Mission Meltdown

Hmm. Where did I leave it last week ?

Quite.

It's got a little cooler this week. Bit more livable. It was a bit damp yesterday though but that's ok.

Meltdown is working pretty well now. It has its updated Windows licence (if your Windows isn't activated, it puts watermarks on all your screenshots. Couldn't have that) and I picked up the new cooler too. It's a bit of a monster ...

4D looks suitably impressed with the size of the box. The idea is that the bigger the cooler, the more fins and surface area it has and the heat dissipates away more quickly if there is more surface area. The fans are also a factor, with CFM being the unit of interest. Bigger 120mm fans like on there have more surface area again and more radial velocity at the outsides, so (Too Science Didn't Read) they can push more air through as well. And because they're more effective, the bigger fans can be run slower which means less noise.

So ... monster cooler means everything is cooler, everything is quieter. Win ! But I haven't fitted it yet mainly because ... effort. (It's a pretty big job to replace a cpu cooler) And also because the AMD Wraith Stealth cooler that comes with the processor is ultra quiet. As in silent ... I can barely hear it even when there are no other active noise sources and even there, I may well be hearing the case fan or the power supply fan.

Because I'm not running the machine hard yet, like it will be when it gets colder and I turn the Science Sums back on, it doesn't need that better cooling.

So far, I've been doing more internet spaceship piloting, more motorsport managing and I'm having another look at Battletech's massive Roguetech mod.

That little fella is my crazy pirate melee mech. A little fella but effective when he gets in close. Hasn't acquired a name yet, I'm naming the mechs when I reconfigure them. So far there is the Fires of Elysium and a Clint class mech got named Rise of Eastwood.

Battletech ran just about on the old machine, I had to run it off the SSD in order to get acceptable performance in the basic campaign. The bigger Roguetech mod was unplayable, probably because it was wanting to take up 10GB+ of memory and Pumpkin only had 8GB. It was apparently barely touching the processor load actually, which may be a sign of how poorly optimised it is. Great game, poor implementations.

Motorsport Manager doesn't feel any different ... but it shouldn't really, it's not a game that relies on or gets advantage of better PC performance past a certain point.

Elite feels smoother. I've reached the edge of the galaxy ...

That's an earlier shot and I've turned up the anti-aliasing a little since then. (Anti-aliasing attempts to make lines less jagged).

I may have found some tea down there ...

Time to enter The Abyss. There are differences in the density of stars in the galaxy. In the centre, the stars are so dense that before the route planner was substantially upgraded, the planner would crash the game client if you tried to plan beyond about 300 light years (too many options to check). Out in the Abyss, ships with lower jump ranges have to go around. Mine is very long range but even there, the path goes wiggly and shorter jumps need to be taken.

Here's the travel map so far :

It's quite a distance travelled there ! More to go. The plan is to head back in a semicircle. Soon.

I found another couple of close binary stars on the way in, always good for a screenshot. This one is definitely with the improved anti-aliasing but I'm not sure that'll be apparent there.

That's where I've parked up until I go back in. That's at Beagle Point, looking back at the Milky Way from the edge of the galaxy. There are stars on the map further out but because they're beyond the jump ranges, they're unreachable.

One thing you do notice when upgrading like this are the shortcomings of the other machines. I really notice that at work but it's not really the fault of the laptops we have. They're actually pretty solid machines and would make me consider getting HP laptops as well (business grade, as their domestic grade is rubbish). The big problem with the work machines is the infrastructure, especially the Microsoft side. Too many slowdowns seem to come from the laptops having to check elsewhere even for the simplest of operations like changing to bold. They'll pause when opening the dialogue for formatting a cell in Excel.

It's pretty sad that the Microsoft applications have got that bad. They really need to be better than that, or have a rethink on how much they're communicating with the servers.

But I'm not thinking about that at home.

Soon ... Deus Ex Mankind Divided or Prey ! Am knackered though and still a bit worn out mentally and those games need a bit more mental energy than I'm willing to put in at the moment.

Soon :-D