New PC

Well, I bit the bullet and bought myself a new PC. Specifications are as follows:

Intel Core i7 920
Asus P6T motherboard
12GB (6x2GB) Kingston DDR3-1333
Asus HD4870 1GB
Lian-Li PC-A77 full tower case
Noctua NH-U12P CPU cooler

Kept the DVD drives and 1.5TB worth of hard drives from my old PC. Total cost? About AUD$1900 (USD$1330) all up.

Overclocking

Initial results for overclocking the i7 seemed promising - it shipped stock with a core voltage (vcore) of 1.2V. The default range of voltages for the i7 920 is 0.8v - 1.375v, according to Intel. The CPU core is a c0/c1 stepping, according to CPU-Z. I didn't really expect to be able to get a new D0 stepping, since it's way too new for the local retailers here to stock it.

Using the stock voltage, I was able to get it to run at 3.6ghz stable. At 1.375v, I could run it at 3.8ghz stable. I reached 4ghz only by increasing voltage to 1.44v. 1.44v was considered far beyond safe for regular usage - the CPU was hitting >87C load, and that's using one of the highest performing air coolers on the market (the Noctua NH-U12P).

I eventually settled for 1.375v and 3.8ghz. With a multiplier of 20x, that means a BCLK of 190mhz. The cheap Kingston ValueRAM also reached a surprising overclock - it's currently running at 760mhz (1520mhz DDR), which is a 14% overclock over the stock 666mhz (1333mhz DDR). And that's at stock voltage of 1.5v, and stock latency of CL9.

That's one mighty fast CPU - a definite upgrade over my ageing Core 2 Duo E6600 circa 2006.

Didn't bother overclocking the video card; it's plenty fast enough for pretty much anything except Crysis.

The Old PC

My old hardware won't be going to waste. there's still a perfectly good E6600 and 4GB DDR2 RAM in there. It'll replace the network server I have here at home; it's currently running on a ~2001 era Northwood Pentium 4 with 512mb DDR. The Core 2 should be a significant upgrade for the server, which runs stuff like my Perforce server and media storage.

NextWar: The Quest for Earth for Xbox 360 Version 1.01 Released

Hi all.

An updated version of NextWar: The Quest for Earth for the Xbox 360 has been released to Xbox LIVE Community Games. Version 1.01 fixes the "Send Next Wave" crash bug.

If you've experienced this bug, you should redownload the game from Xbox Live Marketplace. Thanks to all who noticed and reported this bug, I wouldn't have been able to fix it without you!

NextWar Developer Q&A

I recently did a short interview for xblaratings.com.

You can read it here.