27 September 2009

Another one bites the dust

Spock in the shop
This week saw Spock go back to the computer shop so it can be turned into a standard P6T instead of the deluxe v2. While it worked a treat they only have a single PS/2 port on the back which means the deluxe doesn't work properly with a KVM. They also have one of the PCIe slots spaced 3 slots away from the other so would be ideal for a dual graphics card setup, if you don't use a KVM.

Introducing Sulu
I got one standard P6T back from the shop. Its been named Sulu. As you can see I am following a Star Trek theme here. Its off and running with my supposed standard setup of a P6T motherboard, Intel i7-920, 3Gb of RAM, XP Pro and a GTX295.

Dust storm hits Sydney
We had a dust storm hit Sydney on Wednesday. I woke up in the morning and the sky was a red color. As there was a strong wind blowing I had to close all the windows and doors to keep the dust out. I also had the "farm" powered off for the whole day as it would get too hot without opening the window or using the air conditioner.

GPU-Z updated
The guys at TechPowerUp released an updated version of GPU-Z. I let it loose on Sulu now that it seems to understand the single circuit board versions of the GTX295. Below is the screen shot. Unfortunately my assumption that it had a 45nm GT200 chip was incorrect.




New ATI cards released
ATI released a couple of new cards to the market this week. The HD5850 has 1440 shaders and the HD5870 has 1600 shaders. This means the HD4850 I got about a month ago is no longer available.

Nvidia has also stopped making the GTX260's and GTX295 as they get ready to release a new card. This may mean I can't get the dud GTX295 replaced, but we will see. I might also want to see what they release to compete with the new ATI cards. A potential upgrade coming?

BOINC testing
There were further BOINC versions out this week. We are up to 6.10.9 which I have installed on Kirk. The other machines are all on 6.10.7. The main difference from last weeks one is some bug fixes around the cuda tasks being immediately preempted and some additional work around supporting ATI cards.

Apparently ATI is not providing any help to the projects to support CAL/Brook+ so there are only a couple of projects that currently can use these cards. ATI seems to be concentrating on hardware. Its useless if you have a super fast card if there is no software (apart from a few games) that can use it.

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Games said...
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