I was finally around for a game night and got to jump in on a few matches of Quake 3 online. This is probably the first time I've actually played it against actual humans and not bots. Definitely was a lot of fun, but need to tweak my mouse sensitivity a bit. And also practice more. This should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of performance to expect playing online. 

I was trying to figure out what kind of case I could use to hide away this little device so that it is safe from getting destroyed or having the cable ripped out. I remembered I had this little plastic box that came with my Logitech mouse that the weights and little buttons could be stored in. I only remembered it, because I threw it away the night before, so I had to fish it out of the trash can. It worked about as well as I expected.

I fired up Need for Speed on the Playstation 1 recently, which brought back a lot of fond memories. I mostly played it on the Saturn when I was a kid, but discovered at some point that the Playstation version was superior. It looked a bit better, though the game was impressive on both consoles. I'm not really debating which version is the best right now. Just the one thing the PS1 version had, that no other version had - this really cool behind the scenes video in the credits.

I searched high and low, and couldn't actually find anywhere that this has been posted before. So I went ahead and ripped a copy of it, tossed it up on Youtube, and here it is! 

Modern video cards are the size of water melons, and about as heavy to boot. This is a problem since they barely fit in cases, and they block access to existing ports, which is a problem that I ran into recently.

I recently upgraded to an RTX 4080, from my 3080, to get some extra frames in Cyberpunk. The upgrade was totally worth it, as running it at the native 5120x1440 my ultrawide monitor supports was causing me issues. Mostly with the GPU running out of VRAM, as that resolution pushes the 10gb my old video card has. 

While worth it, the upgrade presented me with another issue. The new card is so damn big, my 2nd PCI-E x16 slot is completely blocked by the heatsink, which renders my capture card completely useless. But luckily there is a solution to this problem. And luckily for me, my case has vertical slots to side mount cards. 

Enter this little cable; the pci-e riser cable. 

For $35 from Amazon, one end pops into the port on the motherboard, and is low profile enough that it can fit under the cinder block sized heatsink. 

Worked like a friggin' champ.

Excellent weekend to visit Asheville. We stopped by the Zip N Slip Snow Tubing Park where it was about 18* outside, and covered in a nice fresh layer of real snow.