Water Cooled Xbox

[Bing Fung]

Those Rube Goldberb guys at Hard OCP have done it again!

I love how they take the simplist of things, mod them up or try to OC anything that takes electricity, just to say they can

They have water cooled an Xbox which will be the springboard for and OC'ed Xbox... Can't wait to see it happen.






This is one of my favorite sites Full Artical Here




Bing

[SiliGoose]

LOL! That's crazy.

Do they really think they can OC it? How?

I've read that adding memory is a posibility but doing so would be worthless as games don't support it.




-Sili

[JonMarsh]

Well, just goes to show some people have too much time on their hands!


So, uh, once you water cool it and actually overclock it, you'll have, uh, how much processor power compared to the average upperend Athlon PC? 60%? 70%? And which games can I buy that actually support HD resolutions?

I dunno, guys. Of course, I'm just an old stick in the mud. I have enjoyed a couple of games on a PS-2 (Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance is fun, and graphically striking- more so than any XBox title I've seen in demo's), but I'm kinda hooked on 1280X1024 or higher res for games. And I prefer PC conventions regarding saving and input devices.

Also, it's interesting that in Europe as Xbox is becoming available, they're charging the equivalent of $200 more than in the US. :E Makes you think they don't really want to sell it there, or that they goofed major league on the pricing announced in the US. :?

Maybe I'm just grumpy about all this because I don't have enough free time to be playing games very often!

-Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Bing Fung]

Sili, I'm not sure that they will be able to OC it. I would think a lot of Xbox programs expect certain timings and runing it OC'ed could screw that all up. Then you never know..... It's just funny as hell to see. :LOL: I love the way these guys are always tinkering, OC'ing PDAs, toasters, microwaves...etc... heheh

Jon, you have to see games like Dead or Alive 3, NFL Fever on the Xbox. Even at the low res of 640x480 it looks fantastic. The lighting and shadow effects make it look simply gorgeous! Even though PC games @ 1600x1200, have more resolution, the overall effect of the XBox makes looking at a small PC sceen somewhat lacking. Now if we were to play a game of Medal of Honor on your HTPC and projector, fug-ged-a-boud-it! That would totally kick ass!

Trevor and I were playing Xbox NHL 2002 on his HT setup and it was fantastic on his 65" tv. The 5.1 DD sound was surreal. It actually sounded as if we were in the Saddle Dome Hockey Arena. I could hear my team members calling for the puck up ice, it was a very nice effect. The shear ambience of the crowd was very realistic. We played some PS2 afterward and I have to say, the graphics just don't have the depth that the Xbox can generate. As well the PS2 is totally full of jaggies, it's in bad need of some antialias treatments. The Xbox is a great toy for $450 cdn, wait a minute, the PS2 is also $449.... I'll take the Xbox please :P

I wish I had time as well, I have a rack on new PC games that are not even installed, and I haven't play Xbox for more than 2 weeks now. Gaming is becoming more of a social thing so I mainly play Xbox when a friend drops over and wants to play, or if I bring it to work to team play on the big projectors.




Bing

[JonMarsh]

You hit it on the head, Bing.

I've been eyeing "Medal of Honor" at the stores, even picked it up a couple of times, but I haven't even completed the training missions on IL2 Sturmovick yet! (for lack of time, not trying!).

I did play Max Payne through twice- but I haven't touched a game since the middle of January. I've been spending all my spare time working on the third gen M8 box, I think I actually finalized the voicing of the crossover last night (we're talking 1 dB tweaks at this point). Plan is to finish this set of new boxes by Saturday morning, load 'em, and have them over at my honey's by Saturday evening (there going to be her speakers, promised since last October. Slow work takes time).

Now, I'm going to tweak up the old 2nd gen set with a bit of what I've learned on the 3rd gen pair. Then I'm going to go out and buy Medal of Honor, and try it out on my HTPC, with the 2nd gen set as surrounds!


BTW, if you want to talk game eyecandy, have you played Aqua Nox on a Geforce 3? The game UI and some issues are kinda stupid, IMO, but graphics are pretty cool.

Now, all I really want to know is

WHEN IS JEDAI OUTCAST GOING GOLD?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!


-Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[JonMarsh]

BTW, Bing, have you ever seen Dark Alliance on the PS2 on a Sony 10HT? No jaggies I could see anywhere. It's my impression that it takes a fairly sharp programming crew to get the full hardware capability out of a PS-2. (which, really, I suppose, isn't good API design and support on Sony's part).

And I have seen most of those games on an Xbox. But 64MB of RAM? What were they thinking.....

-Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Bing Fung]

Jon, I have not seen it in the flesh, but the screen shots do look nice and on your 10HT it must be fantastic! :P

My friend Cam just bought a Sharp 9000 DLP and he also has an Xbox, and HTPC. I'm looking forward to hanging around his HT and playing some games as well.

I brought my Xbox into work one day and connected it up to a Sharp LCD projector in a conference room. DoA3 looked fantastic and we had a lot of fun playing 4 player tag team match. We also played NFL Fever and some spectators in the room were really unnerved at how realistic the players looked and moved. The lighting and shadow rendering of FEVER is simply outstanding. I wish I had one of those handy projectors at home to bring to LAN parties and what not

The API can be the biggest problem with the Sony Graphics Synthesizer (GPU) and it's Emotion Engine (CPU). It takes a lot of programming savy to be able to ultilize the 2 vector co-processors of the EE, and the 16 pixel pipeline GS. The sony's CPU must perform T&L functions during 3D rendering effectively, as the Sony's GPU does no T&L functions at all. This stuff should be typically left for the GPU, freeing the CPU to handle only the AI calculations. Making it more difficult, Sony did not offer a set of pre packaged tools for the programer to assist in game engine development. They really left the difficult to use API to the developer to design and make their own bricks to render a wall of bricks. Unlike DirectX programing which offers a lot of pre-made tools to assist the programmer in development. I'm not a programer, but this is what I have read and been told to why PS2's are so difficult to code and use effectively.

I agree, 64 mb seems lite, however it is the most of all the consoles (40mb GC, 32mb PS2). While Graphical programmers can never have enough memory, it means they can't load huge data blocks of game code into the memory, and must program effeciently for the closed architecture. Yes they could have used more memory and it's limitations of 64mb remain to be seen, once second gen development programs hit the market. A lot of second gen games are said to really take advantage of the programmable pixel and vertex shaders of the XGPU. Add to that FSAA and we may have frame rate issues if the programmers aren't effecient with their code. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I did buy Aquanox for my PC, and while the images rendered by the GF3 are absolutlely stunning, I too found the game play of this game lacking. I have not played it much at all.

What is JEDAI?




Bing