Ayarane Project

Well, poop. Blastoise just can’t win when it comes to games.

Ever since I cleared the first Mass Effect, it’s been back to the usual MMOs until I can get the dude another SSD or something to act as additional app storage. Only then I started having driver issues up the nose, and it only got progressively worse until today.

The 285 driver made YouTube pretty much unusable (most videos would “Green Out”), but 296.10 was even worse– couldn’t play games OR run any kind of video without Blastoise totally upending himself and forcing a hard reboot. Running the beta driver (300-something) kinda stabilized things but not by much. So I went back to the 270 driver that the card came with.

Plan B entailed diving into the settings for underclocking. Now… OCing/UCing is territory I don’t wander into since I figured it’s best not to try to reinvent the wheel, but this particular card (the Galaxy MDT GTX570) is factory overclocked, and it was suggested I manually ratchet it back to the default clock speed. That appeared to work for City of Heroes on the short term, but had catastrophic results for WoW, which would just crash outright after character select.

Oh hell. This had to happen on a raid night, too. Thankfully Dinah the Badass Ninja MacBook is always ready to step in, but…. yeah.

The fact that I’m even having to take such arcane measures to whip MMOs into submission (and they’re pretty low on the gaming food chain) should be signal enough that something has gone REALLY bad in this card. At least unlike the previous, I still have basic Windows and video playback usability, but I’m a couple days out the return window at Amazon so I’m kinda SOL there. :(

At this point I would just say “f you nVidia” and go back to ATI, but I still don’t have any love for bloaty Catalyst. Aaargh. I’m already looking at having to pay the Stupid Geek Tax again since this will be Blastoise’s second video card replacement and this form is barely 5 months old.

On the flipside? Whatever I loot this time will give me back twin monitor functionality. Good lord I’ve missed that. T_T

Who’s got two thumbs and gets to replace Blastoise’s video card already? This dood!

I was on Blastoise earlier and decided to play some more Mass Effect 1 (since I had to restart as my old saves were on old Blastoise). I get to the Citadel to do its clusterfwegh of side missions, and… o hi, BSOD! Well, in this case it’s more like “go directly to black, do not pass go or collect $200, just press the damn reset button.”

Big deal. Even the best machines burps now and then. Pick yourself up and try again! (Also auto-save FTW.)

I get a little farther, into Chora’s Den and… ow, geez, another BSOD. This is starting to get a little scary. True, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated my video drivers… but then again I’d just built Blastoise in December, so it’s not like that should affect things either because he was just fine before today! I made a note to look into that later, I just wanted to get this Citadel crap done so I can go get Liara. (VA nerdery: her VA is Lightning! :D)

I’m just about to wrap up the last side mission and during the chatter… oh wow, total meltdown. Blastoise freezes up mid-syllable and won’t visibly reboot properly even after hitting the reset button or even doing a hard reboot. I let him sit for a few and try again while I go get another Pepsi, and I hear the Windows startup sounds. Oh good, he recovered, right?

Noooope. It’s, like… the keyboard and tablet LEDs flash like normal, and his webcam orients itself like normal… but the monitors aren’t having any of this nonsense. Even after checking the monitor connections, it’s still a no-go. I’m guessing Blastoise’s card went bad in such a way to kill video export but not enough to completely brick itself (or else I don’t think Windows could even proceed, heh). Whatever the case, if I can’t see anything, it’s no good. I don’t have any spare cards to throw in as a temporary measure, either (remember, the one in his old body is impossible to extract, I must have cemented it in or something), so I get to loot a new card.

If you forgot from the previous “let’s rebuild Blastoise” posts in November/December, he ended up using the N560GTX (I actually bought it through NewEgg since Amazon was sold out at the time). I’m wondering if I should just get the same card again or if another kickass mid-range go-to card has cropped up since. I would like to stay nVidia, and putting a soft cap @ $300.

Bleh. I was hoping not to spend major coin for awhile (since I did get mother her iPad and I still need to get new glasses) but, well, poop happens. :\ Looks like this will be my Yoshi Day loot (in place of Tales of Graces f and another mega-sized Angry Birds plush), haha. That aside, I’m only mildly pissed that there’s no Mac version of Mass Effect so I can at least continue through Dinah. :P

And, of course, it’s when Blastoise goes down that I really want to paint. Boo!

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Speaking of Angry Birds… dude, Angry Birds Space kicks ass. I got it on Dinah– you really do benefit from having more screen space here compared to the other variants. No wonder Rovio partnered with Samsung for this one (to pimp out the phone version of the Galaxy Note).

Also, I swear that the Space version of Red Bird looks like Kamina from Gurren Lagann. “Who the squawk do you think I am?!” or something. :D