I Miss My Time with Me

It’s been a busy pasty couple of days without much time to myself. I will be definitely working on recharging myself soon. Yes, I’m a classic introvert and I’m NOT going to apologize for it.

I bought another video card to replace the Radeon x600. I wanted to upgrade mainly to get a video card that supported HDCP so that I could watch Blu-Ray movies on my computer. I’m not a gamer at all so a powerful and expensive video card isn’t required. After discovering that the x600 could not handle full screen 1080i video, I wanted to get a new video card right away.

New Video Card
Per usual, I went to Newegg and looked at sub $100 video cards with the best rating. The HIS Hightech H467QT512P, a Radeon 4670 based card was at the top of the list. It was cheap (around $86) and I didn’t hesitate to order it right then and there. I made sure it had at least 512MB of GDDR memory and was HDCP compliant and finalized the purchase of the card without looking at it more closely. After reading the reviews more closely, I discovered that it takes up two slots due to the large cooling fan. It was too late to cancel the order. My card had been charged and the order was processed. The PCI-e x16 slot is next to the x4 slot which had my Aver Media tuner plugged in. I was going to loose dual tuner capability. UGH. I chucked it up as a lost since I had already previously decided that I wanted to get a HDHomeRun tuner. But the $160 price tag was going to be tough to swallow. I started considering using USB tuners instead of internal cards, but I may just get another motherboard that has two x16 slots (for Crossfire or SLI) and room to add my tuner.

I ordered the card on a Friday and it arrived on Tuesday at work. I installed it right away after I got home. I downloaded a couple of demo games (Watchmen and Bioshock) and it looks pretty good on high settings in those games. I decided to stress it with Crysis and it wasn’t hard to do so. LOL I had to back the resolution WAAAY down and turn down/off some visual quality settings. I didn’t get a chance to play it alot yet. Maybe when I get home today.

Home made HDTV Saga continues…
Since I lost AC3 audio decoding for the Pinnacle software and refusing to pay the $5 upgrade, I decided to see what I could do about receiving over the air (OTA) digital broadcasts. I bought a $30 RCA “flat” indoor HDTV antenna from Walmart. It’s lightweight, small and beige and it could be oriented horizontally (preferred) or vertically. Boring looking, but it works. I hooked it up to both of my tuners using the splitter (loosing the cable signal, but I didn’t care). I set it up in my window and I got most (if not all of the local stations sans some located in Athens I believe). All of the major networks came in clear with full signal. I was amazed at how clear the picture was. Though sitting up close on a high pixel density monitor you will see some imperfections in the picture. I did notice some compression artifacts in some of the broadcasts. I was disappointed to discover that my favorite Fox shows (24 and Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles) were shown in 720p. Lost didn’t look bad as long as I backed away from the monitor a bit while watching it. And you can really notice the imperfections in the news broadcasters faces. Man, the make up isn’t helping!