Soon after installing the GTX 295 I started experiencing strange issues. 3D Performance was in the pits, video playback had issues and even sound while playing a game was choppy and stuttered. I was at a loss for what could have been happening because I had the latest drivers from nVidia and did a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 Enterprise Edition.

Then I remembered last time I had the symptom of stuttering sound…

Many years ago when the only way you could get even basic RAID functionality was to utilize an add-in PCI card. This was before PCI-Express, so your card was limited to 32-bit/33Mhz standard PCI bus which was limited to 133MB/sec. Depending on your chipset or motherboard layout, you might be using onboard sound or an add-in PCI sound card.

During periods of heavy IO when using a PCI RAID card, the PCI bus would be saturated with data to the RAID card and there would be limited bandwidth for the sound card, causing chopping and stuttering sound. A workaround that sometimes worked was to put the sound card ahead of the RAID card in the PCI slots so it would have priority to/from the chipset.

Knowing this I started doing some research on what hardware my Dell Dimension 9200 was actually using. The chipset inside is the Intel P965 Express chipset, which after looking at the specifications appeared to me to be the obvious issue.

Intel P965 Express Chipset Diagram

The PCI Express slot provided by the Intel P964 Chipset is a fraction of what is available today by modern PCI Express 2.0 chipsets. It came down to the system not being able to quench the thirst of the nVidia GTX 295. Because of this, it was maxing out the available bandwidth on the northbridge and not allowing any other devices to be serviced.

Suspecting this, I upgraded my motherboard (which also required a new case, so needless to day the Dell Dimension 9200 is no longer) to a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P which sports the Intel P45 Express Chipset.

Intel P45 Express Chipset Diagram

All in all, this chipset provides more bandwidth across the board. When I upgraded I kept my Intel Q6600 processor and 4GB (4x 1GB DDR2-667) RAM and wouldn’t you know it, it solved all my problems! Games play super smooth and the sound is perfect.

So if you’ve recently upgraded to a newer video card and are experiencing strange performance issues, you might want to look into your motherboards ability to keep the video card’s higher processing ability quenched without sacrificing servicing additional components.

Cheers!

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Perhaps my expectations for it were too high, expecting things like plot and decent graphics…. you know things games aren’t expected to deliver (apparently).

My qualms with Borderlands are simple…

1. There is no plot, or at least none to the point I played. You’re a character, on a planet, in a town… all of which you know nothing about or the history of it. Because of this, the endless list of “quests” turns into a laundry, or “todo” list. It almost feels like work after a while.

2. The graphics, although stylized, were designed almost to compensate for the game engine’s terribly slow loading time. It’s a feature of the Unreal engine to load low-res textures as a place holder while the full res textures are loaded and rendered. Because of this if you venture through the world too quickly, your screen is awash in murky, flat textures. Some people see it as part of the style; I see it as a lame compensation for a poor game engine.

3. The AI is stupid. Do yourself a favor and play as a sniper. If you’re far enough away, even standing in the wide open, you can pick people off without them even moving! As a low level character it took me 60 shots, but I was able to kill a higher level character because he just stood in place while I was lighting him up.

I can see how this game strokes people’s egos in the sense that you continuously build up your character and find newer weapons (which I’ll admit, there are plenty of). The game lacks substance though, which to me is paramount when committing a large slice of my time to playing a game.

So I’ll follow the trend many user reviews are following and create an equation to describe borderlands:

(((Fallout 3 – Plot) – Graphics) – Production Value) + Weapons = Borderlands

Borderlands SUCKS!

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The available alternatives out there didn’t seem technically feasible as most D-Link and Linksys offerings are merely Windows Media Center Extenders with “support for MPEG-4/ASP” (read: DivX) but no support for MPEG-4/AVC or MPEG-4/VC1. The option of setting up another HTPC for my home theater wouldn’t be financially viable because at a base price of about $399 I might as well invest in a Blu-Ray burner to watch my backups.

Enter the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player…

Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player

While scouring the internets looking for solutions to my problem, I stumbled upon the recently released Western Digital Live HD Media Player. The specs fit the bill (and them some) for my technical expectations:

• VIDEO – AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9
• AUDIO – MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS

Throw in the fact that it supports 1080p over HDMI and is only, it seemed like a no brainer!

The device itself is small. Hilariously small actually. Imagine a small box of 3.5″ floppy disks (if anyone actually remembers those)

Now, my home network setup is unique to my situation. I have two Apple Airport Extreme base stations extending the same network. My NAS is attached to one base station in my office. The Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player is attached to another Apple Airport Extreme base station on my home theater. I knew going into this situation that bandwidth would be an issue as playback of h.264/MKV video is bandwidth intensive and can sometimes require upwards of 50mbps depending on the quality.

My initial testing after hooking up the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player showed that I was in fact having issues with wireless bandwidth from my Intel SS4200-E NAS to my home theater. The MKV playback of a 1080p MPEG-4/AVC video began stuttering and losing audio/video sync. I started to get disheartened because I thought my Apple Airport Extremes must have been connecting to each other at the highest possible speeds, right? Wrong.

Turns out I had room for improvement in my Wifi setup. I stumbled upon this blog post over on Engadget which talked about the speed differences between Apple’s 2.5Ghz “compatible” N and their 5Ghz modes. I checked my Apple Airport Extremes to see what my network was set at. You can do this by opening up the Airport Utility and selecting your primary base station. Under the wireless tab, you should be able to select your wireless mode.

Setting Apple Airport Extreme Radio Mode

After fiddling around with all the settings, I found that explicitly setting 802.11n with a 5Ghz radio frequency gave me much higher wifi throughput as I had previously running 802.11n in “b/g compatible” mode. The downside of this is not only 802.11n devices that support the 5ghz frequency are able to join my home network, meaning our iPhones are stuck to non-wifi mode while around the house.

Apple Airport Wirelss Setup for Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player

That aside, the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player was able to play back all of my 1080p HD content without slowdown or playback issues. It would seem from other reviews on forums and across the internet might be having networking issues if they’re having trouble during playback. Granted, I can’t speak for every method of encoding h.264 (between different profiles & containers, it’d be hard to do a comprehensive test), but I can say that my files which I encoded with x264 and saved in an MKV container playback perfectly!

I couldn’t be happier with the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player and I haven’t had a single issue yet. It’s able to connect to my Intel SS4200-E NAS (both UPNP Media Server and SMB) and browsing files is a sinch. Part of me wishes the interface allowed for more interactive content, such as Media Browser does for Windows Media Center by automatically loading movie information and covers based on the file name. I suppose these features might come at a future time, as Western Digital has just released the first firmware update for the TV Live HD Media Player and they seem to be on track for the next release shortly.

The only drawback I’ve run into thus far is the inability to play WMV files, which I suspect might be a licensing issue… but who knows. It might be coming in a future firmware update as well!

Hope this helps someone out there in the same situation I was in! Please leave any questions you might have and I’ll be more than happy to answer!

Cheers!

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The DNS-323 has been a great NAS! I had my doubts at first with a D-Link product, since in the past their networking products that I’ve used haven’t been quality. So my issue was, how do I upgrade from a RAID1 on a two-drive NAS to a new fault tolerant system that has at LEAST 1.5TB of storage. I mean, if you’re going to upgrade you need to make it count, so doubling the capacity of my current NAS was the primary goal.

I did some research and with NewEgg running a sale on the hardware, I settled on the Intel SS4200-E NAS. On the spec sheet, this NAS met my requirements because it supported up to four drives, RAID5 and RAID10! Technical reviews I found of the device put it at the top of the chart when it comes to RAID5 performance.

The inhabitants of the Intel SS4200-E NAS was going to be four Hitachi 1TB drives.

Intel SS4200 NAS

Well, let me backtrack a bit and go over the problem that brought me to even write this post.

Because I already had two 750GB SATA drives in my D-Link DNS-323 NAS, my plan was to setup a 1TB RAID1 in the Intel SS4200-E using only TWO Hitachi 1TB drives. Once the data was copied over, I would re-purpose the 750GB SATA drives in my old NAS as an additional 750GB RAID1 in the Intel NAS. Sounds simple, right? Wrong.

The first major flaw I found with this unit is that it only allows ONE CONTAINER PER DEVICE. Meaning if you have 2x Drives, you’re running a RAID1 or RAID0. If you have 4x Drives, you’re running a RAID5 or RAID10. That’s it! There is no way with the Intel SS4200-E NAS to setup two containers! I could have two independant RAID1 containers, even though I was using four drives!

What the crap?! So much for a business class NAS from Intel!

So I ended up having to buy two more Hitachi 1TB drives (which isn’t too bad, being they’re only $79 on Amazon with FREE SHIPPING! ) and finally settled on a 2.7TB RAID5.

Hardware setup was super easy as the Intel SS4200-E is an ‘almost’ tool free setup. I say almost because some of the thumb screws SHOULD be tightened with a screw driver

Intel SS4200 NAS

The software, EMC LifeLine, is pretty well polished compared to the D-Link and other NAS offerings. It makes great use of AJAX to display real time system status information on the screens and gives you even small features that other NAS devices might overlook. Small things like LED brightness, which trust me, when your office is near the bedroom, this one is a huge feature!

Intel markets this NAS as an entry-level and SOHO NAS. So it’s very entry level, to a fault. Other features are lacking such as FTP support. Your only option with FTP is to turn it On or Off. That’s it! You can’t configure even basic options such as port, permissions of quotas. So be warned if you’re looking into using this NAS as anymore more than at home storage.

The Media Server that comes with it is alright. My XBox 360 saw it without issue and was able to stream all types of media off of it without issue (such as MP3 and DivX). My only gripe with the Media Server is that you have to manually re-scan for updates. I’m not sure if there’s an automatic timer, because there’s no option for that in the configuration.

All in all, I’m pleased with the Intel. It met my basic needs for a home NAS but I can see how it would be limiting for someone looking for more advanced features or someone who requires more ability to configure the small options.

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The case I’ve been using is a Morex 3677B case, which is fairly small but still allows enough room for a 2.5″ Hard Drive and a Slim Laptop CD/DVD drive.

A couple gotchas I ran into while upgrading from the VIA board to the new Intel Atom based board:

1. The Zotac IONITX board has only SATA connectors, no PATA connectors to be found! This was a road block as both my previous hard drive and slim CD/DVD drive were both PATA so I was forced to upgrade them as well. Luckily I was able to score a 320GB Seagate drive for only $79!
2. Zotac provides a small 50mm fan to use on the heatsink because the Dual Core N330 CPU as well as the nVidia northbridge require active cooling. Luckily the Morex case has a 50mm exhaust fan that sits close to the heatsink. I was able to flip it around and use it to blow onto the CPU.
3. Speaking of the heatsink, it’s about 1.5″ high and ALMOST comes too close to not fitting into the case. So it’s something to keep in mind when you’re working on your setup!

I’ve got everything hooked up and it was very easy to get the driver package installed. Because the Zotac IONITX came out so recently, the CD it came with had the latest drivers and the motherboard had the latest BIOS installed.

The ONE issue I’m having and still searching for a solution for is that using HDMI as the audio output, I’m getting audio distortion. I’ve tried different source materials and even tweaking the audio settings, but it’s still happening. Other than that, I’ve been super pleased with it’s performance! I mean, seriously, a computer the size of a shoe box showing four CPU’s (2 physical + hyper threading) and an nVidia graphics adapter!

Hope this helps someone out there in the market for upgrading their own HTPC as well!

Cheers!

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Reunion Title Screen

Does anyone else remember playing Reunion back on their 386’s with a staggering 2MB of RAM? Lord knows I remember!

Reunion came out over fifteen years ago and I still feel the urge to play it now and then even today. It’s a great game and can be downloaded from many abandonawre sites across the internet.

I started playing again recently using DOSBox and I was amazed, because I didn’t even know the game had sound! When I played “back in the day”, my system didn’t have a Sound Card (because I couldn’t afford a Creative AWE32), so needless to say it was a whole different experience. The game has a fantastic production value and even when modern development languages, I’m not sure that even I’d be able to create a game of such depth a complexity!

Anywho, I began to get frustrated because I knew there were parts of the game I was missing because I couldn’t meet certain goals or didn’t have enough resources. Granted, I should have spent the time perfecting the game and working towards those achievements….. but it’s an old game and I don’t have as much free time as I did when I was thirteen years old

To that end, I sat down and studied the Save Game format for a while and also the (paltry) Save Editor that was included in the Abandonware version. I knew I could come up with something better that gives me even more options in the game. It took me a couple hours but I was able to come up with a pretty functional Saved Game Editor for Reunion that works around a couple glitches the previous version had.

I know, I’m a total cheater but it was a fun little project and I figure perhaps ONE person on the entirety of the Internet must need something like this as well, so I figure I’d throw it out there for anyone who needs it

Reunion Saved Game Editor – Download (92kb)

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So I built an HTPC. I built a GREAT HTPC. It was small, fanless and had everything I’d ever need. But I was disappointed though, only because the quality of the video combined with what I was ACTUALLY able to do with it let me down. I suppose it was my own fault because I had let my desire for the system to be completely silent and fanless impact its performance.

Fast forward a couple years later and I have this shoe box sized PC sitting below my computer desk at home. What should I do with it?

In moving forward with reviving my HTPC from its unused ranking among my home hardware, I decided to set forth a couple of goals for the upgrade so I could be pointed in what I was shopping for (and so I could have a valid excuse to tell my wife why I was spending more money on something I never used in the first place )

1. More CPU Horsepower – This is obviously the most important aspect of this upgrade. Currently my HTPC uses a VIA EPIA-M 600mhz fanless Mini-ITX motherboard with built in CPU/Video. Originally this seemed like enough to play NES ROMS but it became obvious that OS overhead and lack of video acceleration were deal breakers when it came time to play DivX/XviD movies. So this next version had to have considerably more CPU power.
2. HDMI/HD Video Support – In the last few years I’ve upgraded my Home Theater to use HDMI exclusively. It was mostly to clean up the serpent lair that was the are behind my AV rack (which I’m sure the EMF was giving me cancer). Here’s a picture (seriously, no joke!) So, in honor of my new found love affair with HDMI, this new HTPC must support HDMI in a Mini-ITX form factor up to a resolution of at LEAST 720p.
3. 5.1/7.1/Surround Sound Support – Sorta the same as above, but the HTPC needs to support surround sound. As I’ve mentioned in my previous article, when I backup my DVD’s to XviD, I preserve the Dolby AC3 soundtrack so I would like to still enjoy the surround sound when replaying these files on my HTPC.
4. Wireless Ethernet – You see a theme here? Basically I want the power cable and the HDMI cable being the only wires coming out of the back of this device. Wireless Ethernet is pretty standard on most motherboards now, so this shouldn’t be a tall order.
5. Price – I understand that to make this upgrade even worth it, things have to be cost effective. I want to upgrade the Mini-ITX motherboard in my HTPC for under $200 out the door.

I began my search at my favorite peddler of Mini-ITX and mini-system wares, LogicSuppy.com. I immediately take note of the new Intel Atom based solutions from both Intel and Jetway, but I also note that Intel has decided to “nerf” their Atom offerings as to not undercut their desktop motherboard market. Their Atom Mini-ITX boards, albeit cheap (sub $100), lack sever of my requirements. The Jetway Atom boards at LEAST offer DVI (so I could do a ghetto fabulous DVI -> HDMI conversion), but that would require more cables than it’s worth and the Jetway boards cost upwards of $250! Yikes!

The time came to conjure up my Google-Fu skills to see what I could come up with. Newegg has some descent offering from VIA but all the EPIA boards are under powered in comparison to the latest Intel offerings. A 1.8Ghz VIA C7 board would seem to have the horsepower, but it fell short of the requirements and also crept up to almost $300!

I keep going back to the Atom platforms but none of them seem to fill my requirements. That is, until I come across the NVIDIA ION platform offering from Zotac! I remember reading about NVIDIA ION but never gave any serious thought to it as a desktop platform. I decided to check out the features of the Zotac IONITX-A Atom N330 Offering:

1. Horse Power: Dual Core Atom N330 1.6Ghz CPU — CHECK!
2. HD/HDMI: 1080p over HDMI — CHECK!
3. Surround Support: 7.1 over HDMI — CHECK!
4. Wireless Ethernet: Build In — CHECK!
5. Price: Amazon lists it at $189 when it’s released  – CHECK!

It seems we have a winner!

Talk about a colossal upgrade for a HTPC. A Mini-ITX motherboard that has a dual core CPU and HDMI output!? Insane! Needless to say as soon as this little bad boy hits the streets I’ll be picking one up.

I’m curious if anyone else out there has been in the market for a mini HTPC upgrade as well? What have you been looking for and what were your requirements? I’m interested to hear from you!

Cheers!

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I checked around the net for models that were supported by my car (which was hard because it was a 1st generation, 1st year TSX). I know there’s an MP3/DVD Player option as well as an XM head unit available for the 2004 TSX, but no iPod adapters from Honda. I finally decided on the DICE Electronics R4 Kit for Honda/Acura because it had received positive reviews and seemed a pretty simple install

I purchased the DICE iPod Kit from a reputable seller on eBay for $139 + tax and had it within a few days. The unit itself is pretty small (only a couple square inches) and has inputs for the iPod cable as well as AUX input. It’s a good thing the unit is so small because it has to fit up in the dash

Installing the unit in my car took about all of 2 minutes. Literally.

(Sorry about no pictures, I’ll add them as soon as I’m able to!)

Step one was to remove the storage bin that is located below the factory radio. This is where the factor XM or MP3 player would go. Simply open the bin and pull it out towards you. There are two clips on the bottom right and left as well as clips on the top.

Pull out the storage bin carefully as the light above is still attached to it. Carefully remove the light taking care to not break the housing. Once the bin is out your radio compartment will be exposed. Just a warning: be careful in there! Unless you’ve unhooked your battery, there’s still live current as well as some wires for the airbags Don’t kill yourself over an iPod hookup

Step two is wiring it in. You’ll see one wire running straight up into the stereo. Unplug this. This is the wire that will plug into the daisy chain provided by the DICE iPod kit. Plug the other end of the DICE iPod kit into the factory radio.

Step three is running our cables however you choose (into the glove box, storage bin, middle console) and putting the storage bin back in! Presto! Done!

I used a Dremel and cut out a small section of the bin to run the cables through. To keep it clean looking, I used a bit of rubber (read: old mouse pad) to cover the Dremel spot and cut a slit down the middle allowing the cables to run through it. This helps seal up the bin without having a gaping hole into my dash. Also, for the sake of future use I added a small amount of hot glue to the connectors that are plugged into the DICE iPod Kit so (god forbid) someone pulls on the cable too hard it wont unplug from the DICE iPod Kit while still in my dash. I didn’t add a LOT of glue, just a small drop to hold them in place nicely.

Finished storage bin with iPod & Aux Cables

A few “gotcha’s” about this unit and the 2004 Acura TSX. The ‘XM’ mode of the DICE iPod Kit only works with Honda/Acura models with an actual ‘XM’ button. This wasn’t introduced until the 2005 model year. The 2004 Acura TSX only has a “CD/AUX” button. Because of this, the DICE iPod Kit cannot work and will not be detected in XM mode. You have to set the unit to “CDC” (CD Changer) mode.

Other than that, the unit works great! It’s able to charge my iPhone 3G while I’m listening to music as well as allowing me to stream my iPod and any audio from my iPod straight into my factory radio!

Setting the DICE iPod Kit to ‘iPod’ mode allows you to control the iPod manually on the screen and not with the wheel controls. I find this much easier than trying to navigate the songs using a ‘track up’ & ‘track down’ method on my steering wheel. Also, in ‘iPod’ mode, the DICE iPod Kit acts as a standard audio source. Meaning it’ll play Pandora and send ring tones to your factory radio without having to use the AUX input, like iPod adapters from other manufacturers!

I hope this helps someone else out there in the same situation I was in Please feel free to ask any questions and I’ll be sure to post pictures of my setup as soon as I get them!

Cheers!

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Well, the other night my wife was watching a movie through Netflix on the TiVo and about four times it just quit out to the main TiVo menu. What the frick?

I told my wife to give the XBox 360 a try and see how it handles. Well turns out that the 360 had a hiccup too, but you know what it was? A buffer underrun! That’s right! My internet connection for whatever reason couldn’t keep up with the Netflix stream and it ran out of data. Of course the XBox client was smart enough to realize this, displayed a message and buffered some before streaming again.

My TiVo client? Crashed out. Talk about two code bases not up to par with one another.

So if you’re having the same issues, odds are your network connection (for whatever reason) is not keeping up with the Netflix stream and it’s just crashing out to the main menu of TiVo.

My suggested work around for the time being is try watching it on your XBox 360 if you have the option. Otherwise, you might want to contact your cable provider or stop torrenting all that norwegian snow porn

Cheers!

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This week Microsoft rolled out Netflix instant streaming support with the new XBox 360 Dashboard (which they’re calling the “New Xbox Experience”) while TiVo is also rolling out Netflix support this week in their latest beta firmware update.

Netflix streaming allows people who subscribe to the (currently) $8.99 subscription to stream UNLIMITED movies available for Instant Online viewing to their XBox or TiVo for no extra cost on top of their monthly subscription. To sweeten the deal, Netflix also offers up to 300 movies in ‘HD’ quality at no extra charge.

So, let’s review the score. HD-DVD has gone the way of Beta Max and although both Apple and Amazon have offered rental and purchasing of movies electronically but are still bound to their respective platforms (Apple being iPhone/Pod and Amazon being TiVo) including the PC. I’ve yet to see either party partner with another distribution outlet which is expected from Apple but almost a shock with Amazon.

When I think about it though, Netflix is an obvious answer to the question of what company would be the first to provide movies to Microsoft for online streaming. Netflix partnered with Microsoft in the first place to provide online instant viewing of movies through Microsofts (at the time, new) Silverlight technology, which is a competitor to Flash (which popular video sites like YouTube use).

So now you have a company with an already established shipping and distribution system setup for physical media (both DVD and Blu-Ray) and has partnered with two ‘direct to TV’ companies who have in total over 30 million set top boxes already installed in homes across the WORD! Could this be the coming of the revolution?

I certainly hope so!

About six months back I finally decided to just sell my entire DVD collection. I personally was just done with physical media. I was tired of moving them, dusting them, having them take up space and never really sitting down to watch them. I mean really, I owned a little over 200 movies and sat down AT MOST one time a month to watch one. It got so bad that some of the movies were still in their original shrink wrap packaging. The industry had hooked me on the idea that I needed to COLLECT movies and I had come to the realization that it’s seriously a stupid hobby.

I became a personal flag barer for electronic distribution starting with the ability of renting a movie from Amazon unbox for only $.99 (when they’re on sale) but even then I’d have to wait about 30 minutes for the movie to buffer enough for me to be able to watch it the entire way through without having to pause and let it buffer some more.

Enter Netflix. Not only does it let me INSTANTLY begin watching a movie by detecting my connection speed and ability to download data at real time, but I can also ’shop’ online for more movies to watch while not at home using Netflix.com. This means I can think of a movie while at work or on the go, queue it up and watch it instantly when I get home.

The bonus? This is all covered under my $8.99 Netflix account that I already had. Oh sure, there are more costs involved, but let’s break that down (and to keep it fair, I’ll break down as if I’m starting with NOTHING):

- Netflix: $8.99/mo ($107/year)

- XBox 360: $199 for Arcade Edition ($199/year, first year)

- XBox Live Gold Account: $7.99/mo ($49.99/year)

- Digital Cable: $39 for 10mbit down/1mbit up (in my area) ($480/year)

So even including your monthly Cable bill, you’re only looking at a monthly average cost of only $70 or only $29 pr month if you don’t include your monthly cable internet bill! FOR UNLIMITED INSTANT MOVIE VIEWING!

That’s pretty amazing to me! I hope more people hop on this bandwagon and we begin the revolution! Down with physical media!

I’ll step off my soapbox now

Cheers!

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