New System (Update)

Well I received the parts for my new system on Thursday, May 21st. Put everything together and installed Vista Home Premium 64. Initially I had issues with those evil "Blue Screens of Death".

But after checking online I found that some other people were having trouble getting the memory I bought to work at 1333 on other boards. The solution was to turn them down a notch to 1066. I did this and haven't had any memory issues since. This could be an issue with the memory or an issue with the MB itself.

Here's the main guts of the system:

AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor
EVGA 512-P3-N841-AR GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard

So far, I've played LOTRO and CoD: World at War. Both performed flawlessly. LOTRO at maximum settings was getting 45-60 FPS. While I didn't get the FPS while playing CoD, at maximum there were no problems and the game ran very smoothly.

I'll install more games and test out the performance. But overall I am very happy.

Turbine's unannounced MMO?

I've been seeing mumblings online that Turbine, Inc. the developer of Asheron's Call, Dungeon and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online has been secretly working on a yet unannounced MMO.

While there is no information on what the MMO will be about, a few things have surfaced.

In Jan. '09 there was a job listing on the Turbine site for a micro-transaction and e-commerce manager. When the community of their current MMO's started to balk at the idea that micro-transactions would be used in their current MMO's, Sapience, a LOTRO community manager, replied;

"We know the recent job listing has caused a bit of a stir, but please be aware that this posting is for an unannounced future project."

Source: ShackNews

Odds are this MMO will be developed for the console market. According to an interview with Adam Mersky, Director of Communcations at Turbine, from Aug. '08;

"We’re looking at creating, hopefully, the first MMO that really works. Right now we’re looking at if for the 360 and the PS3…We’re not going to rush to be first so-to-speak, but clearly we’re leading the way. We’ll ship something when it’s ready, and when it’s something that’s going to work on the platform. Clearly there are a lot of hurdles. We’ve been working for awhile, plowing through the majority of them, and we’ve got a lot of work still to do."

Source: Destructoid

Could Turbine be bringing one of their existing MMO's to the console or are they starting something totally new? Could we see an Asheron's Call or LOTRO on the 360 or PS3? I'll keep an eye out for future information on this project.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (Update)

Well the people at Bioware have put out more information on their upcoming MMO. So far I really like where they are going with this. Here's a little bit about the worlds they are developing.

http://www.swtor.com/media/vidcasts/devdispatch002

System Update.

Well it looks like one of my 7950 GX2's went south on my system. After taking it out and running with a single card, my system seems a little more stable. I took 1GB of the RAM out earlier as a memtest showed errors after a crash. Later this week I may put it back in and test it again.

I ordered my new rig Saturday from Newegg.com and I should get it by the end of the week. It's not top of the line, but it should perform better than my last system. Here are some highlights of what I got.

AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor
EVGA 512-P3-N841-AR GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard

There's room to upgrade this system later on to a faster CPU and more memory. The video card is a little outdated, but should perform better than my old setup.

I'll update my blog after I get everything running.

On a side note I've installed Windows 7 on a VMWare image for testing. So far it looks fairly nice, but with my limited RAM, it's causing some issues. I'm hoping to give a review of it in the coming months. I may even try to load it on the new system.

Computer Woes

Well it looks like my outdated PC is going to need some work. Blue Screens of death started cropping up and it appears that some of my memory may have went south. Hard drive is running hot, which may be contributing to my system issues.

Time to clean out all the dust bunnies and look into replacing whatever has gone bad.

LOTRO is going well, I actually hooked up with a few members of Explorers of Legend and have joined the guild they are in. The guild is named Explorers of MiddleEarth and they seem like nice people.