Author Archives: Clay

About Clay

I'm a Data Center Operations Engineer in beautiful Charleston, SC. I'm happily married to my wonderful wife Nan and we have an teenage daughter Lela. I'm a total geek. I got into electronics when I was around 9 or 10 and got hooked on computers shortly thereafter. I also love Sci-Fi, (not fantasy) particularly Star Trek. My favorite outdoor activities include rollerblading, biking and hiking. I'm also a bit of a car guy and amateur racing driver.

Ooops…

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Hey, you made it! This is my website’s new home for the immediate future. (At some point last week my website disapeared. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but as I only found out about it tonight, I wasn’t able to make the proper preparations for a smooth transfer. Sorry ’bout that.)

A new adventure..
Aside from playing Doom3, lately I’ve been working on a retro computing project. I’ve been playing with an Apple II+ I got from a friend and my wife’s old Commodore 64. However, I’ve decided to put that on the back burner for the moment and embark on a more exciting (and more useful) new project. I’ve had my HDTV monitor for a few months now, and still haven’t gotten it hooked up to a digital feed. With the cost of terrestrial recievers at $250+, I decided to attempt to build a high-def HTPC (Home Theater PC) instead. The idea is to come up with something that can basically be an enhanced TiVo type device that can also play games and burn TV shows and movies to disc. I’ve ordered the parts (which don’t cost much more than a reciever) and hopefully I’ll be able to start on this sometime this week. More on this soon!

DooM ]|[ woes..

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Well folks, it’s 3am and I’m throwing in the towel. Before I go, there’s another issue with Doom 3 I wanted to highlight..

Bugs, bugs, bugs..
So, to add to the 2 problems I mentioned before, there’s a sound problem with the game that seems fairly widespread from some of the articles I’ve seen. (check out this one, and this one for more info..) The problem is that sound cuts out fairly regularly if you use the surround feature with a 4.1 or 5.1 system. From my experience, it’s sporadic at first, but gets worse as the game goes on. My advice: If you haven’t already bought the game, wait until Id/Activision releases a patch to fix all of these problems. This really is a great game, but the technical glitches really start to ruin the experience after a while.

Let the carnage begin..

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Ok, it’s late, but I can’t stop playing. I’m getting scared out of my socks at every turn, but it’s so much fun…

I need a new video card..
About a year and 1/2 ago when I was planning out my system specs, (fully expecting Doom 3 to release on schedule) I got the best bang-for-the-buck hardware I could find and proceeded to overclock the crap out of it. Now it’s a little over a year later, I’ve got Doom 3, and it’s good, but my graphics card needs a little help. Everything looks incredible with 4x AA/8x AF, but the framerates are horrible. To get it playable, but still run at 1024×768 I had to turn it all off. It still looks great mind you, I’m just being a perfectionist.

There’s a couple of reviews over at [H]ardOCP with good information on configs as well as what you’ll need to really see this game in all it’s glory. Thankfully Id designed their game to be playable on modern hardware. So, in a way.. it’s good that they waited this long to release it. However, only the absolute latest cards from NVidia seem to be able to get Doom 3 to the next level of graphics quality. Oh, and if you do decide to buy a hot new card, make sure you upgrade your PSU to compensate for the added power drain. Ok, ok.. enough writing.. time for some more gaming..