• Grabbed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 8.10
• Ghosted Vista install out to another drive (to restore later)
• Installed Ubuntu, took whole system drive.
• Booted Ubuntu. Took about 10 seconds longer to boot than Vista. (Vista starts off booting slow, but as SuperFetch gets smarter, it boots faster and faster.)
• Downloaded updates.
• Marveled that Ubuntu auto-mounted my NTFS storage and app drives. No surprise there.
• Activated the recommended Restricted nVidia driver for my 8800 GTS and set full resolution, then turned on the eye candy.
  • Fought with this, as I have to do every time I install Ubuntu on this video card, to get 1280×1024 resolution. I’ll spare you all the minute details, but I spent a good 45 minutes on it. Ubuntu refuses to detect this mode automatically and the GUI gives me no option to force my own settings. None of the command line options to force a redetect of video hardware seem to work anymore, or I am using them incorrectly. I have to edit xorg.conf manually to add in the proper modes, refresh rates and the like. It’s a PITA. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO MANUALLY EDIT ANYTHING TO FORCEFULLY SET A VIDEO MODE THAT I WANT IF THE OS DOESN’T DETECT IT. Windows doesn’t make me do this. 1) It absolutely, 100% of the time, always has and probably always will detect my monitor’s native resolution JUST FINE and sets it to it out of the box and, 2) It just happily shows me all the resolutions the CARD supports and lets me set it to whatever I want in the event the monitor isn’t detected. See, Windows gives me a GUI for advanced options and assumes I know what I’m doing. XWindows on Ubuntu does not. (I cannot stress this enough, that Windows has never, as far as I can remember, failed to detect and either auto-set or allow me to set ANY LCD monitor’s native resolution EVER)
• Marveled at how the default compositing engine is slower in Ubuntu 8.10 than it was in 8.04, and is subsequently slower than Vista’s compositing engine. (8.04 was faster last time I ran it, actually, dunno why that might be). I don’t care if it might benchmark faster, because it LOOKS and FEELS slower. For eye-candy, that’s what’s important.
• Amazed that Firefox on Ubuntu renders this blog more slowly than Vista does, and scrolls pages slower too. It is positively choppy. Everyone says Ubuntu is supposed to be faster on the same hardware. Hmm…
• Installed Wine from Ubuntu repository with Synaptic. Easy.
• Tried to install SimCity4 and RushHour using ISO images.
  • This was a FAIL, most likely due to lack of experience on my part. Apparently, mounting ISO images over an SMB connection and getting them to show up to Wine is more difficult than I am willing to try to figure out. I just used the CD’s last time I did this, but I tried to save time and use my ISO files – no go.
  • Found out that the default way of mounting ISO files in Ubuntu doesn’t like Wine or vice versa, and is generally weird. I had to install gISOMount to get ISOs to mount well, using a GUI, in a proper way. I know, “use the command line, you noob”, but I shouldn’t have to use the command line to do something this simple. I don’t have to use the command line in Windows to do this.
• Installed SimCity4 and RushHour using original CDs instead
  • This worked just fine, although the SimCity4 installer shows a constant 0% completed while installing.
• Copied Plugins and Angel Coast Region from NTFS drive to linux home folder for testing.
• Launched SC4RH for “play”.
  • Launched the game and waited… some more… a bit more.. THERE (about twice as slow loading as Vista/XP)
  • Loaded up Angel Coast/Buena Vista (My HUGE city, almost entire map of skyscrapers and 600k people) and waited. And waited, and waited.
  • Marveled at how slow it was compared to Windows. Thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful 1-3 FPS when scrolling around the city map (in Windows this is more like 6-10fps). Noticed issues with rendering the clouds (could see silohuettes of planes and mission bubbles left behind when scrolling). Watched as the color of the ground would randomly change color when it shouldn’t. Menus took longer to pop out. Options took longer to open up. Was slower trying to lay down roads.
  • Didn’t end up playing, because it took too long to do anything. Hell, its slow enough on Windows, I don’t need anything helping it to be slower.
• Posted this complaint about how Ubuntu 8.10 and SimCity4 are slower on this computer than Windows Vista.
• Went back to loving Ubuntu for servers and Windows for desktops.

I gave the part back to my vendor, since it was within 1 year and said “replace it”. The vendor sent it back to MSI for repair/swap.

Fast forward to yesterday. It took MSI forever to get my card back to me, but they did come though. I got the replacement card, and there was good news. It was an upgrade. A free upgrade. To a much nicer card. An nVidia 8800 GTS 320MB. MSI seriously pumped my video performance for free. WOOT! (Check ‘em out on Toms’ Hardware…)

I took out the crappy PCI Radeon 9250 I had been limping along with and installed the 8800GTS. Went to nVidia’s website. Installed the newest drivers. Everything looked great. My LDView models looked great, and rotated faster than 1 frame every aeon.

Naturally, because of the nice upgrade, this called for updating the 3DMark scores on the website here. I fired up 3DMark and ran it through the minimum tests required to get a score. I thought it ran slow, and I was right. The final score was 2000 points SLOWER than the card I had originally.

WTF!

I did some research and tried everything everyone said about this card, my Motherboard, and even the card brand. I uninstalled drivers, ran DriverCleaner, and reinstalled. No joy. I tried updating DirectX. No joy. I removed all unnecessary cards, drives, and peripherals. No Joy. I made sure my powersupply was properly rated for the card. It was. I even went so far as to disconnect my OS drive and connect a new one, then install a clean copy of Windows, then the chipset driver, then the
video driver, you know, the proper order to ensure happy video goodness. NO JOY!

The only thing that I could think of is that the CPU is overclocked, and perhaps there was some sort of odd timing thing. I dropped the Core 2 Duo E4300 from it’s happy perch at 2.7 Ghz back to is lowly origins at 1.8Ghz. Lo and behold, the card perks up and is nice and snappy.

WTF, part 2!

Now, I researched specifics about my card coupled with my motherboard, a Gigabyte 965P-DS3 v2.0. Nobody had any real suggestions. So I started playing with Front side bus settings, memory ratios, and PCI-e bus settings. Nothing I tried worked. I decided to flash the BIOS from the version I had, F9, to the newest, F11. No joy.

I then did some more Googling, because by this time, I am ready to try any hairbrained idea I could find, and I found this cool forum post talking about how to get the most out of your DS3 motherboard. I tried doing everything they said there, including increasing the PCI-e bus to 102mhz. Still, no Joy. I tried 104Mhz. No POST.

At this point, I start fudging around with the FSB setting, starting at the default of 200Mhz and bumping it one Mhz at a time, trying to see where the breaking point was. I found it, at a measly 205mhz. I needed to be at 300Mhz to get my machine back to 2.7Ghz. All of this leads me to think there is some sort of weird timing/sync issue between the FSB and the PCI-e bus that makes the video card wait for a couple of cycles before pushing out data, or whatever.

I went back to that cool forum post and read all of the comments at the bottom. Some people were reporting about instability issues, and stating that there are many people who had success with this instability by bumping up their PCI-e bus above 110-115mhz stabilized their systems. I thought “fork!” because mine would not work above 104! I dropped back into the BIOS and set it to 110, thinking “what the hell, worst that will happen is it won’t POST again.”

It worked. OMGWTFBBQ, it f***ing worked. At a PCI-e setting of 110 mhz, and with my CPU overclocked to it’s fast 2.7Ghz, the machine POSTed, booted, ran 3DMark06, and gave a nice score of 9551 3DMarks.

I HATE COMPUTER HARDWARE, and love it at the same time. What else can exasperate you yet engage your mind to it’s fullest at the same time?

Not much, that’s what.

Check out my new speccies, here.

• Super Mario Bros. – NES: Main Theme. Need I say anything.
• M.C. Kids – NES: The thing that’s really cool about this game is how cleverly they -engineered- the music, along with the creativity that went into making the music fit the game and sound really memorable. My favorite here can be heard in level 4 of Ronald’s Clubhouse, or on track 6 in the NSF file from the game.
• Megaman 3 – NES: The whole game has awesome f***ing music, but Magnet Man in particular is great.
• Dr. Mario – NES: Fever. Catchy Tune
• Final Fantasy 7 – PS1/PC: Gold Saucer Music