Month: July 2013

GTX 760 Upgrade – Very Nice

ASUS GTX 760
ASUS GTX 760

Did I mention that I upgraded my video card? Woo hoo!! I got a new ASUS GTX 760 and it is hot – or rather cool. This is an upgrade from a GTX 560ti, which I passed along to the Aurora R2 system.

I have noticed that the new drivers are a little glitchy. I’ve had a few driver crashes – black screen followed by a popup indicating that the driver failed and restarted. Oh well. I’m sure that Nvidia is working on fixing those problems.

I’ve not noticed that the video performance is better in Tera. I was using maxed out settings with the GTX 560ti. But with 4 times the Cuda cores things surely are going to be better.

– ww

Creeping Obsolesence of Media PCs

Video Netcast on Tablet

In early 2011, I made a media PC to watch netcasts on my TV. At the time the system was connected to a plasma display and was running at 1440 resolution. Also at the time, it was perfectly able to play the netcasts from the Twit.tv network, as well as other videos.

Currently the jetway atom PC is connected to my new TV which is full HD and it has been upgraded to Linux Mint 14. Also I’ve noticed that it will no longer play live broadcasts or recorded shows from this site. So what has changed? Continue reading “Creeping Obsolesence of Media PCs”

Considering an Upgrade

Intel ci7 3770 box
Intel Core i7

I’m using two of my computers for, among other things, to edit and convert videos for upload to YouTube. Here’s my channel. One of he machines is an Alienware Aurora R2 I obtained used with Core i5-750, circa Q3 ’09. The other is a system I built from scratch, with a Core i7-2600 circa Q1 ’11.

I’m considering upgrading the older Alienware system to an Ivy Bridge 3770 processor. This upgrade of the processor, motherboard and memory will cost about $550. So the question is: How effective will this upgrade be in increasing Video Conversion performance?

A BenchMark

I decided to do some testing to find out whether the two systems that I have are very different in performance before proceeding with the upgrade. When using both systems to edit videos, they perform very well using Corel Video Studio X5 [2600] and X6 [750]. The editing process proceeds with no noticeable delays or lags. Any performance issue has to do with how long it takes to convert the video. Continue reading “Considering an Upgrade”