It’s a bit large…
Yesterday I took delivery of my new 32" Samsung LE32R87BDX (big mouthful thar) HDTV. I have been agonising over purchasing a HD screen for ages now but finally jumped on board after the recent purchase of my Xbox 360’s HD-DVD player. While I was day-dreaming away in my office at work, the delivery man phones up saying that he’s just delivered it at my home. I almost got knocked out by an Australian backpacker as I jumped onto the bus and dashed home…to find the biggest box I’ve seen in ages. Took me a solid 10 minutes just to drag the box up to my room!
Upon unpacking the screen, it’s just hard to describe how gorgeous the thing looks in it’s lovely reflective finish, which sadly also makes it a fingerprint magnet. HD video on it looks utterly crystal clear and so defined, once you turn off the post processing features that are enabled by default. This thing is gorgeous. Now for those who will tell me to wall mount it, I’m afraid it’s not possible on these walls….they’re made of something that isn’t your standard household masonry. Suffice to say that drilling into these walls is a mission and a half and I will end up with a huge amount of broken drill bits - I speak from experience.
Sadly I had to ditch my twin 19" Widescreen TFT’s that I use with my PC, just so I could fit that HDTV on my desk. So I’m back to a single 20.1" Widescreen for the PC now. Not good, it feels really odd to work with. Anyway, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend (Monday is a public holiday) so I’ll be spending it with me girlfriend chilling out and watching HD-DVD’s on me new tele \o/
A cheap HD solution for the masses
Woo, been a while since I wrote any solid content for the blog. To be honest I’ve been incredibly busy with settling into my new position at work amonst other things. Spoilt by some of the HD quality film trailers/game trailers on the Xbox Marketplace, DVD’s have started to look poor by comparison. I just cannot watch a DVD anymore without spotting how bad its video quality is in comparison. I have been holding off purchasing the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player for quite some time now but have finally purchased the thing.
Not a lot of people know that it can be easily used in Windows, so I decided to write up a quick article on how it could be done. PR has recently reviewed his HD-DVD drive on his blog and likes it too!
Does it impress?
I’ve been writing about this for a while now, just collecting and scribbling down my experiences with this new operating system from Microsoft. It’s such a big system with so many drastic changes under the hood that at this early stage, it can have teething problems. Read my first two months experience Here.
Also a quick heads up, PR has updated his blog with a blinding review of the Toshiba M400 TalbotPC!
Ratters!
Just a quick mention that I’ve added a review of a new toy that I’ve recently purchased for my second PC. I’ve been a bit slow on the reviews front but haven’t at all forgotten them. Now that my second PC is out of the way, I can focus on slagging off 360 games, yay!
I’m free! Since it’s release on the 30th January I’ve been tinkering around with Windows Vista and generally being driven mad by it’s quirks. On the upside I’ve found this operating system rather refreshing to use over stale XP. I’ve also been taking down notes on my experiences and have written an article on what Windows XP users can expect when they make the transition to this bloatastic OS.
Now that this write up is out of the way, and my system is semi stable, I can finally get back to writing games reviews, which I’m well behind on right now.
Bit large innit?
Blimey! My current stunner of a PC case, the legendary Coolermaster 201c wasn’t large enough to accommodate the needs of my new PC rig. The sheer size of my Ninja Scythe CPU heatsink made me realise that it’s time to upgrade the case. After weeks of hunting for a decent one under £150, I had narrowed down my decision to two cases. The Antec Nine Hundred gamer case (approx £100), or the Coolermaster Stacker 830 (£170). The latter is regarded as one of the largest most spacious cases you can buy. As I’m an old school Coolermaster fan, even though their products aren’t as good as they used to be, I purchased the Stacker.
It arrived last week. The box was so large that my local City Link delivery driver now hates my guts. I was at work when it arrived, but my dad sniggered like hell while he watched the guy attempt to remove the gigantic box from his van. I could have passed out upon seeing the size of the box when I got home. Upon taking the thing out, one thing was clear - It’s a bit bloody BIG.
Having space for 9×5.25" drives, and up to 9×120mm fans, this thing is utterly massive. So big that it barely fits under my desk, and I really struggled to get any good photos of it. Tried to take a photo of it while it was stood upright on my bed, but it just toppled over! There’s so much space in there, that you could fit a small moon in there and that’s with my components present! So far I have 5×120mm fans in there, and the system is totally silent, miles more than my last rig in my Coolermaster 201 case. It’s so quiet that at night the only sound I can hear, is the low frequency hum from my sub woofers.
Oh bugger…
There goes the rumour mill. It’s now true. After a good month of speculation when pictures of a HDMI 360 was leaked onto the web, it has finally been confirmed after the CES show in Las Vegas. Bill Gates’s keynote speech was something a lot of people waited for, hoping he would speak about the future of the Xbox 360. Instead he talked about Windows Vista, Live Anywhere, and then IPTV on ‘a’ 360 - the way he said this seemed to suggest he was talking about new 360’s rather then our current gen models.
Then just before Bill Gates keynote, Dean Takahashi, an Xbox expert and author of the ‘Uncloaked’ series of books on the Xbox and Xbox 360 leaked some news on a new 360 arriving in 2007. He spoke about the Xbox 360 Revision 2, codenamed Zephyr which would have a larger capacity hard drive 120/160mb, HDMI output, and running cooler with its .65nm CPU. It’ll also be IPTV enabled. In the UK, British Telecom will provide our IPTV service…I can hear the boo’s already.
Paul Thurrot, from Windows SuperSite has mentioned on his podcast that a new 360 is on the way during Q4 of 2007. He hasn’t seen it yet, but it has "IPTV capabilities and a larger hard drive", it WILL definitely feature a CPU on a smaller production process so it’ll require less power, emanate less heat and require less cooling too which means that the new 360 should be a bit more quieter then our current models.
I’ve just added two reviews to the reviews section. Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360, and the Western Digital 320GB My Book External Hard Drive, which I recently purchased to backup all my data onto.
I’ve been feeling quite poor recently, after the New Years celebrations. I’ve felt unfit, and unwell as a result too, so I really need to get back into shape, not that I went on a mad drinking/eating spree during the festivities, but I did stop going to the gym for a solid 3 weeks and I can now feel the effects of that decision. This unwell feeling isn’t helped by the fact that my Laptop has died, while I awaited parts for my new PC (below). I was meant to use the lappy to write reviews while my main PC was out of action, but that plan backfired. So after spending well over £1100 on components for a new PC, I’ve not got to get the lappy repaired too. Great 
More Power!
I’ll possibly be away for a few days while I do a total rebuild on this PC, which is an ancient beastie. To be honest I don’t need to build a new rig, but given that Windows Vista arrives towards the end of January, I do want my machine to handle this bloated behemoth of an Operating System (OS). I’d roughly guess that about 90% of PC users who want this OS will end up doing a rebuild of their machine.
It’s slightly absurd that an OS should require so much resource power just to bloody run, but that’s just typical Microsoft. I’m going to stick to XP for as long as I can though, because I’ll be buggered if I’m paying £220 for the Home Premium Edition, I’ll wait for a price drop. I’m not too clear on the upgrade version yet as the info is a bit clouded. So this Friday 5th, my new PC parts will arrive along with XP Media Center 2005. Hopefully everything should go well, because I’ve got a heap of reviews needing checking.
This new rig will be mainly built for non gaming use, as I have the Xbox 360 for games now. So I’ll be doing video encoding, general office use, blogging/php work, photo editing and multimedia on this new rig for the most part. One half of me doesn’t want to spend the best part of £750 on new parts, given that this machine still does and can easily do anything that I normally throw at it. Hell XP flies on this. However it struggled with the Windows Vista Beta, although it was a beta. See ya soon!
So I’ll be moving from:
Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Barton 2500+ (running overclocked at 2.4ghz)
1.5GB of DDR3200 Ram
3×160GB Hitachi Deskstar Hard drives
Creative Audigy 2 Sound
Nvidia 6800GT (running dual 19" Widescreens)
Geforce 2MX PCI (running one 20.1" Widescreen)
To:
Abit AW9D-Max Motherboard (its got blue leds!)
Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4ghz (will be overclocked)
2GB of DDR2 PC6400 Ram (further 1gb to be added later)
1×160GB Hitachi Deskstar (got enough external storage as it is)
Creative Audigy 2 Sound (I’ll stick with this for now)
Gainward Geforce 7900GT (to drive my dual 19" screens)
A little more complicated then one would think…
I’ve been trying to make sense of this for sometime now, and only finally understood it. Microsoft have tried to get one over Sony in the HD (High Definition) war, and to be honest they’re hammering them hilariously. Although MS forgot to mention that 1080p wouldn’t be as simple as most people would have thought. The techy geeks knew it would be a complicated matter, and to be fair - it bloomin is. Depending on the method you’re using to connect the Xbox 360 to your TV set, you’ll obtain various results while watching films and playing games. I’ve been staring at a forum for what felt like hours last night and finally got my head around it.
360 with component cables:
- Xbox 360 games will be upscaled to 1080p, and games which are 1080p native will run without a hitch.
- HD-DVDs will run at a maximum of 1080i, which is due to the AACS DRM implemented into HD-DVD’s.
- DVD’s will only play at 480p, due to the CSS inside DVD’s, which prevents upscaling any higher…bummer.
360 with a VGA cable:
- DVD’s, games, as well as HD-DVD’s will display in full 1080p. Sweet!
Microsoft has been very quiet about this, and it’s obvious why. They know a lot of people use Component cables to connect the 360 to their HDTV, and to have DVD’s playing at 480p is quite frankly pathetic. However most people will already have separate DVD players anyway, so this situation isn’t that bad. MS were quite foolish not to have seen the HDMI bandwagon coming when they released the 360, and even bumbling giants Sony saw it. I wonder what the video quality will be like on the HD-DVD drive coming next month in November for the 360?
