It's Alive!!! Faucon's Computer Runs Again

Finally, my computer is up and running. It took one hour of power-supply transplant surgery, but my patient, an Athlon 64 3700+ (socket 754 Clawhammer core) mated to a DFI Lanparty UT nForce3 250Gb motherboard with 2GB of CAS Latency 2 (2-3-2-5 1T) PC 3200 Patriot RAM (GO USA!!!), 4 hard drives (1x 74GB Wester Digital Raptor drive; 1 160GB Western Digital PATA drive, and 2x 320GB in a RAID 0), and a GeForce 6800 Ultra (Engineering Sample), is recovering nicely.

The key here was the video card. Since it's an engineering sample, it takes more wattage than the retail 6800 Ultras (350Watt power supply recommended versus 480Watt PSU). My previous power supply was just a regular 430Watt baby-beast. The new one, however, churns out a healthy 520Watts. To complicate matters, the 6800 Ultra requires 2 Molex power connectors with a decent amount of amps supplied to each connector. With my new Corsair PSU (from www.newegg.com) I get over 50 Amps of juice from a total of 3 independent +12Volt rails!... more than enough for the 4 hard drives, 2 DVD-RW drives, video card and other components. Yay! Computer's alive again!

My parts are dated, though, as they were all top-of-the-line 2 and half years ago. I don't really care... as my computer is quiet and hauls balls (as djRoME would say). I have SWG loaded onto the RAID 0 (that has a combined cache of 32MB). The game loads very quickly, but what's best, is that the transition between levels is about 5 seconds. My computer from 2 & half years ago would take about 40 seconds. The RAM helps too. Anyway... enough of this tech-talk. Let's get down with the game.

As you should know by now, I play SWG (Star Wars Galaxies) with my brother. We are part of the Cheerioz family, with my brother going by Nee and myself going by Faucon. That's French for Falcon. I was inspired by the short story from 1829 by Prosper Mérimée. It's a story that takes place on Corsica, an island to the south of France, that I really loved visiting almost 5 years ago. Anyway, my SWG name comes from Mérimée's "nouvelle".

Click for full size (pops).

Here, you can see a picture of Nee and I at our Cheerioz estate, near Moenia on the planet Naboo. My brother and I are about to head out on a "Legacy" quest.

Click for full size (pops).

Here's another shot of us riding in Nee's 2-person transport. Lots of trees on Naboo, especially around Moenia... which is in a swampy part of the planet.

Anyway, "Legacy" quests are the SWG version of a story-driven arc. They lead you throughout the galaxy and often times require some flying in order to complete the missions. You get a chance to meet many people from the books & movies, which is one of the things that I find so exciting about SWG versus other MMOs out there. Also, as you should know, flying is my favorite part of this game. In my next entry, I'll be explaining more about my ship and will tell you why... for some reason... I have a screenshot of my character with almost no clothes on!

Until then, this is Faucon, logging off.