Gaming relief and CPU scaling

There's nothing more settling than looking at a very full editorial calendar for the month ahead. Every Thursday night we have our weekly editorial staff meetings at AT and we iron out what just about everyone at AT has on their plate for the next 2 - 4 weeks. This last month I've been so focused on Half Life 2 and all of the launches that happened that I hadn't been able to help organize December's calendar, leaving it fairly empty. But thanks to Thursday's meeting, December is nice and full of articles and I'm at ease.

I think I've inherited my mom's unshakable knack of worrying about everything all the time. But as is the case with most generation-to-generation inheritances I've received a lesser form of the worry gene. I don't worry about as much stuff, but enough to keep me nice and stressed on a regular basis. Things like making sure that we get articles up on time, making sure they are done as best as possible, business issues, the new house we're building, etc... all fall into the realm of things to worry about on a daily basis. Although I'm a firm believer that everything works out in the end (and to this date, everything has), that philosophy is not enough to overcome the worry gene.

At one point not too long ago in my life, there were two things that would take my mind away from worrying: driving and gaming. Now that I'm happily married, Vinney has stepped up to the plate as the first person capable of making me not think about anything at all. Vinney's also an avid gamer providing yet another avenue to de-stress.

I've mentioned before the lack of good driving roads up here, so we've turned to gaming quite a bit. Half Life 2 has been fun, but until recently the lack of multiplayer prevented it from being a game that we'd both enjoy. We've got a few friends back in NC and other areas that we usually game with so multiplayer is a must.

We recently took the plunge and finally signed up for Xbox live for some multiplayer Halo 2 with a couple of the aforementioned friends. We started out doing horrendously but once we realized that the point of the little Xbox live communicator headset was to actually coordinate with one another our game improved tremendously. We're still below average at best, but improving, which makes the gameplay much less stressful :)

Valve's latest Half Life 2 patch thankfully added multiplayer support (I loved the original Half Life multiplayer), but unfortunately broke all compatibility with older timedemos. So I spent Thursday night remaking all of our timedemos (as well as a new multiplayer demo). The new demos are as close to the old ones as possible, but they don't produce 100% comparable numbers (the numbers they produce are a few percent off of the originals). You can grab the new demos here and I'll be adding the updated link to the first two Half Life 2 articles shortly.

I've been working on the CPU scaling article ever since I finished up with the X850 testing and so far things are looking ok. This article has the potential to turn into much more of a Half Life 2 "scaling" investigation, looking at the effects of fill rate, memory bandwidth as well as CPU speed on Half Life 2 performance, but I haven't made the final call as to how exhaustive I'm going to make it just yet. I'm still waiting on a few more sets of results before I can determine whether or not it'll be useful information.

I will also be doing another Desktop Pentium M article (similar to the one I did back in July) using the newest batch of desktop Pentium M motherboards. The CPUs I used for that article had to be sent back, so I've got a few more on order that I'm waiting on before I can start testing for this next piece. I'm hoping to have the article done towards the end of December.

It's definitely getting cooler here in CT, but so far it's not too bad. I'm afraid that the worst won't be here until the end of the year and the beginning of next year though, so I'm not counting my chickens just yet (despite the phrase, I'm not *that* southern).

Take care and enjoy the rest of the weekend.