn’t wait to get back. We met up downtown before noon, got checked in, and had a pre-concert beverage (or two) before heading out.
The first day started with rushing in to catch the set by Young The Giant. It was a warm sunny afternoon and jumping around to “My Body” was a great start for the festival.
From there it was a brisk hustle down to the other end of the park to catch The Naked and Famous. With their shimmering, poppy synths they sound quite a lot like Passion Pit, only the lead singer is a woman, which gives them just a hint of Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs vibe. Their set at Lolla sounded great, even if it was a little low on stage energy.
Following Naked and Famous was one of our most anticipated acts of the day (or the whole weekend), Foster the People. We’ve been fans of Foster since last Fall, when D first heard “Pumped Up Kicks” and knew it’d make a great Halloween party song. Since then they’ve really blown up, hitting lots of festivals this year, even if they’re not necessary a mainstream name yet. Since we were already at this stage for Naked and Famous, we moved up even closer after their set ended and wound up just a few people back from the front. Lead singer, Mark Foster, came out in a long sleeve dress shirt and black trousers – way overdressed for the hot summer day. A couple songs in his entire shirt was drenched.
The band sounded great, they had great energy, and the crowd was phenomenal. There was more crowd surfing during this set than probably any other act we saw over the weekend, and definitely more than at any of the headliners. It reminded of Matt and Kim’s set from last year and Dan Deacon the year before. With Foster, Lolla 2011 had officially hit cruising altitude.
After Foster, we grabbed a bite to eat, more drinks, and chilled out (literally) in the Dell Lounge tent. A worker there snapped our pic on a tablet and emailed it to us.
After resting up a bit, it was time to hit the DJ stage. This year Perry’s was set up under a huge tent. It was a interesting setup – something I’ve seen from other festivals – as it allows for hanging light over the crowd and projecting things on the tent above them. I guess it was a little more immersive than the open outdoor stage they’ve used in the past, but mostly you were just more immersed in people. And heat.
We caught the last few minutes of The Bloody Beetroots’ set. The tent was completely packed. Too packed to dance, but it didn’t keep the mass of bodies from trying.
Next up, was who I most wanted to catch at Perry’s, Skrillex. Somehow, even more people pushed into the text. D had enough before the set even started and bailed to listen from outside the tent. Justin has left for other stages earlier, so it was just Mike and I. As the awesome waves of dub got under way, it seemed like an endurance challenge just to stay in there. The day was already warm enough, and with all these people stacked in the tent, the temps inside soared. Lights swirled, lasers wooshed. Exhausted fans would appear from somewhere deeper in the scrum and squirm their way out. Around 20 minutes into the set, a girl behind me vomited – missing me but got the guy next to me. Mike and I decided listening outside the tent would be fine indeed.
Before leaving Skrillex rocked us with a mix of the Ludacris hit “Move Bitch”. Oh yeah!
We decided we weren’t ready for another dance crowd, so instead of watching Crystal Castles (who were darn good in the rain a couple year’s ago), we grabbed a shady spot under a tree to watch OK Go. They did a decent set, but without their clever videos, they didn’t overwhelm me. One unique highlight was when they performed “Return” with only hand bells.
And of course, their biggest hit was fun to see live.
Digging on the mellower vibe for the rest of the night, we decided to skip the huge headliners, Muse and Coldplay, and instead finish the night with a much more intimate set by Ratatat. They are an electronic duo; one mostly plays synths part with a guitar, while the other switches from guitar to various synths and drum controllers. Their music is instrumental and downtempo, and I very much like gaming and coding to it. Their stage show features all kinds of visuals and very strange videos, and there are never spot lights on them. Incidentally, this makes recording their show quite difficult as they grove along in relative darkness.
It was a great end to our first day. We were tired, but not exhausted, and would be ready to hit Day 2.
Posted Sunday, August 28th, 2011 4:31 PMNo Comments
To quite little fanfare, another year has gone – though this one slightly more stinging than usual. As the clock struck 12, I enjoyed a bit of our best tequila in a snifter and reflected on the 30-something years.
I managed to avoid anyone noticing my birthday at work, and with that avoided the collection of black cliche’ cubicle decorations that keep getting passed around. Spending this milestone overseas didn’t happen as maybe I was hoping, but there will be other summers.
