For to long I sat on at E6600 clocked at 3.0ghz with 4 gbs of DDR2 800 ram and a ATI 4890. The motherboard was giving out, the case was to big and loud, the whole computer wasn't performing at the level that it was supposed to. I decided instead of upgrading it was time to build a new PC.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... The Beast!

(right click View Image for FireFox users to see full image)

Beautiful eh?

Specs:

Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case61447888

Antec TruePower New TP-750 750W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.3 / EPS12V V2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC "compatible with Core i7/Core i5" Power Supply61447888

ASUS P6X58D-E LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard61447888

Intel Core i7-930 Bloomfield 2.8GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX8060193061447888

G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9T-6GBNQ61447888

EVGA 012-P3-1470-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card61447888

ZALMAN 9500A-LED 92mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler61447888

ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black SATA 24X DVD Burner - Bulk - OEM61447888

I was able to overclock the the i7 930 to 3.8ghz with low temps (40-50c gaming 80c max load) and this machine screams. Crysis max + 4xAA = 45 fps. Dirt 2 DX11 Full settings + 4xAA = 60fps, Just Cause 2 at full DX 11 settings + 4x AA = 45 fps... Only game that brings it to it's knees is Metro 2033, but the DX11 isn't that optimized compared to the other games.

Other benchmarks include a 3d Mark06 score at over 19101 and a 3d Vantage score at 17880 all before overclocking my CPU.

Overall I love this machine. It's fast, quiet, stable, a perfect machine. I have my new 22" monitor and my old 5.1 surround sound set I bought with my old machine along side my keyboard and gaming mouse... I'm in gaming bliss.

Jealous? You should be.

Last week was my 22nd birthday and tickets went on sale for their October 5th show at the Target Center in the Twin Cities.

I seriously can't wait. I am a huge fan of Muse and I hear their shows are some of the best I can see. I had to pick between them and seeing Rush for a 2nd time and I figured I would see Muse since I have no idea when their next US tour would be.

So yeah, be Jealous.

I have decided to gather all of my pictures of my gaming setups throughout the years just so I and everybody else can see the progression since I have been on Gamespot.

This is the fartest I can find. It is a picture of my first dorm and gaming setup. My desk is just to the right and it contained my laptop, but for gaming all I had was my PS2 and my Xbox. That set of legs was my former roommate who was watching some TV.

A lot happened that first year of college, but nothing really new in gaming. I did however decide to transfer schools from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, but I didn't buy anything new for gaming outside of Guitar Hero 2.

That summer, in transition from school to school, I decided to build my gaming PC. It was the summer of 2007. I was going to take this monster to a dorm in the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Yes, it played Crysis.

Sadly I cannot find any pictures of my gaming setups during my time at UWO.

However that year I did happen to buy a little something for myself. I got sick of watching all of my GUFU buddies on the IRC playing GTA4... so I bought a 360.

You'll notice a few new things there. First off my 360, but second is my awesome 5.1 surround sound speakers. I love em. Still had my crappy mouse and keyboard. Also I didn't own my own TV, this meant I had to use my computer monitor.

Let me just say that my time at UWO wasn't the best. I decided to transfer back to UWEC. Unfortunatly all they had left for me was a hotel room really far off of campus. When I got there, I found out the hotel had AC, an indoor pool and hottub, my own private bathroom, massive rooms, and air conditioning. It was awesome.

That computer monitor wasn't good enough. I ended up buying a 22" HDTV for my 360. It has a native resolution of 1650x1080 and works perfect as a 2nd monitor.

Later that semester I moved back to the dorms on campus. Here is the setup I had.

All of this would be my junior year at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. This year I return to the dorms. Over the summer I was able to stay in a dorm all to myself. Here I changed my setup quite a bit. I decided to put the Xbox 360 and TV away from my computer, to mix it up a bit. Don't mind the beer, I turned 21 and was enjoying a cold one.

I had this whole place to myself. I used a lot of my (now ex-)girlfriends stuff. I don't own alot of my own. All of my stuff is expensive.

I didn't take any pictures of my setup for the first semester. At the end of the first semester my roommate moved out and took everything with him pretty much. My new roommate didn't bring much with him as he is a forgien exchange student from China... can't fit much on a plane.

Anyways right before this school year started I decided to go back to my roots with Sony and I bought a Playstation 3. These are the pictures I took tonight of my current setup.

All things considered, I do pretty well for a small dorm. This setup has provided me with hunderds of hours of gameplay in a very small space. I have spend many thousands on it, and I have to say for a college student, it isn't half bad.

I have been home for 14 days now and I haven't been this bored in so long. I took a long break from work to go home and see my family. I have been here ever since, the days are literally blurring together.

The advatages are I get some time to work out, the liquor cabinet is free and well stocked (don't worry I'm 21), my father has a beautiful 1080p TV and 5.1 setup that I take advantage of, and I don't have to really do anything. Thus I am now bored. I have played probably 20 hours of WWII Online and I have just been lurking the fourms as video games don't really interest me.

It really is funny how fast you miss people when you are not surrounded by them like I am back in college. I guess I need the break but I really kind of want to get back into the swing of things.

I have taken the opportunity to catch up on movies. I have seen Avatar three times in theaters, The Hurt Locker, 500 Days of Summer, rewatched Termniator Salvation, and watched the entire first season of Superjail. I loved every single one of those and I think The Hurt Locker should win best picture this year. Avatar was amazing but I liked The Hurt Locker more. I'm probably biased because of my love of war movies (just look at my banner of my profile).

I am trying to think of a new gaming montage/trailer I should make. It is much more difficult when you want to really take your time with something and make it great. Maybe I will enlist GUFU in helping me.

Anyways I have been a general moderator here on Gamespot now for about a month... ish and I can say I really enjoy the responsibilities. I have been on this site for 6 years now and it is nice to be given something back to the community.

I was thinking of doing a review of a game or two or doing some sort of video review. I tried a video review once, it failed horribly, lets just say the community never saw it.

So I took advantage of Steam's holiday sale. So far I have bought...

• Darwinia
• Multiwinia
• Sniper Elite
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Skies
• Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum
• Red Faction Guerrilla

I have't really had time to play them yet. I had to drive through that massive blizzard yesterday for 4 hours... not fun.

Anyways you all may want to check out the future of my union GUFU. We are going to be soon hosting a public blog and doing more podcasts from the admin staff and members of GUFU. Keep your eyes out on that.

Well I have finally made it the 8 long weeks of the iMod phase and I am now an offical gMod of Gamespot! I believe a party is in order!

Anyways I am hoping to do my best to keep this community a great place for all members. I have been a part of Gamespot since 2003 (6 freaken years), it has been a second home to me.

As for other thing I guess I have been doing some stuff with my union GUFU. We have had some intresting times lately but we will come out on top.

As for life, it is my fourth year of college and I am now on my last week of the first semester, finals week. Yays for me :(. Anyways I only have a year and a half left of college before I enter the workforce with a Software Engineering degree.

As for video games ArmA 2 just had a huge modification come out called ACE 2 (Advanced Combat Enviroment 2) and it is amazing, really changes the game a lot. I also bought Mirrors Edge for the PC and have really been blown away by how good it looks. I finally got my 360 back and it quickly went to collecting dust as I have been quite busy in real life. I have spent a lot of time with the Battlefield Bad Company 2 beta on the PS3 and have really enjoyed it.

Anyways I guess I should stop writing a blog post and continue with this paper due on Friday. Such is life.

Yes there is a war being fought that nobody knows about. Its not on some distant battlefield on some forgien land, no politics, no public relations, no media... just pure war. This war is happening every day and is fought by those who you would never suspect.

This war is being fought on the virtual battlefield of ArmA 2 in the digital world of Chenarus. Yes, every day massive amounts of fighting happen on the front. There is still no clear winner after several months of fierce fighting. The casualties on both sides have been high, but neither side seems to be letting up.

Little do you all know, I am one of those soliders. I have been fighting the fight ever since the first bullet flew. My squad, the 502nd Blackhearts, has been called upon time and time again to try to put and end to this infinite war...

Here are some pictures from the front line.

If you can't tell this game is beautiful and I thought I would show some pictures off.

I play a game called World War 2 Online. In the late 90's, a group of developers got together and wanted to make the worlds most realistic WWII game. Cornered Rat Software was born. They saw games like Everquest and Ultimate online and how a massive, persistent world would be perfect for the most realistic WWII game. They decided to make the first MMOFPS ever.

After years of building up their own graphics engine and some unique coding that strung together multiple servers to allow one giant game world, they had finally made WWII Online: Blitzkrieg.

I never got to play this game, I was only in 7th grade, I ran a computer with a ATI Rage 128 graphics card, and I was to busy with my new PS2. Though I am glad I didn't. Back in the day you had to spawn into a town with whatever class you wanted, then join up with other players, drive to another, enemy held town, and attack it. These attacks were fought on the largest video game world to date and lets just say that it was very empty. For a person to get into an attack it would take upwards of an hour, only for you to get shot and you to have to wait another 20-30 minutes. This game was truely only for the most hardcore... especially with graphics like this...

Even with these graphics, this game somehow kept a population of players. It combined navy, air force, tanks, and infantry all into one, massive world. You really feel like your just a part of a battle. Some battles contained over 500 vs 500 in the early days. These numbers even today are not heard of. This game was doing things that Battlefield 1942 did several years sooner. It was truely revolutionary, if you could get passed the horrid graphics.

Well throughout the years, the developers CRS started to change the game. They added in mobile spawns so that you could get into battle faster, they focused the attacks with a high command system that had to place attack orders onto towns, they expanded the maps, created brigades that moved with the front line, changed the sound effects, and eventually changed the graphics.

In 2006. CRS re-released the game as WWII Online: Battlegrounds Europe. This fundamentally changed the entire game to make it much easier to play and MUCH easier on the eyes. Hell I remember X-play did a review on the game. Unfortunatly the same problem followed. The game may have the largest video game world every created, but its 99% empty all of the time. For the new players its extremely hard to find a good battle.

Here are some pictures...

As you can see it looks just a little better.

Well since 2006 there have been many new features added to the game to make it even more accessable. They had added a stronger tutorial, more towns to fill the game world, a new brigade system that makes supply move just like real life, more tanks and planes, and many tiny features to make the game more smooth.

Now in 2009 they are planning on giving the game one more massive graphic upgrade. While not as noticable as the first major one, this one will move WWII Online, a game built in 1999 and released in 2001, look pretty decent. You have to remember, there is a minimum of a 15km draw distance on all computers and all computers must beable to run the same graphics so nobody has any advantages ever. Its very tricky.

This is what CRS has in store for us for the next update...

Rag doll physics, more clutter, higher resolution textures, shadows, and a few new models on the tanks and planes. They upgraded their game engine for quicker updates and more graphical effects. In the next months they will be continuing to upgrade everything in this game, every tank, every plane, every ship, every building is getting an upgrade in one form or another. The game looks now pretty impressive for its size.

Its amazing to see this game grow through the years. I started playing in 2006, I may be currently unsubscribed becasue of my time limitations, but I am awaiting this new update. I cannot wait. The latest graphics upgrade really shows how capable this old engine is. They are not done yet with this upgrade. When the patch 1.31 comes out, this game will look and play completely different than before. I will continue to update my blog regularly with it.

Hate on me all you want, but backwards compatability is massivly overrated. I never find myself playing ANY old Xbox or PS2 games ever, especially this far into the generation.

I have never understood why people want backwards compatability so much in a console. As technology changes, games change with it making the old games obsolete. Its the reason why we make new consoles ever 6-10 years. There is no point to keep going on and on with the old games.

When Sony droped BC from the PS3 it was because it would lower the price. If they would have kept full backwards compatability the price would have risen significantly and we would not have seen a price drop.

The fact is when it comes to production costs, you can never have everything you want. Backwards compatability is nice, but when trying to push gaming forward, stopping to support old games is completely pointless and actually detracts from the entire reason of research and development.

So today I took the next major plunge this generation. First it started with my gaming PC, next my Xbox 360, and now I join the Playstation 3 crowd.

Yes today I bought the 120 gig, Playstation 3 Slim. Its a sexy little console that looks durible enough to withstand being run over by an M1A2 Abrams. I bought Resistance Fall of Man and Uncharted with it, both used. Resistance has been a blast, but I fear I will beat the game if I keep playing it like I do.

I'm wondering if I should pick up Fat Princess. I probably will by the time you all read this post. I will probably also buy FF7.

I love this thing. I don't know why I didn't buy one sooner. The customization, the beautiful XMB, the online web browser, the media compatability... just everything.

PSN is Wasdie, please if you add me make a message telling me your from Gamespot.