It’s me, live with it

I didn’t know that they will be releasing a James Bond game until a few days ago, when I read about it at IGN. Being a Bond fan, I set out to find more. After a few minutes of researching (as in, reading this Wikipedia page), I found this game to be quite appealing.

I have been a shooter fan since the early days of counter-strike. Since then, I’ve played quite a lot of title, and finished nearly all of them. Among them, Call of Duty 4 is one of my favourite. It is great looking without being a major system hog, Nice story, no horrible bugs, and so on. And the upcoming Quantum of Solace will be using the Call of Duty 4 engine. So, at least, it should look good and hopefully not become a system hog. Unless the developers make a terrible mistake in building the game, the chances are slim.

The developer for this game is Beenox, whom I’ve never heard of before. From what I read, though, they made quite a lot of game ports to PC. So I think the game is in good hands.

Back to the game.

Daniel Craig, in my opinion, made great performance in Casino Royale. That is my favourite James Bond movie, if only because the first James Bond movie I watched was Tomorrow Never Dies.

So, this will be a game that is based on one of my favourite movie, using the engine of one of my favourite game. This, I will be looking forward to.

I’ve been fiddling around Nvidia’s CUDA these last few days. And I am very impressed so far.

For example, I need a few days to get 100 folding@home points when I’m using the CPU. Using my 8600GT boosted my score to 800 overnight, which is entirely impressive.

It proves that a GPU can work much faster in some applications than a CPU. Much, much faster. It is very fast that I think there is a mistake somewhere, but no, it really is that fast.

I am currently thinking to upgrade my video card. I’m eyeing to buy a Radeon HD 4670, but I’m not going to drop the 8600GT. I have a spare PCIex4 slot, and the 8600GT will continue folding there.

It’s great to have a supercomputing power at home, let me tell you.

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me this question:

“Do you think that 740GB of harddrive space will be balanced with 2GB of memory?”

A little weird, but I understand the meaning. He is concerned that adding more harddrive space to a PC will slow it down, because more harddrive space needs more memory so it doesn’t flog itself all day.

There is a little flaw in the logic, though, so I’ll give a short answer here. It is fine, you can add even 750 more gigabyte without worrying.

Now for the long answer.

First, we need to understand what RAM does in your PC. Wikipedia page here, you just need to scan through it.

Random Access Memory is used as a temporary storage that holds the data your CPU (processor, if you will) is processing. Pretty much all it does is just feeding unprocessed data from the harddrive to the CPU and sending back any data that needs to be written to the hard drive.

The data it needs to hold, by the way, depends on what you’re doing. Hammering away at Microsoft Word only adds a little memory usage from the amount already used by your operating system. Play Crysis, though, and you’ll need an extra gigabyte for keeping textures, levels, models, configurations, and so on. Using professional 3D applications like Maya or 3Ds Max needs a respectable amount of memory, too.

Your operating system also needs some memory space to run nicely. Older Windows version, like Windows 98 only needs a few tens of megabytes. Windows Vista, on the other hand, can use one gigabyte nicely. Sane people sticks with XP, which needs a few hundred megabytes, but is a mature operating system by now.

Even if you have five 500GB harddrives tied in JBOD setup, you don’t need much more memory compared to using one 250GB drive. Yes, you need some memory space to keep the JBOD setup working nicely, but that’s about it.

In conclusion, the amount of memory you need is not related to the amount of harddrive space you have. It correlates to what operating systems you are using, what applications you are opening, and what files you are actually working on.

I had a disagreement with a friend of mine. He said that a graphics card’s brand will determine its performance. I think the opposite. I’m following dan’s must-be-cheap doctrine.

I think so because there are only a few board manufacturer, versus a helluva number of brands. This means that quite a few brands will share the same board, Maybe they put a custom heatpipe cooler, but that’s about it.

And as far as I can see, they perform pretty much the same, too. An example here at firingsquad. If you look at the boards which shares the same clockspeed, you can see that there’s no performance difference. Even when you’re comparing it with the highest factory-overclocked type, you can only see 13% difference. It is big enough to be noticeable, but not big enough for me to care. Besides, I like overclocking the card myself, so if I can save 40 bucks by buying a cheap brand, I will without hesitation.

The radeon 4670 I mentioned earlier, is finally available here in Indonesia. I can only find a Sapphire-branded one, which is currently priced at a little above IDR 1.000.000.

It is a little bit above my predictions, but I’m still waiting for the offerings from HIS, Digital Alliance, GeCube, and PowerColor. I can’t find any 4670 from Digital Alliance’s site, though, so I’m not entirely sure about their offering. I hope the price will go down as more vendors release it.

Now, though, I’m still waiting.