TechnologyInsanity.com

First of all, I smoked a pack a day for 4 years. I picked up my first e-cigarette more than a year ago, I dropped it and started smoking again for a year. Then I picked up the e-cigarette again. I stayed with them for 3 months, and I still use it daily, a lot more than snus. (currently, anyway)

A number of things point to e-cigarettes being relatively safe (however there needs to be more research done) and I have used them for months, guess what? My lungs have cleared up, I can finally breathe again. I feel good, generally.

I’ve heard about snus being a pretty healthy alternative to cigarettes as well, and some people combining it with e-cigarettes to finally “lay down” cigarettes completely. One day I had no batteries for my e-cigarette and I was out and about, so instead of buying a pack of cigarettes (which would’ve broke my 3 month long cigarette free streak) I opted to pick up some camel snus. I felt something familiar, a “good feeling” not like when I vape on my ecig to kill withdrawal, that’s a completely different feeling. Then I remembered that there are MAOI’s in tobacco, and that’s what I was probably feeling more than anything. Remember, I didn’t use these MAOI’s for 3 months, however I think they were the problem. I was still holding on to my old cigarettes because I really felt something was missing from my e-cigarette, and it was bothering me.

Later on I decided to try swedish snus, and man is that ever stronger than camel. I had an “MAOI” rush. (I had been puffing on my e-cigarette like normal until the package came, and had just put it down prior to popping in some swedish snus.)

All of a sudden, I feel much better, and feel like I used to when I smoked. This resulted in me throwing away all my cigarettes (finally). I had been holding them because I wanted that MAOI feeling back. I missed it. I was going to ignore it as much as possible and try to get over it, however this makes me feel safer. Now I can say for certain that I don’t have any need to smoke.

Note: You have to realize that smoking is the WORST POSSIBLE WAY to get nicotine, period. I know a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking that smokeless tobacco is WORSE for you than cigarettes. That’s completely FALSE. Unfortunately, cigarettes have the highest rate of all cancers. Oral, lung, pancreatic, etc. Yes there are risks to snus, however those risks are very small in comparison with smoking. (90% – 98% safer)

Conclusion

In my opinion, combining e-cigarettes and snus is going to be the absolute best combination for anyone to quit smoking. Some people don’t care about the MAOI’s much, others do. However, I think e-cigarettes and snus are great choices for anyone willing to stop smoking. Pick up a blucig and see if e-cigarettes are right for you. Otherwise check out northerner.com.

Still, I would like to quit nicotine/tobacco completely, but I’m a pretty big addict. The least I can do is try to be healthier with my habit, and it’s so nice that the “powers that be” shield all harm reduction is secrecy.

I picked up another monitor for productivity reasons – but I already had a 1680X1050 (22″) & 1920X1200 (24″) screen. I’ve picked up different monitors over the years and never bought them as sets. The 3rd monitor is e-IPS 1920×1080 (23″) – because I knew I wanted to start moving to IPS technology. The other 2 are obviously TN panels.

While doing all this, EyeFinity was not the priority. The priority was more screen space to work with. However, since I had the whole setup basically, why not mess with EyeFinity?

I had to set all of them at 1680X1050 since that’s the lowest resolution out of the bunch. That gives me 5040X1050 – which looks horrible out of games. I was pretty much expecting everything to be horrible since like I said, all 3 are different monitors, and the LG screen has these horridly big bezels. So, by far not the best setup for something like EyeFinity.

After getting in game however, everything looks good. I’m shocked. The bezels don’t bother me -  I’m shocked. I was able to get the other 2 to line up with my 24″  – I’m shocked. My games are more immersive and I’m enjoying myself a lot – yet again pure shock.

So what does all this tell me? You don’t have to have the perfect setup to get EyeFinity enjoyable or working right. I’ve looked and I’ve looked – but I have yet to find anyone running EyeFinity with different monitors and resolutions like me. I am thinking about switching the 22″ and 24″ screen out for 2 more 23″ IPS Dell panels, but that is far into the future. At that point, I’ll have something to compare against and see if it’s really that much better than my current setup.

Lots and lots of people think EyeFinity is just a gimmick – well I really have to disagree there. After going EyeFinity – I don’t want to go back. I don’t think you can say anything until you’ve experienced it first hand for more than a few days. As you can see, I was very skeptical of the technology and thought it would completely suck. I was wrong.

Sure, it’s a somewhat costly setup, but if you need the monitors for productivity anyway, you can’t go wrong. Let me tell you, 2 monitors is 100x better than 1 and 3 seems like the sweet spot for me.  Sure, spaces are cool, but if you need to see a bunch of things at once you can’t do that with spaces. (also remember that one panel must be DisplayPort or you need an active display port adapter for the 3rd monitor)

Conclusion

After having this setup for awhile – I can safely say that EyeFinity is awesome. Game play is just so much more immersive – and fun. It’s really really hard to form an opinion without experiencing it first hand which is going to be a drawback for this technology to spread. Also, yes I know that Matrox has had this technology for quite awhile – but you have to buy a $300 device on top of the $300 video card which makes it even less accessible to the mainstream audience. So ATI has done something magical – introducing videocards capable of driving 3 displays (FINALLY) and combining 3 monitors into 1 display – all wrapped into a highly powerful graphics card. I won’t be switching to nVidia unless they implement similar technology.

Picture taken before all monitors were lined up correctly..

I picked up some cheap Kingston V Series 64GB SSD from NewEgg the other day because they seem to be all the rage lately. Not just that, but I am performing system wide upgrades, started with the chair, but my final setup is coming close now.

Anyway, I’m not going to show you a bunch of benchmarks because I’m sure you already know SSDs are fast, depending on which one you get they may be blazing fast. What you may not know is how they change the feel of the overall system. Boot time is cut in half, roughly, but I didn’t really care about that because I don’t even turn off my PC all that often.

What does surprise me is that applications overall feel more responsive!  Any application you put on the SSD for general use pops open faster and feels better in the interface. Not sure why they feel better while already opened, but I have separate windows + apps on the HDD and SSD and I compared how they functioned, the SSD wins hands down. Probably because the program still accesses the hard drive on and off while in use.

Storage: if this is an issue for you (like it is for me) install windows + apps on a 64GB drive and move everything else to a 2TB 72K drive or something. I have about 2.2TB of usable storage other than the 64GB SSD and it works out great.

One thing though.. If you’re sort of a power user and have lots of applications 32GB is definitely not going to cut it. 64GB+ will work. In fact, I cannot install all my games on the 64GB drive, so I’ll have to install/uninstall if I want the loading speed of the SSD. So in my case, I think I’d be better suited to a 128GB+ drive if I wanted to fit everything that needed speed on it.

With the storage issue, not being able to fit all games etc, is it still a worthy upgrade? You bet. Hard drive are obviously the bottleneck in most newer PC configurations, and with an SSD they really pop alive as far as general use

My old chip was a Q6600. Why was I upgrading at all you may ask? Well, my Q6600 could only hit about 3.2GHz, I wanted some more power plus the extra cores is a nice touch. Generally speaking, the Phenom II X6 is close to the performance clock for clock of my old Q6600. I also snagged a deal on frys.com where the processor + motherboard was only $260. I combo’d that with $80 DDR3 Corsair XMS3 ram (after rebate) from tigerdirect, and picked up a H50 cooler at retail price from newegg. ($80) I also intend to sell my old parts on eBay in the near future to help recoup some cost.

specs:

GA-890GPA-UD3H

4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333

Corsair HX520w PSU (If you don’t think this is enough.. I’ve done the calculations and even with the processor at 4GHz at max I’ll hit 480w or so, with everything fully loaded, 100%. Corsair PSU’s are slightly under rated, and will deliver 520W continuously without issue. I don’t intend to keep my CPU at 4GHz though so there really is no issue, or “pushing” the limits.)

1055T (stepping: CCBBE CB 1015BPMW)

ATi Radeon HD5850

Corsair H50

1x 320GB 72k drive

1x 500GB 72k drive

1X 1TB 72k drive

Overall, pretty cheap upgrade. Let’s start off by saying this was not exactly an “easy” venture. I thought it would be, but it in no way ended up that way. Starting from the beginning, I had to remove my old LGA775 motherboard with a Q6600.

That was pretty simple. Mounting the H50 was also pretty simple. The rest of the process was also simple, and what I’d expect.

So I power up the system, install windows, boot into windows, and all of a sudden… BAM my pc won’t start up. I keep pressing the button like an idiot and smell something burning. My worst fear was that the power supply was dead. I proceeded to disassemble my entire build, that I just put together. I took the power supply to a nearby computer to test if it worked. It worked without issue. So what’s the problem? I have to take out all my components to find out what is causing the problem. I take out the H50 radiator and fan and put it on top of my case.

I power on the system like this, and guess what? The H50 fan starts smoking and making sounds like it’s burning up! Immediately I power off the PC and take out the fan. I replace these fans with my antec fans I’ve had for quite some time. My antec 900 came with a bunch of them. No problems.

This whole process took awhile to sort out and set me back time wise substantially. Anyway, with this sorted out I went to begin overclocking my computer. I hit a wall at around 3.75 GHz, northbridge needed some more juice.

Then my ram timings/speed were getting messed up even with the highest divider. My motherboard is sensitive to the timings on ram for some reason, so I couldn’t boot with certain timings. Not cool. After struggling with the ram timings, speed, northbridge frequency etc, I was finally able to start booting at above 3.75GHz, and eventually was able to hit 4GHz. To make it stable, I had to run a lot of prime95 and ram tests. Prime stability came in at 1.5V. Worth all the hassle? Maybe not since I don’t think I’ll be running my CPU at 1.5V. I can get 3.8ish at around 1.38V. Extra 200Mhz for .12v doesn’t seem worth it. Of course, I just had to push it to 4GHz because it’s “magical” or something

3DMark06 run: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=13861077

Well, that’s that. I’m just adding some finishing tweaks to my setup and figuring out what the “best” overclock would be for performance,  energy consumption, and heat. Probably about 3.8GHz, 4GHz turbo, with C&Q enabled.

This processor is noticeably faster than the Q6600, so I’m happy with my upgrade.

UPDATE: I settled on 3.5GHz @ 1.28V. Should be close to stock watts, at 4GHz it’s a 93% increase.. 93% increase for 500MHz isn’t what I’d call a good deal considering the cost of electricity here. I leave my PC on 24/7 so I don’t want to burn up too much. Haven’t figured out turbo yet, doesn’t seem to work correctly. Only bumps voltage to 1.32v which isn’t enough to do much with. Of course, I have saved the 4Ghz profile in my motherboard in case I need it for something

Again, my Q6600 ate close to 200w at 3.2GHz so I never ran it there much. I try to keep my overclocks a little energy efficient.