New-ish Hardware

Looks like I should be getting my motherboard later today. Let me back up a bit.

Once upon a time, my graphics card started acting up last Thanksgiving. You know how when Windows boots, there's that welcome screen, then fade to black, then desktop? I would always get display corruption when the desktop would show. It looked like magenta fish scales. This was mitigated by disabling Aero (the fancy glass effects), but it would still freak out whenever I tried to watch a movie or play a game.

I RMAed my card and got it back. Same stuff. Being about Christmas at the time, I knew that Sandy Bridge was going to be released, so I waited until about a week after New Year's to get a shiny new Sandy Bridge i7, new motherboard, new RAM (16 gigs!), and a new PSU. Once I put it all together, I was disappointed when I saw... magenta fish scales instead of my desktop.

After trying and checking many things, I eventually decided to put it in my server, which by then was my old desktop parts that I had originally started out with. Made sure Linux had the drivers, and they were enabled, and mostly encountered the same problem. After an hour or so, the card had warmed up, but was not having any problems. I immediately shut down the server, removed the card, and put it into my desktop while the card was still hot. Success! I played games until I shut the system down at the end of the weekend.

Guess there might have been a bad contact on the GPU or something that thermal expansion somehow took care of. I did that "cook in server until warm" trick at least once again. I managed to convince EVGA to RMA the card again. I never got it back: I got upgraded! Goodbye GTX 280, hellooooo GTX 285! It was only later I discovered the thing comes with 2 gigs of VRAM, twice my original 280, but I don't really care about how much RAM graphics cards have nowadays. I'm more concerned about fillrate, memory bus width, and clockspeeds. Using my friends' logic, I guess I have to hate NVidia now, since I had a card with an NVidia chip on it and it broke.

In the middle of figuring out what was wrong and sending it in, here comes news that all the Sandy Bridge motherboards are bad. After 3 years, there's a possibility that the SATA ports might go bad. Great! After this system retires from desktop duties, it will likely end up in my server, and I think that working SATA ports might help with that.

I sent it in Monday last week, and should be arriving this evening. Hopefully I can look forward to months of not touching my desktop's innards. It's been extremely annoying, but somewhat fun. Too much fun by this point, needs moderation. Crap, talking like Scientist Salarian. Must stop!

I was listening to NPR last Tuesday and they had a story about Portal because Portal 2 was coming out. I HATE YOU! CAN'T PLAY BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE A MOTHERBOARD! Oh well, at least I preloaded it that weekend. Zero guesses as to what I'll be doing when everything's in order.

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Screenshot of Papers, Please, showing a multitude of documents and a man with killer sideburns — Papers, Please

Papers, Please is a bureaucrat simulator where you man a border checkpoint in a fictional totalitarian country during the late cold war. Gameplay mostly involves examining people's passports and other entry documents and calling 'gotcha' on them. Otherwise, you let them through if you can't find anything or you're lazy.

Screenshot of World of Goo 2, showing two sprayers fueling an airship. — World of Goo 2

World of Goo 2 is another sequel to a game that I don't think needed one. However, given the amount of time since the original, I'll let this one slide. I haven't played through the original for several years, so any references to it are from my own memory, and may not be accurate.

Screenshot of High On Life, showing all guns in the last bossfight with Nipulon. — High On Life

It's been a while since I played a silly game, so here we go. Some time ago, I happened across a Humble Bundle that had High On Life. I remember hearing about this, so I got it. A friend of mine is into Rick and Morty, and this game was made in part by the guy behind that show.

Taking down a vehicle convoy in the canyons. — Rage 2

Once upon a time, I played Rage. It was a competent FPS, but forgettable. So forgettable that I forgot that it had a sequel. Looking through my Epic Game Store collection, it escaped me that I acquired it at some point. It must have been a freebie once. Judging by the fact I hurried my way through it in 5 days and had fun, Rage 2 is not forgettable, and is, in fact, quite enjoyable.

Screenshot of Johnny over a reprogrammed bomb. — Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Phantom Liberty is the only DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, so I'll skip a lot of things that article covers. Phantom Liberty takes place in Dogtown, a section of Night City that's next to Pacifica. Like Pacifica, it was meant to be the rich part of town, but something went wrong, and it became a half-built slum. It's home to a gang named Barghest, named after mythical hell dogs, so they named their territory Dogtown. (To me, this is a Witcher reference.)

Screenshot of the TOGETHER level. — Yobi's Basic Spelling Tricks

Yobi's Basic Spelling Tricks is a spelling game that came with my family's old Compaq 486 back in the 90s. I'm not sure what prompted me to dig this up. I suspect that seeing a blog that's trying to list every videogame that features Moai jarred my memory, but this isn't listed there (despite Moai being in this game). (I'd like to submit this game there, but I can't find any way to do that outside of Twitter.) After about 3 minutes of searching, I found this game and fired up Twentieth Century.