This week my 939 based AMD 3700+ X2 has been replaced. Good bye old friend, you held up better than could have been hoped even under the whip of overclocking and played long beyond your abilities. In your place I've got a sexy new i5 760, but that's no reason to go away to eBay mad. So let's all toast to old CPU's and the fun we've had together. [Image Can Not Be Found]

Anyway, some observations. The new CPU did help with Red Faction: Guerilla . I was having serious problems with lag and unplayable slowness once I destroyed something with lots of complexity. Apparently, the continual physics calculations that were slowing things down causing issues. However, there's something about the game and its menus and interactions with Windows live that's seriously broken. Playing Crysis takes ~28% of my total CPU pool, Metro takes ~46%, and waiting at a menu for an update to Windows Live to download takes 100% of all four cores. WTF? I read something about some other idling too fast when there's nothing to draw and this sounds about the same.This really loud klaxon started to sound while updating and I thought I had won the lottery. Then I found out it was my hardware monitor sounding an alarm for overheating and I had to kill the process thereby breaking the patch application. That's nice.

This rig should play F1 2010 very nicely and heat this room through winter as well.

In Metro 2033 one of the soldiers at the end of the game had this magnetic rail driver gun. I never obtained one and couldn't arrange for his death so I could wind up with it. I just started again and now I find one of these guns in the very first human enemy room we encounter. Anyone else see this? It's the weapon of the game, dropping those jumping Nosalises with one shot and the winged demons in two. Ammo is cheap and an hour in I have 360 of the lead balls and haven't shot a regular round or shotgun shell.

My estimation of Steam went up a notch when I started and found the control mappings from Metro preserved from before. This is a new drive so it's definitely Steam doing it. That's nice. I hope the control settings are still present for GTR-Evolution as they're a pita to get set up properly. That would go a little way towards making up for the fact that support for MoTeC no longer seems to work. 

I had the Diamond Monster MX300 sound card and the first Voodoo 3DFX card in what was the a very tricked out 3D Thief machine. Sadly Aureal went bust and no one had drivers for anything past win98. I had a discrete sound card prior to this, but the new mobo's have built in 7.1 support and while I'm sure someone would argue a discrete card is better, it's no longer worth the effort. My new CPU is smaller than the last one and the mobo is as small as a uATX one. Ah, newness.

Remember F1 2010 next Wednesday!