Seth Gorden

Whoah. I just had an international business meeting. I’m still getting my feet wet in the world of professional game development and production. And yet, life moves me forward faster than I realize sometimes. Just got done with a video conference to Taiwan! Technology just makes everyone so accessible. That, and having friends who are fluent in other languages. I’m so thankful I have both. International Communication Win.

Props go out to Skype for awesome connectivity, to Rick Lai for being professional, my pal and fellow Full Sail alum Scott Farmer, and my boss Tim for getting up early with me to have the meeting. Also, to my lovely wife Nina for the fresh banana nut bread this morning! So good.

Okay, I broke down and bought a new computer. First time I’ve built one up from pieces ordered individually. I got a decent new processor from Intel, the i7 line (not i7 Extreme). And I got decent graphics card from EVGA with the NVidia GeForce 9800 GT chipset that will get me through most applications without too much trouble. Nothing jaw dropping, but a decent machine with 4GB of Ram, all coming together around an award-winning Asus motherboard.

So I boot it, install the OS, and before I could even blink… Blue Screen of Death! The error was always something about MEMORY MANAGEMENT. It happened a number of times before I decided to address the issue. Turns out that my two fancy 2GB  Corsair XMS3 memory sticks operate at higher voltage than my motherboard’s default. Thankfully, Asus had my back with plenty of BIOS options to adjust the Voltage. For my particular setup, I manually configured the DRAM voltage to 1.65 and the frequency set at DRAM-1600MHz. This solved my problem. No more BSOD, and the system response just felt a whole lot snappier. All that done… it was time to benchmark!

A friend recommended the 3dMark program available from FutureMark. So, I download and run it. And what did I find? Well, words can only say so much…

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Inspired by Penny Arcade + one of my own.

[11:26] Me: I don’t quite know why, but when I read [the latest Penny Arcade Comic], I imagined that every instance of the word “Magic” was replaced with the word “Boost”
[11:27] Rob: hahaha
[11:27] Me: if I hadn’t already created a comic on the subject, I would photoshop it in there, and post it.
[11:28] Me: Maybe i’ll just start selling t-shirt that say things like… “Real Wizards use Boost”
[11:28] Rob: lol
[11:28] Me: and on the back “Real Programmers use Magic”
[11:28] Rob: that would make me lol
[11:29] Me: Okay… that does it… I will not actually sell the t-shirt, but I’ll photoshop a fake ad for one.
[11:30] Rob: lol

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