Tuesday, 29 January 2008

New Pinnells Blog

By the way - if you want to see what's happening with Denise, Ethan and Toby - rather than my geeky stuff - head over to Pinnell's Family Blog

Friday, 25 January 2008

New Computer

Recently I’ve been thinking that I need more gaming and photo-processing power than my current AMD 4400+ X2 / 7950GX2 system provides, so I started looking at buying a new computer.

Overclockers (http://www.overclockers.co.uk) do some good deals on pre-overclocked systems. Lots of Q6600 quad-cores which are overclocked from 2.4GHz to 3.3GHz. Nice as the Q6600 is £160 rather than over £680 for the 3Gh QX6850!!

Anyway, the only problem was that they didn’t have exactly the spec I wanted. The nearest to it had a 8800GTX and 4x1Gb memory modules – rather than the newer G92 based 8800 GTS 512Mb and 2x2Gb memory.

So after lots of indecision I’ve decided to buy all the components separately (apart from a bundle on the Mobo/CPU/RAM/Cooler) and put it together myself (and learn how to overclock it which should be interesting)

Here’s the parts list:

Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - OEM
Asus P5N-T Deluxe nForce 780i (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-8000C5 1000MHz ReaperX HPC Enhanced Bandwidth Edition Dual Channel DDR2
Tuniq Tower 120-LFB CPU Cooler (Socket 478/754/939/940/AM2/LGA775)
Point of View GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
Western Digital Raptor X 150GB 10000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM
2 x Samsung SpinPoint T 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM
Pioneer BDR-202BK 4x BD-R/RE Blu-Ray Serial ATA Dual Layer DVD Writer - Black
Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gaming Case
OCZ GameXStream 1010w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit Edition DVD - OEM

You’ll notice I’ve gone for Vista 64-bit. Well I want DX10 support for Crysis, and also lots of memory support for Lightroom – so not much choice really.

I’ll post some shots when all the bits arrive….

Sunday, 20 January 2008

HDR Beer


Beer HDR 20080119
Originally uploaded by Billius
9 Exposures Bracketted on D300. 1/2 EV increment (set on b2 I think) 105mm VR Macro

Wanted to crop - so batch cropped in Lightroom, exported as DNG but PhotoMatix choked - so exported in TIFF.

Processed in PhotoMatix

My First HDR Shot!