Setting aside the fact that some aspects of the game felt somewhat shifty and that you only get to experience a fraction of the single-player campaign I still came away liking it. Sort of. Even though it’s a different game altogether from SC1 and SC1:FA.

A great many things seem to have been simplified. There is now a tech research tree instead of factory upgrades. And there doesn’t seem to be a bonus to constructing certain buildings next to each other, like energy generators next to factories. SC1 had complex base building theories originating from this little feature. I like how factories only come in one flavor, and can build all units that have been researched. But I do miss having three different generators, three different mass extractors etc.

Also I am unsure how resource management really works. Seems you just pay once for structures now, and that you no longer have to manage power consumption of shields, defensive guns etc over time as they come online and you lose generators in combat. Also I am unsure of whether you actually use energy and mass storage facilities anymore. Plus, at least the one experimental unit I did build constructed a lot faster than I remembered. And it doesn’t seem to be possible to use multiple engineer units to speed up construction of buildings and experimentals. Assigning an engineer to speed up construction at a factory still worked though.

Bottom line is that a lot of the focus has been shifted from base management to action and combat. But SC2 still holds a lot of promise … and besides, when was the last time we saw a good or even passable RTS? Most people seem to be waiting for Starcraft 2. I couldn’t care less as I never liked the first game. And especially since Supreme Commander 2 runs beautifully and scales on any hardware and Starcraft 2 is reported to run like ass even on the fastest system.

I really want to like this game. But I don’t know. Will it work out or will SC2 be yet another example of consoles (in this case the XBOX 360) ruining and "dumbing down" PC gaming? I guess we’ll find out in a few days. Also looking forward to a version with no Steam and less unskippable intro videos.

Edit: Got the final game and I’m sorry to say that I was underwhelmed. It’s an Ok game but nothing more. The more I play, the more annoying I find the game’s signature unit spam. And as far as the AI is concerned it’s either stupid and easy or stupid and hopelessly difficult. There is no middle ground. Even though I don’t play RTS multiplayer and never will, I can imagine that MP sessions will be short unless you pay attention. Just build a handful of fighter/bombers and sic them on the enemy ACU and you’re done. No one can withstand a nuclear explosion in the middle of their base early on after all. I reckon the problem is that units are simply too fast and easy to build in SC2 and that games resolve far too fast because of it. Which also means that you’re unlikely to ever have time to advance within the tech tree. Just upgrade your air units with more health and shields if possible and keep spamming. Air units after all don’t depend on fuel anymore as they did in SC1 so you can use them liberally. I’d go so far as to suggest playing MP games without air units.

Verdict still stands. WotLK is the grindiest game ever. Leveling my top three characters to 80 was easy enough once I had done it once and could buy "cold weather flying" plus swift flying mounts for the other two. I also changed some professions around. Leveled mining and jewelcrafting. Then finished leveling enchanting and took up inscription. Finally leveled alchemy and kept herbalism. No point in keeping skinning since it isn’t profitable anymore.

Still as inaccessible to casual players as ever. Refusing to do instances goes without saying of course. But then there is the camping for rare spawn pets. Or that mount. Or grinding reputation. Or scanning the auction house for hours, undercutting, cancelling and reposting. Getting jewelcrafting recipes will take months, unless you vacuum every last piece of titanium ore at the AH for prospecting (at almost 400 gold per stack!). In particular, inscription is undercutting hell. Nothing you make at skill 400+ will make any money. You end up posting the same couple of hundred old glyphs over and over and over … I had to move all of that to a special alt just to keep the mailbox clean. Ahahaha, and people wonder why there are gold sellers in WoW. Try making the game a lot more casual and less grindy and I’m sure things will change.

I think I’ve had enough for now. Perhaps I’ll be back in Cataclysm.

After some research I realized that the reason for this was the task scheduler where WinSAT.exe exists buried quite deep in the task tree. Microsoft\Windows\Maintenance to be exact. Normally set to run at first opportunity every sunday.

As for why the scheduling causes a problem I do not know. But obviously something goes wrong coming out of sleep. Perhaps it is linked to the Radeon 5xxx series and their nifty 2D underclocking. But at any rate I do not understand how WinSAT can just rush past the benchmarking suit (pretty sure it didn’t run) and proceed to downgrade the graphics score.

On a side note, whoever caused the Falafel stand outside of Saluhallen to relocate, well fuck you buddy! I had to survive on Snickers bars.

Addendum: I also caught a fairly bad cold / influenza. Wow. Great. I suspect it was during my visit to the imaging center. Ironic.

Addendum 2: Another thing that also sticks to you, aside from contagions that is, would be the feeling of despair over the ever increasing numbers of god-awful street musicians and beggars. Never saw that ten years ago. Or perhaps I just wasn’t looking hard enough. I do remember that phenomenon from larger cities like Paris or London though. I’m struck with such a complex mix of emotions ranging from annoyance and anger to sadness, guilt and embarrassment.

Verdict: Not my cup of tea (surprise!).

Too realistic, frantic and messy. Plus you basically need teamplay to survive. Plus the demo "assault" type map puts even more emphasis on teamplay. I should probably put more time into the game seeing as I was admittedly overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the gameplay. I’m more of an Unreal Tournament or Battlefield Heroes kind of guy. Where everything makes sense and you can cut down the entire opposing team without any help from your so called teammates.

Another thing that greatly irked me was the lack of a proper HUD. Sure you have a minimap, ammo counter etc. But no health bar. The relationship between mud and blood on your screen and how much health you had left wasn’t exactly self-explanatory to say the least. I greatly prefer games that give health statistics as a bar or a number. And where you actually see how much you’ve damaged someone in exact numbers. Bad Company 2 has far too much of shooting blindly (until your ammo runs out anyway) into thick vegetation for my liking. Plus there is a whole cryptic department of upgrades and stuff in-game. From what I can tell they’ll all be free (paid DLC?) with character experience, but even so I’m not fond of the un-even gameplay they create. Jumping into a game I found myself facing high ranking players with who knows what kind of abilities. Plus there looks to be some nasty copy protection on this game. And there is punkbuster of course.

Having said that, if teamplay is your thing you’ll probably be thrilled. The graphics where also pretty impressive and I do enjoy the destructible environments greatly. Walls, building and trees get blown to smithereens in a way what reminds me a lot of Crysis.

It seems a fair assumption that the noise isn’t just coming from the PSU but is in fact caused by the PSU. Now I have a fairly fancy Corsair 520 PSU that has been working well for years. So I don’t know. Maybe the sound was always there but masked by the tremendous noise of the old graphic card. Perhaps it’s something with this GPU (5850). Or perhaps, as hinted by the unofficial solution that Corsair offers on their forum, it has to do with power consumption.

Coil whine after all can happen in any number of ways but generally there are two scenarios that people mention on the net. The first being the idle whine, usually when moving the mouse or scrolling. The other being a load whine that kicks in when both the CPU and GPU start to draw power for instance during a 3D application. That is to say, there is usually a threshold you have to pass.

And going by the Corsair debate, and their somewhat silly idea to disable SpeedStep (to increase and stabilize power consumption I take it), this train of thought bring up the notion that getting a new leaner graphic card might have actually dropped the consumption to below the coil whine threshold. It’s all pure speculation of course. But even though I haven’t disabled SpeedStep, just running some application that brings the consumption from 105 to 140 W and beyond (where I was before the upgrade) changes the audio landscape completely. Running Furmark at 220 W I just cannot hear the whine anymore. Then again that also effectively exits SpeedStep so who knows what is the chicken and the egg here.

I don’t know what I’ll do about it. RMA is awkward, just think of the shipping charges for a PSU and not having a working unit for weeks perhaps. On the other hand it was hilariously expensive so I can’t tolerate even the smallest of blemishes. Seems it is still under warranty so it seems stupid to open it up and encase the capacitors in epoxy or whatever.

The results came back without any remark so I guess I have a severe case of white-coat hypertension, in addition to my other problems. Now if I could only figure out what is driving the heart rate through the roof at the first sign of mental or physical stress.

Of course under normal circumstances I’d never pay for a factory overclocked card like this. But I’m sure it’s good for something. I’ll save a few minutes not having to overclock it myself. Har har har. I’m not so sure about the cooling though. It’s the same cooler as every other 5850 out there. Adequate but not fantastic. Though from reviews I gather the card runs no noisier than at stock speeds. Don’t know about temperatures though. But you’d think XFX would do something at least to improve the cooler. Oh well, I might get an after market cooler at any rate. I’m going to have to test it first to see how it compares to my old 2900 Pro. Plus the situation with XFX and warranty after such as modification is a bit unclear. The last time I did this to a graphic card was the 9700.

I am obsessed with power consumption obviously so I’m hoping for something like this (cut and pasted from here, sorted by typical 3D consumption):

That is the theory at least. Unfortunately I don’t have data on the 2900 Pro peak power draw, but its typical 3D draw is so gigantic that measuring it seems fairly redundant. The point has been made. The 2900 series was awful. The 4890 and 4870 were awful too in their own way but at least they delivered a performance that could relate to their massive draw. And the 5000 series offers superior performance at decreased consumption. It’s like magic. We’ll see if Nvidia’s Fermi can match that.

Addendum: I got the card and have installed it. In terms of size it was as clumsy as the 2900 Pro. Though with the small difference that the power connectors on the 5850 are placed on the short end of the board. I can only say that it was a snug fit with the Gigabyte Aurora due to the 3.5” drive cage. On a side note I also had to do a complete geometric recalibration for my standard resolution (1280×960). Not just a nudge but the screen was a mile off to the left. The joy of CRTs …

In terms of performance I’m not much of benchmarker. I ran Furmark at 1280×960 8X for 120s and saw more or less exactly a tripling of frame rates. The GPU ran at 74 degrees C compared to 79 degrees for my old card. So in terms of temperatures I’m not that impressed. But Furmark is a bit synthetic, the card is mildly overclocked and I already knew the cooling was spartan at best. At least the fan is a tad quieter than on the 2900. Idle temps by the way are around 41 degrees which I think is pretty good.

Power consumption improved about as much as I had anticipated. I don’t have any fancy testing equipment so I can only use a kill-a-watt to approximate the total power consumption. For this particular setup, idle / desktop consumption dropped from 145 to 100 W or so. That is obviously with SpeedStep scaling down the frequency of the CPU.  A particular 3D game dropped from 250 to 210 W. The Furmark test dropped from about 275 to 230 W. And that is with several times the performance obviously. Also, much to my surprise, the sleep / S3 STR consumption dropped dramatically from about 16 W to about 9 W. I had no idea that graphic cards contributed so much to S3 consumption.

All in all energy savings of up to 200 SEK per year give or take. An LCD monitor would probably cut down the costs by just as much. But all of this is obviously based on excessive use.

Camera has been idle far too much lately.