It’s good to be back
Apologies for my unexpected silence during the last couple of days. I had intended to make a couple of posts, but I found myself getting a little sidetracked.
The primary cause was the arrival of my new computer. Seriously, I must take a moment to praise ShuttleUK’s excellent service. When my brother called them on Tuesday, while I was out at work, to check the status of the order, they said that, if they finished building it before 4:30 PM, it might reach me by Thursday or Friday. Imagine my delight, then, when I got home on Wednesday to find it waiting for me, pre-assembled and ready to go. Although my previous four systems were all self-built, there’s definitely something nice about getting more or less a complete system out of the box. Of course, there were a handful of extra steps involved for me, namely hooking up my USB sound card (which conveniently arrived on the same day), opening up the case and fitting my secondary hard disk (the SATA and power cables were a bit of a squeeze, but everything worked out in the end), and installing Windows Vista.
I liked Vista, by the way, although it ultimately ended up lasting for just over 24 hours before I wiped it and went back to XP (more on this in just a moment). I cursed at it several times, but only over trivial things that I could easily correct by changing the settings, or could have got used to over time. Most importantly, there was nothing about the basic functionality that caused me to revert back to XP.
Unfortunately, as is almost always the case with computers, all was not plain sailing. As nice as Vista is, the available drivers and software are currently not in the best state. Lyris has already run into problems with his Radeon X800 video card, since ATI have yet to add video-in functionality to their Vista drivers, while I found myself unable to use my USB Freeview stick. I also encountered a whole host of problems with both PowerDVD 6.5 and PowerDVD Ultra, although how many of them were because of Vista, my video card or a combination of the two is unclear. Anyway, I would say that, until DirectX 10 games start becoming widely available, Vista doesn’t really have anything substantial to offer beyond a more aesthetically pleasing (albeit in my opinion slightly less productive) GUI. Anyway, prior to uninstalling Vista, yet another problem reared its ugly head in the shape of my new nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS.
Yes, nVidia. I swore off them last year, after the chaos that was my brief dabble with a GeForce 7600 GT before Christmas, but hey, I thought, surely the problems I had with their video playback have been fixed by now. It has, after all, been five months. Oh, how wrong I was. nVidia’s driver programming team must be comprised of blindfolded monkeys, because I can’t think of any other explanation for why their overlay implementation is so bafflingly idiotic. For a start, their inverse telecine quality is inferior to ATI’s (which, for computer-based deinterlacing, is in my opinion close to flawless). The main problem, however, is the same one that I encountered back in December: piss-poor contrast, brightness and gamma controls. Seriously, the sliders seem to have a mind of their own, and are inconsistently applied depending on which software you’re using to play back your video, DVD or whatever (unlike ATI’s AVIVO, where you just set the sliders once - leave them at their defaults, in fact, because they are pretty much perfectly calibrated from the outset - and never have to worry about them again). Try as I might, I could never get anything approaching “pure” black without lowering the gamma so much that the entire video would be plunged into a state of almost complete darkness. I basically had to settle for murky grey in PowerDVD, because nVidia’s brightness settings were so high, even with the slider in their control panel at 0%, that PowerDVD’s brightness slider couldn’t be dragged far enough into the negative figures to counter it. Oddly enough, Windows Media Player was much better from a brightness standpoint, although I was still losing massive amounts of shadow detail in order to get anything approach true black.
I bravely soldiered on with nVidia for several hours, trying every combination of slider controls and different generations of drivers that I could think of (including one, which ironically enough was included on the CD that came with the card, which caused me to lose control of the overlay’s settings entirely), before finally saying “Screw it!” and ripping my case open, ready to prise the card out and fit my old Radeon X1950 Pro. The only problem is that my Radeon has a ridiculously large fan, which causes the card to take up close to three expansion slots (despite only being a single-slot card) and be considerable taller than normal. Translation: it doesn’t fit in my new ultra-compact shuttle case. As a result, I’ve purchased an unused Sapphire ATI Radeon x1950 Pro 512MB on eBay, which should fit nicely, as it only takes up two slots (judging by the size of the picture fan) and is a sensible height. In the meantime, it was extremely fortunate that Lyris had a spare Radeon X1300 lying around, because I’m using that just now. It’s a lightweight as far as gaming performance goes, but it’ll do until my new card arrives. Anything but having to wrangle with that GeForce again. I’ve now decided: from this moment on, no nVidia product will cross the threshold of this house. It’s just not worth the hassle. It’s a shame, because I’m sure that, for 99% of gamers, it’s an absolutely brilliant card. For someone who demands high quality, hassle-free video playback, however, it’s hopelessly crippled.
(ATI do, by the way, have their own DirectX 10-enabled video card coming out in the near future in the shape of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but I expect it will be a little too expensive for my means when it first comes out, and in any event, a DirectX 10 card is fairly pointless without Vista. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on it, though - the given benchmarks show it absolutely thrashing the GeForce 8800.)
Oh yeah, I came across another random annoyance yesterday. As nice as my USB Audigy 2 NX is, it doesn’t have the full functionality of its PCI variant. For a start, there’s no tone control (basically treble and bass with Creative’s drivers). Worse still, I discovered that, for standard PCM audio, it can’t pass anything better than 2-channel stereo via its digital connections (DVDs, however, can still be experienced in all their 5.1 glory, thanks to the wonders of S/PDIF). No problem, I thought, I’ll just connect the card to my decoder through analogue. Next problem: my decoder has front and rear analogue inputs, but nothing for the centre speaker and subwoofer. Who in the hell makes a 5.1 audio decoder and then only allows up to 4-channel analogue audio? Answer: Creative, the same loonies who made a 5.1 sound card that can’t send 5.1 audio over digital. I can live with 4-channel audio for games and other miscellaneous functions at the moment, but I’m actively eyeing up the alternatives. A new sound card - one which supports 5.1 digital audio - would be considerably more cost-effective than a new audio decoder, but the problem is that you’re rather limited when it comes to USB sound cards (as I’ve already explained, my Shuttle motherboard can’t accept any PCI devices due to size constraints).
Oh yeah, and I’m going to have to get a new keyboard, since Shuttle, in a further attempts to save space, removed some of the legacy I/O ports on the motherboard, including the LPT, and P/S2 mouse and keyboard connectors. Unfortunately, my keyboard is P/S2, meaning that it’s USB keyboard hunting time. I’m currently using a spare wireless Microsoft keyboard belonging to my brother, but it’s a pretty rotten piece of hardware, so blame any spelling mistakes in this post on it rather than my poor addled brain. I need to find a long network cable somewhere too, so I can connect my printer to our router via 10BASE-T (previously, it was connected to my old computer’s archaic LPT port, for some ungodly reason).
All in all, I can’t say I’m not frustrated by the situation. I love my new Shuttle: it’s compact and deliciously quiet - so much so that, when I first switched it on, I thought it was dead on arrival until the boot screen appeared on my monitor. It’s also going to be a pleasantly powerful gaming setup once it has a half-decent video card in it. The whole process, however, is turning out to be somewhat more expensive than I was expecting, and, with the obvious benefits provided by a small form factor PC, come the even more obvious trade-offs brought about by the decrease in available space for components. I’m confident that I will eventually be completely happy with my purchase. In the meantime, however, it’s off to Google to look for some bargains.
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