Radeon HD 4870 is out today and reviews are looking good

This is AMD's 300$ card in quite some time, and its showing its teeth, the card is almost as fast as the new GTX280 and the AA performance is just fantastic welcome back AMD checkout this review

Installing nVIdia Display driver on Debian Based systems

This is the way to install the official nVidia Linux Driver on Debian Based systems, Including Ubunt Linux and all its Variants. The driver is needed if you want to have the full Hardware acceleration for 2D and 3D, and is essential if you want to use Compiz-Beryl.

1. Getting the proper Driver from nVidia
Get the official Linux driver for your nvidia card from here
and save it to a folder ex inside your user's home folder
the downloaded file looks something like this NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.09-pkg1.run

2. now you have to go to a Run level where you can shut down the X server, logout from the user account if you are logged in, then press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to enter the run level 2, now you will be faced with a command prompt to login, use your normal user info to login to linux. then execute this command to shut down GDM (and the X server with it)

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

you will be asked to enter your user password again because this is a command only the root account can perform, and sudo command gives temporary root capability to a normal user

if successful you will end up back in the command prompt

3. Now to give the nVidia driver package the full read write Access type in this command.

sudo chmod 666 NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.09-pkg1.run

4. Now to install the driver Type in this command

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.09-pkg1.run

now follow the instructions of the nVidia installer, let it compile the kernel for you and youll be finished in a few seconds

5. now that all is done lets restart the X server and GDM type

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

now you will be greeted with the nVidia logo as it loads, you have to restart the X again by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace

you are all done, To change the setting of your driver please use the tool nvida has provided, it can be located in the applications menu usualy. you have to run it as root to be able to save any changes to the xconfig file.

XFX Geforce 9800 GTX Black Edition is out and its going to beat the crap out of 9800GTX+

Yeah its here and the benchmarks are sweet check it out. But the 9800GTX+ will be much OC able because of the 55nm fabrication process.


Read the full review here

MintLinux a Linux distro with a Refreshing breath or NOT

I downloaded MinLinux version 5 and will give it a try tonight, hopefully itll stay on my PC for a long time to come, I have tested the live Boot and it was fantastic, MintLinux is based on Ubuntu and this new version is based on Hardy Heron, As you might know Hardy is not up to its mark, you can consider MintLinux Ver 5 to be the Hardy the way it should have been, Ill post a complete review of this awesome Distro Tomorrow.

You can nab it here

Nvidia Released the new Forceware 175.19

This Driver claimed to have fixed a lot of bugs for Geforce 9 and 8 series cards, so if you are a owner you should install this driver, that's what im going to do after i finish my work
Grab it here

HD 4870 and Geforce 9800 GTX+ is Out

AMD did things right this time, the HD4000 series is much better than its predecessor, Benchmarks shows that the High End HD4870 is about 30% faster than its younger brother HD4850, which is a massive improvement considering both cards have the exact same Core specs. the higher clocks of the HD4870 and the massive bandwidth of GDDR5 Memory comes in to play here. As predicted nVidia have released its 55nm G92 based super clocked Geforce9800GTX+ to compete with the eminent threat of the Red team, interestingly XFX has released a standard 9800GTX with higher clocks than the 55nm 9800GTX+ lol, this will be interesting.

got a new LCD widesreen Monitor...i should say YAYY

The Fact that i don't is no matter how hard I try to convince my self LCD's are the next best thing to do honestly they arnt, they don't have the same color responsiveness of a good old CRT, and the one i bought have a sucky vertical Viewing angle (not that i look at it while standing in a 180 degree angle, but its irritating to know that i cant do it if i want to) and as always it has a dark greay instead of black, and its too damn bright, ok Enough complaining actually its awesome when it comes for gaming and Photoshopping et all..

Monitor is Samsung Syncmaster 943NWX its the latest from Samsung and I can reccomend it to anyone who dont give a damn about the usual annoyances of LCD panels.

Alone in the Dark 2008

Yes its out, I have been waiting for this game for a long time, This game has maybe on of the best Soundtracks of all. and its graphics is awesome. cant wait to play it

See a sample on youtube

Firefox 3 World Record

The newest version of the Mozilla's open Source browser has been downloaded over 8 million times during the first 24 hours of its release, and It will be the Guinness world record for the most downloaded software in one day.

Mmmmm Radeon HD 4xxx Series is almost at hand

Internet is flooded with Pictures and reviews of the new Graphics Monsters from AMD, the Radeon HD 4000 series. Seems the cards are performing better than expected, actually I saw some Benchmark Results that Depicts HD 4870 Being considerably faster than a 9800GX2 now that gonna hurt nVidia quite a bit, fingers Crossed.
Heres some Benchmarks Techpowerup Forums did with HD 4850





It's Interestingly Fast don't you think, in synthetics its slower than a 8800GT but on games its considerably faster.

ReactOS goes ver 0.3.4

This OS is intended as replacement for windows NT based systems, still in alpha stage, but this new release is a milestone for this ambitious project.
more info here

Music................:)

Got my hands on two nice songs today, one of ma friends suggested them to me, i love em.

Morandi - Angels - Youtube Linq
Oro - Jelena Tomasevic - Youtube linq

Geforce 8 and 9 Series Overclocking Guide

I have Originally posted this on www.elakiri.com

In this guide I’ll show you how to squeeze out more juice out of your Geforce 8 and 9 series video cards but before all a warning is due.

All the images here are from a Geforce 8800 GT but its all the same for Geforce 9 cards

Warning!


The procedures that are shown here are not for novice users. Overclocking, flashing the Video card bios, will void any warranties you have for the product (some manufacturers provide warranties for cards failed by over clocking like EVGA, but remember if u tamper with the video Bios your warranty will go haywire) and also may render your graphic cart useless, may reduce its life span and can also harm other parts of your system (in the event of overheating). You follow the procedures mentioned in this article at your own risk; I am not responsible if you ruin your Graphic card by following this guide.

Ok now you got pretty scared, but don’t be, because it’s a very safe thing to do if you do it the right way.rst, the tools and hardware you will need as follows;

• Rivatuner (version 2.09 is the latest build while writing this guide)
• GPU-Z (another handy utility but no used much in this guide)
• NiBiTor (nVidia Bios Editor) version 3.8
• Nvflash (nVidia firmware updating utility)
• Graphics intensive game or 3dmark 2006 (for stress testing)
• Bootable floppy disk (foor flashing the video bios)
• Old PCI video card (this for recovering you graphic card if something go wrong, I’ll show you how to do it later in the guide)

Now let me give you a brief introduction to how the geforce 8 series graphic cards innards work.


Geforce 8 s GPU (and all direct X 10 cards) is very different from the GPU’s of the previous generation of graphics processors, it features something called unified shaders, and (you might know that all previous GPU’s had Pixel shaders and Vertex shaders that work independently to process pixel shading and vertices) unified shaders can both work as pixel shaders and vetex shaders at the same time, for an example if a game need a lot of pixel shading power the GPU can allocate more unified shaders to that and less for vertex shading, any way the whole point of me telling you this is that these new cores have the ability independently change the core clock of the GPU and the clock of the shaders (shaders are a bunch of stream processors).


Principles of overclocking a video card


As I have told you earlier these new Geforce cards features two clock domains to overclock the GPU (these two are generally linked, means if you OC the core clock by 10% then the Shader clock also increase by 10%, but this can be unlinked in Rivatuner though it is not recommended), beside that, as you might know you can overclock the graphics memory also, it is not recommended that you overclock all of these at once, the best practice is to over clock step by step, first you have to find the limits of the GPU and then default the GPU’s clock and go to work with the memory, this way you can avoid complicated situations.


Overclocking using RivaTuner


This is the tool I prefer to use all the time, but you can use any one of those good tools out there, RivaTuner is an Advanced Graphic Card tweaking utility capable of plethora of tasks including overclocking.



First start of Rivatuner


Riva Tuner main window

1 - Click this button to open the Customization Menu
2 - Click the Graphic Card Icon to bring up the System Tweaks window thats where we do our work most of the time


First you have to Enable Driver Level overclocking, to do that click on the check box, a message box will popup if you want to reboot to detect default clock speeds of the card, if haven’t done any over clocking before, you may click the detect now button or else click restart button so the card will reset to default values upon system reboot.
Before starting to OC...Always check that you have proper cooling and if your card has the ability control the cooling fan speed, set it to 100% to make sure maximum cooling is applied, Always keep an eye on the temps while ur overclocking, dont let them go beyond 100C

Now we can get on with the business of overclocking, we'll start off with the core clock, don’t tamper with the shader clock and don’t unlink it with the core clock let the memory speed on default, increase the core clock in 10Mhz increments, after each increment stress your card with either 3dmark 2006 or some very graphic intensive game like Crysis, while you’re doing this pay very careful attention to what you see on the screen, if you see any texture corruption or screen blackout, system Restart, Hanging, your pushing too hard on the core clock so reduce it by 10Mhz, repeat this procedure until you find a stable frequency for the core clock.

Now reset the Core clock to default values by clicking on the Default button (this actually reset the whole card to factory defaults).

After finishing with the core clock we shall now move on to memory clock (remember memory is very sensitive to heat and you will need good cooling to OC memory) it’s always safe to increase the memory 5Mhz at a time, even though good memory can be directly over clocked without any damage, to be on the safe side follow the 5Mhz at a time rule, as with the core clock stress test after each increment and find the most stable frequency for the memory.

Now you can set the new found core clock and the memory clock at the same time, do another stress test just to make sure it is all stable, save the new OC profile using the save button. That’s it guys. (now most of you will get satisfied with this simple procedure, you’ll have to load the OC profile each time you reboot you’re PC, if this is not a hassle for you then you are all done, if you are really a speed freak like me , please continue reading)

Advanced Bios overclocking

If you don’t know what you are doing please don’t attempt any of the following procedures
As you might know Video Cards have a Bios that have information of the default clock speeds, fan speeds, voltages and so on, these settings are loaded on the System POST (Remember the Text appear first stating the Make and the Manufacturer of the card), now if you are like me, who don’t like to load OC profiles In windows each time you start your system, you need to change them in the Video bios, lets proceed shall we
To do this you need Nibitor and nvflash
Nvidia Bios Editor is a Advanced Nvidia Bios editing utility combined with Nvflash (nvidia bios flash utility), that can, I must stress this “Kill” your graphic card if you use it the wrong way.

Before anything else, you must first take a clean bios image of your graphic card and keep it somewhere safe; you will need this if you mess things up

Fire up Nibitor



Click on the tools menu got to import bios sub menu and click select device, a window will popup asking you to select your video card, click ok, now the main window will populate with the settings from the bios, to save the bios to a file, click on the file menu and select save bios, give a location and you are done.

Now to set up the boot up clock speeds of the video cards, since you now have stable overclocked frequencies at hand it’s the time to use them here.

As you might have noticed the default clocks of your card is already shown on the main window, now we have to change them to our new and improved lol clocks, click the bootup clocks button.



now change the appropriate Core, Shader and memory clocks with the new Values and hit ok button.

Now to make your video cards post screen more attractive hehe, click on the boot settings tab



in here you can change the Post text as I have changed on this screen shot lol, mess arround with this section cuz its quite safe.

Do not try to change any settings other than the ones i have told you earlier if you don’t know what you are doing, leave them as they are.

After finishing all this, now it’s the time to save the modified bios to a new file, go to the file menu and select save bios and give a path, and you are done.


Now we move on to the quite dangerous method of flashing the video bios.


Get the Nvflash utility and put it and the new bios image (let’s say this new bios image is named ocbios.rom) to the bootable floppy disk, stick it inside the floppy drive and boot up, after booting to the DOS prompt, type “nvflash -p -u -f ocbios.rom” without the quotes, then the bios will be flashed to the Video Cards EPROM, restart the pc after this, if all went well you will boot up to windows, and will be happy as you can be, but if you find that your newly flashed bios is giving you trouble you can re flash it with the original bios you saved earlier (let’s say its named originalbios.rom) to do this type “nvflash -p -u -f originalbios.rom”, Congradz you have successfully over clocked and flashed your new Geforce 8.

now if you really screwd things up you might be looking at a blank screen during post, if so please read on.

This is where you will need the old PCI video card, stick it in, remove the PCI-e card, boot up and go to bios, in bios find a setting that set the default VGA to either PCI or PCI-e, set it to boot from PCI, turn the system off, now you can stick the PCI-e card in and still boot from the PCI card, now re flash the PCI-e card properly with the original bios and hopefully it’ll start working again.


Remember that this kind of situation happens quite rarely if you do the things right and if you know what you are doing so don’t chicken out, experiment and the rewards will be there.

blog strat trans OPT

OK, finally i have decided to start a blog. This will contain all the stuff I love, so make your selves at home.