Mecha

NEW BLOG POST My PC arrived in all it's bits and bobs. Monday night proved to be the longest night in building a PC ever as I had to battle with the graphics card, a hard drive that wouldn't register in the bios and deal with the shock that the motherboard didn't carry the basic keyboard / mouse ports. Had to trace all over Edinburgh for a keyboard at 8:30pm. Good news is it's all up and working as of this morning after much stress testing to make sure the CPU's overclock was stable. The CPU runs at a nifty 4.60ghz with the CPU 40 degrees when idle. On a heavy load, it doesn't break 60 degrees which is excellent. The graphics card's sitting at a cool 35 degrees when idle and around 55-60 degrees on a heavy load (tested using games such as Batman:Arkham Asylum and Dead Island). Unfortunately, I'm having to use my TV as the monitor for now because my currert monitor isn't compatible with the system. Using the TV as a monitor is bloody horrible though. The picture's fuzzy and I'm just plain sick of seeing it on the TV now. I'll be grabbing up a new monitor as soon as possible, that's for sure. I've tried everything to make it look half-way decent but it's not working out at all. Installing my pre-existing copy of Windows 7 was a simple task, updating the darned system through Windows Updates however has been a complete joke and I had to resort to doing one update at a time. There were 382 updates overall so tracing through them to find the one's I needed was the worst experience I've ever had with Windows. Oh well, at least it's done. My plan of using this as my Battlefield 3 machine fell through when I picked it up for XBOX 360 so I had something to do while Windows was being a git. Other than that, now loving the machine to bits. Was well worth the hassle!

NEW BLOG POST I've just bought a new PC! This one's getting on in years (now 3 but has had many internal changes) and is daring to overheat every minute that goes by. I really don't want to cause any damage to the HDD's or the RAM there-in cause I'll use them in my new machine when it arrives. Case: Antec 300 Case with Purple LED Fans PSU: OCZ ZS 750w PSU CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K 3.30GHz @ 4.60GHz Sandybridge CPU Mobo: Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard ** B3 REVISION ** Cooler: OcUK H2 Flo CPU Cooler RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit HDD: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6GB/s GFX: OcUK GeForce GTX 580 1536MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card Sound: Realtek 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board) Optical Drive: LG DVD+/-RW SATA Drive This will be my Battlefield 3 machine. I plan on shoving my 2tb HDD in, wiped so I can use it for all my gaming and application needs. My old PC RAM will go into my dad's machine when I get a chance, boosting him to 8GB respectively. There's also the possibility of shoving in another GTX 580 but for now I'll roll with one. I may switch up the RAM later too now that I think about it. I'm hoping that this machine will last a few years. The case is big enough for me to make changes as this cycle goes on unlike my current stock case from Hewlett Packard. It should arrive on Monday, so I'll be in a good mood if it does. Can't wait to get back to PC gaming, it's been a while (bar WoW which works on any machine, even overheaters) since I've played any hard-hitting games. I get the feeling I'll be flying with this machine!