A New Adventure - A Glimmer of Hope

I married well. VERY well. It's one of the few things I'm proud of as far as major life decisions are concerned. And by this, I'm not talking about money, or looks (Though my wife IS good looking), or something relatively superficial. I married a good PERSON. Relatively sane. She's not without quirks, foibles, outright frustrations, or differences of opinion - The same is true for me on all counts.

But if you marry well, and while understanding the modus operandi of the other, can both agree on the principal or paramount issues in life or in a relationship, the differences and problems are easily eclipsed. You accept the other for who they are, their desires, their goals, their joys, their sorrows,for better or worse. I am very lucky that I married someone who agrees with me on a lot of the major aspects of life, and is fundamentally driven by motives centralized on being a good, kind, and caring person. Very lucky.

Enough of the sentimentality - My awesome wife bought me a new computer, and it's amazing. I've been trying to find a way to get a new one for the last few years, and finally, my wife decided it was time. Sure, it's my anniversary/Christmas/birthday present for the next year, but that is OK with me...


I present my new PC, aptly named, Velocity:

• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Intel(R) Core™ i7-3820 Quad-Core 3.60 GHz
• 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1600MHz
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1.2GB 16X PCIe Video Card
• ASUS P9X79 Pro (Intel X79 Chipset Quad Channel DDR3 ATX w/ UEFI Bios, BT GO, SSD Caching, 7.1 HD Audio, Intel GbLAN, USB3.0, SATA-III RAID, 4 Gen3 PCIe x16 & 2 PCIe)
• 120GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III 6.0 Gb/s SSD
• 500GB Western Digital VelociRaptor 10,000RPM SATA-III 6.0Gb/s
• Thermaltake Frio OCK CPU Cooler

This baby SCREAMS performance. Nothing on it is overclocked - It's all with the stock configuration.

I have a copy of FRAPS, so I decided to load up Skyrim and put it to the test. Bear in mind, I'm using the HD high-res texture pack, a few community made high-res texture replacers, and a few lighting/environment/terrain/water mods (High-res when possible). I then cranked the settings to Ultra (Highest possible values for every setting, from AA to Terrain Draw Distance). I like to play in windowed mode, so I set it to 1440x900 (Desktop resolution is 1600x1050, or something to that effect) and started up FRAPS.

On Ultra, windowed-mode, HD everything when possible, my framerate WHILE RECORDING never dropped below 50 FPS. It never skipped a beat.. It never stuttered. My jaw was figuratively and literally on the floor. [Note to self - Add screenshot here to inspire awe and jealousy when you get home]



I got a trial copy of BandiCam to compare recording quality. FRAPS recorded 23 minutes of gameplay, and took up 53 GB (Yes, that's not a typo) - BandiCam, with the exact same quality output, recorded a length at the cap of 10 minutes for the trial with 150 MB of disk space... I think we have a clear winner here.


One of the reasons I hadn't started doing UO videos before was my machine was much, much too old to do it effectively. I didn't have enough disk space, slow processor, slower hard drive, Windows XP, and it goes on and on. The other was getting a good recording application.

I now have three more major obstacles to overcome:

1) A decent microphone.
2) Deciding what aspects of UO to show off in depth beyond the basic gameplay elements.
3) My voice.

Two of those issues I can resolve.. Two out of three ain't bad. They're problems I'm very happy to have now. I'm getting closer to where I want to be with recording UO.

Thanks for reading.