Trapsummers

Thanks for all the help everyone. My PC has only fully crashed one time, so I may be jumping to conclusions. The display driver issues have spanned four driver versions (and I only update these if I run into problems); granted, I have not tried using DDU to remove them, so I guess I can’t rule this out. Everything else like temperatures, frequencies/timings are all looking good, and I have no overclocks right now.

As for the warranty: I was under the impression that participating in a mail-in rebate, like I did, would void the warranty. If worst comes to worst, though, I guess it’s worth asking Corsair if I can still make a warranty claim.

I think I will run the CX500 for a while and see if the problems are truly gone, or just obfuscated. If the problems don’t return, then I will put the HX750 back in and test again. At that point, things should become clearer.

So, lately I have had trouble with my display driver and PC crashing. When the PC crashes, it is not a BSOD, rather, total power loss. This only happens while running games/stress tests. I did some tests to try to isolate the problem.

Methodology: OCCT PSU Burn Mode 30min stress test

After running this test for 29 minutes, my display driver crashed. Looking at the results, the FPS dropped from the average, 300, to less than 4 on three occasions, and dropped to 0 when the display driver crashed. Next, I took the PSU out of my system and took a multi meter to it. All the voltage readings are well within the normal range.

After those tests, I put a spare Corsair CX500 in my system and ran the OCCT stress test again. This time, I ran the test twice for 30 minutes each time, with a 1-minute break in between tests: the display driver didn’t crash, and the FPS never dropped below 280 during these tests.

I’m thinking that my display driver could be crashing, and FPS dropping, because my PSU stops supplying enough power to my GPU for a split second. Unfortunately, I can’t devise a way to fully confirm this.

Do you think it’s safe to assume that the PSU is to blame, or should I test something else before replacing it? I already tested my memory and, of course, updated my display drivers.

Full specs:

Corsair HX750 PSU (It is about 6 years old; seen ~3 years of use based on HDD S.M.A.R.T. data)

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4690K CPU @ 3.50GHz

8GB DDR3

GTX 970 (Gigabyte windforce)

1 SSD with 2 HDDs

MSI Z97 Gaming 5 mobo

The entire system pulls an observed maximum of 360W from the wall.

My friend's PC had a problem like this. It would just shut off without notice, no blue screen or anything. It would also turn on randomly. It turned out that the problem was a faulty power switch in her Antec case. I found that the switch remained half open by connecting a 9v battery to the switch and testing the voltage through the switch with a multi meter.

To test this, unplug the power switch from the mobo and use a paperclip to turn on the PC (use the paperclip to bridge a connection between the pins that the power switch header was connected to) then let it run for a while. I think it is worth trying before investing in new hardware if none of the other suggestions help.

Wow, Logical Increments is pretty great. I used a mix of passmark and tomshardware for my build. I will have to remember that site next time I am doing something like this, thanks.

It has been about five years since I built my current PC and I made a ton of mistakes with that build.

Current specs:

i7 960 OC'd to 3.7Ghz

1x GTX 580 1.5GB VRAM

ASUS RAMPAGE something or other

7200RPM HDD

750w Corsair HX modular PSU

Cheap-o CoolerMaster case with FP-IO that only halfway works

etc.

Biggest mistake being the 1.5GB vram. This time I did much more research before putting together...

Parts List

This build is meant for 1080p gaming; ideally it will last for the next five or six years. I plan to overclock the CPU. I might do SLI in the future. The 970 3.5GB/224bit memory issues do not bother me. As is, the build is right on budget, $1100.

My main question is about the CPU. Is it worth spending $80 more and going with an i7 over an i5? The big difference between the two is Hyperthreading. Game devs, thus far, haven't been able to adopt semaphores into their calculations, though, so Hyperthreading isn't very useful in games. At the same time, with both consoles running four cores, I can imagine multi-core physics becoming a bigger target in the next few years.

There is a lot in terms of programming that you can do with modern GPUs that you just cannot do on the 360’s hardware. I think you might be right, at first, you might not see an immediate improvement in the way games look. At the same time, there is a lot that developers can do with a newer GPU that would lessen the amount of work they need to put into a game in order to make a game look the way it does now. Less time spent on making trees sway in the wind equals more time spent on other aspects of the game.

That is not the mention the obvious fact that new hardware will allow for higher resolution textures.

Sorry for the massive delay between updates. I got kind of caught up in making my new Super Mario World hack, updating my old Minecraft and Hard Reset mods, and some college stuff. Sadly, I could not work very much on my game the last few weeks, but I have still been accumulating ideas and sources of inspiration. That might sound like a really sad excuse for progress, but in my case, it is more progress than I could have hoped to accomplish with any amount of free time two weeks ago. I entered a state of writer’s block after my last blog post.

This time, I made videos with commentary. I thought it would be easier to verbally explain most of the stuff I wanted to show, instead of typing out all the details. There is also a certain impact being able to show something in motion that you cannot get with pictures. I’m afraid that my mic is kind of bad. If people seem interested enough in my commentaries, I will upgrade to a better mic.

There isn’t much to say that I don’t cover in the video, next time I will show some of the characters and where I drew inspiration from when creating them. I will also talk about my design philosophy and what I hope to accomplish with my game.

For those of you that are interested in seeing the kind of work that goes into the programming side of the game, I also made a video covering some of that as well.

Hi everyone, as some of you may know, I have started development on a video game which I am calling “Tetra’s Cloud.” My initial plan was to keep relatively quiet about the project until I released it, however, now I feel like in doing so, I would be setting my game up for failure. For this reason, I have decided to document some of the development process in the form of blog posts.

What is Tetra’s Cloud?

Well, until a few weeks ago I could not have answered this question. What happened was, a few weeks ago, I got bored and decided I would make a text adventure game for laughs. After I had basically finished the text adventure game within a day, I was thinking about an idea for a game I had a few weeks earlier, which I had called Tetra’s Cloud. I spent time debating if I wanted to transform the text adventure into Tetra’s Cloud. I was a little unsure if I wanted to make Tetra’s Cloud a text adventure, though, it just didn’t seem good enough. Then I decided I would start over, and Tetra’s Cloud would be a Point-and-Click Adventure game/Turn-based RPG.

My role in the development.

I am doing all the programming and art myself at this point. Surprisingly, most of the programming has gone pretty well, all things considered. I mean, I am sure I have done some things in a way that more experienced programmers would find less than optimal, but everything works the way I want it to. The art is what takes me the longest to make. Combine the fact that I am incredibly picky in regards to how things that I make look, and the fact that I am not an amazing artist and you get weekends spent on single images.

Where I am in the development process.

At this point in the development I am still setting up the framework and deciding how I want stuff to play out. Almost 90% of the art and ability names are still placeholder, but I have nearly all the mechanics working. Mechanics I am still working to implement are save states, loot and gear, as well as healing outside battle. Actually, I have not decided if I want to reset health after a battle or if I want Pokemon style non-regenerating health. I am also not sure if I want to have gear yet, I might wait until chapter 2 to implement that, I don’t know. Obviously I have the story done, but I don’t want spoil any of it. What I will say is that the story takes place in a futuristic/sci-fi inspired setting.

What you can do.

If any artists are interested in doing some art for the game just private message me and I will be happy to give you some more details. Keep in mind that I cannot pay you because the game will be released as free when it is done (I will not be making any money off of it at all), and I cannot afford to pay someone with my own money.

As I get further into development I will be giving more details and taking feedback/ideas. At this point, I do not have much to show, other than all the programming stuff which wouldn’t mean anything to the majority of people, and the place holder content. If you have any questions, I would be happy to try to answer them when I get the chance.

I am a bit of a late arrival, I guess. I did not know about Giant Bomb until some guy started talking about the site during one of his World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta videos on Youtube. He urged his viewership to check the site out, so I did; and here I am. That was only two or three years ago.

If I remember correctly, the first thing I viewed was the “Eat Them!” quick look, and then I watched some of the Dealdy Premonition endurance run (BR) because a part of that was still on the front page at that point.

Patrick as a person never bothered me. In fact, I enjoyed most of his quicklook and podcast appearances early on. What bugged me about Patrick was his ability to write articles. Every time I read one of his articles I would find a typo or grammatical error within the first paragraph. It made me feel like he didn’t care enough about what he posted on the site to spend more than 2 seconds proof-reading.

At this point, I still find typos quite often in his articles, and I still avoid most of the articles he posts. He continues to be fine in everything else in my opinion, just as long as he is not writing.