Brent’s Thoughts

I am not a hardcore hardware reviewer, but I think I will jot down some notes on what I thought about this board.

Personally, I like this thing. It works well and has some nice settings on it that will let you Overclock the CPU, memory, and video card. The north bridge and south bridge work well and I haven’t hit any bugs or glitches with it. I have had a few issues with the board rebooting if the CPU gets too hot, which isn’t really a bad thing, but annoying. Also if you have an ISA card that you need to use then this board isn’t for you. Only PCI and AGP on here. The board also comes with some nice audio on board that works really well under Linux and Windows. The extra IDE ports on the board are nice as well, even if you just use them as regular IDE and not the RAID that they will do.

:) :) as far as MOBOs go.

I think this song is the theme song for my life. Perhaps it isn’t my life in general. I don’t know if other people have these kinds of problems, but it seems that it is the story of my life.

Scott Stafford has long since disappeared. He was gone around 5th grade and I haven’t heard from him since.

Todd lives in Hawaii now and I hardly see him anymore. He recently had a kid that I wonder how long it will be until I see it.

Jim is actually the closest (in distance) of my old friends. He still lives pretty much in the same spot, but he is still a good distance away and has his own life to live there.

maxx has moved to California and it sounds like I will see him even less than I have been, since he is not planning on coming by here anytime soon. I understand his reasons, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.

Frank has rolled out to Belgium and will be returning to go to North Carolina.

Jeremiah, who is the latest member of the crew, is slated to leave for Bloomington, IN around the end of August to go back to school. Plus I cannot believe that at some point he will not end up in a foreign country as a missionary.

Every time I get a new member of the crew something happens to cause them to go somewhere else. Maybe I smell bad. I guess it is possible to look at it from the point of view that if one didn’t leave I would never meet the others, but that seems weak at best on the argument scale. I have talked with some of you about my dream to have all of my friends back around me and having a good time. I wish there was some way I could make that happen. In the end I hope you all know that if you need me, I am here… still, and that I do wish you were here.

So for a while now I have been suffering through my job at AFNI, with little to do and less to think about. So I started reading some different material (I will talk about this in another post) and that has sort of jump started my brain a little. I picked up some documentation on iptables (firewalling tools) and started working through it. I dropped this though as the How-To that I am looking at is formated wrong for my learning style. So I started working on Diablo to make him better. I realized that I hadn’t tried the second IDE controller that the board had under Linux so I started messing with that. I had to pick up an auxillery power supply from some old dell machine to power all of the drives. So then I had 4 hard drives in but they were all different sizes and that was annoying. Having remembered some stuff I read I picked up some docs for LVM (Logical Volume Manager) for Linux and I read through it. Picked it up pretty nice and started working on it. I probably wouldn’t have been able to focus on it much except for I dug up some KMFDM mp3s and started jamming. In the end I now have one drive of 47 gigs and one virtual drive of 87 gigs. This drive is composed of a 60g, a 17g, and a 10g drive. I have been working on getting some GUI type programs to work so that I can get some screen shots of this for those that want a graphical idea of what it looks like. This is a perfect example of the streaky-ness of my life and moods. A couple of weeks ago I was in a depression and now I am feeling pretty good. I think it is because there are a couple potential jobs on the horizion that I would be willing to get out of AFNI for. Hopefully they will come in and I can be back to my happy go lucky self.

I have added a new section this. Obviously it is called reviews :). I am going to attempt to review the things that I do and try here. So on with the first review.

:) :)

4/5 smileys

Microsoft has definitely come out with the best console on the market now, but I am not sure how much of it is Microsoft and how much of it is NVidia. For originality MS gets a 1 out of 5. In truth beyond the security “features” they added, such as hard drive encryption and no standard ports they have created a computer. Congrats only 25+ years too late. MS didn’t truly do any technical “innovation” which to me is just more proof that they are not a techinical company, but a marketing company with buy-out divisions. They didn’t add all the stuff that they could have into the machine in my opinion. This machine looks fairly nice and I don’t have any issue placing it in my stereo cabinet. They should have went with this to add in a mp3 playing stereo componet to it. Also since it is a computer, has a network connection and does run a version of Windows it seems it would have been quite easy for them to enable file transfer to it so that patches, updates, and addons to games could be uploaded to it. As well as files for songs that you want to played.

For thought though they get a 5 because the did the one thing that has always held computers back as truely hard core gaming consoles: Standardization. Here MS has created a badass computer that can really rock some games. So can regular computers, but what they did is they told game developers, “Make your stuff work on THIS hardware and we will make sure that the hardware works and is the same for all of the machines.” This is what made console games so much more popular than computer games for a long time. MS’s slogan “It just works” (or is that AOL) really applies here.

So lets take a look at what really makes this things rock though. Is it the memory? No it has less than most computers that you can buy now. Is it the CPU? No it actually has a P3 cpu in it. Most of the machines you buy now are P4 so that can’t be it. How about the hard drive? Well it is true that most consoles don’t have hard drives (yet), so that does make it better than all the other consoles, but still most computers have hard drives that are bigger than the one in the Xbox and faster. Video Card? Hell yeah, part of it is the fact that the buses on the mainboard are a little better optimized than normal PC buses, but in truth the thing that makes the Xbox shine is the NVidia Graphics chip. It has options and functions in it that MS hasn’t even started to delve into yet. This is what makes the Xbox better than the PS2. The PS2 is over a year old and working with some older hardware from a company that is not whole known for making badass video cards. Now the Gamecube is a little better off in that it also has a big name video card manufacturing company making its stuff. ATi makes a decent video card, but I think that Nintendo is aiming too low with its games to become a huge force again. Therefore I think NVidia should get most of the credit for the Xbox. Anyone can make a PC, but it is the work that they put into the video card that truly makes the Xbox.

All in all the Xbox is a damn nice piece of hardware. It is fun to mess with and it has some really nice games that I will review soon. Also I think because it is so much like a computer that it has some really nice potential for advancement through hacks and modifications. Hopefully some thing really cool will come out of it.