The Rapture - W.A.Y.U.H.

This song has been stuck in my head lately… thanks a lot Madden ‘07.

The McVideo Game

It’s not as good as Ivan Drago, but it’s fun nonetheless. Go destroy a 3rd world village!

McVideoGame

SLI Hell and Heaven

This one is for the gamers and techies out there.

Last night, my new $89 BFG Tech 7600GT arrived from Newegg. It’s actually my second card, for SLI. I bought my original card last March for about twice the price and it’s performed liked a champ. Before I bought the card, I knew that there were plenty of horror stories out there about mismatched BIOSs and general weirdness with SLI setups.  But, I figured, hey what the hell, it’ll work for me.  Thanks to my gaming buddy Anubis (”Yeah, keep talking smack before you have it, you’ll have SLI hell), I was also cursed with the SLI Setup From Hell.

So my 7600GT arrives and when I pull it out of the box I noticed one big potential problem. The board is shorter and blue, so it’s not an exact match to my original green, longer version. Uh-oh. I put it into the system, did all of the necessary motherboard changes to my ASUS A8N-SLI Premium and jumped into Windows. To my surprise, Windows booted up and looked to be working fine.  I reinstalled the nVidia graphics drivers and Enabled my SLI setup.

Then the problems began. I tried 3dMark06 and it bombed out.  Unreal Tournament froze on Exit, and Call of Duty 2 still only had 40 FPS in DirectX 9 mode. Hardly what I was looking for, right? It was time to track down how to “flash” the new card’s BIOS to the old card’s BIOS to match them up.  Maybe that would help? After a bit of searching I tracked down my boot disk, and slapped a copy of NVFlash on it.  Reboot. Backup the BIOS on the new card, and attempt to flash to the old card. No dice. NVFlash started yelling about the boards being different. Lovely.

So I jumped back into Windows and searched Google for my specific problem.  Low and behold I just had to add some switches (-4 -5 -6) and it would force the BIOS onto the old card. So I booted back to my boot up disk, ran NVFlash, and after various warnings and pleadings to not flash that BIOS onto a different board, I had two functional cards with matching BIOSs.

That should fix everything, right? Wrong.  It was a 50% improvement, but UT was still freezing the system and Call of Duty 2 was just jumping around like a mad man.  So I complained, whined and moaned.  I tried switching the cards around without any improvement.  I switched them back.  Nothing seemed to work.  So after a Yahoo Chat with Gump and Anubis, Anubis told me he had the answer to my solutions. His magical solution was for me to call BFG’s Tech Support at 1-866-BFGFIXX (1-866-234-3499). I said, “Yeah Right.” Anubis made a good point, “Um, you’re going to call in three days anyway after you’ve been bitching, why not try now?”

So, I called. I held on the phone for nearly 30 minutes and gave all of the good geeky info to tech support guy. His professional response to the blue card, “Hmm. Uh. Hmm. Well, weird I’ve never seen a blue 7600GT, but that should matter. You’re getting some weird errors. Who is your motherboard manufacturer?” So I told him it was ASUS and he directed me to find out what chipset I had running, which I already knew and told him it was the nForce4.

“Great, go download the newest chipset drivers from nVidia, that should clear you up.”

I said thanks, that I’d try it and hung up. I had to admit I was skeptical. But, SLI Heaven was a chipset update away. I reinstalled the graphics drivers again after the chipset and low and behold my SLI works at 99% stability now.

3dMark06 went from the low 3000s with one to 5500+ with SLI

Call of Duty 2 is getting 75 FPS in multiplayer DX9 full everything at 1680×1050 resolution.

Unreal Tournament Single Player with Highest everything and 1680×1050 averages over 200 FPS.

Thanks BFG Tech Support and Thanks Anubis!

Ivan Drago: Justice Enforcer!

So the guys over at DannyFordIsGod.com made me wet my pants with delight the other day when they posted an online game called Ivan Drago: Justice Enforcer. You remember Ivan, the evil Russian that Rocky had to fight. Well he’s back to clean up America. See if you can get through this 80’s-style arcade game. I can make it through all of the levels, but I always need the continue.

Check out a couple of screen shots: