Welcome to the ancient, mystic society of No Homers.
For the most part the Mac Pro is overpowered for me, but then it comes with a measely 1GB of RAM. Reall expensive, obscure RAM. So I finally bought another 2GB. Hopefully this will help Windows perform a bit better, especially with my long City of Heroes sessions. I find it funny that what really drove me to the upgrade was the small percentage of time that I spend in Windows. Never really felt a big need in OS X.
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I was working so hard to get Boot Camp working just so I could see how game performance would be. Trying to read reviews on the internet about this is a complete waste of time. If you don’t have a Core 2 Duo Extreme, quad SLI video, 8 gigs of RAM (even though Windows XP only detects 3 or 4gb) and killer nics then your PC is garbage and can’t handle any games period. My “old” PC is far from these requirements, yet I can play all my games with max graphics. Even new demos like Prey. Not perfectly, I’ll admit, but definitely well enough for me. So the Mac Pro needed to do at least that much.
My first tests were City of Heroes and Titan Quest since those are the two games I actually plan on playing. City of Heroes is on maximum graphics (%200 textures and such) and it runs like a dream. Incredibly smooth, even when running through crowded cities with Super Speed. Which on my old system would hiccup now and then. City of Heroes isn’t the most graphics heavy and gorgeous game, but it is fairly processor heavy because of the large world. Titan Quest also ran great with full graphics and that one is a pretty new and intensive game. I haven’t spent more then 10 minutes in the game so far though, so jury is still out. Next was the Prey demo and the new Flight Simulator X. Prey ran great at max graphics even on the multiplayer maps that had you jumping through all sorts of portals and switching you upside down like crazy. Never a single hiccup. When Intendant cranked Flight Simulator X to max it really put the hurt on his PC. He loves his flight sims, so this was a real good test for him. With everything on Ultra High our flight was smooth as silk. Water effects were amazing too.
And this is with the base video card and RAM. I eventually plan on either doing SLI or upgrading to a beefier video card. And I am definitely getting more RAM. I’ll wait until this thing starts to have problems with games before I stress about the video card, but the RAM will be in the near future.
While I was having fun in City of Heroes I decided to do a little recording of me and 8th (Sosacms) doing our usual encounters. Hopefully this will get a few of the resistant savages hooked. VirtualDub actually detected all 4 processors just fine, so it was encoding to Divx at 100 fps. That was pretty damn neat.
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Since I already dedicated nearly two days to Boot Camp, might as well dedicate a post. Boot Camp is a very impressive utility. It does a very good job making dual booting easy. It will even “Partition Magic” your drives for you. I wanted to use a lot of space for gaming without cutting into my main Mac drive though, so I just threw Windows on one of the 160gb SATA drives I had from my “old” PC. I still put Windows on the main Mac drive though, but in a small 10gb NTFS partition. Then on the other drive I split it into two partitions, a 32gb FAT32 “shared” partition so I can quickly send things back and forth between both OSes and then the rest of the drive is just NTFS, which OS X can read, but not write. So far I am liking that setup. Windows has plenty of room to grow and so does OS X.
Unfortunately, getting to that setup was a painful task that took most of my blessed 3 day weekend. The problem with the Mac Pro and Boot Camp is SATA. Windows doesn’t have the right drivers at install time and even if you update them post install, it still doesn’t work. So your SATA II drives only get about 3-4 mb/s transfer rates instead of the 60-70 mb/s you would expect. Not sure if Apple is working on a fix for this or not since I don’t really see how they could. To fix the problem you have to modify the XP install disc, which I don’t think Boot Camp will ever do. Fortunately (kind of), somebody threw up a guide on how to “slipstream” all your goods onto your XP CD. Although, the reason it tooke me a day and a half was because of the poor instructions.
Instead of listing instructions to fix the Mac Pro SATA issue he decided to give a much larger list of instructions to include his personal preferences on hot-fixes and sketchy hacks from sketchy sites. So what could have been a 1 or 2 item list of instructions was more like 12 and you had to try and customize it to fit your needs. Combine this with my inexperience with slipstreaming and there was a lot of room for error. I didn’t have a Windows box to do this with anymore either, so I needed to use the broken boot camp to make my new XP ISOs. Since SATA is transferring so slowly it takes about an hour to install XP. Then I have to install updates like .Net Framework and all my needed software, nLite, Nero, etc. Once I add a driver or make a change to the ISO then I have to use it to re-install XP and start the entire process over again. So even if it is only 5 or 6 attempts that will destroy an entire day.
I eventually started completely over, trying very hard to stick with the instructions and trim as little excess as possible and was able to get a working install. Beyond the SATA, everything works great. You pop in your driver CD, it runs an installer, and you have audio, video, mac to windows friendly keyboard, etc. And now that I have the slipstreaming done I have made a really amazing XP install disc. nLite really lets you tweak things out. Every little thing that bugged me about XP had tweak options. Like not making Thumbs.db files, going to a Windows 2K appearance, etc. Some of them got pretty nitty gritty too. I also was able to make a fully unattended install. Every question the installer asks you, including the CD Key can be entered into nLite. So I am now using this as my official XP installer for PC and Mac.
So a miserable time, but I came away with something pretty worth while. And now that it is done I can just work away on my Mac Pro without any trouble.
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Cracked open the Mac Pro this weekend so I could throw in a pair of 160gb SATA drives for Boot Camp and backups. The picture is awful, but that’s what you get with a camera phone in the hands of a jackass. The quality of this case is astonishing. I’ve never worked on any PC case that was this well laid out and rock solid. Even when I spend upwards of $200. To get inside you pull on a lockable lever on the back and that will release the holds on the case as well as the SATA drive bays. The side plating is very heft and has padding around the edge to lower noise from vibration and keep the case as airtight for the airflow.
SATA drives are very easy to install. Just screw them onto the enclosure and slide it in. The power and communication connectors are mounted on a plate in the back and it clicks right in. The RAM looks to be similarly simple. I haven’t done the RAM upgrade yet, but those daughter boards slide right out. Each one has 4 DIMM slots. The video card is nearly impossible to see, which is fine since it’s just a boring video card. It rests right on top of the RAM area so it gets hit by the front fan. You can add another video card right on top of it as well to do SLI mode.
All in all I am very happy with my purchase. A very hefty price tag, but the quality is outstanding and I think it will last me a very long time with the amount of upgrading I can do. It’ll be a long time before Quad Xeon and up to 16gb of RAM just doesn’t cut it. And surprisingly enough Windows actually detects all 4 processors. They each show up in Task Manager with their own load graphs and all.
When I get home I’ll post about some gaming. Even made some fun videos with CoH. Which was a nice excuse to use Final Cut Pro.
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Picked me up a Mac Pro last night. Was sick of switching cables between my Mac Book and my PC, so decided to combine them. Was also getting tired of taking my Mac Book to and from work every day. I was (un)hooking it four times a day. It also doesn’t have much RAM. So on big projects when I have all kinds of stuff open, like Illustrator, Photoshop, etc it got pretty bogged down. Then if I needed to run Parallels to get into Windows it would just destroy what little RAM was left. So I’m going to mostly use the Mac Book at work where I don’t use such heavy software. Eventually I’ll get me a work Mac of some sort and leave the laptop for just in house portability.
Anyhoo, there’s my justifications for getting it. I haven’t really been able to play with it too heavily. I ended up re-installing Mac OS X three times last night, so that ate up most of my time. I didn’t have a fire-wire cable so I couldn’t choose the handy option of copying my stuff from an existing Mac. And I kind of screwed things up trying to manually copy all my preferences and libraries over. It does seem really fast, even with your basic applications. Load times are significantly reduced and such. As it should be with Quad Xeon lovin’. I do need more RAM though if I’m going to be doing a lot with Parallels. The default config only gives you 1GB.
I haven’t busted it open yet, but will do so this weekend. Have some SATA drives in my old PC that I’m going to be throwing in there to give me a combined 550GB. Still leaving 250GB for Sosacms when I give him my PC. Which will be a very nice upgrade for him. It is still a great gaming rig. I’ve kept it up to date so I can play all the games with max graphics. If I could run Mac OS X on it natively, probably wouldn’t have bought a Mac Pro.
I’ll put some pictures up if I end up cracking it open this weekend. From what I’ve seen in screen shot and such, the interior is an amazing design.
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Finally launched the project I’ve been working on the last two months. Just hoping it doesn’t fall on it’s face as soon as it gets heavy load. My code is flawless, of course, but we have an API to another service that is pretty nut sucky. Even on the test server with very light load it can take up to 20 seconds for a simple call. And it only makes it that far because I had to code in a retry X times method. Wish they would have gone with somebody reputable instead of this open source garbage. I like open source apps and languages, but not so much on open source businesses. They tend to be of low quality. Oh well, this should make the company so decent revenue, which will make me some decent revenue.
To celebrate I picked me up a 60gb iPod. Been wanting one for a while since my laptop doesn’t have a lot of space. Rather hook the iPod up to all my various computers instead of carrying around a copy of my massive stash for when I’m off our network. This thing does a lot more then I thought too. Not only does it sync my videos and music, but photos, calendar, and contacts. Also plays games and has all sorts of neat utility apps, like a stop watch. I have about 25gb of music videos I’ll probably throw on it. I never watch them on my PC since I have better things to do. I’ll finally get some use out of them now.
Got a docking station so it will hook up to my PC/Mac as well as TV. Put an episode of House on the TV with it. Doesn’t look horrible, but doesn’t look allt hat great either. Guess it doesn’t blow up to 92″ that well… It will work as a last resort or only option though. Videos look amazing on it’s screen, so will still work great for traveling or random boredom.
All in all I’m pretty damn impressed with it. Now I just need to get the hookup for my new Yamaha reciever and see what that does. That’s the real problem with these things. They interface with damn near everything. And none of it is cheap.
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I finally got my dual monitor setup going at work and am not very happy with it. It’s a bit of a hack since the MacBook doesn’t natively support such a thing. Basically I crank the resolution up to 2048×768 and then this little box cuts that in half and sends each half to the monitors. So I’m stuck at 1024×768, which really sucks. And everything gets thrown in the middle of the screen, as you would normally want, but they just get cut in half. Even my dock. Which at such a low resolution I don’t really have room for. This trick would be OK if you have a machine that supports 2560×1024, but basic built in Intel graphics wont.
So I picked up a good widescreen LCD. UPS overnight wasn’t much more then the usual Fedex saver, so I went with that. Hopefully it really gets here tomorrow. That would make me a very happy person. Price tag is nice too, especially compared to the Apple version. Same size and less then half the cost, even with overnight shipping. If I like it enough, I might even nab one for home. I’m not unhappy with my L90D+ though. That’s is a gorgeous monitor.
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My new Yamaha receiver came yesterday. Got it all setup and sounding fantastic. I am very impressed with that thing. Didn’t realize it was a 9.1 system until I started reading the audio setup part of the manual. Has the usual front L/R, surround L/R, center, sub. But then adds in a “presence” L/R that go above and in-between the front L/R and a “back surround” that goes in-between the surround L/R. So some day I might have to pick up 4 more speakers. The audio setup process was really impressive too. You put this crazy 360 degree mic about where people will be sitting. Then it blasts crazy noises from each speaker, determines if they are wired correctly, equalizes and levels them based on distance, etc.
Making our lives easier with source switching too. I mentioned the 3 step process we had before. It sure is nice to have one click to take care of it all again. And the up conversion to component made it so we have one cable to run to the projector. Which was the hardest part of this setup. Projectors are rough. We have it at the base of a table thingy, so about floor level. Gives people good leg room from couch and something to set their drinks on. Projector still gets good airflow too. Sure made it tricky to get the bastard lined up to work with DVD, Anime, and games. Everything has to be slightly different.
I think I am happy with it though. Watched Transporter on it last night and it looked and sounded fantabulous. While watching Excel Saga we even thought there was a bunch of teenage shitbags goofing off in front of our house. And having widescreen movies fill that 92″ 16:9 screen really makes me think, “fuck the theater”. I already thought that with the Wega, but I could occasionally be convinced otherwise. Don’t think that will be the case anymore.
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Microsoft if coming out with it’s own MP3 player to compete with the iPod. Look familiar? Don’t care if they are making their own, just wish they would have tried a bit harder to come up with a design that was marginally different then the iPod. I still wouldn’t buy it, but I would have a sliver more respect for it.
Finally got to go back to work today. Can’t wait to find out what disasters I missed. And I’m sure the project we were a few weeks behind on enjoyed my absence as well. It is nice to not be in a bed half the day though. But I wouldn’t mind having a few more days to get the new pad in order. It’s a disaster right now.
The projector was a more complicated project then I thought. We have it setup and looking fantabulous, but the room placement is very odd. Projector has to be in the middle of the room, 8 feet or so away from the screen. And then we also need all the AV stuff with it. It puts out some serious heat too, so can’t have it stuffed in some hole. When Intendant gets up here maybe he can help me think of a better way to situate it. But for right now, it’s working and I am very happy with the projector. Played some games and watched some movies on it. Wide screen movies fit on it perfectly in LBX mode. Game Cube and PS2 fit great in 16:9 mode. In 4:3 they have a fair amount of room on either side, but that’s to be expected. It was frustrating at first, since every movie and game I put in seemed to run at a different resolution. But we managed to find the happy medium. Now we sit back and enjoy 92″ of goodness.
On the negative side, my receiver sucks nuts. One day, many months ago, it just stopped doing surround sound. Any digital input, DSP, Pro-Logic, etc was mute. Only way to get any sound out of it was plain old stereo. And LFE to sub woofer didn’t work either. So I had to do some tricky stuff to get that working. Sounds crappy though. The front panel says “DSP NG” all the time, which I assume means “DSP No Good”. Or maybe “No Ground”, but not sure I would fix that. So now I’m pissed that I have this glorious projector and about the lamest sound you can get.
I think I’m going to pick me up a new Yamaha receiver. I’ve been hearing good things about the Yamaha receivers and it was recommended to me a while ago when I was trying a Sony out. It has 5 AV inputs and 2 Audio only inputs, 3 component, 5 S-Video, 5 composite (like it matters), 5 RCA audio, 4 optical, 2 coaxial. You may think that sounds like a lot more then 5 inputs, but the inputs overlap. The actual video labels are DVD, DTV, DVR, VCR (s-video / composite only), then a S-Video / Composite on the front panel. It also supports an iPod docking station, which I might try out some day. We already have a component video switcher and planned to only use a receiver like this to handle the surround sound and up conversion. The projector doesn’t really support multiple sources very well. The component input is with an adapter on it’s VGA port. When using the adapter it covers up the S-Video input. So I really need everything to just go over component. It looks like this receiver will do that just fine and probably even remove the need for our current, remote-less component switcher. Right now I have exactly 3 component devices. If we do the MythTV box or satellite again, then that’s one S-Video. If I need another component input I can just start using the built in DVD player on the projector. It’s actually very nice, has optical audio out and everything, if I can just figure out how to disable the built in speakers.
Will be nice to be able to switch inputs with one click of a remote again. For a while you had to get up and manually switch the video, then switch the audio input on the JVC, then switch the video input on the TV. Then we got lucky and the JVC died, so everything was in crappy stereo. So that removed one step in that process.
Hopefully we’ll soon be sitting comfy, watching movies, and downing some tasty Asti.
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