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Today wasn’t so much a day as more a culmination of a few days. I’m just now getting caught up on all my work so I’ve had time to give this project some attention. I spent a few hours today calling around searching for replacement engines and suffice to say the search wasn’t very positive. In a desperation move I went to a Pull A Part knowing full and well that all the cars there would be stripped to the bone. Finding 4 240SXs on record, I began browsing the yard. The first one was an empty shell, the second one had a rusted shortblock, the third was partially dismantled, but the fourth was in perfect condition. Judging from the large marker writing on the windows, the owner had just graduated college so I suspect he tossed the car in search of a better one. Great news for me but unfortunately the block had 240k miles on it.

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During my recent trip to California, Corsair hooked me up with some of the DDR2 and DDR3 Dominators. Prior to this I have more or less stuck with OCZ since my DDR1 days however I simply couldn’t pass up these sticks. For the following week I was jittery in anticipation, these sticks had the potential to really unlock my DDR2 platform. My CrossFire benching has jumped onto the DDR3 bandwagon however my SLI platform is still utilizing a 780i motherboard, hence all my excitement. So how do these sticks hold up? Are they worth they price tag and wicked heatspreaders?

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During Gigabyte’s Spring Break they presented a slideshow to us, highlighting upcoming technologies in their P45 launch. P45 really will be a remarkable chipset but not due to the actual chipset performance itself but the features that come with it. Gigabyte has a slew of features that’ll be a part of their P45 series boards, some pertinent to overclockers and some to the average consumer. What I find most impressive about this entire slideshow though is the focus Gigabyte has turned towards the enthuasiast sector.

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While on vacation over the last two weeks I had the chance to experience a rare event. Gigabyte, the computer component manufacturer I have been working with closely, invited me along with 15 other overclockers to test their upcoming P45 motherboards in Taiwan. I flew out of Atlanta on April 26th and landed at Taipei, Taiwan on the morning of April the 28th. Here’s what went down.

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I spent last week in California making new friends and visiting various hardware venders. While traveling through the San Francisco area I had a chance to stop by Corsair in Fremont. I had spoke with Robert Pearce, one of Corsair’s Marketing Specialists, and he arranged for some time to tour Corsair’s offices in Fremont. I actually rode the BART train in from downtown San Francisco at 7am with Michal Nowicki aka bachus_anonym so I had an early start that day. When we finally arrived 45 minutes later, I was decently surprised with the amount of equipment and testing that occurs at Corsair.

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At 4:15am today my QX9650 died. I purchased this chip on January 17th, 2008 and it lasted a little under 4 months under my control. During it’s lifetime though it brought me many good moments and really propelled my overclocking career forward, revealing new doors and opening old doors. Unfortunately, last night while benching 3DMark 2003, the system crashed hard midway through a test and refused to boot afterwards. Upon further investigation, and to my hearts joy/sadness, I verified the chip was dead. I say joy as I was deathly afraid I had killed another Gigabyte board, but thankfully this was not the case. That QX9650 was a decent chip though and it saddens me to see it move on, it was doing 5350MHz with 1.78v through 3DMark 2003 and 100% stable. That would have been a killer run, hopefully it’s successor can live up to and pass this chips records. If all goes well I should get a replacement quickly as I have a lot of gear here that needs to be tested. I’ve got one more night of HD3850 benching(close to a clean sweep on records) and then I start testing Gigabyte 8800 GT’s.

Contrary to everyone else clamoring about the death of PC gaming, I’m going to write quite the opposite. How can I confidently make such a statement? Well simply, I have faith in the casual gamer sitting in the office cubicle. Some offices might have a console in the break room, but every office is almost guaranteed to have a PC that is connected to the Internet. Through this portal many options are available to the casual gamer.

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I’m almost done out here in California, tomorrow I head home back to Georgia. I’ve had a blast out here in California however I’m ready to be home as I’m getting the jitters. There is so much sitting at home waiting to be benched, I cannot wait. When I get home I should finish out the HD3850 testing, ran out of dry ice last time, and this time around I’ll have some wicked Corsair memory to push the processor to new heights. Later next week I’ll be starting some Gigabyte 8800GT benching and once again utilizing Corsair Dominators, suffice to say I’ll be setting some blistering records. I’ve been on the road for nearly 2 weeks and I have a ton of images and video to post, expect a torrent of information to spew from this site very soon.