THE THIEF CALLED GARRETT

Well I did not expect to be ever writing this post, not any time soon at any rate.

But I did see the chance to build a much needed PC rig and will be followed in the winter, hopefully, by another one too. I had completely forgotten until a couple of days ago that due to my purchase choices I got the new version of my old favourite, game, Thief for free. Yes that Thief of Thief 3 Deadly Shadows infamy.

After it stated there as a problem with my coupon and a couple emails back and forth with AMD I finally got around to downloading the game via Steam.

Upon the first running of the game I was surprised to see the graphics automatically set way down low on resolution at something like 1024 or 1280 across?! So I turned this up to the 1920x1080 native resolution and whacked everything up to max, thinking that even if it is a little too much I can just alter it later?

To my surprise the coders did a silly thing in that the first few minutes of the game you could not save it and get out to change the graphics setting, or at least I thought you had to exit the game to change the important ones. This was not the brightest idea in all honesty and I was surprised someone actually coded a game like that these days! Because i can make the first few moments a living hell instead of vastly enjoyable and exciting. Well it did!

Thief reduced my new PC to its knees!

This was a bit of a shock especially as the game appeared to be coded more for AMD's graphics cards over nVidia, judging from the logos presented? After the lengthy intro was over and I had managed to do the things I was forced to do during its run I saved the game and got out of it. After an initial loo around I discovered a few things. Thief runs OK now!

It seems the Super Sampling Anti Aliasing I think it is called or SSAA does not do much in the game and yet even on low uses a great deal of power. This is also true of the Contact Hardening Shadows and Screen Space Reflections.

I turned off all of these and viola! The game now runs amazingly better than it did before! In fact I think that with a slight overclock or the addition of the Radeon R7 250OC at a later date will have this running like silky smooth!

I also heard that Thief was bug ridden and crashed a great deal and yet this did not happen in the first couple hours of running it. There does seem to be a great deal of issues with the game and if you are one having issues the website I discovered that contained the solutions I mentioned to the performance issues is here ...

http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=141887

The page explains page file issues, crashes and black screening on start up. It mentions editing a file which may seem like a strange and daunting task, it is not. That is provided you follow one simple rule and that is make a copy of the original file. Easy way I do this myself when I have had to is make two copies and rename one with an additional character so the application wont use it. Mane alterations to the correctly named file and save. If the game fails to load, is worse than before or the same then you simply delete the file altered and rename the other file back to what it was, or taking out the letter or number I added to the file. These are normally files called '.ini' that are altered and it can be things like VRAM allocation or limiting the number of CPU threads. I had a game that refused to run without crashing on my laptop which was a Phenom X3 (three CPUs). Limiting the threads to 2 mysteriously solved the issue. Now as much as I love games and always have it does surprise me that you can buy a game in this day and age of multi CPUs and GPUs and yet this error occurred.

In the meantime I will be either on a bus or on my bike in 24 hours time attempting to find and buy a Corsair Vengeance K70 Keyboard?! Plus I have to order a cooling fan splitter cable to get my other front mounted fan working. Not that I need to mind you as it as silent as a mouse with just the two fans and I have yet to hear any of the three fans operating to speed up.

So just to recap, my new rig is A10-7850K on a MSI A88XM Motherboard with 16GB of Kingston Hyper Beast 2400Mhz RAM (not 2133MHz OC'd but 2400MHz RAM) running off a Crucial MX100 SSD. No overclocking or dual graphics just yet. A months time yes but not right now.

ENTER PROJECT ZERO - THE KAVERIAN PC RIG

OK then for you coming here from my computing blog it is high time I got around to both revealing what I have been doing, a couple days late I know, and posting pictures and videos.

Yes I have been working on building a new computer rig, going to upset many fanboys here, well over half of them at a guess.

But then I was never one for waffle and inefficiency, so there!

This system comprises of ...

AMD A10-7850K (Kaveri)
MSI A88XM (slight error in ordering) GAMING SERIES
KINGSTON HYPER BEAST 2400MHZ DDR3 RAM in 2x8GB DUAL)
CRUCIAL MX100 256GB SSD (DO not even get me started on Amazon here?!)
ACE 600W PSU (change at last minute from Corsair)
CORSAIR GRAPHITE 230T CASE (BLUE FANS)
COOLERMASTER HYPER TX3 COOLER (Originally going to be Hydro i80 or whetever the closed loop watercooler is called, lol)
AOC 24" LED MONITOR
DURONIC DESK CLAMP MONITOR ARM

Now still to get, as its unfinished and YES its running but I have a fan splitter and a drive bay adaptor to buy (not enough fan ports and a schoolboy error)

Also on the hit list is the Corsair Vengeance K70 Keyboard in black with Cherry Red Switches.

Logitech G602 (err or was it G702? LMFAO!) Wireless Laser Mouse
LG Blu-Ray Writer Internal

RADEON R7 250OC for Dual Graphics

Audio Technica or Blue Microphone with Boom, Arm, Screen and Cage.

Camera for watching the wildlife in garden 24 hours a day, Logitech? LMFAO!

A professional microphone a serious thought now as I am thinking of news podcast type things. Technical term right there! Type things! Lol!

Oh and it plays Crysis (first one) on full settings rather well, with no overclocking or dual graphics, as I do not have the second graphics card yet and wont for about a month!

This was a big project for me made possible by a court case where I won out of court and I had to do a little saving too.

But it was a psychological thing I just had to achieve so that I can do this again with other things, hence why I called it Project ZERO?! Lol!

Oh and the Duronic Monitor Arm is bloody great except its not the one I orginally was going to get, as this was cheaper but also Duronic. Unfortunately using it for more than about twenty minutes and I get a massive pain in my neck that does not ease so easily.

This is likely down to either my Fibromyalgia Syndrome condition or its the part of my central nervous system in my neck that is damaged that causes the Fibromyalgia in the first place?! LMAO!!

I cannot get help as the NHS have tried once again to make me look like a liar by stating one thing to me and then contradicting me and insisting that they did not say it...

Unfortunately for them I had been recording everything I did for over 3 years so, oh dear NHS the party is most definitely OVER!! LOL!

Yes that was another issue that made this worse as I got kicked by my second GP in as many months because I would not accept being labelled as a liar, oh and I do mean literally here believe me. Lol.

So I was going through all that with Guy's Hospital and another corrupt GP Surgery that lies to you and looks you in the eye after lying and tells you they are not lying and have nothing to hide, lol.

I had thought that my new GP Surgery was not like that but I was wrong and this all occured while I was trying to do this and also an attempted burglary on my house that the Police dropped like the proverbial sack of hot sh... but which I later found out the truth about, lied to again.

Yes sorry, I have made an enemy of many public services purely because I can spot being lied to very quickly, do not like being lied to and simply want them to do the jobs they are paid for.

Because of those three simple things there are times lately when out of the blue when I least expect if they all seem to attack me at once! Lol! So that was what I meant by bad timing.

What none of them know, as not many visitors no especially the ones that disliked videos is that these videos are here to both counter and counter attack the corrupt morons in the UK. :)

Now I have explained what went on please remember that my condition also causes memory issues (loss basically and a lot) so bear with me in some of the videos as I struggle to remember things.

Oh and I have a few more things to acquire but the Kaverian PC is running!

There are more videos than I thought and as I have yet to finish the PC, two to four weeks, I am going to post up 3 videos and then do one a day, or try, for the next couple weeks?!

Hopefully there will not be too large a gap between too many videos of this build?

VIDEOS ...

THE SMALL PRINT SECTION! (LOL) I am someone that says he can do all these things and claims he is an expert in many things but its just talk. This would not be the first time this has happened in my life and now I have let people think what they like as far as mine enemies are concerned. Though as many know if you had looked at my YouTube videos you will see and here me cover a great deal of things which include Reptiles (Herpetology), Amphibians (Batrachology) and Fish (Ichthyology) and also Orchidaceae or Orchids both Hybrids and Botanical (wild species). Added to this imy my ramblings, when I find the time and not being run ragged or in circles by the powers that be, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Japanese Maple Trees, Carnivorous Plants, Cycling and Wing Chun Kung Fu. HUH!! I was supposed to type music as the first one and I forgot FILMS too. There are a few others besides.

THE BIG REVEAL

And I am sorry to have to say this AMD but that was a let down.

It seems there were a couple of words missing from the orginal text that was discovered by others, rather conveniently, lol.

When it was found and as stated in my last post the words 'The most advance APU ever' were spotted and thrown around the Internet like confetti. Of course I could only come to the conclusion that this was something better and more powerful that the currect top APU which is the A10-7850K based on the Kaveri core.

Now there had been some mention that the size of the number of transistors in the top Kaveri did not add up correctly and fell short of the size of the die.

So I naturally assumed, quite wrongly I might add, that it was either a 6 Kaveri Core, or greater GPU Core or both. Then the ball looked like a Graphene molecule so thought this may have been implemented somehow to make them faster than the currect chip but with the same core counts? Wrong again!

Two or three wrongs, I could not be more wrong than a wrong person on wrong day!

I played Fallout New Vegas while the counter was counting down and I was way overtime so exited the game while in in interesting part, jumping in and out of The Divide looking for titbits and any missed weapons, and the first thing I see were just the words 'Don't Be So Impatient' which had also been spotted by some bright sparks early yesterday I think it was.

So I am sitting there thinking 'WTF AMD?' then jumped into the Semi Accurate forum I had been monitoring only to see some confused comments about the so called big reveal. Not just me then? Lol! They were talking about the mobile Kaveru chips and I thought 'It can't have been that, it clearly stated the most advanced APU ever?!'

But flicking back to the webpage I had not only been waiting impatiently for I had told one brother and a nephew about earlier in the day now had a movie running. Only now the words..

'The most advanced APU ever goes mobile'?!

Now considering they have not released a pure CPU FX chip in a while it was natural to think that the AMD enthusiasts out there, myself included, were patiently and eagerly awaiting the reveal of a slightly more powerful Kaveri desktop chip. But we all got disappointed.

Now quite what marketing idiot thought this a good idea I have no idea but not too bright. You do not tease a desktop chip and then go and announce a mobile chip!

I thought after recent times that this type of hyping up and letting down was at an end? Clealry this is not the case, lol.

Sorry AMD and God only knows where you get the marketing guys from but that was clearly stupid and that is a first for me. It wont alter the AMD products I intend to buy but that was a major disappointment, even for me!

So it seems my original shopping list is not going to be altered at all then?

This could have been a lot worse and far more annoying because if they had set that page up with say four weeks or more as a countdown people might have held off buying their products thining that a month is all they have to wait to get something better, even if its for more money?! If so then this would have been a right royal balls up in all honesty!

Oh well back to waiting for another year and hoping that the next, REAL, more powerful APU, DESKTOP, will plug into an FM2+ socket?!

Fingers crossed!

Now I have been forced out of my gaming for no good reason I think I will quickly see what else has been announced at Computex?