Mr. Natural
May 7th, 2004, 09:18 am
Howdy gang,
I noticed something during my last Friday night gaming session. It was kind of sad actually. I took a break from Far Cry and decided to load up BF1942 for a while for some online gaming fun. I’m still a BF1942 junkie and love playing still even though I don’t get the opportunity much. Anyway I fired the game up and started looking for a low ping game with lots of folks for some online madness. As I scrolled down the list it was obvious. A lot of empty servers out there. I was still able to find a game to join in, but it’s obvious, BF1942 popularity is waning. I think probably what had the biggest impact on the drop of participants is Unreal Tournament 2004. Plus there have been a number of good games such as Far Cry taking away from the online participation. Yeah I know Far Cry has online support, I haven’t tried it yet, still working on the single player. I haven’t heard any stellar comments on it though so it hasn’t been on my list of things to check out right away. I don’t think BF-Vietnam has given the BF1942 community the shot in the arm EA Games was wanting. I guess there will still be a few of us die hards out there, so I hope BF1942 lives on for a long time.
Last week I mentioned overclocking computers in my post. Here’s my take on overclocking. A few months ago I was watching “The Screensavers” on Tech TV. Leo and Pat took a phone call from a fellow who had just fried his ATI 9800XT pro video card due to overclocking. Leo and Pat looked at each other and said, “You have a top of the line card, why are you overclocking it?” This is my feeling as well. I know there are a lot of enthusiasts out there who are into seeing how high they can make their system run. But my opinion is if you have a high end system, what’s the point? My system is still kind of new, actually it is a year and a half old. But until I loaded up Far Cry I could run any game at stock speed to my liking just fine. When I first built my system I did play around with overclocking. I think I got my 2.53 up to around 2.93ghz before it became totally unstable. Not too bad for air cooling. But I would still experience occasional glitches, games crashing to desktop, and even complete sudden reboots.
I finally asked myself, “What the heck am I doing here? I have a brand new pc, it runs everything great, why do I need to risk trashing my hardware or corrupting my OS? Do I want to risk a couple days or more downtime? Overclocking usually requires increasing the voltage to the motherboard, cpu, video card and memory. The more overclock, the more voltage you need to increase, which equals more heat and shorter lifespan of the hardware. I finally set everything back to stock speed and have been enjoying things without a hiccup. It wasn’t until I came across Far Cry I’ve decided to “tweak things” again in order to squeeze a little more performance out of my system. So for now I have a mild overclock on my system at 2.66. So far that’s as high as I can get things to run stable. You have to kind of tweak these things a little at a time for a stable overclock. After all my system is now a year and a half old. It’s starting to show it’s age (in pc gaming terms). Maybe I’m looking for an excuse or cause to have to replace my system. :wink:
My opinion is don’t mess with overclocking unless you have an older system and can afford to replace damaged goods, find a need (such as playing Far Cry) or do that kind of stuff as a hobby on a regular basis.
Looks like this weekend will consist of more quality GF time. However there is light at the end of the tunnel. The GF is scheduled to work next weekend! Excellent! :lol:
Enjoy your weekend gang. Party on!
I noticed something during my last Friday night gaming session. It was kind of sad actually. I took a break from Far Cry and decided to load up BF1942 for a while for some online gaming fun. I’m still a BF1942 junkie and love playing still even though I don’t get the opportunity much. Anyway I fired the game up and started looking for a low ping game with lots of folks for some online madness. As I scrolled down the list it was obvious. A lot of empty servers out there. I was still able to find a game to join in, but it’s obvious, BF1942 popularity is waning. I think probably what had the biggest impact on the drop of participants is Unreal Tournament 2004. Plus there have been a number of good games such as Far Cry taking away from the online participation. Yeah I know Far Cry has online support, I haven’t tried it yet, still working on the single player. I haven’t heard any stellar comments on it though so it hasn’t been on my list of things to check out right away. I don’t think BF-Vietnam has given the BF1942 community the shot in the arm EA Games was wanting. I guess there will still be a few of us die hards out there, so I hope BF1942 lives on for a long time.
Last week I mentioned overclocking computers in my post. Here’s my take on overclocking. A few months ago I was watching “The Screensavers” on Tech TV. Leo and Pat took a phone call from a fellow who had just fried his ATI 9800XT pro video card due to overclocking. Leo and Pat looked at each other and said, “You have a top of the line card, why are you overclocking it?” This is my feeling as well. I know there are a lot of enthusiasts out there who are into seeing how high they can make their system run. But my opinion is if you have a high end system, what’s the point? My system is still kind of new, actually it is a year and a half old. But until I loaded up Far Cry I could run any game at stock speed to my liking just fine. When I first built my system I did play around with overclocking. I think I got my 2.53 up to around 2.93ghz before it became totally unstable. Not too bad for air cooling. But I would still experience occasional glitches, games crashing to desktop, and even complete sudden reboots.
I finally asked myself, “What the heck am I doing here? I have a brand new pc, it runs everything great, why do I need to risk trashing my hardware or corrupting my OS? Do I want to risk a couple days or more downtime? Overclocking usually requires increasing the voltage to the motherboard, cpu, video card and memory. The more overclock, the more voltage you need to increase, which equals more heat and shorter lifespan of the hardware. I finally set everything back to stock speed and have been enjoying things without a hiccup. It wasn’t until I came across Far Cry I’ve decided to “tweak things” again in order to squeeze a little more performance out of my system. So for now I have a mild overclock on my system at 2.66. So far that’s as high as I can get things to run stable. You have to kind of tweak these things a little at a time for a stable overclock. After all my system is now a year and a half old. It’s starting to show it’s age (in pc gaming terms). Maybe I’m looking for an excuse or cause to have to replace my system. :wink:
My opinion is don’t mess with overclocking unless you have an older system and can afford to replace damaged goods, find a need (such as playing Far Cry) or do that kind of stuff as a hobby on a regular basis.
Looks like this weekend will consist of more quality GF time. However there is light at the end of the tunnel. The GF is scheduled to work next weekend! Excellent! :lol:
Enjoy your weekend gang. Party on!