Time to spend some time on blogging
about my X3 Reunion progress
.
Whenever you want to enjoy space / flight sims having a joystick is
a must, even better when you got force-feedback So if you bump,
it will bump back to you, physically.

Reunion, is the 3rd part of Egosoft’s space trading and combat
series, above we can see Nikonofune which is the ship of
Saya.

This is mine, at the very beginning, you’ll already get a M4 Argon
Buster and a Mercury TS,
but earning money is still hard to achive at the beginning.

This shows the landing lights of a solar power plant.

Space stations are huge, and there are only a few docking bays now,
most of the time they’ll be in the middle.

Nebula rendering, atmosphere and lighting textures are incredibly
improved.

As well as station design. Most of them don’t differ anymore
between races, but their designs textures, bumpmapping and light
effects are really eye-candy.

Dockingclamps. Although it’s a space game there’s good sound
effects too, even in space, well it’s a game so that goes ok.

And there is a great variety of BGM for all the space-sectors, some
frightning, depressing or relaxing… as in Kingdoms End.

Are you still reading this text ? Enjoy the pictures.

This one is a bit obscure, this is the station in Grand Exchange,
which obviously was sprayed by some teenagers ? ))

Inside of the station it seems someone painted some japanese kanjis
on the walls…. strange.

Where am I ?

One of my f****ing expensive superfreighters.

Being attacked by the side…. shame on them. My turret is in the
rear.

Someone’s in a hurry…. profitsssss….

A nice shot from the side, lighting is really great here. Each edge
will reflect sunlight when moving… wow.

Asteroid fields are beatiful, as long as you see them early enough
when flying through thick sight-killing shield-eating nebulas. (X2
had acid nebulas damaging your hull, I guess it’s still the same, I
don’t wanna try this. But in X2 the shielding was weakened by
lightning charges inside nebulas, which I haven’t experienced yet
in X3.

The weather is cloudy, beautiful storms cycling in the planets
atmosphere.

A huge carrier ship of the Teladi. Slow but deadly. But who wants
to be on war with that trading geniuses.Expect more, when I find some time and mysterious places…

Andy.

Time to spend some time on blogging
about my X3 Reunion progress
.
Whenever you want to enjoy space / flight sims having a joystick is
a must, even better when you got force-feedback So if you bump,
it will bump back to you, physically.

Reunion, is the 3rd part of Egosoft’s space trading and combat
series, above we can see Nikonofune which is the ship of
Saya.

This is mine, at the very beginning, you’ll already get a M4 Argon
Buster and a Mercury TS,
but earning money is still hard to achive at the beginning.

This shows the landing lights of a solar power plant.

Space stations are huge, and there are only a few docking bays now,
most of the time they’ll be in the middle.

Nebula rendering, atmosphere and lighting textures are incredibly
improved.

As well as station design. Most of them don’t differ anymore
between races, but their designs textures, bumpmapping and light
effects are really eye-candy.

Dockingclamps. Although it’s a space game there’s good sound
effects too, even in space, well it’s a game so that goes ok.

And there is a great variety of BGM for all the space-sectors, some
frightning, depressing or relaxing… as in Kingdoms End.

Are you still reading this text ? Enjoy the pictures.

This one is a bit obscure, this is the station in Grand Exchange,
which obviously was sprayed by some teenagers ? ))

Inside of the station it seems someone painted some japanese kanjis
on the walls…. strange.

Where am I ?

One of my f****ing expensive superfreighters.

Being attacked by the side…. shame on them. My turret is in the
rear.

Someone’s in a hurry…. profitsssss….

A nice shot from the side, lighting is really great here. Each edge
will reflect sunlight when moving… wow.

Asteroid fields are beatiful, as long as you see them early enough
when flying through thick sight-killing shield-eating nebulas. (X2
had acid nebulas damaging your hull, I guess it’s still the same, I
don’t wanna try this. But in X2 the shielding was weakened by
lightning charges inside nebulas, which I haven’t experienced yet
in X3.

The weather is cloudy, beautiful storms cycling in the planets
atmosphere.

A huge carrier ship of the Teladi. Slow but deadly. But who wants
to be on war with that trading geniuses.

Finally I bought all the components
for my new X3 – Reunion Game-PC. So I started assembling all the
parts together.
(I know the images aren’t in the right order, but after converting
this blogentry for the second time, I have no more energy to drag
and drop that image positions over and over again…)Although I will still miss the great Thermaltake Armor Chassis,
which I cannot afford, the Aerocool Engine II on the picture to the
right, is really a good alternative for 1/3 price.

The main focus was a combined front and rear fan working inside the
PC case.

I also downgraded the CPU from a dual 4600 to a simple but fast
enough for X3 Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego.

Those two steps were enough money-saving.

To further push performance to its peek I decided to invest in a
high class graphics chipset at a low cost. The PowerColor X850XT
PCIe ATI Radeon R480 Card with 256MB.

Compared to all the other X850XT its price is lowest, but
outperfoms an Geforce 6800ultra quite nice .

Since I did not yet buy my windows OS I just did a quickrun in
Gentoo Linux, which was installed in a second(hour), and measured
about 9700 fps with glxgears.

But not enough. Regarding to the latest discussion on egosoft
forums
a lot of people suffer from AC97 sound issues, whilst people using
a seperate sound card report to get a 10% performance
increase.

Now I had two choices, buying a seperate soundcard for more money,
or buying a mainboard with high quality onboard sound.

When I saw the specs on the MSI K8N Diamond compared to the Asus
A8N SLI Premium or the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D, the thing was
crystalclear.

MSI offers 6x SATA 3GB’s with excellent equipment, and an onboard
Soundblaster Live 24bit on a lower price than the Asus…..

yummie…..

Bought …

Because of the 6 SATA’s and the possibility to upgrade the CPU to
dualcore in the distant future,

I was looking for a power supply with all those connectors for the
future and a low-noise 12cm fan.

And I remembered the tests on tomshardware that showed only a few
surviving candidates in a power supply stress test.

And the winner is: a 500 watts Seasonic S12 power supply with 4
SATA and Dual-CPU(not core) connectors ready for every usage.

Further it has an active power factor correction which saves energy
when the system doesn’t need the full power.

Let me excuse for the color of the dvd-rom drive. It’s a samsung
whatever I have no idea what version code or features it has. I
just read it has 130ms access time for dvd, which is bad. I know
that.

But it was cheap and my favourit Plextor 713 in black was sold out
that day.

And…. so to say, I just bought it to get Gentoo Linux installed
that day. DD

Since I didn’t want to have all technology and more important no
cables filling the view into a windowed PC case, I installed a
Samsung 200GB SATA2 8MB harddisk with native command
queueing.

I didn’t read much about harddisk speed yet but cache transfers
show up with 1799.89 MB/sec in Linux and buffered reads with 55.26
MB/sec. That’s worlds better than my old PATA.

Although I’m not convinced by SATA data and poer connectors yet, I
can see them breaking apart someday.

Yep, and the memory… 2×512 CL2,5 Kingston DDR400, since I’m not
the overclocking guy, everything here standard, and MSI’s
intelligent overclocking is also disabled. (maybe it’s worth
putting mem, cpu and gpu on fire when X4 is being released, we’ll
see)

so far….

Finally I bought all the components
for my new X3 – Reunion Game-PC. So I started assembling all the
parts together.
(I know the images aren’t in the right order, but after converting
this blogentry for the second time, I have no more energy to drag
and drop that image positions over and over again…)Although I will still miss the great Thermaltake Armor Chassis,
which I cannot afford, the Aerocool Engine II on the picture to the
right, is really a good alternative for 1/3 price.
The main focus was a combined front and rear fan working inside the
PC case.

I also downgraded the CPU from a dual 4600 to a simple but fast
enough for X3 Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego.

Those two steps were enough money-saving.

To further push performance to its peek I decided to invest in a
high class graphics chipset at a low cost. The PowerColor X850XT
PCIe ATI Radeon R480 Card with 256MB.

Compared to all the other X850XT its price is lowest, but
outperfoms an Geforce 6800ultra quite nice .

Since I did not yet buy my windows OS I just did a quickrun in
Gentoo Linux, which was installed in a second(hour), and measured
about 9700 fps with glxgears.

But not enough. Regarding to the latest discussion on egosoft
forums
a lot of people suffer from AC97 sound issues, whilst people using
a seperate sound card report to get a 10% performance
increase.

Now I had two choices, buying a seperate soundcard for more money,
or buying a mainboard with high quality onboard sound.

When I saw the specs on the MSI K8N Diamond compared to the Asus
A8N SLI Premium or the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D, the thing was
crystalclear.

MSI offers 6x SATA 3GB’s with excellent equipment, and an onboard
Soundblaster Live 24bit on a lower price than the Asus…..

yummie…..

Bought …

Because of the 6 SATA’s and the possibility to upgrade the CPU to
dualcore in the distant future,

I was looking for a power supply with all those connectors for the
future and a low-noise 12cm fan.

And I remembered the tests on tomshardware that showed only a few
surviving candidates in a power supply stress test.

And the winner is: a 500 watts Seasonic S12 power supply with 4
SATA and Dual-CPU(not core) connectors ready for every usage.

Further it has an active power factor correction which saves energy
when the system doesn’t need the full power.

Let me excuse for the color of the dvd-rom drive. It’s a samsung
whatever I have no idea what version code or features it has. I
just read it has 130ms access time for dvd, which is bad. I know
that.

But it was cheap and my favourit Plextor 713 in black was sold out
that day.

And…. so to say, I just bought it to get Gentoo Linux installed
that day. DD

Since I didn’t want to have all technology and more important no
cables filling the view into a windowed PC case, I installed a
Samsung 200GB SATA2 8MB harddisk with native command
queueing.

I didn’t read much about harddisk speed yet but cache transfers
show up with 1799.89 MB/sec in Linux and buffered reads with 55.26
MB/sec. That’s worlds better than my old PATA.

Although I’m not convinced by SATA data and poer connectors yet, I
can see them breaking apart someday.

Yep, and the memory… 2×512 CL2,5 Kingston DDR400, since I’m not
the overclocking guy, everything here standard, and MSI’s
intelligent overclocking is also disabled. (maybe it’s worth
putting mem, cpu and gpu on fire when X4 is being released, we’ll
see)

so far….

Finally I bought all the components
for my new X3 – Reunion Game-PC. So I started assembling all the
parts together.
(I know the images aren’t in the right order, but after converting
this blogentry for the second time, I have no more energy to drag
and drop that image positions over and over again…)