As a result of the hurricane, at least one of the cats has decided to seek refuge in the hung ceiling of the basement.
The wind is blowing, but as of right now there is nothing tremendously interesting going on – just rain and wind and we still have power. It’s flickered a bit, but is otherwise stable.
The garden has been going well so far. The pea crop was bad – largely my fault, as I underplanted. Plus, that batch of seed seemed to have a pretty poor germination.
The rest of it has been fine – squash and corn were fine, the pumpkins are looking good, as are the onions and potatoes.
Beer is good, carboys are full, and phase 2 of the beer system is complete (phase 1 was 4 kegs with ability to tap 1. Phase 2 was 4 more kegs, with the ability to tap 4. Phase 3 is bringing the taps out of the refrigerator so that they’re proper bar taps).
We’ve decided to keep chickens, starting next year. MyPetChicken.com has a pile of interesting breeds. Liz found a fairly over the top chicken coop, which we’ll be hiring our neighbor to build. He builds houses, and this coop is more “small house” than “shed” or “coop”. That and the economy is pretty down, so he’s available, and building it ourselves will end up taking a couple of months of weekends.
I also picked up a new video card to add to the computer my brother gave me for my birthday. Right now, we’re playing a lot of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and I’m planning on gearing up for Battlefield 3. This requires an upgrade to Windows 7, which I’, not particularly looking forward to, as I fear it will break a good portion of my existing games. My brother, for example, claims that he’s not been able to get Mechwarrior 4 to work.
I think that I’m going to preemptively partition the drive to multi-boot, likely using xosl as the boot loader. That way I can still play games on XP (even after it goes unsupported) if need be. The working theory is that XP will be a fallback if I can’t get it to work in Windows 7.
Anyway, pictures behind the cut. ASUS card with ATI Radeon 6870 w/ 1GB of RAM. It’s a little absurd.
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- Video Card Box (outer)
You can tell it is a high rent card, because it has a knight instead of a CG hot chick...
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- Inner box
This is about 14" wide, just to give you an idea. I thought it was a bit overkill, and that the box would be mostly empty.
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- Inside of box
As you can see, the card fills the box.
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- Hard drive for scale
This is a laptop hard drive, for scale
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- Card detail
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- Card detail
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- Bottom heatsink
Not only is there a heatsink at the top, but there's one on the bottom.
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- Side
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- Heat pipes
3 heat pipes carry heat to the heatsink
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- Comparison with older card
It's easily 1/3 larger.
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- 2 auxiliary power inputs
This thing has 2 aux power inputs - a little over the top. It peaks at 150W of power.. It's just a bit absurd.
Originally published at The Caffeinated Penguin. You can comment here or there.