Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Yesterday, a few of us went to Sim Lim Square to build a custom system for one of us. The system was going to be solely for rendering videos and post-processing pictures. Since it was going to be a white-box, which means that we could choose all the components that made up the system, the buyer picked the following:

• Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 2.4 GHz processor
• PowerColor HD 3870 x2 DDR4 graphics processing unit (GPU), also known as the graphic card
• 3 X 1 Terabyte (TB) hard disk (I forgot the brand)
• 2 X Kingston 2 Gigabyte (GB) (I think it was the DDR2-800) random access memory stick (RAM)

I took the opportunity to upgrade my notebook’s ram to 4GB. Unfortunately, it turns out that my laptop BIOS has been limited to use only 3GB, so I’m out of luck with the last 1GB. I can’t even install PAE extensions for the Ubuntu 8.04 Linux operating system on the computer, since it’s a lower-level part of the system that’s the limiting factor. I wasn’t totally out of luck though, because dual channel for the RAM started working properly again, because the 2 new pieces of RAM installed were very similar pieces (a crucial step in making sure that dual channel works properly).

The graphics card is a super-zhnged piece of monster, with pipes running around the body. The fan blade is an angry buzzer whining when the system first starts up. Or it could have been the exhaust fan at the casing’s rear. Or the processor fan. Wait, was it the air-intake cooler at the front of the case? When the assembled system ran, it was hard to tell, but I do know one thing for sure: it is going to be hell to have to sleep in the same room with the thing running video renders overnight.

Thankfully, it isn’t going to be a problem because the buyer is going to put it in an air-conditioned study area, so the noise bugbear isn’t going to be as bad.

A friend successfully installed a hacked Macintosh OS X operating system (commonly called the “Hackintosh“) onto the desktop, but for some unknown system, the graphics card would refuse to go into 3D accelerated mode. As we all know, it’s a humongous waste of money to spend $200 over dollars on a monster graphic card, only to use it without its touted features! So we spent the entire night over at the friend’s place to try and hack up a solution to the problem.

For me, since I’m not really into OS X and Macintoshes, I resorted to surfing the Internet while the other 2 of them tried to coax the thing to work.

At around 11pm, we ordered delivery from McDonalds. 45 minutes, a subtly disturbed looking delivery person knocked at the door with our meals. He would get to make the same trip half an hour later when my other friend placed his order after the delivery guy left, and return he did, a dark expression on his face, and my friend thought he felt a strong murderous intent when I suggested that we make another order an hour later.

The Mega McSpicy turned out to be the old discontinued McSpicy Double with an artificial price hike, and gave me a hellish toilet trip the next morning at 7am. It broke a record in terms of meal turn-around time, because my toilet trips usually come 8 hours after the meal.

At around 2am, I couldn’t stay awake any longer, so I laid down on the couch in the living room. In the quiet Boon Lay night, my laptop blared music from an Internet stream from the bedroom where my friend was busy trying to hack OS X, to the living room, where I knocked out, figuratively speaking.

It was like finally succumbing to a comfortable black hole in my eyes. No dreams though; somehow I’ve become unaware of my dreams. Either I was forgetting them when I wake up, or I was seriously too dead-beat to be able to remember them.

Thus ends the report on what I did on Friday. It was an unintentional sleep-over that resulted from an over-extended geek pilgrimage, which would have bored any normal person to death. Therefore, I want to congratulate you for having managed to finish reading this. Extra credits if you can understand half of what I typed in the first few paragraphs.

Filed under: General