Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Still here

Apologies for the radio silence. Since my last post I burned out the power supply on my main rig for a 3rd time, this time playing Star Trek Online rather than Champions Online. I finally realized I need a bigger power supply if I intend to play any Cryptic games.

What threw me was that nothing else has given me problems at maxed or nearly maxed settings, including Age of Conan. In the last year I haven't had any issues with my rig, and I kind of assumed it was simply an odd coincidence my system died twice while I was playing CO. However, three times while playing games using the Cryptic engine seems like more than a coincidence. Further, thinking back, the CO era Cryptic engine is at least a year younger than the engine of anything else I normally play. My theory is that it pushes my quad core in a way that most MMOs don't and the power supplies I've been using can't keep up with.

I'm upping my power supply to 530, in theory 110 watts more than my system needs according to calculators I've found. It also seems to be the sweet spot on performance versus cost at newegg. Hopefully this will be the last time I post about a Cryptic game exploding my PC. In the mean time, I've been playing a lot of WoW on my backup PC. To give you the short short version of my next post, archaeology was a pleasant surprise.

4 comments:

  1. Hopefully you picked a different manufacturer this time, just to be safe?

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  2. @Jomar: I haven't ordered it yet, but yeah, that's a good point.

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  3. Just thought I'd look at your other posts since I wondered here via another blog. I wanted to tell you, from what I've heard from the tech guru's at my local computer shop, it's not just wattage you are looking for. I've been told that you also need to figure out the amperage as well. With that I bought a power supply with a higher than normal amperage and I've never had a problem. I run all my games on high settings as well.

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  4. @Me: A new 630 Watt power supply showed up in the mail today. I have no idea how many amps it puts out, but it's a good 210 watts more than my old one, so hopefully I'll be good. Thanks for stopping by in any case!

    PS: I can't believe that profile name wasn't already taken :-)

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