New VKA site and Other Fun Stuff

Finally launched the new Vintage King Audio site: VKA. Looking good, and they love it.

On to more important things. I should be getting my XP1800+ today. I have learned that DirectX9 is out today, so I’m downloading it now from M$FT.

I still can’t get my memory to run any better than at 3-3-3-2 settings with my Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. I’m hoping someone at nForcersHQ forums will let me know what I’m doing wrong.

Today I’m off to a holiday party at my sister-in-law’s work. Should be a good time. It’s a “shop” environment, so I bet we’ll have lots of fun. I’ve never been to a holiday party at a shop. I’m excited.

Hoping to see LOTR: The Two Towers sometime soon. I also want to see that Schmidt movie with Jack Nicholson.

Oh yeah, got HDTV from Comcast the other day. It kicks ass!!! I was all ready to watch my Thursday night NBC shows last night, and they were all reruns, and to top it off, the rerun of ER wasn’t even in true HIGH DEF!!! It was from last year though, so maybe that’s why. Anyway, enjoy your weekend, kiddies.

Computer Madne$$

Yesterday was a busy day. I worked at Vintage King all day, updating their site as we prepare for a launch, hopefully today!

I swung by Scott’s after work and unlocked his XP1600+. Let me tell you. I don’t know what it is, but his rig was able to come within 300 3DMarks of my score, and at 16 MHz LESS FSB, and even 50+ less on the CPU MHz. Good for him!!! However, I couldn’t let that rest, and I updated my drivers this morning to 41.09, lowered my desktop resolution to 1024×768 and lowered the refresh rate to 60Hz. I was able to break 14,000 3DMarks finally!!! My 3DMark 2001SE Score.

Also last night, I went by Kenny’s to upgrade his computer from an Athlon 500 (running at 600 with the help of a golden finger tool) to an Athlon XP1600+. He also went from a Voodoo3 3000 to a GF4 Ti4200. I tried Serious Sam 2 on his box, but it kept freezing up. I believe the 250W power supply is suspect. Kind of sucks, as I wanted him to see what kind of games he’ll be able to play now. Oh well. We’ll get him squared away. I also sold him a 40GB IBM Deskstart 60GXP I had laying around…so that was nice, for both of us.

Overclocking Craziness

Tonight, I realized that I can change my Direct3D settings to be “best performance” instead of “best image quality”. Doing this, I was able to get my 3DMark score up to 13,933. Just a chin hair away from 14,000… my first main goal. Tried upping the video clock from 330 to 335, no eh eh… I did manage to change my ram timing from 3-3-3-2 to 3-3-2-2 (I think).

Vintage King and Overclocking

Been working diligently getting product photos and information up for Vintage King Audio. Their site sure is getting somewhere over the past few months. I can’t wait until it’s done though, so I can rest… or will I miss it?

The other night, I overclocked the BeJesus out of my system. I am currently running stable at 9.5×194 (1844). I ran it through 10 cycles of the Sanda Burn-in wizard. It’s nice to finally have a motherboard that 1) Takes high speed ram (PC3200), 2) Has a locked PCI bus (33MHz), 3) Has most everything onboard, except for video. I have been having quite a good time with it lately, as I LOVE to push it, and LOVE to run benchmarks. I was able to accomplish this by “unlocking” my Athlon XP 2000+. I got the kit from www.highspeedpc.com. What this does is allow me to run my CPU at other multipliers instead of its 12.5 that it is set at. I’m thinking that my XP2000+ sucks for overclocking, as I’m not even getting a 200MHz overclock (stable) with it. Kind of pisses me off.

Off to help Michelle with dinner. I set up the marinade earlier.