Holy shit, has it really been a year since I bought my EVGA GeForce GTX470 for a little over 200EURs? It was a great deal at the time, the GTX470 going from ~350 to a little over 200 was a massive discount – even now, the GTX570 is no lower than 289EURs. The GTX560 Ti is basically as fast as the GTX470, and has less VRAM too.

I must have really played the fuck out of it, haven’t I? Well… actually, in March I played a lot of G Senjou no Maou. Not something you need a GTX470 for. Indeed, even my laptop’s GMA950 could handle this.

And then I played a lot of Homeworld. A LOT of Homeworld. But I only have this screen to show for it:

I think this must have been on the last level. I’ve spent 3 hours on that level already and I still haven’t cleared it, mostly because the maps are huge, traveling takes a long time, and I was focusing on capturing a few ships to increase my force.

There was also EVE Burst Error. I only spent a few hours on it, but a particular scene interested me. Why does everybody in this scene look like they came from Evangelion? EVE Burst Error predates Eva!

And in between, I spent days and days on Minecraft! Minecraft was sluggish on the integrated 880G (RadeonHD 4250) graphics, but it might have been because I set aside too little VRAM for the integrated GPU. I’ll try it again I tried it with 128MB Sideport + 256MB of system RAM reserved, giving it 384MB of VRAM total, and it was very playable, 45-60fps with fast graphics and normal/far draw distance, Max FPS and Advanced OpenGL off. On the GTX470 it flew like nobody’s business, and the GPU itself didn’t even need to go up to 3D clocks. I found inter-island traveling slow, and I hated getting lost and dying from creepers, so I always built an overhead walkway network, lighted, naturally, so that on the ground every part of it would serve as a giant landmark.

I also played some PCSX2, although not as much as I thought I would. It’s funny, I don’t know why. I thought I would catch up on FFX and FFXII, but instead I ended up playing a lot of Suikoden 5. Suikoden 5 is a really awesome game, it’s too bad they canned the series after this one. I even bought an expensive Xbox 360 Gamepad for PC just to have a nice comfortable PCSX2 experience.

Of course, in the meantime, I leveled up my Borderlands character a lot, played a bit of CoD, played the hell out of Crysis 2, found that Crysis Warhead was much more satisfying than Crysis, had a lot of fun with Deus Ex Human Revolution, tried Leisure Suit Larry 7, played some Metro 2033 (too depressing!), had so much fun with Portal, tried Halo 2 but couldn’t get into it as much as I did with Halo 1 (that was a GODLY game I raped my Geforce 4 Ti4200 and Radeon 9500 Pro with it), and quadrupled my Folding@Home points with the help of my GPU.

Yes, I could have been happy with the integrated 880G graphics, but still the GTX470 was a great investment. But the extra 8GBs of RAM?

Yup, that came in handy too I suppose. This year I have little to no money left, but thanks to a friend and my girlfriend (so cute!), I got into photography.

Yes, if he had money, ritchan would actually buy a 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor prime lens for his F5 rather than spend more money on his computer! Isn’t that an amazing turn of events?

To get myself ready for Bulldozer when I have the money and the need for that much more power (my Phenom II X6 is very fast thank you very much) I bought a Asus M5A99X EVO to replace the M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3. So now I have a spare mainboard, RAM stick, a 60GB hard drive from my PS3, and spare case and PSU. What do I do? Why I build a new computer of course! Since the only thing missing was the CPU, I went and got the absolute cheapest I could find, which was the AMD Sempron 145.

It’s a Regor with one core disabled. I tried unlocking it but then syslinux and GRUB didn’t like it, so it’s only running on single core mode. The incredible thing is, it’s fast! It feels really fast. I installed Arch Linux but had some problems with udev freezing the system upon boot, so I switched to Debian and haven’t looked back since. Running GNOME, Firefox, GIMP, the usual stuff, it feels incredibly fast and snappy. You don’t need a dual core! It can play 1080p H.264 videos without help from the integrated Radeon HD 4250, whereas the dual G5 I had could play 720p but not any 1080p video smoothly. I tried installing Catalyst for Linux, but it proved to be a system breaker on Arch Linux, and it’s supposed to be a server with a GUI anyway so who cares. Plus it requires that you disable kernel modesetting, which is a very bad thing.

The only problem is that it’s not quiet enough. The hard drives make a subtle buzzing sound. The CPU fan (the stock heatsink for the Phenom II X6) makes a not so subtle buzzing sound even at low speeds. I unplugged the CPU fan but temperatures slowly and steadily climbed up to 70C over a 30 minute period. I think I need to buy (sigh) yet another cooler for this if I’m going to make it dead quiet. But first I’ll try suspending the 60GB Seagate drive. It’s the type of computer that will have to stay on when my main computer goes off for whatever reason (usually never), so it has to add absolutely nothing to the noise floor.
The heatsink that came with the Sempron is dead silent even when spinning the fan at 1300rpm!

In any case, the point is if you have enough RAM (just one stick of 4GB DDR3-1333), a good filesystem that doesn’t need defragging (anything other than what Windows uses), a cheapo computer is incredibly powerful! GNOME3 is a bit laggy though, but that’s because the integrated graphics is a bit slow. Plus who cares about all the eye candy, GUIs should feel snappy, manage windows and get out of the way.

Oh, and the M5A99X EVO is a very good overclocker. I think I can push this one up to 4GHz if I have the patience, because the VRMs on this one somehow manage to keep the CPU stable at 1.45V (including LLC, which is configurable! imagine that, configurable LLC!), whereas the old motherboard gave it 1.525V (not configurable), which produced a lot of heat. The only problem there is no option in the EFI to switch the JMB362 controlled ports to IDE mode.

So after the incredibly passionate and fun months of May-August 18th (when asking a girl out, always remember, no risk no reward!), life goes on quietly as usual, and I end up with two rather steady jobs that might pay well enough to get me through the month with an overall surplus. Of course, since AMD’s Bulldozer will be released next week or so, it’s pretty obvious that I won’t be having any surplus money

No, rollchan, I have not ONS’ed a girl yet. All the girls I’d like to have are either taken or go with their male friends to the clubs boo hoo. And I don’t like cold approaches. I’ll just stick to asking out people within my social circle, which, thanks to my job as a photographer, is growing by leaps and bounds.

Over the past 3 months, I accrued a lot more acquaintances, a really cute girlfriend, a lot more experience with the opposite sex , a new hobby with its own job (photography with a Nikon F5 and a free EOS 400D), and I’ve learned about the party scene in Germany (you don’t get this in Malaysia), somehow managed to get myself looking pretty good naked just by doing 170 pushups every 2-3 days, and all at the expense of time with my computer. In fact when I encounter a problem with Windows or something, I don’t browse around looking for a solution, I just try to change my usage pattern so it doesn’t affect me anymore. Wow. I didn’t expect this much to happen in 3 months. If I had made this much progress every 3 months since I came to Germany, I think I would’ve become a much more mature and well rounded person. I wonder what else life has in store for me now… I think I’ll start off by doing sit ups as well from now on.

I can never get my head around a one night stand. I don’t think I’ll ever do it, and if I ever do it, I’ll probably leave right in the middle of the night because after cumming into a stranger’s face I will realize how empty it all is, and how weird it is to be sticking a private part into some other stranger’s private part just because she was the hottest girl in the club that night.

I like to use this analogy. The club is a meat market/the butcher’s, the women there looking for a ONS are the pieces of meat hanging from the ceiling, or lying somewhere, neatly chopped up and garnished for the taking, and the men are the shoppers. Except they don’t have to pay anything. All they have to say is the right combination of words, and tada, they’re yours.

Notice the difference between a hooker and a one night stand. Um, well, not much of a difference really, except that the one night stand values herself even less than a prostitute. I mean, really, what’s easier to dish out, 20-80 bucks or a few negs and some appropriate body language that you could pick up from watching some guy on Youtube for free? For me, obviously the latter. Why? Because I do it all the time anyway. It’s just the way I am. The fact that most men think it’s easier to pay and thus conclude that prostitutes are easier, and therefore of less value simply means that I really am The Great Catch.

Nothing wrong with that, really. That’s all dating is about anyway. Say the right things, do the right stuff, hopefully it clicks with the other party, she’s yours. What’s worrying though is the advent of the Pickup Artist and his success. The PUA peacocks, negs, does a C&F routine, dabbles in a bit of “NLP”. All this is canned. He learns his lines from someone else. He learns how to act from someone else. Whatever stories he tells are fake anyway, he doesn’t have a story, he just goes out at night getting fucked, and if he’s drunk enough in the morning he wakes up completely wasted.

And if their accounts are to be believed, there are tons of females out there who would willingly lap all this fake shit up. There are tons of chicks who can’t tell the real from the fake, and go sleep with the fake, post some whiny shit about how he didn’t even make her cum and didn’t care about her anyway because he busted a nut, and the next week do it all over again. Remember the part in “The Game” where Strauss realized that a certain part of town had been over-gamed, and they weren’t getting any that night? Because as stupid as they are, when two different guys attempt to tell you the same story in the hopes of getting some pussy, you can’t help but figure out that it’s all fake. From this we know that females want to ONS someone who is real, but most of them are just too stupid to tell the difference between a guy who leads an exciting life, versus one who’s just memorized a routine. Or maybe they just don’t care, they just want some dick, and the PUA is the only one who demonstrated enough alpha-ness to tip the scales in their favour. Those are the kind you really want to avoid – they have absolutely zero sense of self worth.

Once you’ve got inner game, you start to see how shallow and superficial this all is. Evidently there are a lot of HB8-9s out there, but not many quality ones you would want to get to know better (other than getting to which specific strain of STD she has).

In fact, I think I’ll try this. Next time I ever strike up a conversation with a chick at a club, I’ll say “so my place or yours?” and if she goes with it, I’ll just up and walk away. Hey, I heard it gets them all crazy about you.

http://www.coolaler.com/showthread.php?t=266878

The long awaited Llano Fusion APU review! I guess we should be seeing more of these sometime soon. They tested it with a Gigabyte A75-UD4H. There were some problems with CnQ, so they reran the benchmarks without CnQ and performance jumped twofold. It’s still slower than a Phenom II X4 955 though. They also managed to overclock it from 2.4 to 5.4GHz, although performance didn’t really go up, so it’s probably just a reporting error in CPU-Z. Sorry to get your hopes up.

The A8-3800 is supposed to compete with the Core i3 2100. Since every serious gamer knows that if you buy Intel, you have to buy a separate discrete video card, AMD’s Llano can be quite enticing. It’s not like games are that heavily CPU limited these days – and if they are, just throw more cores at them.

This is actually old news at this point. But if prices correlate with performance, we can see that AMD expects its 4 core FX 4110 to go up against the Intel Core i5 2500K. The 6 core will serve some new market segment, and the 8 core FX 8130P will go up against the Core i7 2600K. Meanwhile, anything below 199USD will be served by Llano, aka the AMD A-Series. The big draw with AMD’s Llano is not the CPU performance, but the fact that you get rather decent 3D graphics capability with your CPU, whereas with Intel, you get… Intel graphics (vomit).

So it looks like a 4 core Zambezi might beat my precious Phenom II X6 handily. I’m kinda happy yet depressed at the same time. Then again, you can’t really compare pricing across architectures. Intel is still flogging a few Core 2 Duos at 100 EURs according to Alternate.

In accordance with my “continuous upgrade” policy when it comes to chobit-2 (which is becoming more and more like a fleet of computers rather than a single awesome computer the more I let my imagination run on) is to be augmented with a second sister computer that will, thanks to its four Bulldozer modules which should be able to compete against a Core i7 2600K, if leaked AMD product placement slides from Donanim Haber are anything to rely on, encode video for shitteru2.net even faster than before.

Not that my Phenom II X6 needed much help – at 3.7GHz, its 6 cores are quite capable of transcoding an anime episode into a 848×480 Level 3 encode with merange at 24 and quite a few quality options dialed up in half the time it takes for me to watch said episode. Which raises a point: do I really need to buy Bulldozer? I’m unwilling to make the Bulldozer PC my main PC anyway since the Phenom II X6 system is good enough – in fact if I weren’t folding for most of the month the CPU and GPU would just sit there idle. The incredible responsiveness of the system is due to the OCZ Vertex 2E anyway, not the CPU.

Obviously, I don’t. I should also be well above buying hardware just to get more folding PPD too. But of course, like a proper computer hobbyist, I do want to have a system based on AMD’s first CPU that kicks ass in a long time. It’s been like this before – I buy the Athlon XP system, and then a few months later Athlon 64 comes out. This isn’t gonna happen this time – this time, I’ll own both old world and new world AMD systems! Just for the sake of having them. I’ll find a use for it later. For now, I think the Bulldozer system will simply fulfill a number cruncher role. Probably stuff it with 8GB of RAM, get the unlocked version, buy a good microATX motherboard with 6 phases or more… overclock the jesus out of it, and make it some kind of number cruncher I can just hand off tasks to.

So, I heard you needed a badass computer to simulate massive TNT explosions in Minecraft. So I built this quick and dirty ugly POS in MCEdit:

That’s before I added the redstone wires and repeaters to detonate it. To my surprise, redstone connections fire away instantly. So as soon as I replaced the redstone diode with a redstone repeater, it stopped responding.

Which would’ve been OK as long as it took up some CPU. After all, with a 3.7GHz Phenom II X6 and 12GBs of RAM, CPU time is something I have plenty of. But it’s idling at 0%! WTF?

It looks like this generation of consoles is getting a lot of visual novel love. Ever17 is supposedly being remade for the Xbox 360. Seeing Tsugumi in 720p makes me cum lots and lots of love for her…

And CLANNAD is coming to the PS3. Don’t really care about that, I still have yet to start White Album PS3. Not that I spend much time gaming these days… it’s sad that when I have the means to hog a PS3 60GB, a lovely gaming PC, and a PSP, I rarely play any of those and my PS3 sits there doing Folding@Home.